MacBreak Weekly 959 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's here, Alex is here, Jason's here and we have a lot to talk about. Why did Apple update everything yesterday Turns out a pretty big security flaw. But here's the good news. Probably not something you have to worry about, something we're all worried about. The United Kingdom says Apple must provide them with a backdoor, not just to UK citizens' iCloud accounts, but to everybody's. We'll talk about that. Some great Vision Pro news a new source of immersive video for you. And where is the iPhone SE 4? We speculate next on MacBreak Weekly

This is MacBreak Weekly episode 959, recorded Tuesday, February 11th 2025: A Bricolage of Features. It's time for MacBreak Weekly show, where we cover the latest Apple news with my good friends Jason Snell from sixcolors.com. Hello Jason, hello Leo, how are you? The lava lamp is working again.

0:01:14 - Jason Snell
The lava lamp is functional. The light bulb has been replaced. It may be the only incandescent left in my house, but it's back because it's got to heat up the wax so that it bubbles around. If you had an efficient thing that just emitted light and wasn't very warm, what would be the point? Anyway, it's good to be. It's also kind of chilly out here.

0:01:35 - Leo Laporte
So I need all the heat I can get. Also with us. Andy Ihnatko, WGBH, boston. He's in the library where no lava lamps are allowed. Hello.

0:01:44 - Andy Ihnatko
Of course, Jason, it must be. It just occurred to me that that must be like working on like a classic car from the 50s and 60s where you have the lava lamp. Like I understand absolutely everything about how this lamp works I can replace the bulb, it turns on and off via a switch.

0:01:59 - Jason Snell
That I can understand, whereas there are lamps in my house where, if it stops working, it's like I can either fix it in five seconds or I need to buy a new lamp you got a little product that is designed around the inefficiency of the light bulb, of the incandescent light bulb, where it's like, well, well, it will get hot, we could do something with that. Yes, now of course, we've engineered a lot of the heat, not all of the heat, the leds can still get hot, but like a lot of the heat out. And so what will become of the lava lamp?

I'm going to have to build like a heater in there and stuff that's too much Too much.

0:02:33 - Alex Lindsay
Alex Lindsay, good to see you, good to be here. I think it was properly said when they first decided of like dude man, that is so hot, let's put some stuff around it, man.

0:02:46 - Leo Laporte
Let dude man that is so hot, let's put some stuff around, dude man, let's just melt some wax.

0:02:49 - Jason Snell
Man, whoa dude, yeah, yeah, we've used it for much other other things, but I think that might be in the origin.

0:02:58 - Leo Laporte
I just put this wax bottle on this hot plate and whoa dude, actually I'm gonna guess it came from. Do you remember the light? No, nobody, I'm the only one old enough. The light shows during the electric Kool-Aid acid tests and similar concerts. They would do two plates with oil in between them and then cast, and so it was kind of moving blobs. I have a feeling it was a descendant of yeah, but that's just a. That's just a thought from an old man who remembers the 60s.

0:03:23 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, I love how, like all these really sophisticated-looking effects from the 50s and 60s, when you think back that well, they can't have been that sophisticated. They weren't digital. When I learned that I saw a teardown of one of those funky space super, super computer props from the 50s and 60s, I said, wow, how did they get all those patterns of flashing lights? Well, they have a motor that spins a disc with some metal dots on it and some copper brushes that contact some and because they have a stack of those that rotate at different speeds.

That means they can get it almost random and I'm like that is way more elegant than anything that I would have thought of.

0:04:10 - Leo Laporte
I'm just like, okay, way more elegant than anything that I would have thought of, I'd say, okay, first of all I'm gonna need two, no three, arduino's. Yeah, one that's connected to an atomic clock. Uh, just quick reminder that apple has, as they seem to do every week now, updated ios, uh, mac os, all the os's, uh, it seems. Now you're gonna see articles, articles with people with their hair on fire. It's already been exploited. Got an update to 1831. Or what is it? 1831.? But if you read the security bulletin, it requires physical access. A physical attack may disable USB restricted mode on a, a locked device.

So unless you've got a bad guy living with, you, or or unless you've handed your phone over to a cop right and they say apple is aware and this is from the apple security bulletin of a report this issue may have been exploited in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals.

0:05:05 - Jason Snell
Uh, it'd be that um usb charger kind of thing. Too right, you swap out a charger or some other kind of block oh, that's what it is sure, right, that's exactly and then, and then you've got access if you've got a, but the extremely sophisticated suggests me that there was an operation, right, an operation to insert this you know a usb, something somewhere where they would then plug in and Jason born did.

0:05:26 - Alex Lindsay
It is what you're saying yes, it is a good argument, for there are cables that are power only you know that you may want to have. I have one of them in my bag that I have marked I almost never use it because I'll almost never plug into a car or a. You know that I don't. You know someone else like a rental car or a or a? Definitely not something at the airport where there's a usb. Like I'm not gonna do that, but just in case I do carry a cable that is got that you know, I've tested it. There's no data there, like I can't get data to show up there, so it's just power.

0:05:57 - Leo Laporte
It's possible to do that. You just don't have a data line. I buy, uh, I have quite a few of these porta pow. They're cheap, um, data blockers, data blockers and, in fact, uh, I think steve gibson called them usb condoms, which certainly brings it home, um, and this is your type a, but I'm sure they have type c and so forth you know you don't you no longer feel quite so paranoid.

0:06:20 - Andy Ihnatko
I recently bought like a new like faraday bag for my phone and I keep decided to keep it like in my laptop bag because I don't necessarily think that oh god, it's like a stingray is going to affect my life at all in any way, shape or form. But if I'm ever walking through boston and I see a big protest, I and if I have that faraday bag in my laptop bag, maybe I'm going to turn my phone off and put it in there just to make sure that I don't get caught in some sort of a sweep. And I hate the fact that I'm now thinking about that.

0:06:51 - Leo Laporte
Now David Shalban, our YouTube chat, says something interesting. He says USB-C PD the power delivery standard does not have a no data line. I don't know if that's true, but that might be something to be. You know what line? I don't know if that's true, but that might be something to be. You know what? Get 1831 is what you should be doing and I uh. While apple doesn't say that the mac os update has the same problem, I note that they did update sequoia to 1531, sonoma to 1474, ventura to 13747.4, watchos 11.3.1, and even the Vision Pro was updated. So there's something going on. I feel like this is you know, they didn't have any CVEs associated with those other devices, but no published CVE is what they're saying. So I'd be doing that Once again, the government is getting involved and there's nothing we can do.

Oh, this case it's the uk. The united kingdom's snooper charter, snoopers charter, uh, which is the investigatory powers act of 2016, is now giving, uh has given the UK the means to secretly require Apple to provide a backdoor in iCloud. This is exclusive to the Washington Post, who says they have sources because neither Apple nor the UK government are talking about it and Apple, I think, is enjoined from talking about it, um, but of course leakers are going to say, hey, whoa, wait a minute, this is a big deal. Remember? Apple? Uh did provide back doors to icloud for a long time. In fact, they even told the fbi when uh the uh. I remember the terrorist attack in southern California.

They said if you just yeah, san Bernardino, if you just brought the guy's phone to his house, it would have backed up to iCloud and we could have given it to you, but they've added something called advanced protection now, which does not give them a backdoor, and I think that's what the uk is uh, is concerned about yeah, and that's it's a huge deal.

0:09:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Because it's not. It's not like the san bernardino case where the fbi went to apple say, hi, we need you to get us into this one phone. Uh, the this one is we want to have the ongoing ability to simply, anytime we want to get into somebody's secure icloud backup, just to be able to do that without even having to go through you. So they're asking for a permanent open gate into people's private data and that's going to be, boy, apple is going to. That's one demand you make of Apple, where Apple is almost almost has to say okay, guess what? Nobody gets encryption in the UK anymore, because we would much rather have everybody understand that all of their data is vulnerable than simply provide a backdoor. The first step for the uk to simply to start saying hi, we also want a backdoor and I message we also want a backdoor into vpn apps. They just simply cannot get it.

0:10:01 - Leo Laporte
They simply cannot condone this, they simply cannot participate in this and the only way you might say well, I'm not in the uk, but it it's everybody. It's so that the uk would have access to america americans data in iCloud as well and because of their part, of the five eyes of the united states wanted access to.

If they could simply ask their friends and say great uh the president of Signal said using technical capability notices that's what the UK is using to weaken encryption around the globe is a shocking move that will position the UK as a tech pariah rather than a tech leader. If implemented, the directive will create a dangerous cybersecurity vulnerability in the nervous system of our global economy. Cryptographer Matthew Green from Johns Hopkins and Alex Stamos. System of our global economy. Uh. Cryptographer matthew green from joms hopkins and Alex stamos.

Uh, who was a regular on our show, wrote a op-ed piece saying the only solution at this point is for the united states congress to pass a law forbidding it, because then that would that when you have opposing laws from two different countries ours in this case, because it's a US company would trump, if you will, the UK law. I can't remember where that op-ed is and I can't find it anymore. I noticed Stamos pulled down his post on X saying hey, we just wrote this op-ed, so I don't know, maybe they were told X-nay on the op-ed. So I don't know, maybe they, maybe they were told x-nay on the op-ed. Bbc has confirmed it, uh, so it's not now just the washington post eff.

0:11:33 - Jason Snell
Uh reminds everybody that there's no such thing as a safe back door yeah, I think my concern with this right like, first off, yeah, there's no such thing as a safe backdoor. If there is a key and Apple has it, because Apple needs to have it, that means that anybody who has access at Apple could get that key and it could spread from there. But even if it just stays at Apple, it means that anybody who, for various legal reasons, can get Apple to unlock data, apple will be able to. To unlock data, apple will be able to. And I mean, I hope you guys can talk me off the ledge here but this feels to me like the death of big tech companies, large companies offering complete end-to-end encryption where they don't hold a key.

It feels to me like the future, the path we're going down. The future is going to be you may be able to compile it from source, you may be able to get it off GitHub, you may be able to find it in an app store. You may not even be able to do that, but that if it's anybody who is sort of a legitimate size or not to offer this, they're going to all end up having to hold a key and be a man in the middle, essentially because got governments who just, you know they don't. They want to be able to unlock stuff if. If they ask and you know the uk's arguments are stupid because the uk's arguments are like oh, oh, no, it's okay, it's not going to be for everybody, it's just going to be when we ask, in a secret court that nobody ever knows about, for reasons that are good, trust us and you can't say, and apple cannot tell anybody it's.

0:13:03 - Leo Laporte
It's one of those things where it's a top secret, it's all secrets, there could be no oversight.

0:13:08 - Jason Snell
This obviously leaked because somebody is bothered by this, but I don't know. It feels to me like we are going to enter an era where, if you're a large player, you're going to have to hold the keys and if somebody else wants to read your encrypted stuff with that key, they're going to be compelled to give it to them, and then you know, that's it.

0:13:29 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, ScooterX. He found the link. It's a Wall Street Journal opinion piece. Matthew Green and Alex Stamos, two of our most respected cryptographers in the US, said the UK kicks Apple's door open for China. Beijing would quickly exploit the British order to allow access to encrypted data. Beijing would quickly exploit the british order to allow access to encrypted data. They said. Congress must immediately enact a law prohibiting american tech companies from providing encryption backdoors to any country. This would create a conflict of laws situation allowing apple to fight this order in uk courts and protect american safety and security somehow. I don't know if that seems likely.

0:14:04 - Alex Lindsay
The problem is is that our you know, our representatives are digital children, and so they, you know, their understanding of this will be very uh well, also, they're told by the fbi, the nsa, the cia agencies that, oh, this is good, we have to have this.

the five eyes have been trying to pry this, this door open, for years a decade, you know at least where and so they use different countries. They there's been laws we've seen in Australia, new Zealand, canada, uk they can't get it done in the United States because every time they bring them up there's enough people that get upset but stop it. But it's one thing to stop it, another thing to get them to do a whole new law that to stop it. That's the hard part is that. But the five eyes have been trying to pry this open for a long time and I, you know it comes probably from a relatively good place. They, their job, they get.

It's kind of like when you're talking to someone in IT and they and you ask them for extra ports to be opened. What do they get out of that Other than getting in trouble when things don't work. When there's a terrorist act and something happens in UK, they're going to blame, you know, mi5 or MI6 or whatever for not doing what they need, everything they could have done to protect it, and they so they're. They're coming from this kind of uh when when you have a hammer, everything's a nail, like we get blamed for things that get through, so you get where they're coming from, but it is a pretty horrible thing to let.

0:15:23 - Leo Laporte
I mean, there's just's just as, as Jason said, there's no way to put this back in the, in the, in this back in the back, and it's just really a bad idea for the people who say, well, you could have a back door and it could be secured, I remind you that in 1994 the united states passed a law kalia, the communications assistance for law enforcement act which allowed uh law enforcement to wiretap in the United States. The backdoors that were provided to law enforcement in 1994 are the ones the Chinese hackers are using with Salt Typhoon to monitor government communications in the United States. You can put a backdoor in there and, by the way, at the time the director of the FBI said oh no, it'll be safe, we'll make sure that that backdoor is never breached, et cetera, et cetera. But it was and it's the Chinese who did it and there's no going back on that. We can't get the Chinese hackers out of our phone system now.

0:16:25 - Alex Lindsay
I mean they're hoovering up. I think that people don't understand also. They're like, well, I'm a regular person, I'm not breaking any laws. Like, how does this affect me? They're trying to get. The Chinese, are trying to get an angle on everybody and all the things that they can, because they're not just interested in you know, taking your money, you know, and taking your bank account. Taking your money and taking your bank account. They're interested in potentially, somewhere in the future, being able to move the population one direction or another. You're talking about a country that has a merit system for how you get things done. They're playing a much deeper game than what we're talking about.

0:17:00 - Leo Laporte
They also tapped the Trump campaign, the Harris campaign. They tapped Congress, even if it's not just, if it's only big shots.

0:17:10 - Alex Lindsay
That's bad, but what, oh no, I'm, and what I'm saying is is that that they, they are selling us digital frames that are gathering our data. They I had a radio on my for my car that won't let you. You can't connect to the radio unless you give it your address book and connect and turn your phone into a hotspot. You know like, and you're like, oh no, thank you. And so the, the, so they're constantly because you got just the same way the NSA does it.

You gather all this information because you don't know who you need to spearfish or who you need to leverage somewhere in the future to get access to something that's bigger than you know. That person may be the cousin of someone who works at a power company or works for a campaign, and what you need is is to be able to send an intelligent email to somebody else going hey, can you click on this? I want to show you something and boom, you're in. You know, and so it's your. All of these things are connected and it's just a. It is really dangerous what we're talking about here, and we'll, you know, we'll pay the price, because we'll actually have bad things happen, because they're trying to protect us from the bad things.

0:18:18 - Leo Laporte
I mean honestly, I would guess that most of you don't use advanced data protection on your iPhones. Do any of you? No, because it is a pain in the ass, right, yeah, um, so it doesn't really impact you guys, because we all are. Apple has our iCloud keys, uh, we. There is a back door.

0:18:37 - Jason Snell
This is only really for people who want to really want to protect themselves with advanced data protection and and that can be, you're like, okay, well, those are the criminals and the bad guys and they don't need to be protected, and that's the argument of all of these law enforcement agencies. But the truth is, you know, if you are a dissident, if you are somebody who is being targeted by your own or some other government and we've seen there are plenty of examples of this there are people being targeted in their own countries. There are people who have left the countries, who are being targeted elsewhere. You can just look at Khashoggi right Like he was surveilled and then he was brought to an embassy and murdered by his government outside right and so Probably why the Washington Post has a document inside, isn't it?

You know it's journalists who are talking to people who are in danger and they want to find out who they're talking to so that they can then find those people and put them in danger, or they're trying to save Like. There are lots of those kinds of issues. It's not just the bad guys and the problem is, once the bottle is open again not to make these slippery slope arguments, but, like, once there is a mechanism, they will use it, which is why people talk about not allowing the mechanism, and law enforcement will always tell you they want more tools. Right, there has to be somebody else to say you don't need more tools. And I I always bring this up when we talk about this.

But when the miranda ruling came out in the early 70s, I believe, where you have the right to remain silent, etc. Law enforcement said that that's it. Crime will run rampant, everything is ruined because we have to read people their rights. Well, that didn't happen, like that didn't happen. But they're going to make this argument. You just need somebody on the other side, and which means, in the UK's case, in practical terms, what you really need is for a whistleblower to leak this to you know a journalist who is going to write about it, which starts a conversation which leads to it being politically impractical, so that the political people in, in in this case, parliament in the UK and in the cabinet in the UK, can go to the intelligence source and go we can't do this, this looks bad, otherwise they'll just take whatever they can get.

0:20:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and for me, absolutely everything that you said. In addition to that, there's such a fundamental principle that if you make encryption illegal or impossible, you can't have a situation where the government is saying that a citizen does not have the right to know something that the government can't know as well. We're not allowed to hold a secret. That is the sort of thing where, if it had been even conceivably possible 250 years ago, this is something that would have been in the Bill of Rights, because until digital encryption, if you write something down, well, at some point someone can find it. At some point someone can dig it up, someone can get it.

Now we have, basically, I can put something in a safe, but that safe can be opened with a court order. I can create a code, but that code can be broken. That's, that's never. It's never come up. Now it is actually possible for us to have a secret that we don't want anybody else to know. Doesn't matter if it's the government, doesn't matter if it's our next door neighbor. We can't have a situation where we are not allowed to encrypt this with the strongest cryptography available if we so choose, because, again, that statement is that you are not allowed to know something that the government cannot find out from you. That is, on principle, something that we have to resist fully.

Yeah, uh what should apple do? They can't play ball, say we're out of here. They can't say that we have to go by whatever rules and laws are enabled in the country that we operate in, because that essentially is. Nobody can believe them ever. When they say that they actually believe in privacy. This is such a wholesale destruction of everybody's privacy in the entire world that this is this is apple's purity test. Do they actually believe in privacy or is this a marketing thing that they can keep promoting themselves on? Because they don't make any money, uh, off of anti-privacy? Uh, so no, they have to basically say that guess what? We're not going to participate. The only way we can comply with this law is by not offering any product or service in the UK that is under the umbrella of this law. I don't see any other way around it.

0:23:19 - Alex Lindsay
I mean in the past they've made iCloud available. I mean they made the servers available to law enforcement when subpoenaed. You know they made the servers available to secure, to to law enforcement, um, when subpoenaed. You know, like the.

0:23:28 - Jason Snell
I think that's not the same thing.

0:23:29 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yeah, so so I think that, but I so that hasn't been a line that they drew in the past.

Where they've drawn the line in the past is the phone Like you can't, like they will. They've not given anybody the ability, including the United States government, uh, the ability, the ability to actually get the data that's on the phone. And so I think, and I think that a lot of the security things that we've seen Apple do, you know, add to the phone is not necessarily to protect you from people trying to steal your bank account, it's to protect you from governments. You know they've been slowly, you know, you know, welding off the doors for years, and so it'll be interesting to see where they cart that off. I guess my question is also if you are in end-to-end encryption between two phones, is there any way to do that without the iCloud infrastructure, Because the messages themselves could be encrypted. Sure, you can have the back end to iCloud, but you don't get. But if the messages are encrypted on both ends, even having access to iCloud wouldn't necessarily give you access to the messages.

0:24:39 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm sorry just quickly. It did occur to me that this is another argument for the ability to sideload apps. It did occur to me that this is another argument for the ability to sideload apps If the thing is that we've discovered with TikTok that there is an ability to simply choke off a nation's access to any app simply by choking off access to the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. If we have a nightmare situation in a country that any sort of encryption is illegal, a signal is illegal and anything that cannot be eavesdropped on is illegal, the only way to get around it would be to sideload an app that can't be choked off from the Apple App Store. So that's just another data point.

0:25:21 - Jason Snell
Because that's the next step here. The next step here is literally making it illegal for any company to offer an encryption system of communication that does not include a key that they possess. Right, that's essentially what they would do, because you can't outlaw encryption. Really. Right, because it's math, you can't do that. But what you can do is require the builders of all encrypted systems to hold in their possession a way to decrypt messages.

And, as Andy said and Alex, as you pointed out, like you could build a system where you're not involved and there's no one in the middle, and it's all direct and they do their own key exchange and all of that. But if they say, legally you can't build that, you have to add a step where you possess the keys, even if you're not in the middle, to add a step where you possess the keys, even if you're not in the middle. If they have to send you the keys as well, so that if their encrypted data is handed off, you have to decrypt it, then what are you going to do? And that's essentially outlawing Signal. And Andy's right, that shows the weak point here, which is, if you outlaw all of these systems, then all you have to do is go to the two app stores and you've choked it off of at least everybody's phone and tablet.

0:26:29 - Leo Laporte
It's kind of interesting because it really is going to be a whack-a-mole, because the encryption is well understood, the software, the source code is out there. It is not hard to roll your own, to be honest.

It's not going to stop any bad guys. Bad guys will have encryption, and anybody who's really technically sophisticated will also be able to create a messaging app. Uh, that is as secure as signal. It's not. This is not some magic technology, no, um, it's, it's out there and so, uh, I guess what's gonna? It's gonna create kind of an underground, a black market of encryption I mean, this is where we were in the 90s.

0:27:03 - Jason Snell
I feel like right where it, when it was like people, real people knew they could get PGP and you could print it in a book and then type in the code or you could get. Or it also reminds me of like DCSS right, when it's like you can't rip DVDs except everybody knows the server that's in a country that doesn't care, that lets you have the code to decrypt DVDs and the net result is yes, Leo, the bad guys will not be stopped. People who are very technical will not be stopped. Everybody who is not really bad but is non-technical and is doing stuff will now be subject to this kind of scrutiny and you can say I have nothing to hide. But again, sometimes you do have something to hide. Sometimes you do something that you think is fine, but there's somebody in your country who has decided that they're going to target you and they're going to find out something about you that they're going to use or they're going to make your life hell or whatever, and those are the people who will be not protected by this.

0:27:57 - Alex Lindsay
But I mean, or it's someone, two or three, you know degrees of separation away that they're trying to get to.

0:28:05 - Jason Snell
you know degrees of separation away that they're trying to get to, and you're just a, you know, just a step on that way, you know.

0:28:08 - Alex Lindsay
And so that's the thing is, it's that the exponential math there is is gathering all that data and we're, we will absolutely be exposed if they do this, like you know. You know, and, and it's absolutely a problem and it is a, it's a, it's a big deal, you know, and they've been again. They've been trying to pry this door open for a decade because they feel like they have to do everything they can. This is what everyone does. This is their mission. That's why you join the NSA or the CIA or everything else.

But the issue is is that we make decisions all the time about what's appropriate? We're willing to put up with a certain amount of danger based on the fact we could make it so that no one dies driving cars. It would just be really not not a great experience, you know, like to to actually drive cars around If we made it. You know, life in prison if you get into an accident, you know, like, like, okay, well then, then everyone's going to stop driving, you know. And the thing is, is that there? This is, it's not good for the industry. It can't be absolute about protection. We have to make decisions about what you know and I it'll sound callous, but acceptable loss. You know like that, that we're not going to give up all of our freedoms out of fear. You know, and that's that's what. That's what we're talking about.

0:29:16 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah To me just quickly. I mean it just. You don't even have to have a reason that you don't. You don't have to have a secret to hide, you don't have to have consequences if a certain secret gets out. You can simply decide that my personal private information is my personal private information. You are not entitled to it. I am entitled to create as thick a barrier of security against a third party learning this or seeing this as I desire, and that is my right. As I desire and that is my right.

As you say, we forget that 250 years ago, a lot of the things that we take for granted today are just simply agreements that were made that became sacrosanct the idea that guess what cops you need a warrant to come in here and search my place. The government cannot actually shut down a printing press. The government cannot actually shut down a website for saying things that it doesn't like. That could have gone the other way. We would have a lot more convictions and a lot of crimes would be stopped if the cops could simply come in, basically rough up anybody they want and throw people in jail because they're pretty sure that someone did something.

As you say, we've decided that the idea of giving up that form of liberty for a little bit of safety is not an acceptable trade-off, and so it has been a sacrosanct part of our rights as Americans, and through other countries, basically looking at our constitution, saying that's pretty good, let's cut, copy and paste it. It's become international. So again, it's not a case of I have nothing to hide or I have something that I need to hide or my life could be in danger if a hostile government were able to track me and who I talk to. I can simply decide that I don't want people to know a certain thing, and that's where no is a beginning, middle and an end of an argument when it comes to that.

0:31:07 - Leo Laporte
I wonder if you're going to create a kind of a cadre of Mr Robots, where there's a subculture of people who understand that you don't use commercial phones or PCs, that you run your own software and that you have your own cryptography uh built into, not your own. Probably, yeah, you know there'd be an underground of of these uh tools.

0:31:30 - Andy Ihnatko
Um, that's dangerous yeah, de-googled, yeah, you get. You can get, you can buy. Buy a phone, put a clean rom on it, put a clean version of asop android on it, choose very, very carefully the apps that you put on it and basically have the most difficult to trace phone on the planet. It's not going to be nearly as convenient, nearly as fun, nearly as enabling or powering.

0:31:52 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you're not going to have the Fortnite on it.

0:31:54 - Andy Ihnatko
It's important to have that power if you choose to go through that.

0:31:58 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean, I guess the question is how many people care enough to do that. By the way, again, if you're not using advanced data protection, this really doesn't apply because Apple already has the keys. So I wonder, has Apple ever said how many people use ADP? I kind of think so Tiny fraction. It's going to be government people, people who have secret agents, people have a strong reason to keep their stuff private. Uh, because it is dis, it is inconvenient. Most, most of us, all of us on the panel I bet most listeners aren't willing to take those extra steps. It's an interesting world we live in. As they say, you're watching mac break. Weekly there's a lot more news, including rumors, flying. I thought maybe today we'd have a brand new iphone se. Could it be any minute now? We'll talk about that in just a little bit. Uh, Jason Snell is here from six colors, Andy Ihnatko from gbh and Alex lindsay from officehours.global.

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Um, apple had to remove some malware. Actually, it was both apple and android. Uh, screen reading malware that was designed to capture your crypto wallet backup password. Wow, um, this is called spark cat. It infested more than one app, but a small number of IO apps.

Kaspersky discovered that Apple has pulled those apps from the App Store. Some of the apps that had the malware included nothing you've ever heard of Cecum, Wetink and NEGPT. 11 apps in total. 11 apps in total, although, according to Mac rumors, when removing the apps, apple found another 89 with the same code that had been rejected or removed previously for violating Apple's fraud policies. So it was a very actually it's kind of an interesting hack. The SDK that was built into these apps wasn't part of the main functionality of the app, but it had OCR capabilities and so it could look at images and screenshots stored on iPhones, and I guess if you have a crypto wallet and you get a recovery phrase, you might do a screenshot of it and save it so that you can recover your wallet. I wish I had, although if I had, maybe a malware would have stolen it anyway.

0:35:53 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's pretty sophisticated too, Like if it got confused by what it was seeing, it would actually load like a different translator, ocr. It's like damn, these people are well-financed and damn clever. That's amazing.

0:36:07 - Leo Laporte
So let's talk about the iPhone SE., it's like damn, these people are well-financed and damn clever. That's amazing. So let's talk about the iPhone SE. Mark Gurman said it any day now. Right yeah, has that been debunked? Are we going to see it? He said no sooner.

0:36:17 - Jason Snell
I think he said no sooner than now and it hasn't happened yet, so he's right. Exactly, he nailed it.

0:36:22 - Alex Lindsay
It happened no sooner.

0:36:31 - Jason Snell
But in a minute I think he said this week or next. So you know, either either it's about to happen or it'll be next week. We don't know. And I can say, and sometimes I go visit my mom in arizona and people are like oh, I think Jason is going somewhere secret for a briefing. I have no briefings or anything about this.

0:36:39 - Leo Laporte
So either they're not telling me or it's not imminent, but I I honestly don't know it will be, according to german uh 499, 499 dollars, which is a little more right than the old se, but it will have an a18, I think, so it can run apple intelligence. That's kind of the main point, I would think. Um, and according to and I don't know if this is credible yanko design spigen accidentally revealed the iphone se for design with its, you know, spigen makes those lovely clear cases and so you can see the action button, a bigger screen and more. I again, I don't know how incredible this is. Sometimes case manufacturers guess and just so they'll have something ready day of and then they'll quickly pull it back if it doesn't work yeah, but they would, but it wouldn't be terribly off it's.

0:37:30 - Andy Ihnatko
It's huge. When they do that, it's usually based on, like tooling and manufacturing, even for like a limited run, costs enough money that they must have somebody who's provided, who slid them enough information that, okay, we're going to go with this.

0:37:43 - Leo Laporte
I've you know every every year people offer, uh, blank, you know, versions of the new phone. You know that are either prototypes or just aimed at you know phone stores or, uh, you know, somehow exfiltrated from chinese manufacturing.

0:37:58 - Andy Ihnatko
So, yeah, probably they have some information yeah, and this and as as we've said many times in the past, like if it really is going to be released this week or next week, this is about the time you would start seeing accidents of this kind, right?

0:38:12 - Jason Snell
I mean case. The other thing is case the case. Business leaks early because they pay a lot of money and it is where most of the industrial design leaks come from, because in they're in china, they got money to spend and they need to know the dimensions so that they can get their cases ready. So it totally happens. Uh, and and andy's right, we're now in accidental leak season, which I don't know. It feels a little bit like the iphone se, like they. It's not even the high, it's not red alert, it's like a yellow alert for for leaks. They're like yeah it's we prefer it to be secret.

But it's not. The new iphone, and the new new iphones leak like crazy. So right yeah um, it is.

0:38:53 - Leo Laporte
I would. I'm sure it's not the most popular iphone, but I know a lot of people who would like an se, right yeah and it's a.

0:38:59 - Andy Ihnatko
it's a very important phone. The minimum buy-in for an ip iPhone has to be competitive with mid-range Android phones, not only in the United States, Because if you think that it's such a lesser version of the iPhone that kids will not be interested in buying it, maybe the kids are not the ones who are actually paying for it. It's the parents who are buying it, so it's a way to keep it in the family. And internationally, the price point of a regular iPhone is prohibitive for a great number of people and Apple still has to keep. They're still making what 52% of their money off of iPhone sales. They can't risk losing a lifelong iPhone user simply because they don't have a decent phone that can compete with a really good 300 400 android phone, of which there are great, great many uh.

0:39:50 - Leo Laporte
German says uh. As I said, 499, that's 70 bucks more than the current se. The current se, by the way, along with the iphone 14, discontinued in the eu because they don't have usbc and law requires that.

0:40:02 - Andy Ihnatko
Uh, in the eu, yeah, so that's another reason to get going on, uh, on the se yeah, um, I do like the fact that german's rumors are basically saying this does not feel like a terribly cut down phone. The fact that it is fully capable of apple intelligence means that apple is really, really committed to the long term and not manufacturing a divide between apple intelligence users and non-apple intelligence users. They really want to make sure that, even if you got in the door for the cheapest ticket possible, you're still getting enough CPU power, enough AI, to be able to use Apple intelligence.

0:40:34 - Leo Laporte
No home button. That will be the end of the home button. It will have Face ID and I think it might be most interesting to us because it should be, according to Gurman, the first Apple iPhone with the Apple-designed modem instead of the Qualcomm modem.

0:40:56 - Jason Snell
So I'm sure there'll be a lot of benchmarking and a lot of interest in this. If it turns out, gasp 5G speeds are not as fast on the iPhone SE as on the regular mainline iPhones Everybody is going to, the response is really going to be eh, it's an iPhone SE, of course, like they can get away with some issues as long as they're functional, with them not being up to par with the latest and greatest from Qualcomm. I'm not saying that'll happen, but I'm saying that it is their cheapest new phone, so they can get away with it on there or on an iPad or even on a Mac, in a way that they can't on the mainline iPhone.

0:41:33 - Andy Ihnatko
They've got to get that right, and it's also completely in line with the idea of having a budget phone, not having to pay other people for licensing or for their own modem technology that actually is going to affect the price as well, or for their own modem technology that actually is going to affect the price as well. Sure, I think Qualcomm's position has always been I don't care if you make your own modems, you're still using our technology. You still got to pay us License, yeah, but there's got to be a savings there.

0:41:54 - Jason Snell
Yeah, they're not buying the chips, right? Yeah, and so that's a big deal.

0:41:59 - Leo Laporte
Well, and I wonder they're not going to build in cdma, which was uh, uh, qualcomm's big license. So I, yeah, uh, you. You're right though, andy, if you need a small phone, there's always the paris hilton razer plus brand new pink, very pink, aggressively pink. Uh, it's a flip phone from motorola, they call it the razer plus, and it comes with a little purse case. So that's nice, it's also pink.

0:42:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Get one for your dog, your little tiny fluffy dog, you know.

0:42:32 - Leo Laporte
I'm so tempted. I'm so tempted. It is a folding phone. Does it have a folding screen? It's kind of hard to tell from the pictures, but there's Paris using it, hilton, not Martino. Um, there she is with her little pink purse. Pretty in Paris, pink is the color. Oh, it even says that's hot on the hinge, paris's trademark. So your wallpaper, her signature style.

0:43:05 - Andy Ihnatko
Is that a Motorola?

0:43:07 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yeah. I'm always like.

0:43:10 - Andy Ihnatko
Motorola still makes phones Like yeah, they make it's an Android phone, yeah, and they make really great cheap phones. Like no kidding, they make a.

0:43:19 - Leo Laporte
Their $250, $280 phone is probably going to be okay without Apple intelligence it would be as good as five as apple's se there are those, well made, who would prefer not to have apple intelligence, and, in fact, there are those who turned off apple intelligence who are now saying wait a minute, whoa, it's back on. Uh, is it a bug?

0:43:44 - Andy Ihnatko
yeah, this. So there, I don't know. The story when it first hit after 18.3.1 hit was that wow, Apple is now automatically turning on Apple intelligence when you install the new OS. And then there are some people who are taking a look at it, saying it's not happening for me, but it's happening for me, and they're sort of like tracking through the install process, seeing that, well, I'm not seeing this welcome screen. And if I saw the welcome screen, people who see the welcome screen are having it turned on automatically, people who are not seeing it. So there's some speculation it might be a bug. I don't know that Apple would create a bug that accidentally turns on apple intelligence.

0:44:25 - Leo Laporte
I think that they might decide that we're good at corning developer jeff johnson, who was one of the people experienced it people he had apparently disabled apple intelligence in uh 18, 3 and saw it re-enabled after the update to 1831 yesterday. He says I personally have two different apple silicon max running sequoia updated a 1531 apple intelligence re-enabled on the macbook pro but not on the mac mini, so I've turned it on. I mean I don't. I'm not sure why you wouldn't want apple intelligence. I know it's not that intelligent. What's gonna happen is going to somehow fix Siri. Is something going to? Is 18.4 going to fix it? Jason, have you been playing with the latest developer editions? I?

0:45:14 - Jason Snell
haven't used the latest beta, the 18.4,. The idea is that it will have some improvements to Siri and it'll have the context, the personal context stuff. That is a value. But then again, this is what we were all really hoping was that this was going to be a big step forward for Siri. And then Mark Gurman rained on our parade and said well, the really good Siri is not going to be for another year.

So I think I mean Apple's problem here is that they recolorediri. They changed the animations of Ciri back when they shipped 18. And that was a mistake because it implies a level of improvement of Ciri that has not existed. It might be that Ciri's better in this. I hope it is Better understanding your personal context, at the very least. We'll see. But if German is to be believed and I think I believe, believe him there's going to be uh, you know there's. The biggest work on siri is yet to come, which is disturbing, although when you think about it, like amazon is about to do an event to promote their future release of an improved agent, right, like a lot of companies are sort of still struggling to do a comprehensive overhaul of their old agents, apple's not alone in this, but boy it is. I mean, I would say it's desperate times, but it was desperate times, like five years ago with siri and again, we'll see.

0:46:37 - Alex Lindsay
I'll keep on saying go back to the disaster that apple maps was, and now it works just fine. You know, like it, just it, just it. There's time, money a lot. They have some time and they have lots of money. You know, and those things, time and money fixes a lot of things, especially when you have a company that pretty good at executing. Um, so I have a feeling like it'd be very hard for us to. I think we should come back three or four years from now and say, well, did they figure this out? Because that's about how long it took Apple Maps to figure it out.

0:47:04 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and wouldn't we all be shocked and surprised and suspicious if Apple, in so many words, said that, oh, siri is so expandable and flexible and extendable that we were able to give it AI features without doing a whole gut and remodel? No, it always seemed like the sort of thing where they will keep the name, they will keep the interface, but it's a ship of theseus. It's like everything has been replaced to make it.

0:47:31 - Leo Laporte
Notoriously, amazon's been having a lot of trouble putting ai in echo. They have announced an event, as you said, Jason, february 26th. Uh, we'll stream it, if it's streamed, uh, because I think it'll be very interesting. Panos panayay x of microsoft, the guy who's so pumped about microsoft surface devices, is now their senior vice president of devices and services. He'll be the keynote, but according to cnbc, apple executives have scheduled a go no go meeting for valentine's day.

They are not confident that they'll be able to put the ai in. It has done a, apparently. You know, leaks from amazon say it's awful, uh, it will be, uh, an add-on. By the way, they'll have traditional, uh, amazon echo and then, for five to ten bucks more, you'll be able to get us an ai based uh, echo. But that's not confirmed, because Friday they're gonna. They're gonna. Their poor sweethearts are just gonna have to be left in the lurch because they're gonna have a big no-go, go-no-go meeting to decide whether to, according to Reuters, to decide whether to put the smarts in. So we shall see. I'm very curious about all this. They're committed. They sent press invites out for February 26th, but it's difficult.

0:48:52 - Andy Ihnatko
The road for every single smart assistant that's been trying to make this adaptation is that before you can make the assistant smarter, you have to make it a lot dumber. Can make the assistant smarter, you have to make it a lot dumber. When you start rolling out these AI features, suddenly the assistant that was hardwired to do the 80% of things that everybody wants it to do it does all that stuff. Well, now it might not.

0:49:18 - Leo Laporte
That happened with Siri right, I can definitely help you.

0:49:20 - Andy Ihnatko
Set a timer for cooking your brownies. Cooking brownies requires three different like no, no, no, no, just set a timer, set a freaking timer?

0:49:27 - Leo Laporte
yeah, well, and siri has. I mean, remember the, the gruber piece that siri has gotten dumber. Um well, it's claiming to know stuff it doesn't know instead of saying, well, here's what I found on the web about that well, and the chat gpt integration that they added.

0:49:44 - Jason Snell
I I I understand why, but I am actually a little bit surprised that it isn't more integrated, that if you say I'm happy to get chat gpt results, it should just be there, that it doesn't sort of take those in and pass them on to you, because instead you end up saying you know, hey lady, ask chat gpt to do this thing, and at that point you know it should probably like again, you shouldn't use do this thing, and at that point you know it should probably like again you shouldn't use it if you don't want to.

But if you're like okay with it, then they should do a better job of letting Siri kick things to GPT and it still feels, I mean, siri is all patched together. They keep adding things to it Like it's a mess and it's built up over years. It is this, you know, bricolage of little sticks and strings and things that have been built on, and built on it's like a nest or something. I love that Beaver dam. Bricolage is a great word, but that's what it is. It's kind of a mess. And then you put GPT on top and the weird thing is that sometimes it says no want, which I would choose to, yeah.

0:50:45 - Leo Laporte
What is a bricolage?

0:50:47 - Jason Snell
It's like a mess of stuff that's just kind of like added together and built up over time.

0:50:51 - Leo Laporte
It feels like a hobby, like somebody would be A collage yeah.

0:50:56 - Jason Snell
I think it's the same kind of French root there, but it's. Yeah, A bricolage is like you know. Imagine just, you keep on adding sticks and strings and twigs and you built up a thing.

0:51:04 - Alex Lindsay
And then you look at it and you're like what the heck is this thing?

0:51:07 - Jason Snell
It's bricolage. That was the name of our CMS at Macworld back in the day.

0:51:11 - Leo Laporte
That's how I know what that word is Excellent. It's a great word. Retcon says it's a term used in arts and literature work made from available things by Levi Strauss.

0:51:23 - Jason Snell
With whatever materials are to hand, so you construct it out of the pieces that are around you.

0:51:28 - Leo Laporte
In French a bricolage to bricolage is to fiddle or tinker.

0:51:33 - Jason Snell
I think. I think Siri is a bricolage, if ever I saw one. Apologies to bricolages everywhere for that.

0:51:40 - Andy Ihnatko
I've never heard that word before and now I'm like how is this not the name of one of those absolutely insufferable tech startups?

0:51:49 - Jason Snell
Such a good name.

0:51:50 - Andy Ihnatko
You don't know what the product is, but they got to start. Let me explain what a bricolage is and why we think it's pertinent to our vision for mobile computing.

0:52:00 - Leo Laporte
I am the Bricolage. Let's take a little break and come back Lots more to talk about. You're watching MacBreak Weekly with some actual intelligence in the form of Andy Ihnatko, ai, Alex Lindsay and Jason Snell. Actual intelligence Actual that's what AI stands for, actual intelligence.

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I did order something this morning. I was very excited. I ordered my new power beats pro 2 uh, same price as uh airpods pro but and you get transparency mode, noise cancellation, personalized spatial audio. The H2 chip is in it, but and this is the first time in an Apple audio product heart rate monitoring also built in. I did buy the orange ones, so you'll, did you? Really? I was like yeah.

0:56:41 - Alex Lindsay
I was like these look really good, but I'm not going to get orange. And then I saw they had other colors.

0:56:45 - Leo Laporte
They have black, gray, purplish and orange, but I thought I'm going all in. Man, I want everybody to know I'm wearing the beats. I just really want to see how the heart, how well the heart weight, works. The other thing I do like about it has an over the ear clip and uh, it's sometimes when you work out with airpods, especially when I'm on my peloton and my head's really shaking um they, it's the worst thing. You're on a peloton and my head's really shaking. It's the worst thing. You're on a Peloton, you're locked in and bicycle clips and then the AirPod falls out. It's really inconvenient. So I think that's what I want the hooks for. They're lightweight. I don't know if I like the Beats sound. My memory of it is it's a little bass heavy, but I have the AirPods Pro, so it'll. I have the airpods pro, so it'll be good to compare and I'll give you a review. Mine come on valentine's day, which is very nice I.

0:57:37 - Alex Lindsay
I think the only thing I really use the airpod pro. I have so many headsets me too.

I have way too many airplanes, yeah but and I use a lot of different ones for different things you know, I've got a regular shock, shocks, open comms, which is the one I use when I'm talking on the phone because it sounds the best for the other side, um, and then I have the shocks that I swim in, the swim ones, and then I have the ultimate ears that I work out in the ultimate ear fits, because they I have all of those too and and uh, the max is the max I kind of use with my Vision Pro. But I also I find that the Apple Pros are the AirPod Pros 2 are just nice and lighter to use the Apple Vision Pro with than putting the headset on. But I find myself that's about all I use and part of it is because I just don't like the way it pairs. I'm like I'm on a phone call on this device.

It would be great if you just stayed there and I'm working on getting it to not look at all the other ones, and I know that there's people who text me all the time when I say this on the show, but it smokes like when you take it out of the box, you know, trying to get it to just do the one thing and so, like my headsets only talk, my open comms are only paired with my phone, so they can't do anything else. You can't, you can't bear to anything else. So I put them on. They always work. And I find that the pairing stuff like I'm in the middle of a call and it still goes somewhere else and people keep on saying it's getting better, it's still happening, you know and it'll be.

0:59:06 - Leo Laporte
This is going to be interesting. Uh, I'll, I'll test that for sure, because I have the same problem with my airpods. Um, but it also ties into the peloton software. So instead of wearing, uh, the, the heart rate monitor across your chest, I can just use we'll see, but I can just use the heart rate monitor I mean in fairness, the, the, uh, the text speech to text works best with the air Apple products and the AirPod Pros specifically.

But this is going to have the H2 in it. It is an Apple product, right? Yeah, it does, it does have the H2 in it.

0:59:34 - Alex Lindsay
We'll see this will be interesting. But if you want it to be like text this person do this thing, do whatever when you use the other headsets, it's all very clunky. Oh, I agree, it's really clunky, really really fast, you know. So this is this.

0:59:46 - Leo Laporte
I'm hoping that the h2 inclusion means it will do everything, just like the earpods. Why should it should, it says? According to mac rumors, thanks to the h2 chip, the full suite of apple integration features one touch pairing, automatic switching between devices via iCloud. That's what you don't like audio, audio, so audio sharing. Allow multiple people to listen to the same source hands-free. Shlomo find my support, so it sounds like it's you know. I always wondered why Apple has Beats and AirPods Different markets, I guess.

1:00:21 - Jason Snell
I was watching Marques Brownlee's review of this today and he said that in his briefing Apple claimed slash Beats claimed that these are, that the power beats originals are the best selling headphones in the world selling in-ear wireless. I forget what the qualifier is, but the suggestion there is they do better than airpods do, and I think that part of that the beats branding is real. It is stuck around. It is the rare branding that is better in its category than apple's branding, certainly different.

The sound is part of branding that is better in its category than Apple's branding, Certainly different. The sound is part of it. There is a beat sound that's bass, heavier, and some people really love it. And this is also the case where, if Apple ever thought, maybe we should make some AirPods that have kind of over ear so that they hold in better and all that, they don't need to, because that's what the power beats are for and people really love them. So now, now those people will get that Apple noise cancellation and all of those other features and that's great and I think I wonder.

1:01:15 - Andy Ihnatko
I wonder how much that that's affected by the idea that Apple airpods feel like pairing them with anything other than an iPhone. It's you can do it just as a basic dumb Bluetooth device, whereas a beats set of headphones is ecumenical Catholic. It doesn't matter where it is.

1:01:33 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I think that the AirPod Pros fit in someone's ear well, just not mine. They fit okay. They work okay.

1:01:42 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's why I want the over-the-ear.

1:01:44 - Alex Lindsay
I'm constantly worried about them coming out. I've tried the bigger ones and the smaller ones.

1:01:49 - Leo Laporte
I've got a good seal on mine. Do you think it will do the hearing aid thing, or is that going to be an AirPods?

1:01:58 - Jason Snell
exclusive. I mean, they didn't mention it right? I'm unclear on what the difference is, because you'd think that it's got pretty much the same tech. But I know that it's not necessarily all the same sensors. But I I know that you know it's not necessarily all the same sensors, not the same noise canceling. So you know you would hope that they would. Of course they're. They're even more obtrusive than airpods pro are.

1:02:18 - Leo Laporte
So maybe not, but that's why I bought orange.

1:02:21 - Jason Snell
I thought I'm going all in nobody's gonna miss it either way, so you might as well let your flag fly.

1:02:27 - Andy Ihnatko
Pick the color that's gonna be easiest to find when you're emptying your pockets.

1:02:31 - Leo Laporte
That's precisely why I was gonna get black. Then I thought, no, it'll hide those, those are, those are to hide. I don't want to hide. I want to know exactly. Everything I have now lately is like that's what I'm gonna get a pair of silver, I know, with my, with my, like my, pink or something with my shocks open comms.

1:02:48 - Alex Lindsay
They're wiry and and if they, if I set them on a pile of wires, I will be like I don't know oh yeah, like I know my open cards are in this pile over here. I finally had to give them their own little special hook and they they're on my head or on the hook, but they can't.

1:03:01 - Leo Laporte
I did get for the airpods pro max, I got the pink, which is really more orange, so so they'll match, they'll be nice.

1:03:10 - Andy Ihnatko
You're absolutely right, Alex.

It's such a bummer that you might want these really beautiful $250 in earbuds, no matter who makes them, because the sound is great, you can pair with more than one, you can keep connected to more than one device at a time A, b, c, d, e all these features you love and then you get them and the only thing you don't like about them is that they don't fit really comfortably, no matter how you do it.

And it's annoying to me that, like the most comfortable pair of in-ear buds I have are a like $22 set of USB-C buds that is found in a drawer. I don't like them. I don't like them more than my wireless buds. I just like they sit comfortably enough that I always get like the full audio, whereas the my second favorite pair of buds, which again sound much better, have a lot more features and are wireless. The thing is, if I don't have them because because of where the vents are placed, if I don't have them sitting exactly in the right place, I'm going to lose like a third of of the audio and it's like it's just such a bummer that you really do have to take them for a test drive, no matter how good they are well, and I think the hard part is is that they I just want them to stay in there and I just wanted to stick and, and the, the, they.

1:04:22 - Alex Lindsay
I will say that again, they were a former, I guess, sponsor of the show. That why I got them. And then I just got hooked on them as the ultimate ear fit, you know fits. I'm so spoiled because they just pop into your ear and they're just, they just snugly, they're part of my ear. The problem is their audio isn't very good. So the, so, the, so, the, the, the audio is good to listen to your. I have to talk on the phone, so I have on the, the, uh, the shocks, open comms. I'm listening to music to work out or walk. I'm going to put on the boat, I'm going to put on the, the ultimate ears I am. I want to have things to happen with my phone. 're all very small, you know, and I they used to be. I used to use edemotic. You know the edemotic phone ones, which were great, they sounded good. I stuck them in my ears. They had the little tree.

1:05:16 - Jason Snell
You know that you stick in your ear and I still have a bunch and they were great.

1:05:19 - Alex Lindsay
I did, I. I thought that I would never give up the wires until I did. And then now I put them on and I'm like what am I doing? It's all stuck around me. I can't like, what am I? How do I live the courage?

1:05:32 - Leo Laporte
I don't.

1:05:32 - Jason Snell
I don't miss wired headphones, I really don't I, I still use them for podcasts, and that's literally it, right I? Just yeah, I was a yeah I was an in-ear headphone snob, but especially when the airpods I mean the airpods were good and then the airpods pro came out and I was like, well, forget. And now it's only. I'm only using these in-ears with wires for podcasts. That's literally everything else.

1:05:52 - Andy Ihnatko
I got to say that my favorite setup is still Bluetooth earbuds, but the kind that have the connecting wire, because the number of times where I'm taking my walk I stop in a store I need to. Unfortunately, I'm jovial and people and the clerks know me and they want to talk and banter, so I have to. I have to yank out one of these buds, hold this little thing in my hand and somehow not lose it while I'm doing my shopping, whereas when it's connected by cord you can unplug one, let it drop and listen only with one ear, or let them both drop, have them wrap around your ear. I will say you can buy, and you can buy like silicone, like straps, that kind of do that same thing, but, like my favorite are still going to be that variety of Bluetooth and they're not, unfortunately, they're way out of sync.

1:06:38 - Alex Lindsay
I will say that I, I, I used to really make fun of uh people who had, um, uh, bone induction headsets cause they'd said they'd looked goofy. But man, when you get used to it, you know, um, you know being able to just sit there and hit stop and nothing's plugging your ears. You're just talking to someone and you hear everything around you.

1:06:55 - Leo Laporte
You can even if you don't play it really loud. Yeah, you could do the dishes and listen to a book and people could talk to you and yeah, it's, yeah it's. They're kind of amazing it's come a long way from the bone phone. Remember that they used to advertise in the 70s. In rolling stone they'd advertise, and it was bone conducting headphones that somehow would hang around your neck. Yeah, it was like a scarf.

1:07:16 - Alex Lindsay
A little run and and the first time I'd ever heard, it was when google glass had it and I was like whoa, what's that? Like you could feel it tickle you in the back, right behind your ear, and um and uh, and, and then, and then.

1:07:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so that's good, they're good I'm just curious if they still sell bone phones.

1:07:33 - Andy Ihnatko
It's also, oh, I think tech phone has a great video about it. He's, I think he got.

1:07:37 - Leo Laporte
He got one and basically confirmed that it's crap oh yeah, I knew that they always send it off. Oh yeah, look see the the like little. That is ridiculous. The thing that's different about the aftershocks is they're actually on your temple, so it's like you know these are just. This was hanging around your neck yeah, but they there are.

1:08:00 - Andy Ihnatko
there are modern kinds that are like that bows and couple make like, essentially, a collar that ends at your collarbones, so that you can.

So it's basically firing small speakers up towards your ears, which is not a terrible. But the thing I like about the bone conductive headphones and these other ideas is the idea that if I'm walking, like if I if the fidelity of the music is not the issue I just want to listen to a podcast or whatever that I do want to have awareness of what's around me. When I'm on my bike, when I'm walking Again, I live in a neighborhood where it's like a sitcom, where people will call to you across the street hey Andy, I didn't see you, blah, blah, blah, and you wind up in a 30-minute conversation and if they don't see your bright orange earbud, they wonder why you're all stuck up and whatever I mean, I'm glad that there's a variety of earphones now that don't necessarily want to take over your entire sound view, because there really is something to the idea of being able to just add a layer of custom audio to the mix of what you're naturally hearing, and that's what these other designs will offer you the technological breakthrough of 1979.

the best thing about that device was the ads. Go ahead, show off your new while you're skiing, surfing or uh, it was a different time, folks. It was a different time we were excited about other things. It was easy.

1:09:26 - Leo Laporte
It was easy to make us very happy we may look back and say, gosh, those were the good old days. I guess maybe we already are. The information says apple. You know, remember we were talking last week that maybe deep seek was going to be a great solution for apple intelligence in china, because the chinese government won't let them use, uh, anything but a Chinese AI. Well, according to the information, they passed over DeepSeek and they have partnered with Alibaba to do Apple intelligence for iPhone users in China. Alibaba's had an AI chatbot for some time.

1:10:05 - Alex Lindsay
It seems like the Apple way to go. Deepseek seems pretty sketch.

1:10:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don't blame them.

1:10:11 - Andy Ihnatko
The information said that Apple definitely considered them, but decided that the team is not ready to support AI for millions and millions and millions of iPhones.

1:10:19 - Leo Laporte
yet they lack the manpower and experience.

1:10:22 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and oddly enough for an Apple, such a privacy-focused company. The information also said that one of the reasons why they went with alibaba was that they have so much data about consumers and people that would like help. Help that would help.

1:10:37 - Leo Laporte
That would be helpful in some way shape or would it be ironic if apple intelligence works much better in china because of that? They passed over uh baidu as well, which is is Alibaba's biggest competition, the Google of China. So it's a big win for Alibaba, I guess.

1:10:56 - Andy Ihnatko
Helps to cushion the blow of all those tariffs for those $8 scarves that now can't be shipped.

1:11:01 - Leo Laporte
Speaking of which there's a lot of noise and it hasn't happened, so it's not in the news category. It's more in the rumors category about tsmc a trade war, tariffs on tsmc. Tsmc has said there's just no way we can build what we have in Taiwan in the United States. We'd like we would if we could, but we can't. Um, this is going to be interesting to watch. This will really be a test of Steve, of Tim Cook's diplomatic skills. This is going to be interesting to watch. This will really be a test of Tim Cook's diplomatic skills.

1:11:32 - Andy Ihnatko
There was a lot of coverage and worrying about this because Trump has gone, has said something about how oh, the CHIPS Act is just stupid and it's ridiculous and basically it's a Biden program that's actually working to finally get TSMC and other makers interested in actually manufacturing chips in the United States again.

1:11:52 - Leo Laporte
Billions of dollars. More than $6 billion went to Intel. Another big chunk went to TSMC, which built a plant is building a plant, actually did build a plant.

1:12:01 - Jason Snell
It's online in Phoenix In Arizona, yeah, but it's making legacy nodes.

1:12:05 - Leo Laporte
It's not making the Apple chips the big chips.

1:12:08 - Jason Snell
It's got to start somewhere. I mean it's very hard to analyze this stuff, leo, right.

1:12:14 - Leo Laporte
That's why I'm not. Yeah, it's a rumor.

1:12:16 - Jason Snell
It's not logical what he's doing. You're right, I think you mentioned it's a Biden program and so therefore it must be bad, even though it's trying to actually provide incentives to get chip developers to invest in America.

It's money being spent in the US, you know. So what can you say? I mean, it is a the US is behind in chip making, it's way behind, and it needs to catch up if you want to have an alternative to Taiwan, given that Taiwan is potentially you know a target of China. So there are lots of logical things that you could do here. I think the best we can hope for is that, you know, the CHIPS Act will get slightly modified and called something else, and then Trump can take credit for it.

1:13:02 - Leo Laporte
Tim Culpin, who was a Taipei-based former Bloomberg opinion columnist, wrote an opinion piece saying that it is his belief. He says what he thinks the president really wants is simply for TSMC to kiss the ring and pledge to invest more in the US, and that's why the 100% tariff is a threat. But remember he did the same thing with Mexico and Canada with 25% tariffs, so maybe it's just uh yeah, I think that's, I mean, that's a good point.

1:13:32 - Andy Ihnatko
He was trumpeting about how, hey, we got had a showdown with Columbia about accepting uh, accepting and basically what the agreement was that. Yeah, you know that, the agreement that we had with Biden a few years ago, we'll do that again. Yeah, and that's literally what happened.

1:13:47 - Leo Laporte
That's what Canada did as well. Yeah, so it's like but that 1.3 billion we pledged to spend on the border yeah, we're going to spend that.

1:13:54 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh good news. But now it's Trump's deal, so that's OK, exactly so.

1:13:58 - Leo Laporte
So I guess really the news is things are uncertain, exactly yeah, and it's very hard to know what's going to happen.

1:14:08 - Alex Lindsay
I think that's going to be the case for a while. Yeah, like you know, like I think that's the general state of our situation, so I don't think that's going to settle anytime soon. Yeah, I mean, I think that you know, apple would love to get out of China. It's just that there's a lot of infrastructure that makes that hard. You know, and I think that that's the you know. And getting out of you know, unwrapping all of those things will take a decade, a decade at least, and there you can see them building capacity in Vietnam and in India and in other places. Um, but it, it, it's something that you know there. It's, it's a. When we're talking about trying to fix a moving train, this is a, a really, really large train with a lot of cars and you're trying to make subtle change, you know you can't turn it on a dime, and I think that that's the problem.

1:14:54 - Andy Ihnatko
Apple's problem is that I'm sure they don't want to pull out of China because they also have to maintain a really great relationship with that company because of all the hardware they sell there. So they have to walk a very careful line, Like when they just I think there was a story that I read, I think a few days ago, that India's plants are going to start manufacturing MacBook Airs for the first time. But the thing is, more manufacturing. They move out of China is another reason for China to say well, what have you done for us lately? Why should we make it easy for an American company to sell American products to Chinese individuals when we could essentially be steering those people towards Chinese products from Chinese companies? So it's a sticky situation.

1:15:37 - Alex Lindsay
And if China does that slow enough, apple will just get, will extract their need for them. You know, the problem is is that you see, china dropped a lot in the last quarter and Apple's profit did not drop. So Apple is also. I think if China does it all at one time, but if China does it slowly, apple will slowly disengage and that's China's risk as well.

1:15:59 - Leo Laporte
Let's take a little break and then, when we come back, john Ashley, producer man, if you will prepare the Vision Pro theme, my finger's on the button, you almost said, but my fingers on the button, you almost said, your buttons on the finger, which would not be good, uh, thank you, John Ashley. Alex Lindsey, uh, is here. So is Jason Snell. So is Andy Ihnatko glad you're here. Thanks to our club members, by the way, who made this show possible, and all the people watching live. Uh, 1164 people watching on twitch and Youtube and Linkedin and Facebook and TikTok, X and Kkick and all those places. Uh, we're so glad you're watching live, but of course, you don't have to watch live. We've got a podcast you can always watch later. Uh, usually it's about five percent of the audience watches live and the rest watch downloads. But it's nice to have the live audience watches live and the rest watch downloads. But it's nice to have the live audience and see the chats going. I see all the chats.

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There's actually stories in the vision pro stack. Oh look, he's, he's, he's, Jason. You look weird with that on. I don't. Oh look, but did you guys send out a memo, are you, Jason?

1:19:57 - Jason Snell
and and Alex are wearing their vision pros we did not send out, but we, you know we've always got them at the ready, always ready. You never know when. You're gonna never know when there'll be a vision pro segment video.

1:20:07 - Leo Laporte
I wanted to actually ask you about this.

1:20:10 - Alex Lindsay
Um, I saw this on reddit, uh, and I wanted to ask you what it means unlocking apple immersive video quality for all I don't know, I don't know what it means by, for all this is a new company that that is uh shooting some uh great footage, oh okay we've.

1:20:26 - Leo Laporte
They say we've cracked the code to match the fidelity of apple's immersive video and just launched today.

It's an app on the app store prime prima immersive. When my co-founder, andrew, and I first met last year, achieving the same fidelity as apple immersive video was difficult, if not impossible, to reach the quality we wanted. We had to build a prototype 16k, 90 frames per second camera, a commercial post facility that could handle it, the petabytes of data, an advanced immersive player to handle 16K, 90 FPS, hdr10 without overheating, a custom Dolby Atmos renderer for Vision Pro with spatial head tracking. And a cross-platform encoder that achieves 48% lower bit rates than regular MVHEVC or HEVC alone. Apparently they did it. So tell me about the. So what is this all? True that you couldn't do this until they did something?

1:21:20 - Alex Lindsay
it's been hard, I mean. The question is, will you not be able to do it two months from now, when the new black magic camera is out and and there's?

safe solved a problem that the black magic camera will solve, probably right, we don't know, but we think it will. I mean, apple's working pretty hard on making sure that the black magic it sounds like apple's working hard on making sure that the black magic camera is, um, going to be able to do the things it needs to do there. What Apple's doing is more complicated than anybody else has done on a headset and part of it requires some processing power. So part of the you know, like the reason, one of the reasons you can't do what Apple's doing on their headset, even if you have the resolution. You know it's doing some pretty intelligent things with all that content and so and it's 90 frames a second, and so so you have the 90 frames a second is hard. It's hard to find a camera that will do 90 frames a second, you know. So they you know different companies have hacked different cameras. The Blackmagic 12K is the most common camera to hack. You know for that because it has a lot of resolution and a lot of frame rate. And so I don't know, you know, I don't. I'm not sure what they use, but that's the most possible one. They there were some pictures floating around of their behind the scenes and does look like they've. They've kind of they must've torn some cameras apart to get to the camera that they're doing, but I don't know exactly what that looks like.

Um, what I will say is that the it's called, the it's called. Is it Prima? I am Prima, vision, I think, or something. It is. Um, yeah, prima immersive is the name of the um of the app. I downloaded it. I'm pointing out for the $3 and 99 cents to watch the concert. Um, it is immediately become, uh, one of the things I would show somebody if I showed them an Apple vision pro. So I have this like's, this hit list. Someone says, hey, can I see the Vision Pro? And you're like, okay, well, you gotta see JigSpace, you gotta see the dinosaur thing and you gotta see. These are the things to wander you through. This would definitely be more the problem is there, hasn't been anything new for a long time right.

They have new. Apple puts out new content, but none of show like this is something that I would actually go. You know, like that, a lot of the immersive stuff that apple's put out, some immersive stuff. I think that you know watching um. Um submerged is definitely on that list. I don't know about the whole thing, but so it would definitely.

I think the submerge is there. I think a lot of the other more live action stuff that apple's done has not been as compelling, in my opinion. Um, I think they've tried too hard. This did not try too hard. This they're doing concerts, right, or music. It's a little it's a bluegrass kind of. I think bluegrass or kind you know, kind of a um, you know a band that at a at a house. Um, well, they're gonna do more. I mean, that's just the first one. Oh yeah, they're gonna do more. Um, I think that they. Uh, it's a very good band that plays really good music. It's always a good start they are, and it does look better than what the video toolbox can do, yeah.

So there's a bunch of things that that that Apple does, as far as you know, figuring out where you are dimensionally, that and it also has to figure out the difference between the interaxial that you had in the inner well, your inner, the difference between the interaxial that you had and the interocular Well, your interocular and the interaxial. So when it says, oh, I'm moving the lenses to where your eyes are, it's also measuring, oh, this is what your interocular distance is between them. And it has to make conversions to make that, because the camera is not the same, and so Apple has to do some trickery to do that, and no one else, no one's had those tools to do the trickery up until. This is probably one of the first things that outside of Apple that somebody has been able to do, because just the two flat images by themselves don't generate the same experience, and so the so it is.

Again, it's very compelling. There's a lot of things that not a lot of things, but a handful of things I probably would have done differently. Um, you know, the camera's a little too high, a little too close. Um, um, there's a interview with her that she's looking off camera and you're kind of like I don't understand why yeah, look at me, I'm right here, I'm over here, hey it's super weird.

1:25:13 - Jason Snell
Yeah, they're learning, but Alex sent me a link and I went and I watched it too and it's good. It's really good. I mean it just says the same thing, which is more people need access to this stuff and the fact that these people cooked it up themselves and have figured out how to do it.

It just means now there's another stream of content that can be out there. That is immersive and it looks because it is. It's really nice. It just it is so comfortable. It is like you are just sitting there getting a private concert. It's such a nice feature of this product.

1:25:43 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I would pay $4 for every concert they do Like. This is like it was, um, because you know they're going to only get better and this one was great. I mean, again, this is probably one of the top immersive videos I've ever seen. Uh, and this was their first try, so I think that they're off to a pretty good state. You know and I don't say that lightly, I mean I've seen a lot of immersive for a long time Um and uh. I did find and I think that there was they. I think they broke through some myths, at least for me. A lot of people say you can't have someone, uh looking at you the whole time during a show. Um, and they even I think they even broke away from that by doing these interviews where she's looking away, but when they're playing, the artists are looking right at you, like they're playing right to you. I did not find that to be a problem, that's kind of cool.

I actually felt more connected to them, having them just play straight to me. One thing that I think that was missing there obviously someone who mixed it I think it was a very well-known Atmos engineer sounds great. It's missing the environment. So, whether you put up a Decca tree or you put up an Ambisonic mic, you had to get a little bit of the environment and just kind of bring some of it back in Just to kind of hear a little bit of the ambience of the room itself. And I think Apple has some tools that do that automatically. But it doesn't feel like they used any of them. Um and uh, but, but I think that it pretends towards. I think a lot of headset owners are going to really be happy if more content like this comes out. You know, with the new cameras, you know, I think this is going to be a really exciting uh, I'm, I was, you know, I was excited to see it. You know, with the new cameras, you know, I think this is gonna be a really exciting uh I'm, I was, you know, I was excited to see it, you know, and I uh. So I think that it's, it's, it's pretty, it's a pretty nifty uh, uh content If you own an Apple vision pro, you should run, not walk.

Download it, pay the 3 99, watch it. We want, I'll tell you the. I'm selfishly telling you to go buy it, because I want them to make more. I want them to go hey, look at all the money that just came in. You know cause it's. You know it's 390,000 or 400,000 or 500,000 or whatever of these out, there is plenty to support someone. If a bunch of us go, hey, let's go buy, let's go buy the. You know if, and and I that's why I'll buy I'm voting for more of this content by paying the price of a, not even a latte anymore. I think this is just a black coffee at starbucks at this point. Um, you know, for the, for the ability to see new bands. I think it's a really intimate space to to watch the bands in. So, again, I was probably a little too close for me, like I was. I feel like I was standing right up in front of them, but, um, anyway, I think it's going to be. Uh, it made me more excited about the new camera coming out.

1:28:29 - Leo Laporte
So, so it's also the other thing that's interesting not restricted to vision pro. It supports metas, horizon os and android xr.

1:28:37 - Alex Lindsay
So, uh, the core technologies apparently would work on those and if you, if you have those, just don't watch it on an apple vision pro and then go back to them okay no, no, but I'm just telling you, like it is it'll spoil, it will look fine, it will look fine, but it will not look like that because there's a lot of processing that's going on and a lot of resolution there that is not representable on the other headsets, and you will definitely feel it, you know like?

1:29:04 - Leo Laporte
are they making their video encoder available to others, or is it going to be theirs and theirs alone?

1:29:08 - Alex Lindsay
I think that they're. I think that there's a couple companies involved there, you know. So I think that one company is doing the shooting, another company, I think, is hoping to do processing for folks, and okay, yeah, amazon's involved, uh, as well as balenciaga, so maybe there'll be some shoes that can do immersive, I my guess is Amazon's involved, because the processing to make this stuff work at 8k, 90 frames a second is non-trivial, you know, and so it is a uh uh.

I think that what's required there is that you can spend the next eight months rendering on your Mac studio, or you could put it up on amazon and pay a bunch of money and have it done in a week they are uh asking if people are interested in distributing their video on prima or using their studio services or scoping out an immersive media production, uh, to come to them.

1:29:55 - Leo Laporte
So it's going to be a business for them and, over and above the app and the concert tickets, yeah, so that's interesting, huh, immersive company is the name of it, immersivecompanycom and uh, good, I wasn't sure. You know, you read stuff on reddit and you don't know, is that real? I knew I had to ask somebody, uh, who knew something.

1:30:14 - Alex Lindsay
I started getting pings early, uh, yesterday morning. I think they released it at 5 am pacific standard time by seven. I had gotten three or four people going. Hey, have you seen this yet? Have you seen it yet? Okay, good, okay.

1:30:25 - Leo Laporte
Jason, you actually wrote a piece celebrating the anniversary of the release of the Vision Pro. One year with the Vision Pro.

1:30:33 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I feel like we I mean we sort of talked about it last week this is. This is the great podcasting and writing cycle, where some people listen to podcasts, some people read articles, and I do both. I like doing both. I wouldn't stop. I wrote that review a year ago and I wanted to take the opportunity to write a lot of words about it, but basically the short version is I called it ridiculous and impractical a year ago when the review came out. It was never going to be a hit.

It is a dev kit, essentially, and the important things going forward are for Apple to keep pushing to make more immersive content, to get more developers developing interesting software for it, which is a big issue and otherwise just keep their eye on the future, because we all know even the next one of these is going to be impractical and too expensive. Even it's half the price, and that's okay as long as they keep pushing. Um, and and we've learned some things that it does really well. Immersive video does really well. They could create a killer app if it was nba courtside or ncaa tournament, courtside or you know, or a broadway theater immersive or you know, or immersive concerts, right, like they've got. There's some pieces there and they just need to keep working at it. But and then I guess Mac virtual display is another one that I think is a winner. I think that's a great feature. That is, again, probably not worth $3,500, but is a sign that there's a feature there.

And then I wanted to save some praise for the personas, which, when we saw them in the initial demo, which is in 2013, and then when they first came out, were weird and uncanny and bad. And over the course of their development of Vision OS over this last year, vision OS has really improved, and one of the big improvements is the personas are way better and they made spatial personas, which it is like being in a room with people. I know it is the closest other than reality that I have ever experienced. It is vastly better than a FaceTime call, and so it's another thing to keep pushing on. But again, how many people who use Vision Pro know anybody else who has a vision pro? The answer is probably not that many, but I, I am one of those people who does. I know lots of vision pro users, so I get to hang out with my friends in vision pro land on the bora bora virtual beach and that's great right, but but like I don't know, we have a standing we have a standing every two weeks.

We try to get together and just and just really shoot the breeze, talk, don't talk about work, mostly, um, and it's, it's it when it comes off, it's really present. I wish, I wish, there was more of that out there.

1:33:18 - Leo Laporte
I don't, that would almost be a killer app for me. I would consider buying it for that.

1:33:21 - Jason Snell
Um yeah, that would almost be a killer app for me, I would consider buying it for that, yeah, and that's why I think when it's you know it doesn't have to be. Look, if it's $2,000, it's still too expensive, but every dollar you take off the price lowers the barrier for somebody who's got money to spend and just needs a reason to use it. The problem with a Vision Pro now and I don't know how Alex feels about this, but like I want reasons to use it I don't often have reasons to use it and when I do use it, I want to stay there and I look for reasons to stay there that's a great song and the prop and the problem is, right now there aren't that many reasons to stay there, but, like I, it is a place that I like to be and I want to be there more.

And these are these are apple's challenges is how do you get people over the hump and and and, and you know. I hope that they continue to work on that, because there is stuff in the it not only is a genuinely impressive product, I think the whole, like UI, is really good. I think vision OS is actually very good. It's just what's it for? And it costs too much to do it and, like these are all the questions and and it's going to take years probably to find the answers. But what is there is pretty well done. It's just it's a little too empty and obviously the barrier to entry is way too high.

1:34:31 - Alex Lindsay
And I think that again, I think that we'll see what happens this summer, but I think that I've said this a thousand times now on the show is that iBooks is a great example of what Apple shouldn't try to replicate, which is that they didn't. They didn't do enough, and I think that Epic showed you exactly how they did the model which is the mega, mega grants. Like we're going to give away a hundred million dollars and we're not going to make it hard for you to get it and we're not going to ask for anything back. We just want to just charge the ecosystem. And I think Apple could easily throw a billion dollars down and just say, hey, we're looking for and they may wait.

Maybe maybe they'll do that this summer, maybe they'll do it at some point, but they have a billion dollars to spend. They spent a lot of money on this, and if they dropped a billion dollars in increments of 25,000 and 50,000 and a hundred thousand, there's a whole lot of people that'd be building content for this headset right now. Like you know, like you know, they would, and they used to throw stuff against the wall and some of it would work and some of it wouldn't. And if Apple you know, and It'd be worth it to learn.

I mean when. I It'd be worth it to learn. You know, I couldn't at the time, I couldn't make the turn. But talking to some folks at Epic they were like I was like I mean that's how giggly. I mean like, like it was just kind of like. It was like yeah, anybody who had some history in doing something. They were like let's give you some money and you get. And you get a car and you get a car.

1:35:49 - Andy Ihnatko
I think I could do this for $24,999.

1:35:53 - Alex Lindsay
And I have friends. I had a whole slew of friends that all got about 20,000 and some of them got 50,000, a hundred thousand and you had to write a plan and everything else. But they're not asking for money back and if you don't, if it doesn't work out, they'll go. Oh too bad, but they really. And it made all of us like there was like oh, I don't know whether I should work on Unity or Unreal Engine. And as soon as that happened, they were like, hey, I can get money for it, I can run this test through it. And suddenly everybody's antennas went straight to it and maybe there's an antitrust problem with Apple doing it. But I think that if they put a billion dollars into some kind of mega fund, whatever they want to call it, I think we would see a lot of exciting things. What is?

1:36:43 - Leo Laporte
Jason, what do you think? So there really are two different questions here. You you say and I think you're probably right that at some point we will wear things over our eyes that annotate the world around us. I think you're probably right about that. But that's not the only thing apple's selling here. They're also selling something called spatial computing yeah, yeah. What do you think of that?

1:37:06 - Jason Snell
I'm unclear on what the future products are here. I do feel like, yes, when we're out in the world, one of the devices we will eventually have is something that allows us to have things.

Yeah, ar with annotation of the world around us, like that seems inevitable, right. The question is is there? I mean, I think inevitably, if you're going to do that, then a lot of things we think of as computing right now would be part of that, and so inevitably, the idea that you would need big slabs of glass to watch TV or to use a computer would also probably vanish at some point. I don't know. I mean, this is the open, this is an open question.

I think that spatial computing is good, like I think they've done a really good job. I don't know whether it's necessary, right, like I mean, it is something that the Mac virtual display is one of the killer features here, because that's just a floating window with a Mac in it and it I mean I don't want to downplay it, it's not just it's actually very good, but it's not revolutionizing computers, it's putting a floating computer window in virtual reality, and I don't know whether people really desire to have an intense 3D minority report kind of space, or if the future of augmented computing interfaces is literally a virtual monitor that you can look at in glasses instead, and I mean that's an open question for me.

1:38:32 - Alex Lindsay
I think meta is in some ways going down the path of you know, what am I looking at here and so on and so forth, but there's no video support for it at the moment, like you don't see the video that's being projected in front of you with the Ray-Bans. But I think that there is the way I, when I look at how I use chat GPT, I open up resolve, let's say, and I got something complicated I'm trying to do and resolve Um, I had some audio pipeline or some kind of compositing or color correction and I just open up chat GPT. I don't even try to, I don't even I don't Google, I don't look for movies anymore, I just go okay, I'm trying to do this, how do I do this? And it goes okay, that's not working. What do I do here? And I just sit there and go.

You see these conversations with me just going back and forth with ChatGPT and in 15 minutes I do something that and I don't need it to know whether it's the truth or not, it's working or it's not working. Uh, when I get to the other end of it, my wife, um, you know, will ask she she last week she said I've got all this stuff in the refrigerator. Um, tell me what I can make with this. And it just chat. Gpt just gave her a recipe and we ate it on friday, you know, and it was great and the thing is you take?

1:39:48 - Leo Laporte
a picture or type in what was in the fridge. She didn't take a picture typed in. She could have taken a picture, though it would have been nice if you could take a picture, I would do that.

1:39:56 - Alex Lindsay
I have done that. I've had, I've gotten stuff at the farmer's market. I have a bad habit I go to the farmer's market and if I can't identify what something is, I will buy it and try to cook it, just because I'm like what am I doing here? So, by the way, there's a couple of them I wouldn't recommend again.

1:40:11 - Andy Ihnatko
It's called Bricolage?

1:40:17 - Alex Lindsay
No, there's like an Asian plant that just tastes like dirt when you cook it.

1:40:22 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm going to interject and praise you for adventure. You look, you learned something. That's all.

1:40:27 - Alex Lindsay
That's all that it took I didn't like that part, but but I'll do it. My, my, my family gives me a hard time about it because I'll just bring home weird stuff.

1:40:34 - Leo Laporte
I did the same thing. I saw a delicata squash.

1:40:36 - Alex Lindsay
I keep on trying to learn how to open pomegranates?

1:40:40 - Leo Laporte
I don't know what delicata squash is, but I'm gonna buy it.

1:40:43 - Alex Lindsay
And it's still sitting in my kitchen I buy a pomegranate like once a month to try to make. I watch the videos and I try to cut the square out of the top oh yeah, the whole thing open, it never works anyway.

So the um, but I keep, I keep working on it, but the um, uh. But the thing is is that when we get to a point, I think the danger for any company not paying attention to it is that this is really really, really hard to do. It's going to take an enormous amount of technology to figure it out and you've got to figure out UI. That is different. So you've got to be doing it right now for something that's going to happen 10 years from now. But I'm going to put on, but we're going to get to a point like our phone.

I do think we also going to be like how do I do this thing that's in front of me, or what is this? And you're going to get to a point where information is just. It's just, you're in a gel of information and and a communication and everything is very, very fluid, and these headsets or whatever, it's a mixture of the headsets and ears and everything else. You're just going to be connected to that and I don't think it's going to be something that's going to take you away from the world. In fact, I think it's going to be something that a lot of times, as Apple said in the past you know something, take you into the world, because you're going to be exploring things that you wouldn't explore otherwise, um, and doing things that you wouldn't do otherwise. I mean the, the, the existence of things like the Jeep, you know, the satellite based connectivity, um, you know, makes it safer to go into the hinter regions in a way that wouldn't be safe otherwise.

1:42:06 - Leo Laporte
Don't wear your Vision Pro into hinter regions. No, not yet.

1:42:10 - Jason Snell
Spatial computing.

Yeah, it does feel to me like spatial computing is what they can do now, and it's a pretty advanced sort of thing.

But, to Alex's point, you do get the sense that, with LLMs and the advancement of AI, that the ultimate interface for this is probably not, you know, tapping to open an apps list and then putting your fingers together right, it's having a conversation, but you can see how that would still be spatial potentially, where you're saying, hey, show me this thing, and a window opens up and it knows where you're looking or what your other open windows are, and it puts it in an appropriate place.

And then you ask ask some context, and it knows what you're looking at and it and it opens something else or it makes a modification. You can see that that may be a place where this goes, although they're not always places where you want to talk and, uh, you know there are other kind of uh. People have different ways that they prefer to interface with technology. I think it's all to play for, though, and I just keep coming back to the idea that something that augments our vision as a part of a larger set of features does feel inevitable, and so, as Alex said, now's the time to be playing with this stuff because it won't appear fully formed in 2040, right, it will be the hard work of technology companies who have been learning and building this stuff over the previous 15 years who get there.

1:43:34 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and I think that an incredible lesson if you're in Northern California or if you visit Northern California in Fairfax I was in Fairfax over the weekend. My daughter and I go somewhere on Saturdays and Fairfax I was in Fairfax over the over the weekend. My my daughter and I go somewhere on Saturdays and Fairfax won the Saturday. There is a museum of bicycles and it's the, and it's it was paid for mostly by the.

Mountain biking began in Fairfax, like the first, the very first mountain biking races were all done in, you know right, in that area, and and all the guys that started it were all there, and so they put some money into it and bought a bunch of old bikes and everything else. And so there's this museum, but it starts back with a wooden like a wooden foot, like you run along, you sit down on your farm and you like move your feet. There's no, there's no crank, and and you should go there in Fairfax and get them to give you a tour, because they won't give it to you unless you ask for it. They give you a 20-minute tour and you get to watch technology over 150 years. And man did it look, you know, like the big wheel. You know that big wheel, the penny-farthing bike, yeah.

I've ridden those they have a couple there Very hard to ride, yeah.

1:44:46 - Andy Ihnatko
And I asked him. I said have you ever ridden one of those? And he's like I tried when I was younger. It's very hard.

1:44:48 - Leo Laporte
You know like, you know like, and then he went into a scar here and a scar here, exactly he goes, he goes like he's getting on them he said I never actually got got, I never actually went anywhere where that I just kept falling off.

1:44:54 - Alex Lindsay
And he goes and um, and so the thing is is then then you get you, you wander through that and you get through this piece of wood, and then they're like maybe we should get springs and maybe we should put air in the tires, maybe we should put shocks in it, and you come all the way around and they've got these like eight thousand dollar inc. You know wonders of technology. Well, we're in this. What we're doing right now with these headsets is the wooden bike that doesn't even have pedals yet, you know, compared, and so you can make fun of, we can make fun of it. But there's a big world coming, you know, in this area and there's a lot of money going towards it, you know.

1:45:26 - Leo Laporte
So I think that it's going to be interesting to speaking of a big world and a lot of money coming towards it apple's last gas. But feature films comes out in a few months and I don't know if you saw the preview on the super bowl, but f1 with brad pitt and uh, featuring a number of famous uh f1 personalities, by the way, um it should be.

1:45:49 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, it should be interesting. One thing, one thing that I thought was interesting, is that when you look at the end of it, I don't think it has apple anywhere like it, just has warner brothers like it's not interesting so I'm wondering whether you know they're, because the I think part of the problem is if you, if you're a streaming company oh, there's a little apple. No, wait a minute, yeah I thought, I thought the warner brothers look, look at the uh show my yeah.

1:46:07 - Leo Laporte
See in the lower left apple original films, warner brothers on the right, right, it just felt like.

1:46:12 - Alex Lindsay
It felt like they're not not making. I didn't realize they were doing an imax.

1:46:16 - Leo Laporte
That's going to be a good way to don't try max yeah wow.

1:46:20 - Andy Ihnatko
the thing that struck me is it's not. I think that they must have cut together shots that they had, oh yeah, as opposed to, because I still don't know what it's really about. But the thing is, it looks like a compilation of actual F1 footage. If you're watching a live F1 race, it's like yeah, exactly.

1:46:45 - Leo Laporte
So I've been following this as an F1 fan, and the F1 subreddit has a lot of information about it. The plot is Brad Pitt is an older driver who's going to mentor a new young driver. There is a lot of shaky cam footage, but the way they did it is very interesting. In some cases they took existing—by the way, these cars have eight or nine cameras on them. They took existing footage, uh, from a race and then, uh, digitally modified it so that brad pitt was driving. Um, I've seen there was one shot where a camera operator probably your brother, Alex had his camera behind a race car and he had a drill with an oddly shaped thing attached to it to shake the camera.

1:47:25 - Alex Lindsay
No, so you know, you think that's funny. There's a, there's a shot, there's a shot in star wars, episode one, where a little droid runs across and gets sucked into the engine. Um, and the engine goes blah, blah, blah and blows up and everything else. And, uh, that was literally a drill. They, they, um, they ran it in slow motion. I was actually there when they shot it and it was. They took it outside of the out of windward and they put it out on outside to get sunlight and someone was underneath it and just hit the, hit the model with a drill and it just it just took but done at 240 frames a second. It, if you go back and look at it, with little droid gets sucked in during the right before the pod race starts. That's just a drill on a slow 240 frames a second on a model that's about two feet long.

1:48:09 - Andy Ihnatko
Can I say that I absolutely love that. Look like it was shot via a 12-axis stabilized drone that can fly from the left eyeball of the driver of the car, do a complete circle, stable circle around and then fly from the car into the stands to get a close-up of the coach. And that looks like Nintendo. That does not look like reality. I can't get excited about it.

1:48:40 - Alex Lindsay
A lot of of that came from one shot. That was the shot from uh, there was the tom cruise alien invasion uh, alien invasion movie I can't think of at the moment end of the battle, or the worlds war of the worlds. Yeah, in that shot there's a shot where he's driving and the camera goes all the way around, around through in out. That was the genesis, because all of us looked at it and go, oh, I want to do that someday, yeah and then people started doing it someday there was.

1:49:06 - Leo Laporte
That was an amazing move, but it was an amazing shot. It was quite amazing.

1:49:09 - Alex Lindsay
The first time it happened, we were all like, let's do that and the problem is, then we did it.

1:49:14 - Leo Laporte
This is why you should never go to the movies with Alex, because he's always go. Oh, how'd they do that shot?

1:49:20 - Alex Lindsay
yeah or I go. That was horrible, like why did you?

1:49:23 - Leo Laporte
or that was hard. Yeah, that's why. So it's it's been very interesting. They have used the last race of the season. Uh, apple was there shooting for the movie. They they've. I think it will be fairly authentic, they realize, you know. And it's interesting because formula one is a very valuable property owned by liberator media of all people, and netflix is bidding for it right now. I think apple probably would be a great candidate to own the f1 rights in the united states. It's, it's really fun to watch these races and it's very highly technical. That's what got me into it.

1:49:56 - Alex Lindsay
Um, it's amazing and it's the state of the art of streaming like it is. I mean they have, they have, oh yeah, telemetry. They have, video, they have. I don't remember we, uh someone, that uh someone came on and talked to us in office hours one time about it a little bit and it's just it's so many cameras and all of that's getting backhauled and they, you know, all this stuff shows up in containers that all just kind of click together and all of it's back to to london and or to the uk.

1:50:24 - Leo Laporte
I use a um an app for the mac that I would highly recommend, called f1 multiviewer. If you have a paid account with f1 tv, which I do, you can then watch the race um in a very interesting way on your tv or, I I suppose, on a vision pro. Every, every um, every car has its own camera, so you can watch each driver's camera view. You can also listen to each driver's radio, so you can listen to all the radio, and there's all sorts of data coming across that you get. There's a driver tracker, there's a data channel, and you can put all of these on your screen all at once If you have a couple of screens or a big enough screen. Here's a guy who's, uh, apparently quite a fan, who has used every screen in the house so that he can see everything that's happening during the race that set up probably cost less than more than 3 500, so he has a good use case for the I honestly I was very sad there was apparently an f1 app on vision pro.

That was discontinued, but I use multi-viewer on my on my big 55 inch um I hope it's really because I hope it's because f1 bottom and said this is good, have some money.

1:51:34 - Andy Ihnatko
Let's do this officially, because that's how we sell a lot of subscriptions, I hope, and sell some vision but yeah, um, all right, let's.

1:51:43 - Leo Laporte
Uh, I think we could take a little break here and come back and get your picks of the week. What about that, boys?

1:51:54 - Jason Snell
I was waiting for 10 minutes and yeah, it's, we had to yeah, we can't gotta start it and not finish it you gotta do it.

1:52:04 - Leo Laporte
We.

1:52:04 - Andy Ihnatko
We have a lot of ocd listeners you're like, you're like that director of the super bowl halftime waiting for michael to take off those glasses, because, oh yeah, I was just seeing that video that's hysterical.

1:52:15 - Leo Laporte
There's an interview with him right and it was driving him crazy because michael said don't start until I take off the glasses and michael is the super bowl halftime.

1:52:23 - Andy Ihnatko
He's just standing there yeah, and you and the video you hear, like his actual the the director's come on, michael, michael, come on michael. And he's sick and and in his old age he's like saying, you know, basically looking with perspective, saying and in live television one second feels like five hours and I was going come on, michael, michael oh yeah michael come on it's, uh, it's a youtube.

1:52:45 - Leo Laporte
It's a don dan, a missioner here. It is, uh, don mischer directing on directing michael jackson's super dull bull halftime show. It was on the rich eisen show on the roku channel, but you can also see it on youtube. It's fascinating. Yeah, uh, what did you think? By the way, apple sponsored the halftime show at the Super Bowl with Kendrick Lamar. It was pretty subversive. It was.

1:53:07 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know if anybody knew, though, because you couldn't really understand what he was saying anyone thought that Apple was going to go clean because they were, because they're, they're the brand or whatever they wow, definitely did not go that direction it was.

1:53:18 - Andy Ihnatko
It was a theatrical presentation. It wasn't just a hey, here's five greatest hits and a couple of uh and a couple of uh guests. As great as those performances in the past have been, this was clearly something that right click save to hard drive because you just want to watch that over and over again well, and I needed, as an old guy, uh, I needed the cliff notes so I watched after the fact.

1:53:42 - Leo Laporte
I mean, when I'm watching I'm going scratching my head. Um, you know, and I have a lot of respect for Kendrick uh, my daughter turned me on to him and his he's very political, very interesting, smart fella, and it's not the usual rap, misogynistic stuff but uh, I couldn't really understand what was going on. Samuel jackson's playing uncle sam and it was very interesting. So I watched the cliff notes later and a number of people put up analysis of it and then that's when I realized that was uh subversive. I don't know, did apple know what was uh gonna happen?

1:54:17 - Andy Ihnatko
it was quite, it was brilliant, it was here. It knows like, here is the, here's the aperture that we can squeeze communications through, and so we're going to adapt this message so it will fit through the aperture that will get us live to a billion people worldwide.

1:54:33 - Alex Lindsay
And boy and you know there was a. There's one song in there. You know there's a bunch of conversations about whether that song was going to go in or not, and and and. And. I'm sure that apple's like yeah, we can, we can pay it.

1:54:46 - Leo Laporte
Dan stutters in our youtube chat is saying it proves apple had full creative control because there's. I can absolutely guarantee you the nfl would not have approved a lot of that stuff as soon as you see.

1:54:58 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, samuel, samuel l jackson is going to address this. Uncle sam, that's. You know. I thought you're going to get political, but I'm glad that you just went patriotic Well on the surface it did. It was red, white and blue. It looked like it was patriotic.

1:55:10 - Leo Laporte
Until the end where Kendrick says, turn off your TV, which I'm sure the NFL is going. What, what.

1:55:19 - Andy Ihnatko
Again you got to get that message to the size of the aperture the people. Again this get. You got to get that message to the size of the aperture people. The people are going to say, oh good, uncle Sam, but again, just like your patriotism and it's like no. Think about the context of this and think about who's actually portraying Uncle Sam.

1:55:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah and oh boy, it was, it was, it was beautiful, very strong, political, uh, beautiful at the surface, beautiful underneath. It was just beautiful um, you know, you remember that, uh, there were huge fines paid, millions of dollars of fines paid, on a super bowl halftime where, uh, I can't remember who it was somebody flipped off the camera and everybody had to apologize for the for flip, for the bird.

1:56:00 - Andy Ihnatko
This was a, uh, subliminal bird yeah, it almost makes up for taking in racism off the off the end zones not quite that was.

1:56:08 - Leo Laporte
That was very you know. Uh, what do they call it there? There was a term that Cathy Gellis used on TWiT on sunday. It's like compliance ahead of time, like let's just not let's just not go there.

We're just gonna. You know, uh, and I loved it. There was a PlayStation controller. They talked about the game and it wasn't the NFL game anyway. Um, let's take a little break. When we come back, get your pics ready, gentlemen, because the pics of the week are coming up next on Mac break. Weekly, we uh.

I just wanted to give a little shout out to our Club Twit members, who really make a huge difference on our bottom line. Yes, you see ads on the shows and that certainly covers a lot of our expenses, but not all of our expenses. If it weren't for Club Twit, we would be cutting shows, we would be cutting staff, we would be cutting the honorariums. I guess we pay to our other hosts because we wouldn't have the money and we don't have the resources. There's no investors here, it's just me and Lisa, and so your contribution to Club Twit makes such a big difference. I know it's only seven bucks a month and we try to make it worthwhile. We try to keep the price low and make it worthwhile. For seven bucks a month you get ad-free versions of every show we do, this show and every other show. You get special versions with video of shows that don't have video in in the public.

Um, you also get access to the club twit discord, which is a fabulous place, uh, to hang up, hang out, not hang up to hang out, uh and I highly encourage it. Um, just for that alone. I feel like it's really nice to have a place to go where other smart people are talking about not just the shows, but everything else that's going on. We do a lot of special programming in there as well. If you are interested, I invite you to go to twit.tv/clubtwit your seven bucks makes a big difference to us and we thank you so much in advance for joining this just in. By the way, google did it. Now Apple says it's renaming the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America on its Maps app. Again, we need that. What is that phrase?

1:58:25 - Alex Lindsay
really thought. I really thought, you know we could have, we could have compromised and just had gulf of america, you know, like it's kind of mexico, it's kind of american america yeah, the change will occur for us users, but apple, unlike google, is going to roll it out globally.

1:58:42 - Leo Laporte
Microsoft and mapquest did you know they were still around with maps? Apple, unlike Google, is going to roll it out globally. Microsoft and MapQuest Did you know they were still around with Maps? They're holding it have not yet made the change, but I think they're going to do that and I presume it doesn't say in this Bloomberg article, but I presume they're also going to rename Denali to Mount McKinley.

1:59:03 - Andy Ihnatko
Fortunately or unfortunately, they can't fall back on an established policy that predates this by a number of years, they recognize one geological truth. Official source for this when that government agency makes a change, they will honor that change within the region in which Google Maps is operating, but not necessarily to other regions.

1:59:28 - Leo Laporte
It's the Federal Geographic Data Committee. Yeah, but they are of course enjoined by what the president does with his executive orders.

1:59:38 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I don't blame Google for doing this. You kind of I don't. I don't blame Google for doing this. I also don't blame Apple for doing this, but it would be a wonderful gesture if they said look, it's not like this has been a contested area, for it's not like this is a war zone. It's not like there's anything to suggest, there's anything more than a political stunt. We don't change maps based on political stunts.

2:00:00 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, or just simply oh well, oh well, gosh, we're waiting for a form there's there, there's just no, there's gonna be so many battles to fight.

2:00:08 - Leo Laporte
I think they were like yeah, you gotta pick your battles, yeah exactly, probably more important that tsmc doesn't get 100 tariffs in the long run. Alex lindsey, what's your pick of the week this?

2:00:18 - Alex Lindsay
week. So it's been a year for the apple vision pro and I, um, and and uh. I was watching um Adam Savage's untested. He was talking about apps that he really enjoyed and thought that they were great that he saw over the last year, and I downloaded one of them called magic room. I don't know if, Jason, have you played with magic room or not? So this is a, this is a headset um, uh app, and what it does is it doesn't save any models, but it creates them. So what you do is you start walking around your you walk around your room and then you hit reveal and suddenly it is building a 3d model of your house while you're walking around and it is, it is. It doesn't save it, it doesn't do anything with it other than make it and it is, and that, by the way, makes you really sick. It does this wavy thing that you can turn on, which is. I would not recommend Don't do that, anyway, but but it is getting sick Just looking at the video.

Exactly. There's probably some other way, anyway. So it will, you can walk around and it'll just build. And you just walk and look, look around in your house and it will build a 3d model. But what's really interesting is is it's semi-transparent. So I, my house, has three stories and as you go up to one story and look down, you can see all the way to the basement, like all the wireframes. Oh, that's cool. So it's like an x-ray of yours.

And what I realized was, as an example, I realized that there's an ethernet that I want to put where my wife works, cause I've kind of run a long run to her right now and I thought, oh, that's going to be really hard. I got to go around all these things and when I looked at the x-ray of my house, I realized the way that the overhang worked from where her office is to where my server room is. I was like, oh, that's 15 feet, like 15 feet of, of, you know, under the, you know, through the basement, like that's not even that far. It's just that what the way it was in my head was there's no way it could be that close and it's. And so you see all these relationships between your house and and your rooms in a way that you hadn't seen before and it and it just totally sticks. You know that that's what the headset's really good at. It's totally just wireframe going across your. It feels it. It feels the closest to the matrix that I've.

2:02:20 - Leo Laporte
I think, I felt they have a matrix mode. Yeah, so you could be in the matrix I also have a clear ceiling mode, which I love I didn't try.

2:02:28 - Alex Lindsay
All I've done is the wireframe thing and that was enough. But the clear ceiling mode and the matrix mode looks really cool, but it's it's not cheap. It's like 15 for something that has no use, other than it's really enjoyable. But it will save me a lot in installing that ethernet cable. So that's my argument. But, but I, but I, uh, I, I it's pretty magical it is. When they say magic room, it is magic right.

2:02:53 - Leo Laporte
So really, you know, I think that's very creative, because it doesn't do anything, it's just giving you another.

2:02:58 - Alex Lindsay
I was like where do I save the model and it, right, it doesn't save them. You got to go back to polycam for that, but, but, but this, but it does this one thing in a very. It's another one of those things like I talked about in the other one. This is now part of the Alex lindsay tour of an apple vision pro. Yes, let me show you what this room really looks like you know just put this on and walk around and see what happens.

2:03:21 - Leo Laporte
Magic Room LiDAR Environment from Infi Labs I-N-F-Y $15. Mr Andy Ihnatko, your pick of the week.

2:03:31 - Andy Ihnatko
Mine is a file manager. We were talking last week about Next.

for some reason, I blurted out oh I love the way the file manager worked, where it's like worked in drill-down pains. It reminded me of one of my favorite intermittent, intermittently indispensable apps. That's called forklift, and what it is is it's a single window file manager. That is absolutely perfect for those times where, like, you've got a whole bunch of like removable drives or you've got a whole bunch of things that are on Google drive or or iCloud or Dropbox, and you've got a whole bunch of things that are on google drive or or icloud or dropbox and you've got stuff on your, on your internal drive and you just need to basically figure out what is on this, what needs to now be like backed up and I can remove it from here, what is it that's on my internal that should go into the cloud or should go onto an external drive, all that sort of stuff. Uh, it's so easy to do with Forklift. You can do it with a finder, yes, but this is so much more than just having a window on the left and snap a window on the right and do copies left and right. It's a single panel interface, so you have basically intermediate tiles, so you can basically have here's where the source is, here's where the destination is.

It will help you analyze what's in which folder. It will mount pretty much anything that's mountable, so not just stuff that you've attached via USB-C, not just your internal drives, but also FTP, remote file sharing, dropbox, again, any of these services. It will also automatically do things like automatically sync between two folders. It will also automatically do things like automatically sync between two folders. So when I need to update the SD card of my Walkman, I do usually use it with an rsync command, but that's still a little bit like cutting and pasting. With this one, I can just simply open up the SD card, open up the folder that's on my NAS that has my music library on it, and then just say, please sync these two folders. And boom, you're done. On and on and on.

Just has all these little features to it that it's not. That's why I call it intermittently essential. It's not something you're going to be using every day or necessarily every week, but like the dozen times a year when you need to do something like this. It will cut the time in half. Uh, and it's not that expensive. It's 20 bucks. Uh, and it's not a subscription model. 20 bucks includes one year of updates. So if they right now they're up to 4.23, I think, so any updates in the next calendar 12 months you will receive for free. After that, uh, yeah, they're gonna want another 20 bucks, I think, but that's it's not a lot of money for uh, for us a an app that really really just cuts so much mess out of a task that has to be done that I keep putting off because it is such a hassle to get this stuff done.

2:06:11 - Leo Laporte
This is a category of app I really like on the Mac, where it's probably a front end to rSync and a few other tools, but it makes it just accessible and easy to use, like Handbrake, which is a front-end FFmpeg. That's one of the things that makes the Mac so much fun is, you can get these GUIs that give you real power. I use SFTP all the time to transfer files. I wish I'd had this. This would have been great when I had to do that. I didn't do it anymore, just quickly.

2:06:41 - Andy Ihnatko
Also, sometimes what you're doing is very, very visual. So I have these Samsung T3, t4, whatever drives those are my. I have only 512 gigs on my MacBook. These are my external storage that usually travels with the device, so this could have anything on it, from just silly things that I downloaded to just try out, but I decided I just needed to make some room, so I didn't want to even go through what was in this folder, so I just dragged it on there and then deleted it off the internal to something that was absolutely essential, and I'm glad I didn't know. I still had it, but I'm glad I found it. So it's very easy to. Sftp and rsync are great if you know exactly what files you want to keep and what you want to do with them. In terms of just standing there with sitting there with some music on and, uh, in mental flow state, just no, no, no, yes, oh, my god, that's from the beach trip in 2002. I still have those and the originals. This was so worth it.

2:07:36 - Leo Laporte
That's what this, this app, is great for very nice, Jason Snell, your pick of the week.

2:07:42 - Jason Snell
My pick of the week. So a while ago I got a cheap-ish e-ink screen and a Raspberry Pi and I had this project where I wrote a Python script that generates an image that burns onto the e-ink screen, and I made a little calendar. It was a fun project, but I would tell people about it. They're like nobody's gonna, nobody else gonna do that right, like it's not a product.

2:08:06 - Leo Laporte
I've been meaning to do that for so long. I got the pie, I got the pie and then you gotta do a 3d printed case and there's all these steps.

2:08:13 - Jason Snell
So what I? This is a product version of that and it's still nerdy, but it's much less nerdy and therefore our audience might be interested in it. It's's called Terminal.

2:08:23 - Leo Laporte
Ooh.

2:08:23 - Jason Snell
It is literally the same E Ink screen that I have, but in a beautiful case that is nice and thin and well-designed and not like 3D printed and thick and all of that. You can prop it up, you can hang it, you can do whatever. It's got a battery in it.

2:08:38 - Leo Laporte
Usb-c for charging the battery. So work with a home assistant. So here's.

2:08:43 - Jason Snell
So here's the deal with terminal. Terminal has a plug-in system, um, and it will also, by the way, they will. Uh, you can get their firmware. You can hack the firmware. You can run it off of a server that you control, but by default you run it on their server and the way it works is there are these plugins. You can create them yourself, um, you can create as many of them as you want. You can query web sources. You can set the formatting. It's basically using an HTML templating language on the server for these plugins, and then there's a refresh system. So you set the plugins to refresh every so often on their server and then it builds an image. It pushes it down so often on their server and then it builds an image, and then all this thing does is, as you set, how often it checks it will check and say, is there a new thing for me to display?

and it downloads it and puts it on here. So it's. It is everything I have grappled with with my own e-ink devices, except that I can see how they're handling it. I can see, see that they're like oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's no good. We're going to have to set up a refresh and all that. Because what you want? Because this thing's like using an ESP in it, right, like it's super, not a brain. So all it really knows is like when to wake up and when to check. It's very low power. And then it checks and is given an image where it's not, and that's it. And then it updates the screen or a series of screens. You can actually have it rotate through a few and there's a button on the back to refresh if you want to force an auto refresh, otherwise it does it automatically.

So it is a closed product only in the sense that they wanted to have control to make it usable. But if you wanted to make one yourself, you could, and if you wanted to take it off of their servers and instead use it with some other system, you could, if you're so inclined. I would argue at that point, what you're really doing is just buying this really nice productized case. But you know what I that's where I may end up. I may end up putting the same contents that are on my Ian calendar on this. But like this is so much nicer than that is because it's a full on product, comes with a lot of built-in plugins so you can get your Google calendar and your weather and all of that on there automatically.

And again, if you're a developer, even if you're a web developer or if you've got data sources like JSONs, you can point it at. You can pretty much build whatever you want and have it display on here. So if you've ever thought about getting like an e-ink thing but thought it's kind of too much trouble, it's nerdy, but I'm not just not that into it enough to go that extra mile terminal might be your solution. It's at useterminalcom. It's 130 bucks. They're backordered because this is a very small company and every time somebody mentions it on a podcast they sell a bunch of them, they run out and they make more.

They have more coming in March. I ordered mine in December and got it a couple of weeks ago, but it is, if you've ever wanted to play with the fact that E-In allows, because e-ink doesn't. It's not just for kindles. The beauty of an e-ink screen is that when it's not refreshing, there's no power being drawn and, as a result, with this little tiny embedded chip and this e-ink screen, the battery life on this is long, so you can put it on a wall or whatever and charge it every few weeks or longer, and so it makes this whole new class of internet-connected ambient information devices available. A lot of fun to play with. I love this category and this is a beautiful piece of hardware. They spent a lot of time building this plastic shell and the little fold-out stand and then getting it manufactured from an actual plastic manufacturer instead of just printed on a 3D printer. They did a great job. It's a really nice product.

2:12:35 - Leo Laporte
Patrick Delahandy says I'm going to have to get one and use the Twit API to make a plug-in. You know what, patrick? I will buy you one. Put it on your Twit card, because that would be a great thing to have. I'll hang it behind me. Um, yeah, or I was thinking I could put the current value of bitcoin, uh, on it and then underneath it, how much money is in my wallet that I can't access, which would be a be like a little little kick in the great, and I can't put a countdown timer to when quantum computing is.

2:13:06 - Jason Snell
Yeah, because that's what I'm like I'm counting on a wallet yes, exactly, I hope bitcoin is still worth something by then.

2:13:12 - Leo Laporte
They do have a retirement, uh countdown, so I might use that in the meantime. That would be fun, very cool. It's very coolM-N-L just as one would expect Terminal, terminal, terminalcom. Thank you, Jason. Jason Snell, sixcolorscom A great blog for Mac lovers and, of course, more than a blog, a news site for Mac lovers. It's a blog, it's fine.

2:13:39 - Jason Snell
Whatever I write words and also do podcasts I do. Whatever you uh, you know 100 of the people hearing this listen to podcasts.

2:13:47 - Leo Laporte
so please, you know, check out my podcast too sixcolorscom slash Jason for a list of all of them. All of them, so many. And mike hurley's going on maternity leave. Eh, that's great, is that his?

2:13:59 - Jason Snell
first. Yes, it is, it is their first child. He is um he. His last episode should be monday, unless something happens in the meantime, and then I'll have a parade of guest stars after that while he's very nice, that's for the upgrade podcast that he does on mike's network, which is, remind me, relay relay.

2:14:21 - Leo Laporte
that's it, relay Relayfm. Mr Andy Ihnatko, when are you going to be on GBH next?

2:14:28 - Andy Ihnatko
A week from Thursday and I've spent already a week trying to figure out all the government agencies that keep technological infrastructure up and running. How can I A how can I compress this into something we can talk about during our slot? And secondly, I'm going to have to rehearse it.

2:14:45 - Leo Laporte
So I don't, my eyes don't twitch and I don't go well, with any luck, gbh will not be defunded between now and then, and, uh, you'll be able to do that fingers crossed.

2:14:55 - Andy Ihnatko
I have. I have tote bags and a number of those that I can. If I'm out on the street we'll keep you warm, but yeah next next thursday at 12 30, go to WGBHnewsorg to listen to it live or later, all right hey, thank you, and Alex lindsay does office hours dot global.

2:15:10 - Leo Laporte
The q a's are every morning. In fact, lisa and I were in bed sunday morning and she said Alex just started streaming again.

2:15:18 - Alex Lindsay
I said my god, does he never does he? Never stop. Sunday's the best one too, because it's very relaxed. Sunday is not like the other days.

2:15:26 - Leo Laporte
It's people what time.

2:15:27 - Alex Lindsay
do you get up on Sunday to do that? Oh, I get up at the same time every day. I get up at probably five o'clock or so, and so I don't like to change this. You don't get to sleep in ever huh, every once in a while, like once a year, I might sleep in like it. It's like literally once a year and then I'm then I feel like I've lost the day and I'm like why did I do that?

yeah, so anyway, better off, yeah so the um uh uh, I like watching the sun rise and all that stuff, so, but the um uh yeah, sunday is like it's sunday's the day where people can ask questions about office hours, complain about office hours, have ideas about office hours. You know like um and have suggestions, or you know questions or whatever, and so and it and we can answer. Like during the week it's usually two or three minutes an answer, maybe three or four minutes an answer on Sunday. We've our record. I think is like 42 minutes, like we just sit there and talk about something you know relax, chew on something, and yeah, so it's the.

It's the only remaining two hour show, and so we sit there and just uh, yeah, so that's. That's. That's what we do on sundays.

2:16:23 - Leo Laporte
Office hours global for all of the goodness, and you can join them in the after hours and ask questions in the q a and all of that stuff too. Thank you, Alex, thank you andy, thank you Jason, thanks to all of you for being here. We do MacBreak Weekly, uh, tuesday mornings for me it's a morning anyway 11 am pacific, that's 2 pm eastern time, 1900 utc. You can watch this live, as I mentioned, on eight different streams our discord channel for our club members, but also Youtube, Twitch, TikTok, x.com, Facebook Linkedin and Kick eight of them. Uh, but honestly, most people decide to watch it at their own convenience, whenever in the mood, and to do that you have a variety of ways. You can get a copy of the show, either our website, twit.tv/mbw there's audio and video there just for you to stream or watch, or download and listen later.

Um, although if you're going to do that, probably the best thing to do is get a podcast client there are so many good ones and and subscribe and then that way you'll get it. You don't even have to think about it. It'll be there on your device and you can listen and watch whenever you feel like it. There's also a Youtube channel, very handy if you want to share clips, little bits of it. And please do tell the world about MacBreak Weekly, the longest running, I think, mac podcast in the world. I might be wrong, but I think we are. Thank you for being here. We'll see you next time. Next week and, as I must say, every week, it is my solemn duty to tell you get back to work. You don't have to return to office, but you got to get back to work because break time is over. See you later.