MacBreak Weekly 958 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy Ihnatko here, Alex Lindsey, Jason Snell is back. Jason's had a busy week, used up all the color in his inkjet doing those six color charts for Apple's quarterly results. Suffice to say, it was a very good quarter. We'll get the report. Also, apple's report cards that Jason does every year with some of the biggest names in Apple punditry Fascinating to see what they think is good and bad about Apple. And then porn comes to the iPhone. All of that yes, it does, and Apple's really annoyed. All of that and more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.
This is MacBreak Weekly episode 958, recorded February 4th 2025. You Can't Handle the Sharks. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show. We cover the latest news from Apple. And there is news from Apple Jason Snell's back just in time to dump some ink on us, some colorful ink.
0:01:09 - Jason Snell
I got, I got. What do you want? I got, uh, financial charts.
0:01:13 - Leo Laporte
I got, uh, I got a report card that's in color too isn't it?
0:01:17 - Jason Snell
I've been, I've been busy this week, Leo. I mean there's just I'm running out of ink. I need. I need some new toner for my charts.
0:01:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's okay. Hp can put you on a subscription. You'll be set. We're just glad you're back. Welcome back Also with us from sixcolors.com, also with us from GBH in Boston, mr Andrew Ihnatko.
0:01:45 - Andy Ihnatko
And you know what the big problem is for Jason and why you should be basically supporting Six Colors is that just because he's out now of red and green and yellow, they'll still make him replace the black cartridge, even though it doesn't make any sense, even though it's perfectly full. It comes as a set. You have to replace all of them.
0:01:56 - Jason Snell
My report card contains 34,000 words of commentary from 59 different people. Trust me, the black cartridge is lengthy and heavy use.
0:02:04 - Leo Laporte
I I do have to apologize. I did not respond to your request for comments. I should have just said I'm stupid, I don't have anything to say, so ask the experts. That's what I. That's what I would have said had I thought that wouldn't look good in a pull quote.
0:02:17 - Andy Ihnatko
It's probably better that you didn't.
0:02:19 - Leo Laporte
Leo had nothing to say. Uh, amazingly enough, also with us from officehoursglobal. Uh, mr Alex lindsay, hello, Alex, hello, hello. Are you growing a beard or did you just? You know, are you just?
0:02:32 - Alex Lindsay
uh, here, suit man you only had a couple days, oh yeah, good I got I was like, oh, I need to shave and I just keep forgetting because I'm busy. So it's been, I'll get to it Next week. I'll be clean shaven again.
0:02:46 - Leo Laporte
I'm not trying to grow a beard.
0:02:47 - Alex Lindsay
My wife doesn't like it.
0:02:48 - Leo Laporte
Yes, she doesn't like it, mine doesn't either. I want to grow a beard.
0:02:53 - Alex Lindsay
I usually shave just for you, leo. So it's very unusual because I almost ran out, but I was afraid I'd be late. There was one comment that Leo made many, many, many years ago and I never forgot it. Oh, I'm sorry. No, no, not to me, that's the funniest part. We were on the set of screensavers, yes, and you talked about the fact that at some point patrick doesn't always shave before the show, right, and you didn't like it. And I have been clean shaven, except when I was growing a beard. I've been clean shaven for your show almost every time, like if I'm really really, if you, if you see any facial hair. It means it's hectic, but almost every show, tuesday morning is when I shaved it for the show. Because of that one.
0:03:35 - Leo Laporte
Comment 25 well, the one thing that's changed 25 years since is that now that is a style. This you know, using what the zero or the one on your shaver. So you have a little stumble.
0:03:47 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I just always think about. I think about it every time I shave oh, I gotta shave. It's tuesday morning, I gotta shave for leo, so so anyway, steve gibson doesn't shave either, so that's funny, it's okay and then then I just don't shave until the next tuesday, and you can always tell if I haven't been on the show for a couple weeks, because then I get really. Oh, that's interesting, I don't, I don't, you know, do it naturally it's like counting the rings on a tree on a redwood, exactly.
0:04:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so let's get to the news. I guess, uh, boy, I want to talk about but this new apple, uh invites thing. But before we get to that I guess we should not be interesting. Yeah well, you know it's not. You know it's disappointing, because they had a great code name. According to Mark Gurman, it was called confetti.
0:04:27 - Andy Ihnatko
Then they released it under the name invites well, if you launch things by a spotlight, the last thing you want is people who come up with clever names. I still can't find my banking app because it's not named by the bank.
0:04:40 - Leo Laporte
It's named as, like gloriosky like I don't think gloriosky capital. One calls your app like eno and it's like what it's? Oh, it's one backwards, oh, thanks, that makes that makes it. How much did that?
0:04:52 - Andy Ihnatko
cost you capital one, I'm guessing a lot anyway, let's.
0:04:58 - Leo Laporte
Let's start with the thing that the problem is a little bit old news, because it broke right after the shows on Wednesday, apple's first or I guess it was on Thursday, its first quarter results Well, and the top line looked like hey, it's really good, you made a billion dollars a week.
0:05:16 - Jason Snell
The record quarter. So, if you're viewing this just as, how much revenue did Apple generate and how much profit did they make? It's at the top. It's at the tippy top.
However, if you are looking through the lens of a Wall Street analyst, you're looking for growth and signs of weakness because you're thinking about the future, and you do that for those who aren't big investors. You do that because the stock price is based on what the estimates of the future viability of a company is going to be and how much growth they're going to have. And it's not quite the same, as is Apple doomed, which is what we always joke about, because it used to not be a joke and now it is a joke, but yeah. So I think, leo, I would say the funniest thing about this is it was a record quarter, all-time record quarter, and iPhone sales were down 1%, which is like iPhone is 56% of the revenue of the company and sales were down 1%, but services and Mac and iPad were all up and that was enough to raise the whole company up to an all-time high.
0:06:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Services had a record quarter. As a matter of fact, I think it was one of the lead-offs in the financials 21 billion.
0:06:16 - Jason Snell
I think it's like eight record quarters in a row for services. It's kind of amazing yeah.
0:06:21 - Leo Laporte
Revenue for three months was 124 billion, that's a billion dollars a day. Profit 36 billion, that's a billion dollars a week. That's nice, pretty good profit, just profit. Wait a minute. No, is that three billion dollars a week? Whoa, wait a minute. My math is all screwed up. It's three months, right? 12 weeks, three billion dollars a week.
0:06:40 - Alex Lindsay
If you had a, if you had a printer in your house and you were printing money, you couldn't print it. Couldn't print it that fast.
0:06:46 - Leo Laporte
No, yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, yet there are signs of trouble in paradise. Um, by the way, gross margin also at a record high of 46.9 percent is china paradise, leo, yeah trouble in paradise. 11 drop in china. Yeah, um, is that something to worry about? What did Tim say?
0:07:07 - Jason Snell
Tim no longer remains bullish on China. I would say Tim is more like we're fighting it out in a tough market there. I think that's the truth of it. Right is that there was a period in there where Apple was able to expand in China and get a lot of growth and they still make a lot of money there even now but it's been three years of flat to down. Um, and, to be fair, they're down 11 in china year over year this time, but they were flat. There was zero last quarter, but if you look at the numbers, they had a period in 2021 where they were expanding rapidly and growing rapidly in china, but since then it's all been flat to down.
0:07:45 - Leo Laporte
I think it's encouraging that the Mac and the iPad were improved Services. I'm not so worried about.
0:07:52 - Jason Snell
I think Mac is really interesting because, although we can say like, yeah, macbook Pro with M4 and Mac Mini and people bought a bunch, it really was as small as the Mac Mini market is. It did kick off a Mac Mini buying cycle.
0:08:05 - Speaker 5
There's no doubt about that.
0:08:06 - Jason Snell
But the thing is the MacBook pro, like, yeah, there was an M4 MacBook pro, but it's really not that different from the M3 MacBook pro the previous year and yet some combination. My theory is that people who bought in the M1 generation are now buying new models and that that we're back on the. You know, everybody switched over the first first couple years of apple silicon and now we're maybe starting to see, uh, people upgrading those systems and maybe that's part of it. But like it wasn't like a mac, like they didn't. It wasn't a new macbook air, it wasn't like it was a huge macbook pro update after they hadn't done an update in years. And yet the mac had a really great growth quarter. Ipad, I understand right, because they didn't ship any iPads last year and Tim Cook said that the iPad Air did really, really well, which makes sense. It's sort of the key, the best product in that whole product line in terms of price and value.
0:08:55 - Alex Lindsay
But the Mac, yeah, the Mac really killed it, and I think the Mac Mini M4 is just a beast. Like in my industry, everyone's talking about the fact that it's just a beast To be able to buy something for $600.
I mean, I was running, I was doing a test where I had the M4 doing I think I mentioned it before 120 frames, a second out of HD footage, and it's at like 3%. Would you like me to do 10 other things at the same time? It'd be great. So it's just a and I've talked to some folks that have the pro and they're just super happy with it, and so I think that was the kind of the real breakthrough. I don't think they break those out, but I think the mac mini probably was the thing that a lot of people were uh buying into. It's a great form factor. It's really really powerful. It kind of clicks off all the you know things and no one it turned out no one really cared about where the power button was the um the apple ad, the no sweat ad, really kind of brings home what you're saying.
0:09:50 - Leo Laporte
I think this is a smart ad. This is the weightlifter who's wearing m4 on his chest. Looks like it's ai generated. By the way, I don't know if that's a real person I doubt apple did you think they did? They actually hired an actor? Yeah, they probably.
0:10:05 - Alex Lindsay
But what it shows is you know not only can he lift that.
0:10:07 - Leo Laporte
But he's got so much extra power he can start to spin the 300 pound weight, dance around with it and eventually lift it with his pinky. That's kind of what you were saying, Alex. Right, it's just another way to to put it. Yeah, it's a pretty funny ad and I think that the point is, you know, this is obviously aimed at real people.
0:10:32 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I think it kind of expresses? That point pretty well. I think the hard part for Apple is that they're going to have this big push but if you're not doing a lot of work, the numbers are just going to be going as fast as it's going to go, and I think that's always.
The challenge is that that you get these, these big pushes, and the people like me buy will. Buy meant potentially many of these, but does the average person have anything? That goes there? And that's why games are really important for Apple is to figure it, because games press, you know, upgrades and they push the envelope, but they're not. A lot of the games aren't really pushing the envelope right now.
0:11:04 - Leo Laporte
Um, it's potentially a great gaming platform, but I think that they haven't figured that one out yet yeah, um yeah, because I think a normal person is going to use it the same way they use it.
0:11:14 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it's just like I try to tell people like I'm like, what are you going to do with it? Well, I'm going to use zoom and I'm going to. I'm going to do this I'm going to. I'm going to open up some spreadsheets and I'm going to surf the web and you're like, okay, well, anything in the last five years we'll do that basically, you got a weight lifter and all these you're asking them to do is lift two pound dumbbells I mean, the big thing that was surprising for me is the work that apple has done with both the macbook camera and the microphones, you know, because we we bring people in to interview for my craft show.
0:11:40 - Leo Laporte
That affects people really more, doesn't it?
0:11:42 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, yeah, and, and we, you know, we had someone from michael krasny show a couple weeks ago that they had, I think, the m3 or the m3 uh laptop and we had sent them, uh, an s or we had sent them an mv7 and we had them all set it up and they just couldn't quite get it in the right place in their desk and they didn't sound very good and we said we'll just try to unplug it, let's just see what it sounds like with the mac. It sounded better than the mic. Yeah, you know, like in it it was just boom it, and so the, the work that they've done there has paid off. I would I generally would want to send a mic. If someone had a good could get the mic close to them. It's always going to sound better. But in an unusual situation it was the, the laptop. I've never had a laptop be better than the studio mic that I sent you know, yeah, that's kind of amazing.
0:12:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, um, what did uh? What did uh? Tim to tim, or uh, what is it? Kavan, what did? Kevin, it's kevin the kevin looks like kavan it's k-v-a-n but it's kevin I'm gonna call him kavan, I don't care, I you can if you want to.
0:12:44 - Jason Snell
It's funny too, because after years of Luka Maestri, the former CFO, who's now sort of retired into another cushy job at Apple, he had the Italian accent and I was like, oh, what will Kevin Parikh sound like? And the answer is he's just a guy. He was just like, yeah, you know, we get in some stuff. You know, yeah, all right, cool. Uh, just a guy who's the cfo of apple now. So no, you know, it's fine, just okay, I'm sure he's fine. Uh, I'm sure luca is right off screen like pointing at him, like don't mess this up, kid don't mess this up, kid.
0:13:14 - Leo Laporte
Make it a good time.
0:13:15 - Jason Snell
You do a good job, but come on, yeah so I, I mean, I think, the most interesting thing. So we we covered china, where tim used to be real bullish on china, and and now he's like, well, it's tough in China, it's tough in China, but so be it. You know, I don't know, he doesn't say a lot in these, right, like that's the truth of it. He doesn't say a lot. I will say, and I know when we were before we started the show, you were kind of joking about this and conflating two different stories, but I will say I think it's interesting and suggests that Tim is well aware that Apple has not really done anything with the iPhone in years. Right, like the last three or four years, this has been, I would say, design-wise, the most static physical design period in the iPhone's history. It's just been we haven't had a totally new looking iPhone in a while.
And they asked him about it and he said something again, little scraps is all you get out of these calls. But a little scrap I found interesting is he specifically said somebody was like so is this, it Is the smartphone just kind of boring and not interesting? And he's like, no, no. And he pulled out the pipeline. Right, he's like, no, I'm excited, we have some amazing iPhones coming down the route and like, of course he's going to say that stuff. What I thought was interesting is he felt like he needed to actually say and reassure analysts that they are working on new iPhone stuff that's interesting and that the iPhone and the smartphone industry is not entering a cul-de-sac. You know, you take it or leave it, but I thought that was interesting that he stood up and said that.
0:14:44 - Leo Laporte
Ben writes this. Asked him him he says do you feel like there's a lot of room for form factor innovation in the future, as the current lineup shows where you're going? I guess, without pulling punches, wondering if you thought, in terms of the iphone, innovation is there's a lot more to come and you could see the kind of current market changing a bit over the next two to three years. Ben says tim, I think there's a lot more to come and I could not feel more optimistic about our product pipeline, so I think there's a lot of innovation left on the smartphone that's a lot it depends.
0:15:12 - Jason Snell
What you call innovation I mean is invites innovation, I mean no I think many of us might call it incremental no, I think he's, I think he's probably andy go ahead, I think he's thinking about some future hardware developments yeah, exactly, exactly.
0:15:25 - Andy Ihnatko
It seemed like he was doing what you have to do in these situations, saying I want to say are you coming up with something like a folding iPhone, how about that? But he has to couch it in terms of do you feel there's a lot of room for form factor innovation in the future, or do you feel the current lineup shows where you're going? And so that's where I think there's a lot more to come and I could not feel more optimistic about it.
0:15:48 - Jason Snell
I can't say anything about future products, the decoding, you know. I I didn't want to do the math of how many years I've been on these calls times four about how many of these I've heard, but I I've learned enough to learn the language of these calls and that's exactly right. Ben writes this might as well be blinking. The word fold, yeah, in morse code, right, like that's what he's doing here. He's like hey, what's what's on with phone innovation? And here's the thing is they decide all this stuff beforehand.
Tim and kevin and everybody had decided that if there was a question about smartphone innovation lacking, tim would say, yeah, one of his hypey kind of like oh, the pipeline.
I'm really excited here to reassure to be fair, I mean I can be a little cynical about it but to reassure his investors and his shareholders that Apple is working on some iPhone innovation stuff, because really that's the name of the game, it's 56% of their business and really it's more than that, because services comes from the iPhone primarily too. So yeah, it's more than that, because services comes from the iPhone primarily too. So yeah, it's telling that they, that they wanted to make that disclosure and it does dovetail with everything Mark Gurman's been telling us that they're working on that thin phone for this year, that they're working on foldable prototypes Like there's a lot of that stuff in there and they're never going to say anything. This is by far the most you will ever hear them, I mean beyond him saying sort of like folding remains an area of interest or something like he could say that maybe but this is about as close as he's going to get and I'm just going to do my weekly.
0:17:13 - Alex Lindsay
the innovation that matters the most is the camera. Like you know, like there is nothing else. When I show someone a picture that I took with a recent iPhone or whatever, the only thing that has someone look at the phone and go, oh, I need to upgrade is the pictures. You know, like it's all that really matters.
0:17:30 - Jason Snell
And when you talk about like folding phones or thin phones, that requires more camera innovation, Alex, right, because they're like, oh man, we got to make that Because, like it might be okay, we've got the 48 megapixel in there in a standard iPhone thickness, we're good. And then they say, well, we're making it way thinner.
0:17:44 - Alex Lindsay
And then it's like all right, I guess we need to make that camera better again, well, but I also think I'm just like when they see it thinner, I'm like, if I was going to put your time into it, just keep putting it into the camera, because all of us sit there and watch the keynote just waiting for the camera. Like if you in the camera, 90% of the viewers would disappear.
0:18:06 - Jason Snell
I don't think it's that percentage. I think that there are people who are motivated by the camera, and we should never forget about it. I think there are also a lot of people who are motivated by the look and that's why they push through things like thinness and they por que no los dos right Like they have to do all of these things, they have to do all those things.
0:18:22 - Alex Lindsay
But I would say, like thinner is not. I mean I guess, maybe you know, I just don't know if thinner is really pushing that many people over the right, but yeah and it's the.
0:18:30 - Andy Ihnatko
I think that all phone, all uh all phone manufacturers are having a problem at the high end because it's so hard at this point to do anything that is sufficiently compelling, even the camera, which, I agree, is what people notice the first time. Now we're really ferreting out every corner to find every edge case photo that you can do a little bit better. It's so tight right now that it really is down to personal preference of what do you want your photo to look like and what is the screen that it's being displayed on. Is it a really super crisp, super oversaturated OLED screen, or is it a different kind of screen? I think that one of the reasons why Apple and Samsung are both trying to get into super thin phones is because it gets people thinking that this is something that's brand new.
0:19:18 - Leo Laporte
Tim did say that the iPhone sold better in markets where Apple intelligence was available. Yeah, that's bogus.
0:19:24 - Jason Snell
I mean it's not available in China and it was down in China and so he's using that as a proxy, but it was almost not available anywhere. I also disagree with that in his medium post.
0:19:38 - Andy Ihnatko
And also Jason was talking about how we've been reading these for so long that we can kind of decode a lot of this. And the more confident Tim is, the less detail he will give out. And so when you parse out all the things he was saying about China, he was not just simply saying it's down and it's really, really competitive even though he did say it was very, very competitive but he was also talking about oh well, we had supply channel issues. Also, there's dollars that haven't been applied yet, that are already in. So they have a big, big challenge there where Xiaomi is leaping and leaping and leaping and they're taking those gains out of Apple's pockets and Apple doesn't really have a good solution to that yet.
0:20:26 - Leo Laporte
Did they ask him about tariffs at all?
0:20:28 - Jason Snell
Yes, and it was the most Tim answer ever about any of this stuff. That's about politics, that's about Trump is and I will quote him directly this is his entire statement on it we are monitoring the situation and don't have anything more to add than that. That's it, no comment.
0:20:47 - Leo Laporte
It's probably smart. I mean, what are you going to say?
0:20:53 - Jason Snell
Well, you know people complain. I mean, Tim Cook is a is a politician in a lot of ways and he is managing up, and the person the person he's managing up is the president of the United States. Okay, what a job to have. I mean, if you've ever had a problematic manager that you've had to deal with, who's your manager and you have to sort of like steer them and know what buttons to push and what buttons not to push.
now, imagine doing that with the president of the united states you know, there's only one person worse would be elon musk yeah, that's tim cook's job for now, and tim is also probably you know, I think one reason says uh, we're gonna buy more ads on x. I think one one of the reasons, tim spends so much time with Donald Trump is that he doesn't want to get told that there's been a reorg and now he reports to Elon Musk. I think that's true.
0:21:33 - Leo Laporte
It's just a matter of time.
0:21:36 - Jason Snell
Commenting on tariffs does not serve him publicly at all, so he'll just shrug it off, and the tariffs are currently 10.
0:21:45 - Leo Laporte
Um. On china uh, there were rumors that maybe tsmc would be uh tariffed in taiwan. Um, well, interestingly enough that has not happened yeah, and he, and he backed trump, backed down on both canada and mexico.
0:21:59 - Jason Snell
So, um, maybe the tariff thing is um somebody asked them about about making phones in India especially, and why they do. That Is their goal to have this stuff be in market. They're building for the market and he said it very clearly. He said when we build a factory somewhere, the scale that Apple requires means that it's not for domestic consumption only. Oh, interesting, If they build a factory in India, it's not for domestic consumption only. Right, Like that they can't. If they build a factory in India, it's not just for India, because Apple's never going to build a factory so small and build up a supply chain, and all of that so small that it just serves a single country. And so, yeah, when they build phones in.
India. They'll ship those phones around the world.
0:22:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but you're going to build it in the country that has the highest tariffs because that will be the least cost to you in that country for now.
0:22:48 - Jason Snell
yeah, yeah but you're gonna count, but you're also gonna hedge right, and that's that's part of it too. Also, again, keep in mind that the last time the tariff thing happened with apple, um, uh, I believe tim cook basically went to donald trump and said, um, if you, if you do this this way, it's going to advantage samsung, a korean company, over apple, an american company. And the answer was oh, we'll fix it. We'll fix it for apple, so that doesn't happen. So we'll see what the impact is on apple in the long run.
But if, if tim is in in trump's good graces, uh, they may skate on this. Because I mean, we saw, we saw this week with the Mexico and Canada tariffs that you know, I mean they were going to take effect until suddenly there was a negotiation and they weren't. There's going to be a lot of that stuff where, like, it's kind of for show, it's kind of to get concessions, it's a threat that's met with a response that maybe makes you know he wants to come out looking powerful and strong, even if the net result is nothing, and there's going to be a lot of that.
0:23:51 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and it's not going to be a problem that's going to be able to go away, no matter what Tim Cook does. Because I mean, when Trump was talking about tariffs on TSMC, apple was down 3% because the market is like I don't know. We don't know how this is going to turn out, given that we were already a little bit soft on Apple to begin with. The stock price is down, down, down over the past year, year and a half. I think this is another reason for a lot of analysts to devalue the stock and to basically make people nervous, and tim apple collectively needs to address that I know, I mean, I don't, I don't think apple needs much from the stockholders right now.
0:24:35 - Alex Lindsay
So so the um, the uh, but I, but I would say that, uh, the tariffs are dumb. And he said he was going to do it. He didn't say for how long, you know. So he's done the tariffs, and then the question is whether he just goes. Well, we, we got something out of it, and then we get it out of the way and go like I just think.
I just think he it was. It was a populist thing to say during the campaign. He fulfilled the promise that he had. He didn't promise how long the tariffs would run. If he gets something that looks anything like results, he'll stop doing something because it's a dumb thing to do.
0:25:14 - Leo Laporte
And so eventually he'll either stop or he'll just keep looking more dumb, so it sounds like it was a very good quarter for Apple, despite China.
0:25:19 - Alex Lindsay
It's an all-time record A billion dollars Record revenue.
0:25:22 - Jason Snell
I mean if your holiday quarter at Apple can be an all-time record, then that means it's a good quarter, because that's a hard time this is the big quarter.
0:25:29 - Leo Laporte
This is the one they have to do, yeah yeah, they're.
0:25:31 - Jason Snell
They're in their product categories. They're a very seasonal business. There's a lot of revenue that's driven because people are buying hardware. In the third quarter it's the new iphone quarter and it's just two weeks of the new iphone, though.
0:25:43 - Leo Laporte
Right, it wasn't, wasn't? It's not a huge no. This is the rest of the new iPhone. This is.
0:25:46 - Jason Snell
October, november, december.
0:25:48 - Andy Ihnatko
So so this is, this is a big spike and if you look at the iPhone numbers.
0:25:51 - Jason Snell
They're very seasonal. They sell a lot of iPhones in that in that quarter. But even something like the iPad and the Mac shows some seasonality. So but the iPhone especially is seasonal.
0:26:06 - Alex Lindsay
Businesses that run their uh run, run on the the 12-month uh curve, of course, are going to buy a bunch of stuff in december, so that's usually so.
0:26:11 - Andy Ihnatko
And also there's a piece of good news with uh canlis. I think, when the uh, when the uh uh uh, when the iphone market analysts uh, issued their latest report, that basically that said that, uh, the iphone 16s had a stronger opening by session than the iphone 15 did last year or the year before. So that would indicate that, yeah, people are going for the iphone 16. Yeah, although it's it remains to be seen whether people are specifically going for apple intelligence or not, but nonetheless they more people were buying iphone 16s and the 15.
0:26:47 - Leo Laporte
how about apple intelligence? Because german is saying and I think I'm saying, and a lot of people saying, apple intelligence is kind of uh disappointing, that it is not as intelligent as in fact it's even less intelligent than it was yeah, and there he was, so that's pretty common, did he? Respond to any criticisms. Was anybody critical? Not?
0:27:08 - Andy Ihnatko
really and he. You could see how much faith he had in apple intelligence by how much he put into his opening comments about apple intelligence. Um, he did get kind of a kind of a a parallel question about about apple intelligence, but basically he just stuck to hey, we're really happy with how it's doing. People are really going for feature a, feature B, feature C and in April we're going to be expanding it to more countries. That's going to be great.
Um, the more interesting thing came for AI came during the Q a and people asked him.
Someone asked him about deep seek, which a lot of analysts are pointing to as wow, looks like that. Apple was stupid like a fox because they weren't putting tens of billions of dollars into capital expenditures to basically have these huge, huge models that require millions and millions of NVIDIA processors. Now there is this new, very, very cheap and efficient model that they can put on their phones directly, that they can adapt for their servers, so that has been seen to benefit Apple in some way, although, of course, as you've been talking about all week, deepseek is still very much trying to figure out what it is, what is good for, what lessons we can take away for other open source projects and who will actually be the ultimate winner here? Yeah, actually, that is the thing that. The thing that I'm most keen to see is if this gives Apple a way to get Apple intelligence running in China, so if they can basically use deep sea which they can, which which would work for them because it is open source.
They can say that, hey look, we examined all of this code, we know how it works, we can figure out, we can. Basically, we're at a point we can manipulate it so that we can have a good conversation with the chinese government and use that as the engine behind apple intelligence in china. So that would be a very good thing. I don't think it would. I don't think it would solve their problems in china with the iphone, but part of their future involves having apple intelligence working as in as much of the world as possible.
0:29:01 - Leo Laporte
I've been saying that apple's hindered because of its privacy stance, that uh, the the really powerful ais require you to send information to their servers and apple wants to keep everything on device, or at least within the apple uh ecosystem, in their, in their server, uh, farms uh, and that heart. That to me seems to be the problem with having it be as smart as it can be agreed, or?
0:29:26 - Leo Laporte
maybe the deep sea could be local would solve it.
0:29:30 - Alex Lindsay
I think it's a long play. So this is the kind of this is. You know, if you watch one of those videos with the rabbit and the turtle, the turtle often wins Right, Like you see the rabbit. So what you have is a lot of AI bouncing around. Apple is doing something that will be slower at the beginning, but potentially having that all on your phone, having that all on to secure a server.
0:29:51 - Leo Laporte
If they can do that, If they can and do it well, but I think that's the way to do it, but the play is they go from their stuff supplying 10% of the solution to their stuff supplying 90% of the solution over five years.
0:30:10 - Alex Lindsay
That is brutal to compete against. If they do that, who knows? If they do it? But we won't know until you know 2030. A few years.
0:30:15 - Andy Ihnatko
And it also depends on how you consider the market. Apple is never going to be in a position where they can do anything but add AI features to their own hardware products, which is what they do. They make their hard, they sell high markup hardware. They can do anything but add AI features to their own hardware products, which is what they do. They make their hard, they sell high markup hardware. They give you reasons to buy their hardware instead of somebody else's. Other companies like Google, like OpenAI, like Microsoft, are interested in essentially being the steel mills that create the steel for any industry that uses steel. So part of what Google is doing is to create features for Google software and Google products, but a lot of it really is that we want to see that if, 10 years from now, any large industry is using AI, they're running it on a Google server, on Google CPUs, using Google's AI APIs.
0:31:03 - Alex Lindsay
And they're running it on Apple products. Google's AI APIs and they're running it on Apple products. The issue again, you know, gets back to like again. My wife uses ChatGPT all day, every day. When I asked her about Apple intelligence, I mentioned this last week. She didn't even know what it was Like, she didn't even know that it existed, you know so you know like we don't watch.
TV? I think, no, we don't watch ads, so we don't see anything. So so the? So she literally didn't know what Apple she goes, what is Apple intelligence Like? And and I said, oh, don't worry about it, just go back to chat. So so the you know, but the but I think that that's the issue is that there's a lot of Apple users that are already using AI quite happily, and you know, apple has a long. They can play the long game because they aren't a software company trying to compete with everybody else trying to compete with everybody else. They are a hardware company no one's going anywhere.
It's bespoke, yeah, and but again, if it-.
0:31:46 - Leo Laporte
I wear this thing, which is a huge invasion of privacy. It's the Bee computer. It's recording everything. It's recording our conversation right now and then gives me notes at the end of the day. But this is a first step in what I really think people want, which is some sort of agentic AI partner, an AI partner, energetic, uh ai partner, an ai partner, that creates a legal document for you all day, every day.
Yeah, so this thing records my to-do list and it does all sorts of useful things if now I'm putting up with this, I they don't even say where the ai is, where this stuff is going, right? Uh, I have no idea and you know, for me that's a experiment. I don't have anything to hide. But I think most people would say, well, wait, I want to make sure that it.
0:32:26 - Alex Lindsay
I would like this, but I want to make sure it's going to do it to somewhere that is secure and private, and Apple has a great opportunity to put that in the AirPods for instance, well, but I mean, apple has the opportunity if they can pull it off and I don't know if they're going to be able to pull it off, but able to pull it off but if they pull it off, the game, the play here is they have all of our mail, all of our messages, our biometrics, um, all of these other things that are in this kind of safe enclave, yeah, their ability to manage that.
To see, like right now, when I go to the gym, they don't even know that I'm at the gym again and maybe they should put that app up. App up when I maybe exactly you're here and you have to. I have to open the app every time I get to the gym so that I can use my.
QR code. It'd be great if it just popped up, because it was like hey, I see that you're doing the same thing again and those are the kind of things, though, or saying I'm checking, eventually, your blood pressure and your glucose and all these other things, do you?
0:33:18 - Leo Laporte
really want to eat that. You shouldn't be eating that, Alex, whatever it is.
0:33:23 - Alex Lindsay
I might want to add a little less salt to that soup. So so the um. So I think that that is uh, but they have the advantage of doing that, that in a way that no one else is going to be able to do um anytime soon.
0:33:34 - Leo Laporte
I agree with that because of the problem they need, they need the smarts, and I think they, I think they have a lot of time to do it years I agree, if they, if five years they come. I mean, it's easy to disintermediate. I'm using an iPhone All of a sudden it can do what this can do on an iPhone, then I would do it To go back to Maps.
0:33:51 - Alex Lindsay
It was a disaster. Maps was a disaster when they released it. It was horrible. It didn't work. It took you to the wrong place. It took you through the wrong. Everything right. Tim apologized for it. Yeah, and to your point, tim apologized for it. Yeah, and, and, and they have. To your point, tim apologized for it. I now, if I go to Google maps, feel like I dropped back a couple of years, like I just I don't like it's on, at least on the iPhone. I don't feel like I and I and I used to never use Google, I mean Apple maps. I was always use Google maps and at some point I kind of broke down to the fact that every time you hit a text, it.
0:34:29 - Leo Laporte
You hit a text, it opens up apple maps and then next thing I know is using it and now it just feels it's not that it's more accurate, it just feels better than than what. They have time. I agree, we're in the very earliest stages of ai and they have a lot of time. Yeah, sometime, it's unknown. I mean, things are happening faster than than anybody.
0:34:38 - Alex Lindsay
But again, all these, all these tools are still available on your apple platform, so it doesn't like it like I'm using absolutely.
0:34:44 - Leo Laporte
On any given day, I have three or four AI apps open that I'm using for some device only works with the iPhone and it has an app on the iPhone and actually kills the iPhone's battery because it's always sending stuff to the iPhone for processing, right, um, so yeah, they. You know I have a an AI folder. It's full of a of all kinds of little AI things, uh, but I would so prefer to do it in Apple's nice warm bath, but not yet, so maybe someday we're going to take a break. There was one more little piece of information from the quarterly results. Apple now has more than 2.35 billion active devices worldwide. So, oprah, you can update that. It is 2.35 billion devices in your pocket now, do they?
0:35:34 - Andy Ihnatko
do they include, like, all of the airpods that people have lost? Oh, I'm sure they do. Right, yeah, if you take out the ones that people lost, that's it's got to be at least 600 million lower than that the ones in my sock drawer that I can't find I know that. I know I have a pair of original airpods somewhere in my house.
0:35:51 - Leo Laporte
I know they say active but I guess it you know. If you haven't deactivated them, then it's still active. Uh, you're watching MacBreak Weekly. Lots more apple news still to come with Jason Snell, Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsey.
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So Mark Gurman on sunday said apple's working on an invitation you kind of an evite clone called confetti should be released any day now. Well, it was. It was released this morning and they call it not confetti but invites. I think confetti was better, but all right, invites. You know what it is. It's very clear. Um, Jason, if you, it looks like you've played with this.
0:39:16 - Jason Snell
I'm oh, yes, I have. I have both invited and been invited.
0:39:21 - Leo Laporte
You have a flash mob coming up.
0:39:23 - Jason Snell
I do, and Alex invited me to a rock band concert Nice. I mean, everything's come out. I haven't gotten to.
0:39:27 - Alex Lindsay
Leo yet, but I was trying to do it before we got to it of inviting people. I invited Andy too.
0:39:32 - Leo Laporte
Do I have to install it on my phone to get it?
0:39:35 - Jason Snell
No, so you have to be to use invites. You have to be an iCloud Plus subscriber, which means you actually need to be paying for iCloud storage in the Apple. One bundle will work too, okay, so that's an interesting little quirk, and then everything else is coming to. It's a link that just can open in a browser.
0:39:53 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I just got an invite to Rock Band concert. Rock Band concert oh, how exciting. Thank you, Alex. Exactly, I'll be there.
0:40:00 - Jason Snell
And they've tied it into all their ecosystem stuff so you can have a shared album of pictures from the event.
0:40:05 - Alex Lindsay
You can have a playlist. Oh, that's a nice idea. So the shared album that's the dark horse Like that is hard to set up.
0:40:12 - Leo Laporte
So we don't know yet, because nobody's but February 11th you're going to have that.
0:40:16 - Alex Lindsay
You can put a photo in if you want now once you've accepted it, I put one photo in for mine, but if you accept it, you should be able to post a photo, as someone who does a lot of events, shared photos easily done by an average person without a big service.
0:40:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, is not trivial well, google can do it right. And um, you know what was? We had our tech tv reunion. Uh and uh, I could.
0:40:45 - Alex Lindsay
That was a service like party time, like what is right, but it's always been a separate service in a sense that you know, like for an apple user just being able to open this up and have it be easy and be a little thing and, um, it feels about the same. I mean, I mean, apple maps is about the same as google maps too. We just just talked about that. The thing is is, if it's on your computer, if you download invites, apple's gonna probably do some PR around it and Apple users will start to use it.
0:41:07 - Leo Laporte
You can share music playlists too.
0:41:08 - Leo Laporte
it looks like right, Okay, it's just I will say, it's simple Is this an actual event? I'm gonna say I'm going, but it is actually an event.
0:41:17 - Leo Laporte
So Carlita says looking forward to it. Jason Snail says I like rock bands. So we've got a little text thing going on.
0:41:24 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah, I'm a maybe, so where's this coming from? Oh, I should say maybe.
0:41:29 - Alex Lindsay
I texted it to you, so one of the things that it works. I texted it to you, landy.
0:41:32 - Jason Snell
Yeah, one of the things about how this works on the invite-er side is you have to add people one at a time, and then you can choose to send them via messages, in which case it slides up a sheet in the app and you send them a message with the link or an email. And it slides up a sheet and you send an email with the link, or you can grab it and put it on your clipboard and then you have to go manually put that wherever they're going to see it and then they ever find my email to reply.
0:41:58 - Andy Ihnatko
Okay, contact.
0:41:59 - Leo Laporte
This is cool it also shows here. You can pull up my screen. Uh, there you go.
0:42:04 - Alex Lindsay
It also shows um their weather for the event a map of where to go can't.
0:42:13 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it's not. Yeah, I'm using the iphone sharing and it's not. It's not really sure. Oh, let me uh. No, it's not your fault, I think it's. Uh, it's the iphone share I will.
0:42:24 - Andy Ihnatko
I will. I will give them credit that getting this invite by text message. It looks very, very pretty. It doesn't look like. You don't get a pretty background, you don't get any fonts, you just get stupid, stupid, unprotected sms text oh, you even have an apple map telling us how to get there apple weather with the.
0:42:42 - Jason Snell
With the weather forecast for the event right.
0:42:45 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's for the date of.
0:42:46 - Andy Ihnatko
That's really sign in with apple account. Okay, yeah, that's.
0:42:51 - Leo Laporte
The only problem is my email is now is now my mac address which I don't really use, but I shouldn't it shouldn't require you to do that.
0:42:58 - Alex Lindsay
um, I think it asks, it asks, but doesn it, asks, it, doesn't, don't have an.
0:43:02 - Andy Ihnatko
Apple account, Create yours. Oh it's. I'm approaching this simply as a user who only understands what is shown to me, which is why I sent it to you. It said sign in with Apple account, and there's no option other than that I have to verify email to reply.
0:43:21 - Leo Laporte
It becomes an iCloud photo shared concert, which is kind of cool.
0:43:26 - Jason Snell
I think you don't need to do that, but it's also possible that they are looking to see if there's a cookie that you have logged into Apple before, at which point it asks you to log in, so it's tied to your account, but I don't think anybody needs to make an iCloud account in order to use it.
0:43:43 - Andy Ihnatko
All I can tell you is that what I'm looking at here doesn't say I don't have an iCloud account, I don't want one, just show me the invite. It's asking me to enter an email address, and when I enter an email address, it really wants that to be an iCloud account, because I gave it like a non-iCloud email and it said, hey, why don't you sign into icloud? I said no, I don't want to. Well, we're not going to give you another button for anything else. Maybe I'm just there is. There is a full apple support page for this, so but that's again, this is rough edges of something.
0:44:13 - Alex Lindsay
Of course, the reason I sent it to you is because you had an android and I wanted to see what the experience was in the android. It turns out not very good, so it looked pretty and then oh, he's an Android.
0:44:22 - Leo Laporte
I mean as as something, I mean as something that you're supposed to be sending to everybody, whether they're tech people or not no, you have to be a blue bubble dude. What are you get with?
0:44:32 - Alex Lindsay
it. Hey, well, I mean, if, if you, I'm a Maverick unbroken, untamed.
0:44:37 - Andy Ihnatko
The cynical side I don't want to get into your big plastic bag that you seem to be so comfortable and cozy and I'm comfortable.
0:44:44 - Alex Lindsay
The cynical side of me would say that that if you made an attempt to include android but didn't do it very well, it would push lots of people, like people would be back to the blue bubble thing, like, oh, it was really easy on them I hope.
0:44:55 - Leo Laporte
I think you're not in the group, andy sorry.
0:44:59 - Andy Ihnatko
I think that Tim's, tim's like staff has already like given him like the shock collar treatments. And if somebody, if a reporter, asks you about a relative who had a problem with invites because he has an Android, what are you not going to say? So I'm not going to say they should buy a iPhone, that's right.
0:45:14 - Jason Snell
I can. I can verify that this works for anybody, and you don't need an Apple account. If you don't have an Apple account, you put in your email address and they send you an email verification link and that's it. So that's the difference there.
0:45:28 - Leo Laporte
I'm adding it to my calendar, so it has a very simple way to do that.
0:45:33 - Alex Lindsay
That's nice.
0:45:34 - Leo Laporte
And then the photo that got posted up here.
0:45:36 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm just telling you I'm not seeing that. I can't add a picture though I gave it an email address. Now it goes to the next page. Sign in with Apple account, email or phone number. Continue with password. Sign in with passkey. Requires a device with iOS 17.
0:45:48 - Jason Snell
If they're doing that, then they have screwed this up badly. If they require everybody who's involved in the invitation to create an Apple account and use it as a lead generation, then what are they doing?
0:46:03 - Leo Laporte
That would be bad, okay, but you know what? If you're going to use evites, you have to create an evite account, right to accept or no is that not true, I suppose? Yeah, I don't know, but I can't. I'm having trouble adding a photo, oh really photos.
0:46:15 - Alex Lindsay
So you saw the photos down below and it says add photos and you hit yeah, so so show that show again.
0:46:19 - Leo Laporte
Show my screen, please. Thank you, uh, so should I click add photos?
0:46:22 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, I'll click add photos, then it shows your photos and it doesn't say it should say up on the top it says select upload.
0:46:34 - Leo Laporte
Oh okay, so now I can upload from here. Right, so I'm going to upload. Uh, let's see a concert of some kind andy, I think you're right.
0:46:43 - Jason Snell
It seems like after it, it tells you that all you'll need to do is verify your email. The next step is that it asks you to create an apple account with that email, which is not verifying your email. Yeah, so that's. That's so. Basically, you have to create an Apple account in order to say that you're going to the. Your kid's friend's party comes down, come on.
0:47:05 - Leo Laporte
Yeah Well, but you know what? Everybody who's anybody is in the Apple.
0:47:09 - Jason Snell
Yeah, but they should have. I'm right they should have a. I get the idea that you want to capture people if they've got an Apple account, because then it ties everything together and that's you know. It's really great. But, like if all you're doing is trying to say yes to your kid's friend's birthday party, having to fill out and you're not in the Apple ecosystem at all having to fill out a create an Apple account in order to do this, with all those boxes that you have to fill out, that's ridiculous. Come on, and did you upload something?
0:47:37 - Leo Laporte
I'm uploading some pictures of of uh, brett michaels, I think uh.
0:47:44 - Alex Lindsay
Anyway, just to give people a concert feel, and then in the shared albums we'll see there you go, there they are, they're starting to come up so then the shared albums. You can see them, leo's, popping up in my in, in. Uh, my photo on my. This is on my desktop, so so it showed up.
0:48:00 - Leo Laporte
Nice showed up in the folder.
0:48:01 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah um and the reason.
That's madonna, I think, punching somebody in the face, but I think that that what's interesting about that is, um, a lot of us want to do things where we display lots of images, like we select them and display them in a um, you know, on screens during the show, during the event, and so having a shared album. That isn't no. I love that. All the other ones have been a little bit, and I haven't done it for years. So it was like five years ago we kind of gave up on doing that because it was all quirky, like it's all these quirky services that did this and being able to give everybody an event and having them all put it in. I mean, it's not going to work for a stadium, but for a party, like a wedding, having 150 people posting images to it, and then you end up with all those images, right? So as a bride and groom, you get all these great images as one would expect it works best with people who are on iPhones.
0:48:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and if Johnny wants to come to the party, johnny darn well, better get an iPhone.
0:48:55 - Alex Lindsay
No pressure.
0:48:56 - Leo Laporte
No pressure, Johnny. I like it that it comes as a text message. Obviously, one of the reasons you need iCloud is because the photos are being added from Apple's photos, right? I don't know if you can add them from Google Photos.
0:49:12 - Andy Ihnatko
No, I'm about to do that, okay, good.
0:49:16 - Leo Laporte
I think this is nice. I think this is really nice. As I said, we used for for the tech tv party a similar third party app and you had to make an account, but you could then upload photos. But they all ended up in a text stream, right, that's and this is just all nice, because now it's my photos.
0:49:32 - Jason Snell
We should say it's iphone only, but the. You can also just do this from the web. You can make an invitation from the web again. If you're an icloud plus subscriber, you can just go to iCloud invites, icloudcom slash invites, and you can do it there. And yeah, I think it is nice. My question is going to be how is Apple going to keep this up? Or is this going to be like clips and cards and all sorts of other things that they ship and then they forget that they exist at all, because it's you know, it's fun? I'm also a little surprised that what they're doing is an Evite. I thought they might try to tackle like let's all get together, kind of more broad, like maybe a little more businessy, and they're like not interested in that. I guess it's very much just I'm having a fun event, let's share music and photos which maybe is more appley in some ways.
0:50:21 - Alex Lindsay
If you look at the sub 18 year old group, that could be a pretty powerful, you know, mix, a mix of people to make this really easy for them to just throw something together. I could definitely. I mean I'll have to, I'll talk to my, uh, my experts, my kids, um, after the show and find I just, you know, and see what they think of it, but, uh, if they would use it. But I think that the music and the photos and all that stuff really fit into a you know the, the teen category, which is their largest segment of users.
0:50:51 - Leo Laporte
So I, I don't know you have teens, I don't have them anymore, they're all adults. But my sense is that teens kind of don't like big tech and kind of it's not kind of cool to you. Just use an apple thing that you know they want to use, something kind of well it's. They do it on tick, tock if they're possible, or snap or something right it's just that these, these other ones don't have this, they don't have it, you know.
0:51:11 - Alex Lindsay
And so, um, you know, it all depends. I mean, I think that they're still pretty heavy. Uh, it. Talking again to my, to my daughter, about it, she said it is softening a little bit, the android thing like it's. A couple years ago, if you talk to my kids, they were like everybody's got an iphone or people are you know. You know, no one wants to come in with a green bubble. And now it's like, oh, there's change. Half of her friends are yeah on on both. So it's it's a little easier. So it'll be interesting to see how. But but I can see that for kids that have most of their friends on iphones or willing to put an email in, they would.
0:51:43 - Leo Laporte
I could see how this would be really easy for them, Jason if you had just used this for inviting me to participate in your six colors report card, maybe I would not have forgotten it and blown it off. Now it's too late. It's too late. Now. The six colors report card is in. You go out. You ask writers, editors, developers, even podcasters, what they think about a broad variety. You have a series of questions. You ask 14 different subjects. You ask them to rate them on a scale of worst to best, one to five, and then text commentary. So let's go through the report card. Sure, anything of interest that you noted from your experts? By the way, Alex and I both blew you off, but andy did it. So thank you, andy, for representing.
0:52:33 - Alex Lindsay
Thank you, andy I missed it it was an honor, just to be embarrassed. I don't know how I missed it and Jason only had to remind me.
0:52:40 - Jason Snell
I sent you a few emails um the.
0:52:44 - Leo Laporte
I apologize, I just feel like I don't have anything relevant to say I mean honestly doing those so I literally didn't see it, so there's 60 different people.
0:52:51 - Jason Snell
your, your scores aren't going to really change things. Um, it means that you don't get quoted. Um, yeah, what did I take away from this? I think the mac really is at an all-time high in not just in sales, but in terms of people. Like, if you look at the, I've been doing this 10 years now, so I've got 10 years of data, which is amazing, and you can see the trough in the late 2010, mid to late 2010s on the mac side. And, uh, the mac is, you know, it's got a 4.2 out of 5 average now and it's like Apple Silicon brought it back to life and it's still at this high plateau after a really, really rough five or six years.
And then hardware reliability somebody said I forget who like hey, there were no gates this year, and that's another place where Apple's killing it.
It is very funny to think that Apple is basically better at hardware than at software, but it's really been better at hardware than software for quite a while now, for probably a decade, that the software is kind of old and they've struggled with aspects of their software, but the hardware, honestly, I think, has never been better. And then, on the other side of it, it wasn't an all-time low for developer relations, but it was the lowest since the first year of the survey, which was in the depths of some real App Store disaffection, when Eddie Q was running the App Store before Phil Schiller came back or was given the control of the app store and did some reforms, and that I think that has to do with the DMA. It has to do with Apple has exerted its control over developers in the long run. I think a lot of people pointed to the lack of interest in developing apps for the Vision Pro as being Apple reaping what it sows for not treating developers well on its platforms and um that, so that's not surprising.
So you know, I, I think again, the goal of the of the report card is not to break news. The goal of the report card is to give people the feel of what the general trends of vibe check is. It is the vibe in the room for 2024 about, like, what did Apple do in all these different areas? How's everybody feeling? And I, I will also say, if you are vibe in the room for 2024 about, like, what did Apple do in all these different areas? How's everybody feeling? And I will also say, if you are immersed in the conversations about Apple, whether they're on blogs or podcasts or video or wherever, I don't think anything in this will surprise you because this is trying to quantify those conversations. And so it's a nice time to like, pause and reflect about the year. Get everybody's a. So it's a nice time to like, pause and reflect about the year. Get everybody's take, check everybody's temperature on it and see, maybe, how it's changed over time and and and. So that's what it is.
0:55:30 - Leo Laporte
The developer report card. I think is is very valuable because you talk to a lot of developers. You've got Craig Harkinberry, Marco Arment, James Thompson and Andy Anako, who says if Apple treated all of its customers the same way they treat developers, we'd still be waiting for cut copy and paste on the iPhone. Of course, you always get the Balmo in there. It is a bad report card not the worst, but as bad as it's been since 2015 for developer relations.
0:55:59 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I mean that that. That is the truth of it. And there's some, yeah, craig Hockenberry, a longtime developer, you know what he said is Apple is blowing it with developers full stop. That's just his, that's his whole thing.
Apple is doing a lot of taking these days and not giving back to the developer community that has helped make its products thrive, and I think that's very much how developers feel about this. Is Apple's attitude seems to be very much that developers are getting rich on Apple's greatness in building these products and never really acknowledging the fact that one of the reasons the products are successful and great is because of the thriving app store ecosystem, which Apple takes credit for instead of all the content that's inside it, and that's a very extreme view. But I will say there are a lot of developers who feel that way, and so when European commission comes along and says, okay, we're going to change some of these rules in our region, apple fights it. And they fight it by making claims about what the whole app store is about that are, frankly, you know, insulting to developers who feel like Apple has an opportunity to maybe mend some fences and instead is waging all out war against being allowed, you know, giving developers any latitude on iOS. So it's not great. It's not a great scene.
And I think they're right about the Vision Pro.
I think that's a great example where one of the reasons that there has not been a great experimentation by developers because, again, vision Pro was never going to sell very well. But I think if developers were enthusiastic about playing ball with Apple and being a part of this, there would have been more of an attitude of, well, I know it's not going to pay off now, but like it gets us, you know it gets us in good with Apple and it lets us experiment with new Apple technology and it's going to be. It's going to be fun and we'll just do it. And you know, if you treat those developers as a pretty serious, cold legal relationship where you take your cut and it's just strictly business which I think is what developers have felt for the last few years um, that stuff's not going to happen and it didn't happen. A lot of the sort of more let's, it's fun, let's try out this platform the developers just don't feel that enthusiastic about their relationship with apple. That is and it can hurt you with.
0:58:20 - Leo Laporte
With new products, there seems to be some consensus that the vision pro uh is struggling because developers just don't trust apple enough to to develop for it.
0:58:31 - Jason Snell
Yeah, john, yeah, I mean, the relative vibes are gone and you probably have to develop on vibes, and the good vibes are gone, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's true. The red and the regulation is just brought to the fore because that's where apple has to make claims about why it does what it does, and it just reinforces how developers feel that they're. They're basically like employees of apple, unfunded employees of apple, who have to just uh, you know, do what they say and and there's no other options on uh, at least on ios there's also a side effect to tim cook's politicking.
0:59:01 - Leo Laporte
With the new administration it's seems to have hurt apple's great. It's the worst grade yet. Uh, used to be their environmental social, now it's their world impact, yeah because everybody, it's the.
0:59:11 - Jason Snell
It's the rorschach test of the entire thing. People just read into it whatever they want. My goal with it and I tried to be a little clearer with it this time is the idea is Apple talks a lot about its goals and philosophies and how it wants to leave the world better than they found it and all of those things. And really this category is how do you think they're doing in those terms? And it's all over the place. A lot of praise for shipping carbon neutral products, including the first carbon neutral Mac, which is that Mac mini, but it's tempered with the idea that they're going all in on AI and there are some serious energy and climate implications for doing that. Praise for accessibility not only Braille screen input updates, but AirPods Pro, hearing aids and a general commitment to accessibility. But at the same time, you know, several of them brought up Tim Cook, you know, spending a million bucks on the Trump inauguration and feeling bad about that and and like again, it's not everybody, it's it's almost 60 people, but people that are not happy about that part.
I my favorite comment maybe in the whole thing is from uh well, there there are two comments in this category. Mike Hurley said Apple's too big and too complicated to be a pure good force in the world, which, yeah, I mean, it's a corporation, that's what it is. It's not a, it's not a charity, it's not your friend, it's a corporation. And then Zach Hall said um, sometimes Apple reminds you that it is a corporation and it is. That's just what it is, and I you. But that's what I like about this category is Apple is a corporation, but it's a corporation that says it has corporate values. What do you think about that? And 59 different people gave me different opinions about it, and that's like. That's why I do it.
1:01:00 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I had to think kind of hard about this one and, like I, I had to finally decide that next year's ranking is going to be a doozy because we get to see, after a year of Apple working in this unique political and economic environment, what they're capable of doing or how bad they can act. I ultimately decided that not enough has happened yet to have that affect the score, but even so, it was like I got to take a point off. It's normally a three, I think I did. I give it a three or two, but anyway I gave. I'm basically like, oh God, next year is going to be, it's going to be a tough one.
1:01:39 - Leo Laporte
And there is one thing that we're a year in which is the Vision Pro, and it received it, tied for the lowest average score with developer relations.
1:01:47 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it's a D in report card terms, that's a D 2.4. Yeah, yeah, which is I don't? I mean, I don't entirely agree with that score because I think the Vision Pro is what it is. It's a year of.
1:02:02 - Leo Laporte
Vision Pro. Now it's still TBD.
1:02:04 - Jason Snell
It is as weird and expensive and not something that normal people should buy as it was a year ago. I think some people are judging it that it's not a popular product, which, I think again, at that price it was never going to be. That Some people are judging it based on Apple's seeming lack of support for things like more content or supporting the development effort. I will say the vision pros a lot better than it was a year ago. The vision OS updates have actually made it more useful and better, which I found it has more features.
1:02:35 - Alex Lindsay
I found that the vision pro is less stable, like for me at least it's just it. Like yesterday I was, I was looking at immersive content which I could, the shark content which I could hear, but I couldn't see, you know like, and I required me to kind of back up and drop out and come back in and it's like the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.
1:02:53 - Jason Snell
They're like they're trying to protect you by dimming the the glasses so you're not frightened by the chute john I just saw it.
1:02:59 - Alex Lindsay
It just showed the video throughput, but no sharks.
1:03:03 - Leo Laporte
You don't want to see the sharks, you're not ready for the sharks. What's happened?
1:03:06 - Alex Lindsay
for the Vision Pro for me is that it's just a little cockeyed, like it's just a little. There's something about it Like my screen now comes up just a little off. I didn't think it would bother me, but it bothers me Like it's a. So, anyway, I feel like they've added more features to the Vision Pro. I feel like it and I feel this all the way across Apple's ecosystem is that it is got more features and less stability, and I just feel like I I feel like I run into that everywhere, which is that the interface is a little bit more quirky, it does weird things, it crashes more often. I feel like there's a like just let's just keep on trying to put all these features in and keep up with android or whatever, and I just feel like we keep on paying the price in stability and and, to be honest, ui, I feel like the app, the apple ui, almost on every platform is getting worse, not better.
1:03:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, let's take a little break. You're watching mac break. Weekly there's still lots more apple news, believe it or not. But busy, busy week from apple andy and not go. Alex lindsey, Jason snell. Thank you, Jason, for the report card. Thank you for the yes, the six colors graphs. Great job, six colors dot com. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'll get you on that hp uh inkjet subscription.
1:04:20 - Jason Snell
I think it'll solve many of your woes, shack, shack has a big tank, for me a full tank, get a big tank I guess that's epson, but that's epson yeah, but it's just a big tank full of ink.
1:04:31 - Leo Laporte
I'll dive in yeah, Epson decided not cover me in ink. I had a long-term sponsorship relationship with epson on the radio show and for some reason they decided not to. They thought I was too political, and so they said we're not going to sponsor you anymore. We got Shaq. I think, is what they were really saying is Shaq was not cheap.
We can't exactly. That's what they really saying. Uh, yeah, the radio show was far from political, but you know it was on a right-wing network, so maybe that was. Yeah.
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Um, I applied, I have a T-Mobile iphone and apple is now teaming up. You know apple has satellite connectivity in areas where there's no cell connectivity, using global star, but they are now working with Starlink to provide satellite phone access. T-mobile's in a beta test. I applied, I have not yet been accepted. The minute I am, I will let you know, because I am a T-Mobile customer. It really makes you wonder. You know how much longer you're going to need a mobile carrier. Starlink's pretty much everywhere. Who pays for this, I guess, is the question Is it going to cost money? Apple's put a lot of money in the global star. Will they continue to do so?
1:08:48 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's different because this is still just an extension of the existing cell network, so it will never basically use Starlink instead of a local cell tower. It's for places that have absolutely no access whatsoever. Of a local cell tower, it's for places that have absolutely no access whatsoever, but it's very, very interesting in that emergency SOS works by again hold up your tricoder lock onto a satellite that it tells you to find. This is just by description of how it works. It's not as simple as just simply taking the phone out of your pocket, but you don't necessarily have to set it up on a tripod with a Pringles can wrapped around the antenna to aim it specifically somewhere. And it's not just for heavily filtered and optimized SOS messages. It is meant to be used as a regular mobile broadband connection.
They've been doing this on some Samsung phones for a while right, yeah, but as you say, I mean, this is not going to be something they give away for free. This is going to have to be something for people.
1:09:45 - Leo Laporte
It's a beta right now, you do have to have iOS 18.3.
There will be a toggle switch in your cellular data settings to manage the satellite feature. Apple spokesperson declined to comment. T-mobile said and this is from Bloombergcom the test will begin with selected optimized smartphones, whatever that is, and then the full launch will support the vast majority of modern smartphones. They apparently have opened the beta to some users running Android 15 on a Google or Android device. This news tanked Global Star in the stock market, by the way, I I really think it's not really a threat so much to global star because that's still the emergency connectivity. It's more of a threat, I would say, to the carriers. So it's very interesting that's t-mobile that's in this first test. Maybe they feel like they have the most connectivity problems.
1:10:39 - Alex Lindsay
I mean you know, like, I mean, okay, yeah, I uh, for a long time I had t-mobile, at&t and verizon, so you got really sent, you got a real good sense of, uh, what was good and what wasn't and, um, and t-mobile consistently has problems like I want to qualify what you just said because it's very dependent on your location.
1:10:58 - Leo Laporte
So that's true for where?
1:11:00 - Leo Laporte
you are.
1:11:00 - Alex Lindsay
It is not true for where I am, but for some I have also at t verizon t-mobile yeah, but for someone who travels all over the world, I'm saying that t-mobile like I had a lot of sample points all over the us, and I'm not saying that there aren't places where t-mobile's super fast, um, you know, and very effective, it's just that it's spotty, like. It's just a spotty experience, so that's all. And so, of course, that they would be the first one, and they're also the ones that tend to be the most aggressive because they're still the outside, they're on the outside curve, you know. So, um, they're going to be the first ones that want to make a deal and do something cool.
1:11:32 - Leo Laporte
So the initial version. Just texting. That's all you get. Uh, spacex and t-mobile say they plan to expand into all data and even voice calls. Uh, spacex and T-Mobile say they plan to expand into all data and even voice calls in the future US only um, something to pay attention to. I mean, I I'm honestly Starlink is well positioned to be. The problem is you need, don't you need, a clear view of the sky? I think you do. I don't know how this would work.
1:11:55 - Alex Lindsay
I think. I don't think it's going to work the way your cell phone works for a long time, like it's gonna. It's, it's, it's as a backup that, oh, I need to get a hold of you know, I need to be able to make a phone call and I have to walk outside or do whatever. I don't think you're going to be able to pick up. You're going to be in a building and using your cell phone with Starlink anytime soon, so so I think that it's it's it's good if of that, yeah, dead, like there's nothing, and that's where something like t-mobile would be great.
Just to get the map data. You know, just to. You know, right, you know, because a lot of times I go, oh we're going to jenner or my brother lives up in jenner and so we're going to go up there, and if I want to do that, I'm going to go save the map. Save the map to figure that out, because I may not have it when I get there.
1:12:40 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, this will be interesting, we shall see. It's the biggest change in cell phone connectivity since cell phones it is, but I still think it's early on, I mean I think that this is a decade away of us using it regularly.
1:12:57 - Alex Lindsay
This is not something I mean. Oftentimes, and I think the problem when we're in technology is we see things I talk about this all the time we see things and you think it's going to be next year or two years from now, and it's really 20 years away, you know. Like it's just, we have kind of a problem with Zoom.
1:13:16 - Andy Ihnatko
Also Starlink that has access to basically global satellite connectivity and Elon was nice enough to basically petition the FCC last year to say oh no, no, no, we can't allow Boeing to add more to launch some of those satellites. It's too crowded up there. Mark MANDELBAUM JR Too crowded. Mark MIRCHANDANI how are we going to get 20,000 more satellites of our own up there if you let them launch a test constellation of 4,000?
1:13:37 - Leo Laporte
MARK MIR 000. Well, elon does have now uh a brennan carr, a very formidable friend in running the fcc and apparently running every uh department of the government.
1:13:51 - Andy Ihnatko
So I think elon will get whatever elon wants one of the one of the less crazy things that brendan carr was talking about, like before during the biden administration, was basically saying we should be more flexible about what constitutes broadband in underserved parts of the country, that we should basically not be insisting that every single provider lay fiber optic cable physically. We should be okay. We should allow ourselves, in the interest of spreading broadband as far as possible, allowing satellite providers to do that as well. So that's again.
1:14:26 - Alex Lindsay
It's a bummer, though. I mean like we figured out how to run power, we figured out how to run telephone lines, we figured out how to run plumbing. To, you know, to everywhere in the United States, the advantage of fiber In the 30s.
We figured that out, I know, a long time ago. We figured out how to do this and we figured out how to make it work and instead what we're going to do is everything's going to be just a little crappy, you know, because the satellite connection I mean, I have a Starlink. It's not the same as fiber, and the thing is is it won't scale and the fact that it's used everywhere will slow down us putting real connectivity in. And the thing is is that people that I talk to are looking. There's a lot of people who want to move or do whatever. First thing they do is can I like people that I work with, if they're going to move somewhere, the first thing they want to know is is there fiber? And so for small towns and rural areas and everything else, if there's no fiber, there's like literally there's no chance that they're going to move there.
And and it's, you know, because that's and and so I think that it's a. It's not good for the, the rural communities. They think it is, but what it's it's it's just sugar, you know, like and and the problem is is that it's not enough and as you up with congestion. It was great when we first got Starlink. I got a Starlink and it was like 150 up and down. It only drops 20 seconds every 45 minutes, which means I can't really use it. So but now it's like, you know, it's 30 or 40 up and down and it keeps on shrinking down, whereas you know, my Comcast is a gig down and 300 up. You know, and we're not going to see that kind of speed anytime soon with satellite. You know, and so it is you get 300 up on your.
Comcast. It's funny. So here's the funny thing I bought an.
Emotem I get 34 up on my Comcast and they'll tell you you can't do it. I bought the two gig down and one gig up, so two gig down and 300 or 400 up or something like that, and then they told me I couldn't have it. Like I literally paid for it and I and then said I couldn't have it when I switched my modems I had to reset the modem. I'm using this new ubiquity or whatever, and someone who I talked to just flipped a bit and and I suddenly had 300.
1:16:37 - Leo Laporte
I shouldn't have said I talked to the same person. Because I'm on ubiquity as well, I probably shouldn't have said this on the show.
1:16:41 - Alex Lindsay
I'll be back down to 40 but. But but the, and I was like he's like is everything okay, are you able to get the your? Is your connectivity work? And I was like, yes, it's working great. Thank you so much.
1:16:50 - Leo Laporte
Don't change a thing, I just did mine it's 816 down, it's supposed to be a gig 1.6, yeah, and it's 19 up, it's supposed to be 30. Yeah mine's not even living up to it oh, I'm so jealous now I should mention, uh, when I talk to the comcast people. Uh, doxxus 4 is coming this year and that will change that. That may be, you're maybe getting doxxus 4 somehow well we're waiting for.
1:17:17 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, well, I put a brand new, like high end I mean. I put I put a very expensive modem in. It's the Ubiquiti modem and it definitely I'm using Comcast's business modem. Oh, I never use the Comcast modem. Well, I have to, you don't have to.
1:17:32 - Leo Laporte
No, they say, you have to for business, you have consumer or business I have consumer, yeah.
1:17:41 - Alex Lindsay
That's why you don't have to. If your business they want to manage, if your business, your, your, your bandwidth is so much better than consumer. Oh wait, yeah, I know so, um, yeah, it's and you pay, by the way, twice as much.
I pay twice as much I pay like 120 for it for that speed, you know anyway. But the thing is is that satellite is just it's, you know. The thing is is that if everyone's got satellite, they won't. They'll be like, oh we don't need fiber, which is great for Elon Musk, but not good for the rural communities. And the thing if we, you know, it's not good for the rural communities, it's not good for small towns, it's not good for all of those things, because what would vastly improve people moving to those communities is fiber.
Communities is fiber, like you know, is fiber something that and I and I'm not willing to listen to anyone talk about we can't do it because we have done it a couple times now, you know, and it would be a huge, you know, workforce development process of all these people running fiber and everything else. But we should, because then, when we want to change to 10 gigs up and down or 40 gigs up and down, we already have the infrastructure to do that. You know, like we don't, we don't have to run more lines again. You know, it's just, it's insanity. It's insanity and it's really it's. It's a, it's a bummer, yeah.
1:18:50 - Leo Laporte
Well, I've got bad news for you. Elon Musk, among all of the other things he's done this week, has frozen the infrastructure bills, broadband funds that we're going to go to those little communities.
1:19:02 - Alex Lindsay
Fiber is competition, yeah.
1:19:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so all that money it was literally, I think, hundreds of millions, if not billions is frozen right now, yep, and probably will never That'll be it.
1:19:15 - Alex Lindsay
Maybe, At least for the next four years.
1:19:18 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, as long as we can get elections, we'll be okay. Oh, we'll get elections.
1:19:25 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh yeah, we, we can, we can have the fun of walking walking to a place and giving a piece of paper and getting a sticker and dipping your finger in the ink yeah uh, apple is scrapping works, according to to Gurman, on its Mac-connected augmented reality glasses.
1:19:42 - Leo Laporte
Now, is it important to say that those were the ones connected to the Mac? They wanted, of course, to make these AR glasses work with the iPhone, but apparently they needed too much battery power and too much computing power. So are they still going ahead with those.
1:19:56 - Jason Snell
Gurman knows very little about this and you can sort of see it. His sources are good, but they only tell him so much. I would say what we know is, according to Gurman, is Apple was working on an AR glasses product, like how Meta is working on one, and they were trying to tether it to an iPhone to use for all the computing resources, and basically the iPhone would drive this thing it would be the brains and this thing would be the output. And they realized it doesn't work. There's not enough, it needs too much. So they said, well, let's do it with a Mac, because the Mac is way more powerful. And then, okay, stop there.
We know that, according to Gurman, and that then Apple executives looked at what they were working on and said this isn't it. I've seen a lot of people say, oh well, see, apple has killed this whole project and they're not going to make AR glasses. I don't know if that's necessarily something you could assume from this. I looked at it and said, well, I mean, who wants AR glasses that you have to attach to a Mac Like?
I'm just going to walk around with my Mac and my glasses on, but they were doing it because it would be a first step, though, right, Well, but I mean, but here's the thing they were doing it for. The idea is you want it eventually to be something that you can walk around with, and we don't know any of the details of this product, but we don't know whether Apple was like nope, we're never doing AR glasses again. I would guess that's not what they said. Or this, ain't it Really like this? Ain't it the thing you were trying here, the path you were walking down, where you started with the iPhone and then you went to the Mac and then you made this thing? And it actually makes me wonder if they're doing something like saying back to R&D with you this, this path, is the wrong path to walk, Go back and start again. It's not going to be a product we can make in the next three or four years. Let's push it out a little bit more, and and that's normal. So I think we don't know whether this is an abandonment of the category Again, I would guess not or if it is Apple having a particular project that they were working on that at some point they said this is not going to lead to a product that people want.
As an optimist, what I would say is maybe part of this is they're looking at the meta Ray-Bans and saying, if we're going to productize anything right now, AirPods that are glasses is a better play than this five years out AR glasses thing. That's just. I mean it's going to be. It's going to be years before we have powerful enough computing and enough battery that is light enough to put in glasses, right Like. It's just going to be a long time. So we don't know. That's the part we don't know about this story.
1:22:35 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I agree a hundred percent.
1:22:36 - Leo Laporte
I thought it does say, the company is still working on successors to the Vision Pro, including updated versions of the original model. It also has other concepts in the works, such as AirPods with cameras, and executives still hope to eventually create a set of standalone AR glasses someday. So he even says this doesn't mean that's dead.
1:22:58 - Alex Lindsay
And Apple is. I mean, these are leaking, but Apple's notorious for killing projects that they've spent hundreds of millions or billions of dollars on. And you know, I've talked to folks that used to work at Apple and they won't say what those are, but they'll say there are things that I saw that we had in our, that we were testing in our living room, that I would have happily thrown down money for, and Apple has decided no, the market's not big enough or we're not doing it as well as we could, and they're not worried about the fact that they spent. One thing about Apple is very rarely do they go. Well, we put money into it, so we're going to put it out, no matter what, no-transcript out and let's rethink this again and uh and and build it up again yeah, it doesn't seem like there's nothing to panic about.
1:23:54 - Andy Ihnatko
It doesn't seem like we're leaving any money off, money on the table by not having this product. However, I hope that they don't allow best to cloud their judgment of good, because, again, the meta Ray Bans are really nice product. The only problem with it is the first word in that product name meta. Just the idea of having a camera that can basically be the object of the object of AI requesting what. I basically saying that, how many calories is in this? Or can I take this with this medication? Or where can I go in this neighborhood to get a cup of coffee? All that sort of stuff where I don't need to have text in front of my eyeballs, I just need to be able to say the thing I'm looking at. Please help me interact with that. And that's a really, really great product.
1:24:48 - Leo Laporte
Apple has, according to German, also changed how Apple care plus works. Usually when I buy Apple care and I don't always buy it, but I buy it for the what I consider the life of the product a few years no longer, according to german, will you be able to do the two to three year pay in advance, at least at physical retail stores only monthly and annual subscriptions, but you still will be able to get those multi-year plans in the online store. Which is weird. That you would have something different in the physical store is that? Does that make sense? Why would they even do that?
1:25:27 - Andy Ihnatko
yeah.
1:25:27 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know. I think it's because it's easier for them to turn, do the other online stuff, and they probably have some mechanisms in the store that take longer. But they're probably just gonna, they're probably gonna good night all of it back to yearly, that's my guess, or go to monthly, uh, or monthly, yeah, I mean, but they're not gonna, they're gonna go away from it's the same amount of money if you do it monthly as yearly.
1:25:47 - Leo Laporte
Right, it's not like, or is it a break if you do it yearly?
1:25:51 - Alex Lindsay
I think it's the same, it's not. It's not very much different.
1:25:54 - Leo Laporte
It might be a little bit more and that could be a lot of money for apple, I think people like to do it, though, if they're, if they say, well, I might get a new phone in a year, which I always do. You don't want to buy for more than a year. I don't know, it's a strange note, but it's, that's what it is. Um, so the first uh I'm happy about this the first native iphone porn app, uh, is available now in the eu congratulations leo it's called hot tub.
But you have to be in the eu because you have to get it in the water. Wow, hot tub uh, you have to get it at an alternative store, the alt store. Pal, this is something the digital market act forced Apple to do.
1:26:43 - Andy Ihnatko
Apple not happy about this especially when, like the, when the women, the developers, basically tweet out it's the first, first porn app approved by Apple. Now Apple said no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We didn't approve it. We did the legal thing we had to do to certify it so that it could be sold through an app store we do not approve.
1:27:02 - Jason Snell
At which point the developer of of uh of alt store pal sent a screenshot of his uh email from apple saying apple has approved this for sale.
Well, they should change that word. Then I mean look, look, this is. This is riley tested. Who does alt store poking the bear? I mean putting a big thing out that says it's the first Apple-approved porn app, and Apple would say there are actually rules against suggesting, implying an endorsement by Apple, and I think that this is. I think I think he's making trouble where he maybe needed to not make so much trouble. At the same time, though, the letter of the law in the EU is that Apple should not be using any of its mechanisms to prevent apps that it would. It doesn't want to exist, because alternative app stores should be allowed to make their own rules, and that's what's happened here.
I'll tell you the immediacy of Apple's response. I got an email sent to me by Apple PR almost immediately with a statement that was on the record, and then a whole bunch of on background stuff that was pretty wild in its vociferousness about this and about how it was about. I mean, you name it. They said it about how this is linked to hardcore pornography and then, therefore, to human trafficking. How Alt Store, because they took some money from Epic, is therefore a puppet of Epic Games, and how Alt Store having this in Fortnite, which is played by children, is so inappropriate, like they went down the list and you know I get what they're saying. But they also see this as an opportunity, and this has been coming for, I would say, more than a year. They've been waiting for their opportunity to point and say see, this is what happens when we can't have complete control over our platform. There's an app that has porn in it. I mean leaving aside that, like, literally, you could just use Safari and see porn if you wanted to, and that's an Apple-made app, because that's the internet and that's how it works. They've been waiting for their opportunity to say, see, look at the Pandora's box that has been opened by the European Commission, and like, I get it.
What makes me angry about this is how disingenuous Apple is about this, because there have been two instances in the last year where Apple has used it's it's supposedly neutral notarization process that it's not allowed to interfere with, which is what they did here. They notarize this app even though they don't agree with it, because it's not allowed to interfere with, which is what they did here. They notarized this app even though they don't agree with it, because it's not supposed to be a de facto app store acceptance or rejection system. It's supposed to just scan for things that would harm your system, but there's not supposed to be any ideology behind it. All Twice in the last year and we've talked about it here Apple has just used that system, pulled that lever to stop Mac emulators from appearing in other app platforms alternative app stores.
There's no rule about that. They should use other means for that. But they had no problem pulling that lever and turning notarization from something that was supposed to be neutral into something that has a big lever that Apple can pull whenever it wants to. So when Apple says, oh no, we couldn't stop the porn because we don't have a lever to pull, our hands are tied. What makes me so angry about this is their hands aren't tied because they pulled the lever twice already, but this time they didn't pull the lever, in part, I believe, because they want to be able to point to it and say oh no, everything is going to hell because apple doesn't have complete control of iphones in the eu here's the statement I'm getting, reading this from a tech crunch issued by apple we are deeply concerned about the safety risks that hardcore porn apps of this type create for eu users, especially kids this app and
1:30:56 - Leo Laporte
others like, it will undermine consumer trust and confidence in our ecosystem. We have worked for more than a decade to make the best in the world. Contrary to the false statements made by the marketplace developer, we certainly do not approve of this app and would never offer it in our app store. The truth is, we are required by the european commission to allow it to be distributed by marketplace operators like alt store and epic, who may not share our concerns for user safety. Did I give apple full justice in that? Yeah, well done.
1:31:35 - Alex Lindsay
You know, functionally the challenge will be for the alt store is that if there turns out to be a whole bunch of these, it doesn't matter whether Apple's disingenuous or not. It turns out to be a bunch of porn apps that all go as soon as they keep on stepping the wrong side. If it becomes a place for that, it's great marketing for Apple and they'll use it. And anytime you know like it's, you know like they're gonna, they're gonna grab that and just beat the crap out of them with it. You know, and and so that you know, and it'll destroy the entire alt app market because they'll use this one and demify it and makes it makes every other alt store harder to run. No, so it's so. I think that it's. I think that they, you know, they, we can talk about whether apple's being disingenuous or not. That's, this is what we all thought was going to happen. This is what we've been talking about it happening and now it's happening.
1:32:17 - Leo Laporte
There's no surprise here. Does uh do? Do Android phones have a porn apps available?
1:32:22 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know, I've never, I've never looked.
1:32:24 - Leo Laporte
No, of course you wouldn't know. Why am I asking you? No, because you do a show about Android. That's the only reason, right, exactly?
1:32:31 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm putting you on the spot there. All I can say is that I've never seen them on the App Store. I've never seen them on the Google Play Store, even accidentally. I think that that's more of a sideload sort of thing, Right which you can do.
1:32:44 - Leo Laporte
Which you can do, yeah.
1:32:46 - Andy Ihnatko
But you know, yeah, yeah.
1:32:49 - Leo Laporte
You don't need an App Store to do that. I don't need an app store to do that.
1:32:51 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't want to feed the algorithm.
1:32:53 - Jason Snell
Oh, now Andy's looking for porn apps on the Play Store Andy come on, come on, let's be clear. I mean this, is Apple using this? Because Apple doesn't want anybody to tell it what it can approve or not approve. And this is going to give it ammunition, as Alex says, because this is going to let people who think there shouldn't be pornography on computers Sorry to those people, people, by the way uh, because it's always. You know, there's a fundamental rule of the internet that everything has pornography anyway. Uh, it allows them to wage a pr battle and it's another front in their pr war against regulation.
And and like, seriously, I looked it up, I predicted this like a year and a half ago on a podcast, like because it's inevitable, like it's I, it wasn't a hard prediction to make that the moment something happens that is bad, apple will point at it and say see, we told you so and they've decided. In fact, I think that's why Riley at Alt Store went out as loud as he did with this, because he could have been quiet about it. Apple would have still made it a big story. So he just went out out loud and and and shouted it to the rooftops. What happens now, I don't know.
Like, again, I feel like for me, the angle that's the most interesting is, uh, if, if they are going to get fined or rebuked in some way for using their notarization system as a lever to prevent things from going in the store because, like, they can't make the argument that they their hands were tied for this and yet have used it to prevent, to protect users from the scourge of, I don't know, using a hypercard, doing doing Mac paint on an iPad, like that, like old Mac emulators, and they're like no, you can't do it, but but porn.
They're like yeah, okay, we, we can't pass that through. I think that was a mistake on their part, strategically to do that, because it makes it harder for them to point at notarization and say this is a neutral process and our hands are tied because their hands haven't been tied in the past. But they chose to act as if they were tied this time so that they because, like, let's just say it, apple didn't want this thing to be an alt store. They could have just not notarized it and that would have caused a scandal, but they could have done it because they've done it for the emulators. I think the point is, this is a more useful thing for them to complain about.
1:35:05 - Leo Laporte
And, out of respect for Apple, I'm not going to make the show title be we're hard when our hands are tied. So so uh, I just I won't. I won't. Okay, I just not, I'm not gonna do it.
1:35:17 - Andy Ihnatko
We're gonna take a break. You're a classy dude.
1:35:19 - Leo Laporte
It's hard when our hands are tied uh, I don't know, my mind just went there. I don't know why. I don't know why I don't, but we will have more in just a moment. Uh, with our great panel, Jason snell, andy inaco, Alex lindsey. You're watching MacBreak Weekly on the twit podcast network and I just I want the folks at the icon factory to know this is, as far as I know, the oldest Macintosh podcast still active. As far as I know, I believe it is. Just want you to know, icon factory, you know, just want you to know. You'll understand what I'm talking about in just a moment.
Our show today, brought to you by ZScaler. Let's talk security. Let's talk cloud security. Here's the problem. Uh, companies maybe your company, certainly our company have spent so much money over the years on firewalls, perimeter defenses to protect themselves and then, of course, to get the employees in through the perimeter defenses, VPNs. Has this worked? No, breaches rise every year. In fact, there was an 18% year over year increase in ransomware attacks in 2024 and a record $75 million payout. Now I have to say that's gotta be just the tip of the iceberg, because I'm sure most companies don't want to admit that they paid the ransomware bad guys to get their data back. It's not. Look at the point being. It's not working.
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Today in... No, I guess it was 2000, the year 2000. On February, February the 4th 2000, the Sims were released into the world. Um, did you any of you play the Sims? Can any any of you speak sim? I played. I bet you, Alex, you can speak sim cannot right I did.
1:39:41 - Alex Lindsay
Sim city is something I played a lot of.
1:39:43 - Leo Laporte
Uh sims, I've never so will wright created sim city and they wanted another sim maxis wanted another sim city. Executives this is from an article, uh, in the new York Times executives at the game studio urged Wright to focus on the SimCity franchise, his urban planning simulator from 1989 that put the company at the forefront of American game design. Everyone Will Wright says everyone in the room hated the idea of the Sims. Then Electronic Arts acquired Maxis in 1997, then electronic arts acquired maxis in 1997, but will wright forged forward and created a game that is now 25 years. Do you speak simlish? Anybody speak simlish?
1:40:27 - Alex Lindsay
no, I did do a music video with the sims. Uh, did you? Stacy's mom, yeah, it was. Ah, found this away. The uh, we, uh, yeah, so we did, we did. Uh, I was, we did this thing called video mods for vh1 and, uh, one of them was the sim. So we converted a lot of models there actually is a language.
1:40:48 - Leo Laporte
By the way, you know, my daughter speaks simlish. I think she might have spent a little too much time playing with the sims. It's very funny when she does it. Um, they, they actually hired somebody to write the language. Claire curtain. She invented simlish, a gibberish language spoken by the game's characters. Said developers refined its social system by imbuing the sims with needs like hunger, comfort, hygiene and, of course, let's not forget woohoo, which, before you could download porn for your iphone, you could. You could have a little woohoo in uh sims. It's actually a great article because they have a lot of uh animated right above our picks.
1:41:36 - Alex Lindsay
I put the link to the video that we did with the sims. Oh oh, let me go look at it. It's on youtube. It's kind of fun. So we did this a long time ago. This is probably in simlish over 20. We didn't do it in simlish, we did it in fountains of wayne. This is this is, uh, stacy's mom, but animate it that we made a music video.
1:41:54 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I see video. Use the sims to turn it.
1:41:57 - Alex Lindsay
We got all the assets from ea. So we got all the assets and we put them into um, I think, motion builder and uh, and then rendered it all out. But it's so, it's a whole music we probably can't play.
1:42:09 - Leo Laporte
Is it the actual fountains of wayne? It is, oh, so I probably have to. I stopped the music so we'll get taken down, even though I love fountains of wayne anyway. So this is funny. Who's we when you say we?
1:42:23 - Alex Lindsay
pixel, uh pixel core or dv garage, one or the other, I don't know. It was a long time. It was 2005, I think, or 2004.
1:42:29 - Leo Laporte
stacy's mom is hot. I didn't know they had such hot uh characters in uh in the sims.
1:42:35 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, this was like a summer for me, like it was like 10.
1:42:37 - Jason Snell
you spent the whole summer doing this.
1:42:39 - Alex Lindsay
Oh no, no, this was. This song was one of ten. I think we did ten of them, I think uh and this was just hysterical. It's a, it's a really great um song yeah, so we had motion capture and and we applied it to their characters and oh, oh, that's interesting. So it was. It was uh, yeah, it's not. We didn't play it out of the game. You couldn't play this in the sims. You just use their resources to apply to.
1:43:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we used the 3d research.
1:43:01 - Alex Lindsay
We did that, we did uh, come on, come on and um, I don't know, evanescence stacy out of the way look at your mom.
1:43:11 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, okay, okay, I'm going to stop now, otherwise we're going to get banned from the Apple Store. There you go. Very funny. Anyway, 25 years of the Sims. I looked. I was sad to say you can only get Sims 2 in the App Store for $30. Sims 4 is not available in the App Store. It's probably on Steam, or something like that.
1:43:33 - John Ashley
They recently re-released uh sims 1 and 2 on the steam store with the uh yesterday oh, to celebrate the anniversary.
1:43:46 - Leo Laporte
okay, that's cool. Uh, icon, is this one of your picks? Should I not mention the icon factories? New, let me see? No, it's not. So I can't mention this and I shouldn't give them a plug because they didn't give us a plug. But the icon factory the team that behind the late lamented twitterific which of course they had to stop making because elon yanked the api has made a new app called tapestry which combines blue sky, mastodon, rss and so forth, and when you launch it it gives you some suggestions for podcasts to subscribe to Not ours, not ours, I'm sad to say. They do add six colors. So, Jason, you get, you get a mention in there, yay, yay, and they like the accidental tech podcast a little bit better. But I understand, I'm not really part of that you know, that hip with it apple crowd.
I guess uh subscription options available to remove ads, although you can run it with ads for free. Uh, they have other features that get unlocked $1.99 a month ow. It's $19.99 a year ow or one-time purchase of $80 ow ow.
1:44:57 - Jason Snell
Well, you know they. A lot of people worked hard on this software, so so this is from a category of new apps. There are several of them out there that are trying to cross the streams, basically, and say, if you want to read rss, if you want to have youtube channels, if you want to have podcasts, if you want a blue sky, if you want to mastodon, if you want to have podcasts, if you want a blue sky, if you want to have Mastodon, sort of like anything. That is a feed, you can put it in here and it's got multiple timelines and you can use it as, kind of like, your master feed reader. It's not a client in the sense that you can't reply to social media. You can scroll it, but you can't reply. It's not posting out. So it's read, read only. It's read only, at least for now, I mean. Maybe they'll change that over time.
Maybe it's using rss only for no, it's got a whole plugin architecture.
It will read all sorts of different things that aren't rss and and uh generate uh items that go in this stream. That that and that's part of the idea is, if it can be uh turned into a feed of any kind. They should be able to read it. Um, this is a, I think, what we've seen Icon Factory, you know, they made Twitterific and they are among the people who have decided that building a whole software system on top of a platform that might be run by people who could change the terms at any point and kill your app is not something that they really wanted to do, and so instead, they've built a thing that is sort of broad and is meant to work with any kind of thing.
Now, in the long run, I don't know whether multi-purpose apps are going to beat single-purpose apps or not. You know, I think this is a really nice implementation, but it's a starting point and there's more work to do, and I that work will only happen. If people show that they're interested in an app like this. I think there's a place for it. It's almost like if you think of it as a next gen version of a classic RSS reader, where, instead of just RSS, you can do like one of the things that I know a lot of people have used Tapestry have praised is they can put.
They can make a YouTube timeline that they put their favorite YouTube channels in and so instead of going to YouTube and having to go through their interface, where they really want to show you the algorithm and not just the posts from the channels you care about, you can just add them to a timeline and when there's a new video, it shows up in the timeline, and you can similarly do that with a podcast, and when there's a new video, it shows up in the timeline and you can similarly do that with a podcast, and you could build different timelines for different subject areas or different content types. And it's an interesting idea. We'll see where it goes. I think in the long run it would be nice if it played the podcast. If it doesn't, do that.
1:47:28 - Leo Laporte
It just shows you there's a new one.
1:47:29 - Jason Snell
It might in a web embed, but like this is the point is that it's not really meant to be the end point. It's meant to be the, the feed list, and then you open it in a browser. It's your doom scroll it's a, or maybe you know, the opposite of doom scrolling, whatever that is, so it's an interesting, really interesting idea yeah, well, and I love that icon factory.
1:47:48 - Leo Laporte
I'm just giving them a hard time. I wish they loved us as much as I love them, but anyway.
Uh, you can, uh, but anyway, it's a very good idea. I think it's an interesting idea. Mike McHugh of Flipboard is doing something I think called Surf. That's similar. You're seeing more and more of these You're right, these multi-feed things, and I think it's probably a good way to get people into the Fediverse and to Blue Sky so they can see all of the different uh feeds that are out there. I think that's probably a good idea. Um, anyway, you might want to check it out. You could try it for free. Icon factories, tapestry, brand new today in the app store. Uh, let's see what else. Um, oh, I thought this was kind of interesting.
You remember we talked a little bit about the gravy leak. Gravy is an ad network that is on thousands of apps, many of them on your phone, and the leak showed that really, the your phone is is bleeding your location to everybody all the time. Uh, this is from a blog timsh. Everyone knows your location. He decided he was going to see if he. He took an old iphone I think an iphone 11 and put one gravy based app on there just to see all of this, all the information was sending out. This is the thing that kind of opened my eyes was it turns, turns out, unity has a mobile game ad network.
Now many, many iPhone and Mac games other games are running on the Unity platform. It was very popular. It's the only one that works on iPhones. Unity has its own network and many of the games the games, in fact. This is their main revenue stream. They made two billion dollars on it. In 2023, many of the games running unity will be doing the same thing sending out your location, your time stamp, your ip address all going to an ad network, going to an ad network. Uh, this is kind of an eye-opener. We'd seen the gravy, a dump, but this is really things. Unity even knows things like your your connection type, your screen brightness, how long your system's been booted for, how many cpus you have, how your battery's doing. You might say, well, who cares if it knows this? But all of this can be used to fingerprint you, because the more of these unique identifiers you can combine, you can pretty much narrow it down to one person. So some very interesting information being leaked by your iphone and every phone.
1:50:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Frankly, yeah, this is this. This is why it's like I keep. I keep wishing for the reality in which, basically, there's a federal law that says that your personal information belongs to you, can never be sold or transferred, it can only be leased for a period of one year and it can only be renewed with your explicit permission. It's not even worth joking about anymore the fact that this device that provides way more benefits to us on a day-to-day and hour-to-hour basis than it takes from us with our personal information. That's bad. I wish that there were a better way to negotiate that transaction than simply say that, well, you just got to deal with the fact that there are always going to be some sort of a bad package somewhere in the calculator app or the weather app or the whatever app you just downloaded, because that's how they're making money off of the app, not by your in-app payments, but because, again, they agreed to put all these, put all these libraries in there.
1:51:30 - Leo Laporte
That is just well, it's often the case. Uh, we found out after the gravy breach in 404, reporting on this, that these, that the developers didn't you know they put an ad network in. They had no idea what. Yeah, I mean, if you use unity, do you? You're saying, well, I'm going to use unity. Uh, you have no idea that you've just installed a tracker in in your app. So a lot of app developers claim to be surprised by this information. Play the John Ashley. We got to do a Vision Pro segment, so if you would, what do you?
1:52:00 - Jason Snell
see, what do you know?
1:52:02 - Leo Laporte
it's time to talk to Vision Pro and the lyrics by Andy and not goes music by. I don't know who. Who gave us that music? Did you do that, john?
1:52:13 - John Ashley
no, someone in uh our club did it okay, thank you.
1:52:16 - Leo Laporte
Club to it. See one more reason we love. Club to it, harry McCracken. Dear friend, harry McCracken and Fast Company how Apple Vision Pro is finding a home in health care. He actually went to a conference, uh, I think, where he found a bunch of medical professionals who, uh, who love the vision pro. 300 people are gathering in san diego to explore the uses of apple's spatial computing headset for surgery and other medical applications. Yeah, and san diego's health.
1:52:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Uh, uses it apparently, and and that's why people have gathered yeah, and a lot of that is just simply, I want a virtual screen. I I'm I'm using instruments that have cameras on them. I need to basically keep an eye on screens. There's a. He got some. He had. He chatted with a couple of surgeons who were saying that you never believe how much trouble it is just to like get a display angled and positioned exactly where I need it to be where rats are, the vision probe. It could just to like get a display angled and positioned exactly where I need it to be, where rats are the vision probe.
1:53:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, as long as you, as I mean, I guess you could see everything that you need to see, and that's the. That would be the key, right? Yeah, um, 3500 is nothing for a surgeon, uh, or a hospital, that's as much as a syringe in most hospitals Right.
Good article though. So if you are a Vision Pro fan, we have clearly found at least one great use for it. Ucsd's Dr Broderick says it's not uncomfortable or distracting to use it. It's pretty much quote pretty much not noticeable when you're in the middle of an operation. The learning curve is near zero. Operations typically last 45 to 90 minutes, which is good, because that's all the vision pro can do on a single battery charge.
1:54:03 - Andy Ihnatko
um, he's, he's very bullish yeah, it's still kind of disappointing, isn't it that every time you've seized people who are like, oh my god, I love this, I would pay that. Is it so worth it? I use it every single day. It's like, oh, wow, what feature of spatial computing are you using it for? It comes oh, I love having a virtual display in my field of vision. It's like, okay, that's not necessarily. It's encouraging, I suppose, because that means that if Apple did want to simply say here's how we take $1,500 off the price of this, we find a way to get displays that are good enough. We don't have to basic If that's what people are buying them for. We can optimize on that feature and go forward. It's bad news because it means that Apple's secret sauce is not quite so potent and that competing advice is my belief.
1:54:49 - Leo Laporte
Well, I have to point out that's when the Google Glass came out. There were a lot of stories. Same thing with Microsoft's HoloLens about how it's used in hospitals and, yeah, used by doctors. It seems like that's the last gasp uh for one of these devices is well, the doctors love it so well.
1:55:08 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I think that and I've talked to a lot of folks that medical from everything, from patients being given something that they can they can look at, to doctors using it for training I haven't seen doctors actually using it for operations. Again, I think we're pretty early on most of those. I think the thing that killed Google I mean I just found my Google Glass, of all things, it's broken. It broke it, right it had a tendency to break right over the ear.
It was a weak point in the in the system, but the uh um, you know what killed it? I think still was. Uh, mostly was the camera like. People just didn't like I was. Even it was a lot of people that just said, hey, you can't like I, I was. I was in Rwanda with the and with the president's team and they were like, oh no, they all took pictures of it. They loved it. They all came over in a long line you must go through it yeah they said, but you cannot.
You cannot have the google eye on when the president is in the room. You know like that was, it was like. You know like it was so the um, uh, so the camera was the problem there, um, but I think that you're getting so much trouble.
1:56:08 - Leo Laporte
You brought that. You brought the laser pointer to the white house so much trouble. Yeah, this is the. This is the successor to Google Glass. These are the Brilliant Labs. They have a camera there I mean the Killer and they have a little the Google Glass-style prism right here for the heads-up display.
1:56:23 - Alex Lindsay
And can you see what you're shooting, the video you're shooting with that camera?
1:56:28 - Leo Laporte
No, can't do anything Right now. You can't do and it's open source and nobody's written anything. The killer app. But this is the glass. These are the glasses I like to wear. These are the meta ray brands and they sound.
1:56:39 - Alex Lindsay
I mean the problem? The problem is is that? Is that the? For me, the thing I loved about Google Glass was being able to see what I was shooting, like a heads-up display of a video that I can see what I was actually. I could actually frame it and shoot what I wanted to, and I knew what you do.
1:56:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you would.
1:56:54 - Alex Lindsay
When you said when you said google, take a, take a video or shoot a video or whatever you'd see the video in the video would pop up in that little screen and and you would then, and I was taking pictures of me and my kids and I was taking pictures of things I wanted to show people in the early days. They did you could do hangouts between two glass and they turned that off, like this security issue. So, but the, but the, um, uh, but the. I think that that is a really interesting puzzle. I think that I still think that we should remember that we're still pretty early on, even compared to the other platforms. Um, you know, we haven't.
There's two big things coming up in the next couple of months, and one will be the camera, which I've talked about. Every week that we talk about this, the cameras are getting much closer to the surface. There'll be some number of them that'll probably come out before NAB, because NAB is where no one wants to show up again without the camera. So NAB is the first week of April, so we expect to see some cameras by then, and it's the first time ever in the history of all these goggles that there was a unified way to shoot and post video, and that's going to. I think it's going to make a difference, and I also think that we're going to see more libraries available at WWDC and I think that those things we should, you know we're going to we're not going to know whether the vision pro was successful or not for another couple of years. You know, and I think that that I think we should. You know it's it may not be successful or it may set up for the next one, but it is um, there's still a lot of room. I think apple still has a lot of what's made some things easier in the vision pro are libraries.
I think the thing that's missing for the vision pro are libraries. Like you know, there's more that needs to be done to make it easier to um, develop for um, and it's some of its development and some of it's just being able to post to it. You know, being able to have a better 3D experience inside of Keynote means that anybody could create things that look like. You know that we should be able. Apple should have an app that is, you know, like JigSpace and easy to develop. For If they just fix that one problem, they'd probably have a lot more usage with the headset. You know, it's just jig. Space is great, it's just that it's complicated and expensive. Apple could fix that problem, yeah, you know.
1:59:01 - Leo Laporte
I have to say, though I have spent, with all the glasses and the ai devices and the pins and the note and all I have spent far less combined than one vision pro so yeah, but I, you know, I was watching the, uh, I was watching the shark video, uh, last night, oh yeah, I finally got around to it.
1:59:19 - Alex Lindsay
Man, I could watch a lot of video that way, like that's the, I mean it is the shark video was finally that's the only particularly good.
That's the thing it's really and and I get to watch movies and I've shot a lot of video for for vr and you shoot a lot of video and the resolution is never quite there and the frame rate is never quite there. And you're like eventually we're going to get somewhere where it actually looks and sounds really good and it plays back well, and someday we'll get there. And you know, I put it on. I was watching the shark stuff last night and I was like, oh, we're pretty darn close now, like it's a pretty, it's a pretty great experience. That's the rodeo thing or the bucking bronco thing.
1:59:58 - Leo Laporte
Oh, did you see that one yet?
2:00:00 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, okay it's again, it's, it's.
It's a filmmaker who got really aggressive about how they use the camera and not in a way that I that I liked you really don't want 3d video on a bull well, no, no, they didn't put it on a bull, they were shooting stuff, but it was just like lots of cuts and then we got really, really close and then we did this thing. You know, it was just like a lot of things that make at least make me uncomfortable and I'm pretty thick skin when it comes to watching VR Cause. I've watched a lot of bad VR Cause. I've shot a lot of bad VR myself. Um, I just felt like that wasn't a great experience. But the underwater, by the way, shooting VR underwater is so hard, like that is not. To shoot it at that level of quality is not a trivial problem, and so that was a pretty. That was just a flex I mean, they were just flexing on that but the 3D looks pretty good.
2:00:50 - Leo Laporte
Anthony Nielsen says they're really good when you're washing the dishes.
2:00:55 - Alex Lindsay
They're really good when you're washing the dishes.
2:00:56 - Leo Laporte
They're really good when you're washing the dishes.
2:00:57 - Alex Lindsay
You can't watch the dishes and watch sharks at the same time. I don't think you do that Well, it's immersive, though, because it's oh yeah, yeah, you can't, you can't. You have to sit and watch it.
2:01:05 - Leo Laporte
It's only six minutes long. Well, Anthony, what are you doing with the dishes then?
2:01:15 - Alex Lindsay
Are you or something? Oh well, I can see. Anyway, I can see putting up, I could see watching other videos.
2:01:17 - Leo Laporte
Uh, that way. Yeah, he says he's watching youtube. Oh yeah, there's no youtube app. I thought, though, is there a youtube? You can just watch it in safari. Oh, you just use the browser. Okay, and that's our vision.
2:01:28 - Jason Snell
Pro segment now you see, now you know we're done talking the vision pro. Now you see, now you know we're done.
2:01:36 - Leo Laporte
Talking the vision pro um the real world. Apple tv is impinging on the real world. First they had the severance cast at grand central station doing their lumon thing. Now dr rickens book, the you Are, is available from the iBooks store. Has anybody read the you you Are? This is the book if you haven't watched the TV show. That kind of stimulated the whole revolt because they realized that they could get out, I guess, and it turns out Rickens, the brother-in-law, the lead, and I don't know.
2:02:11 - Jason Snell
It's a self-help book that's supposed to empower people to take control of their work-life balance, and when you show that to people who are fundamentally only workers who never leave the workplace, yeah, it kind of instigates a revolt.
2:02:28 - Leo Laporte
I'm watching the new severance, loving it. Of course it's weird and hard to figure out.
2:02:32 - Dr. Ricken
Here's a little dr ricken a book begins, it's said that as a child, wolfgang mozart killed another boy by slamming his head in a piano. Don't worry, my research for this book has proven the claim untrue okay, that much we had heard on the tv show.
2:02:53 - Jason Snell
It is, yeah, yeah, the whole idea is that it's really terrible.
2:02:56 - Leo Laporte
It's terrible. He's awful.
2:02:57 - Jason Snell
And yet the innies become obsessed with it and think she is so wise, whereas outside Mark and his sister roll their eyes at the stuff that Rickon does. It's great.
2:03:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Don't you love the cover design? Like exactly one of those like really bad, cheap 80s like self-help book, the pop psychology books that sells like a million copies for two months, then everybody else, everybody after. That's like kind of embarrassed. They even bought it like this.
2:03:24 - Jason Snell
This would be an oprah's book club selection like in the 90s or the early 2000s exclusive excerpt a spiritual biography of you by dr ricken and uh, people, that's michael churnis who is in the great, great, legitimately great tv show that nobody saw called patriot bad title he was in patriot. Now I read no yeah, he's the brother in patriot the lame brother.
Yeah, exactly, very similar podcast to severance and, uh, people should check out patriot, which should be called, by the way, if you've never watched it because you thought patriot, what does that mean? And I don't like that kind of show. Whatever it means to be called bad spies, it can be called sad, very sad spies so good, so good so, michael Chernus, seek him out, if you enjoy Rickon. I knew I'd seen him before oh my god, now I realize it's the same character, basically yeah, two seasons is all we got of Schmigadoon.
2:04:33 - Leo Laporte
It's probably all we ever really needed of the weird Apple TV plus musical. However, it was fun, it was weird. It was it is now going to the Kennedy Center with a stage adaptation. Uh, it's, it's, uh, it was a spoof of kind of you know 50s broadway musicals as uh with, including with songs.
2:05:02 - Jason Snell
Season one was a spoof of 50s broadway's music broadway musical. Season two was a spoof of 70s broadway musicals 80s broadway music season two was a little like a different angle. There was a, there was some sweeney todd andey Todd and stuff like that in season two and yeah, so it's perfect. I one of the reviews said it was like watching season one of Schmigadoon in two hours. Pack it all in there. But it was. It's a fun. Yeah, it's a. It's a. It's a musical about musicals.
2:05:35 - Leo Laporte
Basically, it's a super. It's a meta musical. I suppose it was a great parody. It was hysterical and it had two wonderful uh actors in it. Um, this is these are the broad. These are the broadway versions of the same actors.
2:05:44 - Andy Ihnatko
Um, wow yeah, wow, it's like it's the kennedy center for only like nine days, so it's not like a but, but this, but this seems like too good a thing to just basically, I mean, at minimum in five years time. I hope that this is available for, like junior, high and high school drama clubs yeah, yeah, oh, that would be awesome.
2:06:03 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because the guy who actually wrote the songs and everything wrote this musical. Um, I learned about it from tick tock. I saw some of the rehearsals. I thought what is that? What are they? Why are they rehearsing? And then I found out so, um good, schmigadoon is back. I haven't watched the second season, you can tell so it's it's weirder.
2:06:26 - Jason Snell
It's darker and weirder than the first Leo did somebody order corn pudding?
2:06:32 - Leo Laporte
this is their rehearsal.
2:06:33 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh man, it's so good apparently there are two new songs in there too, so yeah.
2:06:41 - Leo Laporte
I love watching Broadway rehearsals. They're so uh, they're so uh vigorous or something. Uh, let's see what else. Um, is there any? What else have I missed something?
2:06:58 - Jason Snell
after two hours?
2:06:59 - Leo Laporte
probably not, yeah are you ready to go, aren't you all right? Well, we'll take a break longer episodes now.
I think yeah, you're, you're. Uh, we don't really need the long episodes actually. Uh, we could. We could probably make them shorter. Um, let us, let us take a break and then, when we come back, your picks of the week. Gentlemen, you're watching MacBreak Weekly.
A great big thanks to our Club Twit members who made this show possible. You probably know we have ads. That's good. Uh, we thought for a while back in December we might not, but somewhere they came from, somewhere Wonderful.
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If you enjoy the shows, may I invite you to join the club. What do you get for seven bucks a month? Yes, that's all it is Probably should raise that. We probably are the least expensive podcast network out there, but we feel, like you know, like we want to make it accessible to everybody Ad-free versions of all the shows. You get special programming we only do in the club, like Stacy's Book Club, and a whole lot more. We've got Chris Marquardt doing a monthly photo show. He talks a lot about iPhone photography, hands on Mac with Micah Sargent. Anyway, please help us. Seven bucks a month. Visit twit.tv/clubtwit enough said makes a big difference. And a big thanks to all of our club twit members who, in fact, are not hearing this if they listen to the ad free version. But uh, anyway, thank you, we appreciate it. Uh, let's get our picks of the week. Jason Snell. He's in a hurry to go home. Well, he's in his garage, he's not. It's not really. You know I am far. He is home. What's your pick of the week, sir?
2:09:41 - Jason Snell
it's uh hazel by neutral. I love hazel and I just thought it would be a good reminder. They came out with a version uh 6.0 recently. What?
2:09:50 - Leo Laporte
does this do?
2:09:51 - Jason Snell
a bunch of clever Hazel in general watches your file system on your Mac and then lets you set up rules where it will do whatever you want. So, for example, I have a folder that I use for writing stories and after 14 days or something of a file not being used, it moves it to an archive. I've got a thing with old podcasts that will run a script that compresses them after a week so that they take up less space. Or for some podcasts it just deletes them after a month because I'm never going to use them again. So you can use it sort of to file and move and act on anything. I actually have one where I download a calendar file from my airline website. It runs a script that reformats it in a way that I want and then adds it to my calendar. Like you could do anything with this.
Version 6 adds among its very clever things auto-OCRing of images, so we can actually look at an image and see what the text is and match on the text and then do something with it, which is kind of wild and it's just a really great utility. It's in my core, you know, probably core five, maybe maybe it's top 10. I don't know, but like it's. It's in my core Mac utilities, where it just makes using the Mac better to have this little agent that runs in the background and, based on the rules that you set, does stuff for you, cleans things up, tidies things up for you so that you don't have to worry about it, like I don't have to do a spring cleaning of my working stories folder because hazel is always running that spring cleaning in the background nice.
2:11:23 - Leo Laporte
Uh, yeah, this has been around for some time ages yeah fantastic tool. Hazel six is out now 42. There's a family pack or an upgrade if you already had previous versions, which I did for $20. Highly recommended NoodleSoftcom. Thank you, Jason. Alex Lindsay. Pick of the week.
2:11:46 - Alex Lindsay
So this isn't necessarily one of my cheaper picks, Uh-oh.
2:11:52 - Leo Laporte
How many Alex's we're?
2:11:53 - Alex Lindsay
talking here A couple but I wanted to show this off.
I'm going to try to find. I'm working on a less expensive version which maybe in a couple weeks I'll show. Um, I've really gotten into. So I've been doing a lot of spatial video and uh, you know, with with the, with the phone, and I'm but I wanted spatial audio too. So I wanted an ambisonic mic. And how do I get ambisonic? And then the problem is is that then how do you get ambisonic into the phone, because you're shooting spatial with the phone and then you want to be able to have spatial audio. Really, what you need is binaural, not spatial. Uh, not spatial, not ambisonic, but binaural. So it needs to convert the ambisonic to binaural and then get it into the phone live so that you can stream uh, spatial video with spatial audio, or that.
That was the game. So, um. So this is the rig. This is the first rig that I built for it. Um, so this is, this is what you have here. This is at the at the san rafael um uh store, uh, sam rafael's uh thursday's farmers market, which is the best one in the bay area, um and um anyway. So this guy was playing this incredible uh, it's called a Chapman stick, which is just insanely cool by itself, and so what I did is I have this is a Sennheiser Ambio mic, so this is actually I have it around here somewhere, but it's got four mics in it, so they're all building a sphere Spatial mic 3D mic.
So it builds a sphere, an ambisonic sphere Now that goes in as four different channels. And then I borrowed this MixPre-10 from Sound Devices. I'm going to end up buying a MixPre-6. I know the 10 was a little overkill and so I put it in here and then what it does is it processes. It's got an ambisonic plug-in, so it only needs four inputs for that mic. Is that right? Yes, that's right. So that's why I can go down to an ambi of mix pre-6 to do it um. But but I wasn't sure. So I got the 10, I borrowed the 10, I'll get the 6 um anyway.
So the this converts the ambisonic, it records it. You can see, you kind of see like little levels down here, but it it records it um. But it also will convert it to binaural. Now. Now, binaural is really designed so I can listen to it through the headphones and I know what's actually happening. But I can also route the binaural to the USB-C out of the of this of the MixPre10. And I don't know if anyone's done this before, because SoundAdvisor asked like how did it work?
2:14:11 - Leo Laporte
So, anyway, so anyway, it doesn't work.
2:14:14 - Alex Lindsay
And so then this goes into the. This shows up and it just shows up as a stereo input to anything. I'm using stream voodoo here, but it shows up in the Apple. If you want to record the Apple um uh space, the spatial record, spatial video record in the uh Apple um camera will work as well, and what you end up with is this binaural either stream or record straight into your phone from equipment that's, you know, more expensive than the phone. So anyway, but it's kind of a cool and I got to say I'll post some stuff up there. Hopefully by next week I'll have some stuff that's on YouTube or whatever, because you can put it on YouTube, because it's just stereo as long as you have a headset on, and so but it's a pretty cool experience to hear things all around you um it. You know the ambisonic, you know you actually hear the music much closer to what it. You know what it would sound like when you were there then.
2:15:09 - Leo Laporte
Then the street is really compare binaural to surround, to spatial audio.
2:15:15 - Alex Lindsay
Well, so when you have surround a lot of times, uh, uh, the uh you're using we're using oftentimes multiple speakers. So we've got, you know, we've got what we call beds and objects. So in atmos, for instance, we might have a bunch of beds that go into the 5.1 or 7.1 or 9.1 space. Then we have objects up to 120, some objects that we can put into the space as well and we can kind of have them sound like they're going all around. You have a lot more explicit control. Ambisonic is I'm going to record and I'm going to build this sphere of sound around you and then that can be rotated. The sound is in a sphere so you can move it around and reorient it if you need to to have some control. And that's recorded in what's called ambisonic A and then converted to one of two ambisonic B formats that you can then work with. And you can actually convert that ambisonic to 5.1 or other formats as well. So, but it doesn't have quite the same resolution in some ways that some of them were, the other like something like Atmos would have, um, but, and then there's you know, there's other. There's what's called a DECA tree, which is what some people do, which spread mics out away from the source. That's going to give you more spatiality. But I found that the ambisonic is pretty great for what it is. You know it's. It's much more compact, while this looks like a kind of a little bit of a science project, um, the, it is much more compact than a, than a deck of tree. So it's easy Something I can pull it out of my backpack, put it on a tripod and make it go. And now I'm trying to find a. I'm working on a less expensive, much more compact version of this that hopefully I'll show in a couple of weeks. But I'm kind of, you know, I have this problem where I get kind of obsessed about a certain thing and so then I have to learn all I have. I have lots of um, especially, I have a lot of ambisonic mics. Right now this is just the one that I'm using at the moment. So, um, you know, there's cause. There's first order, second order, third order, fourth order. I've got a couple of. That's less expensive and so, but it's dramatically more spatial or more uh, it fills up your space, but when you're only when you're wearing headphones, it fills up your space in a way that spare stereo doesn't, in the same way that spatial music oftentimes will sound more like it's all around you and it kind of tickles your brain in a different way and so, um, anyway it's. I just I was uh.
The challenge was to get it. I've done this a lot with cameras. The challenge was to get this into a phone and that was a successful one. By the way, if you're interested in that, that um, I just want to make sure. I said that guy, but Bob Culbertson this is. This is a picture of his uh that I took while he was doing it. Bob, um, culbertson, um is uh and he's. It turns out he is an og, uh related to he's. He's kind of a um, uh, an og when it comes to doing the chapman stick. I mean, he's got a lot of followers on youtube, so culbertson is and it's. It's an amazing. I've never heard the instrument before. I know that I said is this new? Is this a new instrument? He's like, oh, from the 70s. Yeah, yeah, it's old.
I recognize it and so he and I are gonna he and I are gonna do some more, uh, streams and records, now that I've met him and, uh, he lives up in sebastopol so it's easy to go up and nice, do some stuff. So anyway, that's the, but that's the, and we'll talk more about, I'll show more and I'll post some stuff that I'll have up by the next show something very nice um yeah, I'm wondering why we even bother with uh apple spatial if we just could do binaural well you just don't have a lot of control.
I mean, the binaural is is it's just it's lower resolution. It's in the recording yeah, I mean, in some ways that's what apple spatial is kind of doing is placing all these things into a binaural field. So it's not that we're not using because you can use headphones with apple spatial right. So it's. It is in some ways that way. I don't want to say it's exactly the same, but it's. But you are getting essentially something that's very related to a binaural field for headphones.
2:19:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, andy and I co's pick of the week. We'll wrap things up. Andy, what do you got?
2:19:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Mine is more of a philosophical pick. You might have heard last week the makers of Pebble, the first real smartwatch that crashed. They did a really great job, but they were clipped by, of course, Android smartwatches and Apple smartwatches.
2:19:28 - Leo Laporte
Well, they were purchased by Fitbit, and then Fitbit was purchased by Google, and then you know, three generations later, there's no more pebble exactly, but it was a but it was a beautiful thing.
2:19:38 - Andy Ihnatko
And also this ties in with, like a realization I had last year, which is that, like, I like the idea of smart watches, but I just can't deal with the idea of I have to charge it every single night and if I miss out, I'm gonna have to, like find another watch for the day because I forgot. Uh, and also finding out that I don't use most of the features of the apple watch or or a pixel watch, and so that's why I've been wearing, like, I've been very, very happy buying like 20, 30 casios that, like will tell you the tide and the and the phase of the moon, and that sort of thing, uh, so what? So? The makers, the, the guy who, uh, started up Pebble, started up the original Kickstarter, has been wearing his old watches forever, even though they haven't been supported since 2016. But there's open source communities that have been trying to keep it going. So he called his people at Google and said, hey, what would you think about open sourcing the Pebble operating system? And I'll be damned. Google said, okay, sure, we'll do that. And so the entire pebble operating system is open sourced on google, and now he has a website called repebblecom in which he intends to not reinvent the pebble, so it's not gonna.
It's not like he's gonna start to make watches that have, oh, it's got a heart sensor and it's got like a three color flashlight itlights like no, in interviews he's given to the verge and others he's saying I just want to remake the original pebble, maybe with like modern components, modern stuff, so a better e-ink display, like better bluetooth, better whatever. It's not gonna have a touch screen, it's just gonna have like a physical, like touch, but physical buttons on the side, which is not to me a disadvantage because you can actually push these things with gloves on. So for something that will convey notifications, have custom watch faces, be able to control my Spotify playlist that I'm walking on, and be something other than the same Apple Watch, the same Samsung Galaxy Watch everybody's wearing, I'm really, really keen to see this get going. So all he's doing right now is go to repebblecom and say, yeah, I'm kind of interested in that.
He hopes to get going on this project and start making basic Pebble watches. Who knows after that. But I definitely was quick to sign up because, if this is a reasonable amount of money, the idea of having a simple e-paper e-ink smartwatch that lasts about a week and only has the features that I like to have on it and has an app store on it and independent watch faces. That's something I would spend X amount of dollars on and be very, very happy with be with yeah, micah interviewed eric minjakovsky on last thursday on tech news weekly.
2:22:19 - Leo Laporte
So if you want to hear that interview, that's a good place to go. Twittv slash tnw. Uh, google open sourced it. It's a shame because the open source repository does not compile, as is. Google had to take out a lot of the proprietary stuff, so you really wouldn't have a working smart watch. But it's too bad because, honestly and I'm sure eric has all of the pieces he needs to rebuild the pebble watch but I would love to see this capability built into a variety of devices, right?
2:22:48 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean yeah it would be really cool I love all the interviews he's been given which he's been saying I just want an open source. I want it to be true to the open source origins of pebble so that people want to. If people want to make their own, that's great.
2:23:01 - Leo Laporte
If people want to make their own apps, that's great, so he will open source what he does as well.
2:23:05 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's, it's, it's. It sounds pretty cool. Watch that I don't have to like find that I don't have to find, like the, the, the dongle, the, the magnetic, uh, uh charger that I probably have somewhere in a drawer somewhere, uh, but I just again, I love the whole idea of this and I agree and I'm hoping that this actually comes through.
2:23:27 - Leo Laporte
I wish more companies, when they abandon stuff like this, would open source the code, because, yeah, give the, give the hobbyist community a chance anything and he's saying I don't want to create a business, I don't want to.
2:23:37 - Andy Ihnatko
It's not going to be like a Kickstarter where we get millions of dollars. It's like I want to create a world in which we can manufacture some of these watches and the people who want to own them can buy them. Yeah, I'm great. I'm here for you.
2:23:48 - Leo Laporte
I can't order it, but you can give them your email and be on the list. Yes, Thank you, andrew. When are you going to be on GBH next?
2:23:57 - Andy Ihnatko
Not this week, but a week from Thursday at 1230 Eastern Time. Go to wgbhnewsorg to listen to it live or later, or any of my previous shows.
2:24:05 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, sir. Jason Snell is at sixcolors.com. His podcast is at sixcolors.com. Slash Jason. Go there for the graphs of the Apple results and the Apple report card his annual foray into sentiment.
2:24:19 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I published so many graphs and probably 40 or 50,000 words of various comments by various people over the last week, so there's plenty to read about Apple stuff.
2:24:31 - Leo Laporte
Just check it out. Go take a nap now You're done. Probably go out, write more stuff and do more podcasts. He's a busy guy. Thank, check it out. Go take a nap now You're done. Probably going to go out and write more stuff and do more podcasts. He's a busy guy. Thank you, Jason, we missed you last week.
2:24:41 - Jason Snell
Thank you for being here. I appreciate it. Night-night I'm going to go take a nap now.
2:24:44 - Leo Laporte
Night-night Alex Lindsay never takes a nap. He never seems to sleep at all.
2:24:57 - Alex Lindsay
He does shows all the time, doesn't have time to shave anymore. You know it's control global what's coming up?
2:25:02 - Leo Laporte
more Q&A. It turns out Q&A is a big thing. Yeah, people love the Q&A yeah, it works well.
2:25:04 - Alex Lindsay
so so we've got just, it's just, it's thriving. So we're continuing to do Q&A and so we're gonna keep doing that and we're playing around with a lot of formats. We're getting ready for NAB. Nab is two months away, so we're starting to test our gear and make sure that everything's ready to go, did you?
2:25:20 - Leo Laporte
go to NAMM.
2:25:21 - Alex Lindsay
I kind of wish I'd gone to NAMM. It looked like there was a lot of cool stuff I wanted to. My schedule right now is pretty hectic.
2:25:35 - Leo Laporte
So I haven't been able to get out. Go to nab we're going to cover it.
2:25:38 - Alex Lindsay
Me going is the big open thing, just because of my current uh breaking news.
2:25:40 - Leo Laporte
Alex has work my day job is very busy 090.media. If you want to add to his stack, yeah pile of things a little insane awesome.
It's great to have you too. All three of you wouldn't be the same without you, wouldn't be MacBreak Weekly, so we're so glad, uh, you could be here. It wouldn't be the same without you it wouldn't be MacBreak Weekly. So we're so glad you could be here. We do MacBreak Weekly every Tuesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern Time, 1900 UTC.
Streaming live. If you want to watch live I mean, it's a podcast you really. We don't even expect people to watch live and only, frankly, a small percentage of the audience does, but it's there for you, the live streams. Of course, if you're in the club, you get access to the club Discord and you can watch there. But there's also YouTube. There's Twitch. We're on TikTok still for as long as President Trump allows it. We are on X.com for as long as President Musk allows it. We are on Kick I don't know who's in charge of that. We are on LinkedIn and we're on Facebook as long as Vice President Zuckerberg allows it. So we really we're everywhere. We're everywhere the oligarchs are everywhere we're allowed to be everywhere we're allowed to be plus America.
We like to stream, uh, but you don't have to watch a stream, because we also offer downloads of the show, both audio and video, at twit.tv/mbw. That page has a link to our YouTube channel where the video of the show lives, and that's a great way to share clips from the show. If you want to do that, we appreciate it. It's a great way to spread the word about MacBreak Weekly and, of course, the easiest way to get it is to subscribe. Maybe use that new Tapestry app to add MacBreak Weekly. All you have to do is add twit.tv/mbw and Tapestry will say oh, you really want to listen to that, huh, okay, okay, if you insist, and it'll add the feed or to whatever podcast client you like to use. We appreciate your listening. We're glad you were here. Unfortunately, it is now my sad and solemn duty to tell you get back to work. Break time is over. See you next week. Bye-bye.
2:27:39 - Mikah Sargent
Hey, focus up. That is what I said to Hands-On Tech when we looked at the relaunch. It is time for us to focus on one topic at a time and make sure we're answering that question. I am answering that question as thoroughly as possible. If you are a member of Club Twit, you can watch the video version of this show completely ad-free, of course, listen to the audio version ad-free. If you're not a member, the show will still be available to you in both ways. You can watch the video on YouTube with ads, or you can watch the audio as you always have. I mean, listen to the audio as you always have in our feeds. In any case, you got to tune in to Hands On Tech because I guarantee there's going to be a question you're going to want to have the answer to, and from time to time I also review a gadget, a gizmo or something of the sort. You gotta check out Hands-On Tech and I can't wait to get your question.
