MacBreak Weekly 960 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.
 

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy, alex and Jason are all here. The team is assembled. We will talk about Apple's soon-to-be-released we think iPhone SE. It's probably got a new name and there might be a new MacBook as well. We'll talk about some of those rumors. Did Netflix briefly integrate with Apple TV and then pull back? And then we're going to pull out our backpacks and show you our picks. Yes, it's Backpack Week on MacBreak Weekly.

00:30
Next

00:33 - TWiT.tv (Announcement)
Podcasts you love.

00:35
From people you trust.

00:37
This is Twit.

00:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is MacBreak Weekly episode 960, recorded Tuesday, february 18th 2025. Backpack Week. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we cover the latest Apple news. There is some Apple news Ta-ra-ra, andy and I-ko. Hello, andy, you're sitting here before the show I'm sorry, that was very much a non sequitur and I apologize.

01:10 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
That's fine, you know, especially in early 2025 in the United States, any day that begins with songs and music is a very, very positive thing. I support that.

01:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Any day that begins with levity. Mr Alex Lindsaysay, office hoursglobal and 090.media. Hello, hello. How are you? It's good to be here to see you. You've been up since 2 am, I'm sure four.

01:34 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I actually went to bed at 2 am this morning, but oh, but yeah, so there was a different, different side yeah, yeah, exactly, but. But normally I get up not two am too early?

01:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, I'm not, that's it's not too early to go to sleep. It's too early to get up. Exactly, exactly, yeah, it's just right to go to sleep. Yeah, jason snell, six colors dot com hello greetings.

01:57 - Jason Snell (Host)
Are we not all singing micah sergeant has completely taken over this network and we all sing.

02:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's right, he is kind of a singer all singing all the time.

02:05 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
It's good to be here you're never not auditioning for your next gig we're.

02:10 - Jason Snell (Host)
We're recording this at one day from something apple is going to do that tomorrow about.

02:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tim cook says I've got something really wonderful. Will happen yeah and maybe iphone 16e is what some are saying something wonderful.

02:25 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
So so he just tweeted it out, along with, like what you would expect to be, like the picture you get like in the e-invite, and so now. So now that's what twitter is. Now twitter is like how they tell us that something's happening.

02:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is uh apple kissing the ring, is it not?

02:42 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
yeah, not, and not the first time there's a they've. This is. People have also noticed that they started apple started advertising on twitter again.

02:49 - Jason Snell (Host)
Yeah, so yeah, it's all part of the same, because that hashtag is is one of those flash tags that you pay twitter to do. I'm not convinced.

02:57
I mean, I think part of this is kissing the ring. I think part of it is also that this is an existing marketing channel they already had, and so they have a whole system set up to do it. I would not be surprised. The challenge is that the two other most logical places for them to do this are Facebook and Threads and Instagram the three most right. And it's all Facebook, it's all meta and they hate meta, right? So I don't know.

03:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Can Tim Cook skeet? Does he skeet?

03:24 - Jason Snell (Host)
They don't. That's a whole thing. Actually, it's funny because one of the things that's happened with the dissolution of the sort of monoculture of Twitter as a short form thing, where now people are sort of all over the place in other places is a lot of businesses sports especially are like teams are setting up their own like blue sky or their own threads account and the leagues are coming down. The nfl just did this, where the patriots, uh, you know started a blue sky account. The nfl is like no, we don't have a deal with them.

03:53
No, take it down oh like how much of that is oh, we don't want to do anything but be on x. And how much of that is just, we haven't done that yet like there's no system or policy because, yeah, by all rights, apple should be doing this on on threads and blue sky and instagram and you know, et cetera, et cetera they're not advertising at all on threads or or facebook I haven't seen anything like this with a you know, an announcement that they're doing a special, uh, something that isn't an event.

04:23
Don't use the word event. It's not an event, but uh, it is a happening and everyone's invited it's a birth.

04:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a birth. It's a whole announcement. I spent a little time on.

04:32 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I haven't seen a facebook the the feed for a long time so I open it up.

04:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I open it up and then I leave. It's not on facebook. Yeah, I'll save you a click. It's on x there.

04:46
It is right there, yeah there's a apple logo animated, no less well, yeah, but it's not. It's a video. So look at that 25 and a half million views. I guess tim's justified, really. And there's the very first reply I just did in blue check. I'm ready, I am a non-consensual blue check, just like a cory doctor. I'm not gonna pay you 40 a month for that. I don't want to give you any money. But anyway, let's talk about the iphone 16e, which is what the rumor says it shall be named.

05:20 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
It's the se's successor, right, yeah, but they're not there, but there are a bunch of rumors about it. We've heard about the hardware. Now the thing that has been playing last over the last week is that there might be ditching uh, they usually they previously just call it the se, so that if they don't update it in three years it doesn't sound like it's been two or three years behind. So that's why there's no like number behind it. Now there's people saying, oh, I think they're going to switch it to. Now it's the iPhone 16 SE, which would be an interesting shift. I don't know if I buy it because for that exact reason, that gives them sort of an obligation to make people think they don't have like a four-year-old phone by giving them a number well, that's interesting.

05:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, because if you give, if you give it the name 16e, do you give? Do you do a yeah there? Are lots of rumors that Apple's going to really redesign the 17, that it's going to be a whole new ball game. Yeah.

06:12 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
A bunch of cool rumors, not really locked down yet, but a bunch of CAD files appeared which made it up with a couple other rumors that people have been trying to get traction on, basically, the big change being that we're going to have uh, we're going, we're going to have a uh pixel like camera bar, instead of like the usual, like square in the side, uh and every, basically the. The rumor is that that's definitely going to be for the 17 pro, maybe not on the 17,. Nothing. There's also ideas that the 17, if the 17 air the super thin one will have a more like, also have a camera bar, but not quite so thick because it'll only have one lens in it. That would be interesting. I wonder how many people would really cotton to that.

06:59
I like it because one of the one of the advantages of the camera bar that I discovered, like early on, as soon as I got my my old phone here, is that because it of the advantages of the camera bar that I discovered early on, as soon as I got my old phone here, is that because it goes the entire width of the phone. If you have this lying flat on the table, it doesn't wobble from side to side, because it's an entire brace from one side to another. But it's definitely taking away something that is a unique identifier of the iPhone and making it look a little bit more like another phone that's out there. So it's. I think people are gonna have some feelings about it is it credible?

07:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
though I mean it's a little early for renders yeah, well, I mean, I don't know.

07:39 - Jason Snell (Host)
The extra exterior is pretty commonly um found because of case maker, leaks and other things like that, and sometimes we know more about like the shape of it than what's inside and what it does is like there's a button. What does it do? Nobody knows, but there's a button, we know that much. I mean this SE. I'll just point out that what I like about this rumor and I I've been tending to believe that they might call this a 16 and place it in the 16 family is first off.

08:06
Today, if you go to Applecom slash iPhone, you will see the 16, 15 and 14 all listed there, because Apple does sell phones from a year or two back.

08:18
They drop them down in price. They're still available and, honestly, the low end phone is like that anyway. So I don't think it's as big a deal name wise as that. I do think it maybe comes with a little bit of more of a commitment that you you know you're not going to be able to say, well, we've made this 18, 17, 16, and then also the 16, like at some point you're going to need to rev it, maybe more often than every four years. But I like in general the idea, too, that it makes it simpler for them to say all the 16 models have Apple intelligence, for example, because I would imagine that this phone supports Apple intelligence, and then that would let them say, yes, it does that. And you could cluster features together where, like, not every phone's going to have the same set of features, but maybe there's a baseline of stuff, there's an expectation that, like 16 and later works, whereas now the se is kind of an outlier and um and and so like.

09:09 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
I mean it's a weird kind of marketing decision and debate, but I think it's, uh, a possible and I don't think it would be a problem yeah, I think the big difference this time is that this it's going to be harder to really zero in on what makes this an other or a lesser kind of phone. What rumor has it it that it'll only have one lens, one camera. That's on the back, that's fine, but the idea that it is rumored to have the same processor as the iPhone 16 and have enough RAM to run Apple intelligence, that's pretty cool. That gives us a very long lifespan.

09:44 - Jason Snell (Host)
It's an important phone for them. I actually think one of the biggest challenges is going to be how good is it and what does that do to their profit margin? And therefore, what does that do to their price? Because the one of the great values of this product is that it is a great value. And if they have to soup it up in order to get it to be 16 level Apple intelligence level does that mean the price comes up and that would hurt sales in uh for some of their target audience.

10:06 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
For that, product, and I think that I mean for the folks that are buying the pro or you know, um that that's out there right now, the, the or the 16, I, when you, as soon as you take the cameras away, I still think you, you, you you've already made. That's the only thing they have to change and they're getting. I still will always come back to the number one reason people buy phones is because of the camera, and so I think that if you take the model it's cheaper.

10:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think also Cadillac learned if you take the same model and you put fins on it, you can sell a whole new range of cars.

10:39 - Jason Snell (Host)
One of the reasons you make something look different is so that people who have the old phone feel like, oh, this looks so old one of the rumors alex about this phone is that they might actually take that 48 megapixel sensor, the one that they've been using for a couple years in the pro, and put it in the sc. And they couldn't.

10:56 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
That would still make sense except, like the thing that has me thinking very strongly about moving to us, I haven't moved to a 16. I've been like I got a 15 pro max or whatever and I don't know if I really need the 16. The, the wide angle 48, is the thing that cause I've gotten very good at shooting with a with the wide angle, and so as soon as you figure out that you put the person's face in the center of the frame and then you gather this huge, you know, as soon as that doesn't stretch them or distort them, it just it just shows everything else around them. Uh, as soon as you get to that, you're like I really wish I had a 48,. You know the 48 megapixel for that, as opposed to just the 12.

11:30 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
So yeah, and wide angle I think is a lot more useful than telephoto. I mean you'd love to have both, but in the at the end of the day, if you don't have a Apple's doing, that means you get a slightly blurrier, lower definition photo of your kid or your dog, like out in the yard. If you don't have a wide, super wide, that means that you don't fit everybody at the dinner table at the restaurant inside the picture and you'd much rather have those faces in there.

11:57 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I think the only problem with the wide angles is, like anybody outside of, for me, the wide angle is great for, um, landscape and one person or two people in the center of frame. As soon as you take one step off, the distortion starts to pick up so quickly that, um, that I find that, uh, that that, you know, having one or two people, I, I take a lot of pictures. My kids were like we were at the, the crater, uh, in Arizona, and I was able to put the two of them in the center of the frame. You can see the entire crater behind them. You know, and so, and, and that was just such a great shot that that's when I really was like, oh, I really know how to use, how, I know, I, how I want to use this lens, but now I wish that it was 48, and so I keep on going back and I, I think that, like for the 17, the easiest thing for Apple to do to get people to go to the 17 is just make the third one 48.

12:44
You know, like, just just keep adding the 48 megapixels to each sensor and you'll, that's, that's enough for a lot of people to upgrade. I do hope, and I know that there's like so many back and forths with the 17 that they do do the long strip instead of the corner, so that we potentially can get spatial images, spatial video and spatial stills that are, um, that have better interactional distance, you know like that, that have a wider, more, more, uh, diversity between the lenses.

13:12 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
Yeah, but. But. But getting back to the reasons why they got to do this, like it's a really important for them to have an inexpensive phone, oh, I agree.

13:19
Because, because I say yeah, exactly, it's not gonna. It's not gonna convince anybody who was going to buy the iPhone 17 to hey great, I was planning to spend $900. Now I can spend just $500. No, but it will allow parents to buy phones for their kids that don't cost $1,000, when they are kind of whining about oh I don't want an Android phone, I want an iPhone. And also internationally, where price is really really super important well, you will.

13:44 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Because, like like my, my kids I was, I had to do a bunch of r d, so I had a couple extra 12s, uh, pros, um. So that's what my kids have are these ones that once I was done with the r d, I just let them use those, those cameras. When you look at the back of my daughters it's it's like the the case that she has holding it, holds the phone together. She's dropped it so many times, like if she took the case off I think it would just fall apart, you know, and so so the um. That's, the problem that parents have is that kids aren't going to treat their, their phones necessarily in the same way that they might. Sure they are Ninjas with the phone.

14:17
I will say that the one thing about my kids is that I'm always amazed.

14:21
I learned something new about what my phone can do as far as the camera goes every time I hand them the camera, because they just know everything about the amount of cross-pollination between kids in high school around what their phones can do and what you do with the phone photos on my phone the other day, and I figured out that my daughter had figured out how to take pictures of herself in my in sitting in the passenger seat, in a reflection of the Chrome on my dashboard. You know like, and I was like what is that? And I didn't even know where it was taken from, and so so they, um, uh, so I think that it's, and I do think that that it'll be interesting to see. I think that they, I absolutely think that, even on a less expensive phone, putting the 48 megapixel in, I think that they've amortized the CapEx at this point into the development of it. It doesn't cost them much to add it, and 48 really does make a huge difference when you want to blow something up or put something together.

15:16 - Jason Snell (Host)
And they have that whole pipeline so they can bin it and make it a 24 with better quality, which makes the output better, because you don't necessarily and nobody necessarily, needs 48 megapixels, but it also gets you a much better 24 megapixel and it allows them to have that virtual second camera where they just crop on the middle 24 megapixels of the sensor. And so I mean it's funny that we're talking about maybe having a 48 megapixel sensor on an iPhone SE. Essentially, I mean, just two years ago that would have been bananas. But at this point, yeah, they have shipped that sensor in so many different models and in fact you could argue this is a way for them to use the first generation sensor that they've already kind of updated in the 16 Pro with this one and they're going to put that 48 everywhere. So it makes the for a low-end iPhone. It actually will make that camera potentially pretty great and pretty flexible.

16:12 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I keep on getting amazed by the camera in general. I was at my you know my daughter's in a couple bands and so she's playing at Hot Monk. She's in the little session room and I put a Blackmagic camera. You know, I mounted a Blackmagic camera. There's a place to mount them in the hot monk and and then I use my hand.

16:31
I use my phone as a handheld and there's two things that I noticed. One is that the phone did a better job in low light than the black magic camera did. Number two was how much I could do with just my thumb of zooming in and zooming out and all the computational photography of it, figuring out that, using part of this and part of that, and every once in a while I saw bump, it would bump to another lens, but for the most part it was just figuring out what, what are you doing right now and what, what do you want to grab onto? And um, and it was just a. It's, it's pretty amazing device, definitely worth pushing harder than I realized I pushed. I'd been not in that kind of interactive zooming thing with my phone like I was like I pick one lens, right, I pick the lens that I want to use and, uh, it's a it's pretty pretty amazing piece of machinery, so yeah, what you know.

17:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean ostensibly the reason apple's doing the se uh with is it the a18 or the a17 is so it can do Apple intelligence. You know they want Apple intelligence across the board, but do you think people I asked this in the Discord and the resounding answer was no Do people want Apple intelligence?

17:35 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I don't want it, I think eventually, I mean here Eventually they will. The potential of Apple intelligence when it can look at all my emails and I can just ask it for the information from this. Hey, what? What email was that? There was a point that the cause I do this with chat GPT all the time.

17:50
I open up exactly the whole thing is, I already have something, but I open up chat GPT on my phone all the time, at least a couple of times a day. I open it up and I go and I just push the button and I go there was this thing, that was like this thing, what is that? And then I'll just figure out what that was. You know, like I was just like how do I do the thing with the thing and and and I I'm very like I it's kind of how, like how I spell with Google, like I just like I don't know how to spell this word here, how do I spell that? And then I put it back in.

18:26 - Jason Snell (Host)
That you know like. So yeah, they should have a like a ui for that. That might be my big complaint about, about llms is everybody's like, yeah, command line chat interface, everybody loves it, it's great. And it's like no, no, no, no, no, no, it's been 40 years. No, no, build an interface, people, a nice interface on that.

18:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's completely peripheral, but I use uh, perplexity ai like crazy, and they have every model, including now a complete reasoning model based on reinforcement learning, and I just attached it to my action button. I just press it and I start talking and, oops, I don't know what that's doing. Oh, it wants to see me, I mean then I just start talking and it starts answering already, and it's just, I think, I mean that's a good interface.

19:04 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I'm not, you know. Yeah, exactly, I mean with mine. I'm like with, with, with chat GPT on my phone. I'm typically hitting the talk button and I just sit there and talk back and forth to it. Right, then I'm driving, thinking about something, and I just start asking it questions while I'm driving, just like what about this and what about this, and how many would this look like? And tell me a little bit more about this, or whatever. And I don't feel like I don't feel like I'm missing it. And I said this in the last show.

19:28
I asked my wife about whether she thought Apple intelligence is important. She didn't even know it existed. Like she didn't even know. Like this is amazing.

19:34
A huge chunk of people aren't watching ads, like you know. I know that Apple does this, but you got to remember that we're subscription based. I don't see any. No one in my family sees ads ever, like you know. So we don't. So the ad campaigns don't have any impact at this point on on us thinking about things. And she's not missing it. My, my wife uses chat GPT all day, like she, she's a wizard with it. Um, so it's not that she doesn't care about AI, she just doesn't. She doesn't care about Apple intelligence, and I don't think that that, again, I just don't think that it's that much of a driver. I think that apple, for investors, had to say we're doing this thing with intelligence, and I think that there is a huge potential in the future of mixing the fact that it has all this personal biometric, you know, health data, all these other things that it's combining with it with ai far behind though at this point.

20:21
I mean no, but the thing is that that, but nobody else has what apple could potentially they're not even as good as stable diffusion was, but three years ago again, I mean it doesn't, but I what I would argue is it doesn't matter right now, like apple has to figure it out and see how people do it, but who cares right now? But two years from now, three years from now, if it's looking at all my health data and giving me recommendations on how to do that, I'm not going to give my health data to anyone else, like you know, like I'm not so. So the thing is is apple has this lock on on privacy and currently they have a lock on privacy and and and personal data at a level that nobody else has. They can be behind for apple intelligence.

20:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, at some point they have to catch up, but not for two or three years like I latest rumor, I guess, is that it won't be until 18-4 that we're going to start seeing an improved Siri.

21:11 - Jason Snell (Host)
That's not quite. It's worse than that. The latest rumor is that the improved Siri may not make 18-4.

21:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh jeez.

21:18 - Jason Snell (Host)
And keep in mind that Mark Gurman has also reported that the really improved Siri is being targeted for, let's say, 19.4.

21:27 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
someday next year. I mean, if it just played, it just didn't, it's hard even amazon can't do it.

21:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They were going to put a smarter amazon echo together. They had a you know a last minute uh, live or die.

21:39 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Meeting on valentine's day and they decided, yeah, it's not going to make it the hard part is is that you can run loose and goose with chat, cbt and if it's wrong you know you go.

21:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, it doesn't reflect badly on Apple yeah.

21:52 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
You know, like the. The thing is is that you know like I I think I was talking about this on the show, but I was I asked it for a router. I said here's a 16 port router, I need an eight for the. What's? The eight port version of this Cisco and the four port version? It gave me the eight port and it was totally accurate. It made up the fourth port. The four port one doesn't exist, but it gave me a model like. It gave me a model, a breakdown of it, the specs, everything else. It just made it up out of thin air, and what I thought with chat GPT was oh, that's funny, you're a funny guy and I'll stick with the eight. But if Apple did it, they'd be, you know, people would put it on twitter, you know, and so right. So I think that the, the requirements that amazon or apple have to have to reach for their brand makes this way harder.

22:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
um, when we just understand that is another version of the innovators dilemma, and that's that.

22:42 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
What's stung so many companies is their inability, including Intel now, is their inability to do to change uh, with the time or just it's just that you, there's so many places, uh, you know I can't remember the exact quote, but you know Mark Twain said you know it wasn't it's not the stuff that you don't know that gets you, it's the stuff that you're sure that you're sure about. You know and you know. And I remember I taught when I was teaching green screen Justine Ezzerich that's how I met her was I was doing a green screen in Pittsburgh, a green screen class in Pittsburgh, and she was in the class asking all the questions and everything else and within months she was doing green screens that I would have never even attempted. She was doing it with little consumer cameras and handheld and in front of something and the keys weren't perfect and everything else, but she was building compelling content and I looked at it, going, oh, you can't do it that way.

23:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's not the proper way to do it Would have reflected poorly on your professionalism. Yeah, and I couldn't prove anything.

23:40 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
She didn't prove anything and she just ran with it.

23:46 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
But I think that that was a lesson for me of like I might wanna experiment more. I just think that, most more than that, the stakes are just so much higher when you there's a big difference between an app that you can choose on your own to seek out and install on the phone and an actual fundamental feature that you're promoting on the sides of buses. It really has to be on point and you never get to. You don't get that first impression twice, so you may as well to and, as we've been talking about, we're not. We don't have a lot of experience with people who are wondering gosh, how come my, my apple doesn't, my iphone doesn't have all these ai features that are built into claude and built into gemini, so they got time to really ride this out.

24:20
In the meantime, I'm very, very pleased and impressed that they are saying that we don't want to have a big wall divide between Apple devices that can do Apple intelligence and Apple devices that can't. This idea about the iPhone SE means that they're committed, that every single device that they make is going to be able to do Apple intelligence. You're not going to be left behind because these phones they last four or five, six years, maybe in four years you will be absolutely cut adrift. If you, if you feel like you don't have uh ai features and at least your phone, that you use gemini on your android device oh, yeah, a lot it's, it's got it's, it's about that's google's ai yeah, and it's very good.

25:01
It's very conversational just came out.

25:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's very good. You have to be as with all ai. You have to know what it's very good.

25:04 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
It's very conversational To what we just came out. It's very good. You have to, as with all AI, you have to know what it's going to be good at, what it's not going to be good at. As usual, it's really it's bad at things that have an absolute hard yes or no, right or wrong answer. But it's great for conversations, it's great for research, it's great for solving a problem and actually operating the phone via voice. It's great for solving a problem and actually operating the phone via voice. I guess the best thing I can say about it is that I no longer wish I had the Google Assistant back, because it took a while for it to actually just be as good as what it replaced, but now it is.

25:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apple is starting to catch up in things like photo editing tools to Google and Samsung.

25:47 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
Are they as good? You not really not really. Replacing objects is still really much hit or miss. Uh, it's again. It's early. It's not like they've been pushing this out as a feature for the past two or three years, as as Google has. I think and hope that they'll catch up um interesting people not care.

26:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean is is. Does Apple have plenty of time, or do people? Are people going to start saying this is, this is uh, it's not up to snuff uh eventually they're going to go.

26:13 - Jason Snell (Host)
Hey, apple I think you're I don't know I think we don't know, because it the question is, what will ai become, and will it be that anybody first off Apple's platform is strong enough in so many markets that I mean you just mentioned, leo wiring perplexity up to your action button right Like you can have AI assistance on that platform without it being Apple's own?

26:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I never use Apple intelligence ever.

26:40 - Jason Snell (Host)
Right and it's okay. So that gives them a little bit of runway. I think the other thing is just it's going to take time to see whether this is a thing that is everywhere and dominant and it could be enough to make people never buy an iPhone again, which is what Apple is trying to fight as a threat or whether it turns out that people like some of the features that AI generates but that nobody in the long run is going to say I'm going to buy a phone based on what AI is in it and we don't. I mean we don't know. There are scenarios where Apple could get ridiculously behind here, although I would argue again that the existence of third-party competition to Google, you know, first off, because Google is a major AI competitor and they have a phone platform. The other phone platform is Apple's. So even if Apple is a little bit of a laggard, everybody who's a Google AI competitor is going to want access to the iPhone because it's the competition to Google.

27:38
So I think Apple I mean there are threats here. I don't think they're existential. It's like if Apple intelligence doesn't take off in a year, apple is cooked is silly. But there is a question of what the consumer intent is in the long run, because I'm not sure as much hype as there is in Silicon Valley about AI, I do not believe that a vast number of phone buyers today or in a year are going to say I need it for the AI, I just don't. And Apple's tried it too. Apple's tried to sell Apple intelligence and it hasn't really motivated sales. I think that people are motivated by what it can do for them, but I don't think that the tech industry has really demonstrated enough about what it actually can do for you. I mean, alex does it, but like for regular people to be like, I got to have AI in my phone. And even if we get there, I believe that if Apple isn't all the way there yet, there will have partners who will.

28:31 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I have two or three screens dedicated to AI all day and I do not feel like I need Apple intelligence. You know, like I don't, like I don't feel like I have, because the other thing is is that I'm usingude for one thing and mid journey for another, and runway for another.

28:44
So much of it is just in the cloud and and uh, you know, but, but the thing is, to me it's like I'm using each specialty based on what I think it's good at or what I'm most comfortable using it for, um, and I don't, and I don't know how I would pick one of them. Anyway, I do think that Apple you know, you, you, you know maps was a disaster when they came out. You know, and many other things have been. You know, apple's put out they need time. So having people have it and having people interact with it and having Apple get to watch that and throw a billion dollars a year into figuring it out two years from now, three years from now I think that makes sense for Apple. I don't think that it matters. I think it could take two or three years and no one would miss it. No one's going to miss. I mean, I don't know anybody that I've talked to that said well, I just wish Apple intelligence could be other than when we're talking about on the show.

29:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No one talks to me about Apple intelligence outside of the show. Yeah, but what's funny is Apple does no one cares Like crazy, well, I know, but Apple thinks people care.

29:41 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
It's still just a huge opportunity. Remember that Apple's business is all about, for good and for ill, making people stay inside the Apple ecosystem as much as possible. And imagine if they dropped the ball on Apple Photos and everybody was like, oh, you've got to get on Google Photos, all the things they can do. Oh, it can do searches. Oh, it gives you all this extra storage. And Apple Photos was just a place where you can back up your phone, your photos. So they have a very long runway. They have a lot of time to work this out, but they got to put some points on the board on a consistent basis. They don't want to lose that people's attention.

30:14 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I've said this before. I think they did drop the ball on Apple photos and I'm still using it.

30:19 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
Yeah. Just begrudgingly, because like am I gonna do?

30:21 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
like am I really gonna go out and like rebuild like this is the problem did you ever use Lightroom?

30:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, you're a pretty serious photographer, didn't you know?

30:29 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I had Aperture for a long time. I'm still bitter about that um and so, uh, and so, yeah, I'm pretty salty about the Aperture thing. So, and then after Aperture I kind of went into photos and that was it. Like I just don't have time to like I'm not as serious, are we all salty?

30:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just want to.

30:44 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
I'm just checking it was such a great app jason, are you salty?

30:50 - Jason Snell (Host)
I never really liked it. I did use it, but I never really cared I had everything as this chocolate, literally three salty guys.

31:00 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I'm as salty as a cow cow salt, like about it. You know like. You know, like it's like I, I, um, yeah, it's so frustrating, but but the after that I never really took to anything else and I just ended up using do you think the future of photo editing is ai google?

31:15
sounds? I think so, absolutely. I think it's a big. I mean, the reason not the only reason, but probably 80 of the reason that I still have photoshop, that I'm still paying a subscription for phot, is the genitor of AI. I that, and it's not.

31:26
I'm not making mid journey images in Photoshop, I am selecting something and saying get rid of this, and it gets rid of it. Behind a reflection, you know, seamlessly, or I say, or I, or I, or I make. The biggest thing I do is I make an image a little bit bigger, like I make the canvas bigger, and I just tell and I just I don't even put something into it, I literally just hit the generate button and it goes and it just pops it out. It's amazing. I mean, I had a, I think I had a, uh, an image where, um, you know, someone sent me a poster and I needed the it for the broadcast and there was a bunch of text on it and I just selected the text and said remove text, boom gone, put it in the broadcast as a background. And so it was. You know, that kind of stuff is so fast and easy, but I don't need Photoshop to create to do what Midjourney does, which it doesn't do very well in my opinion, but think a little deeper than that.

32:17 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
It's not about necessarily generative AI and creative tools. It's about being able to say, hey, shlomo, lighten up this picture a little bit, and then understanding what you mean by that. It's hard to pick up my daughter in this soccer photo. Can you make her a little bit more prominent? Or can you get rid of that big trash can in the background? All this sort of stuff you can do just by expressing what you want it to do, and it's doing a hell of a lot of ai lifting in the background that you don't know or don't care about. All you know is that now you have this beautiful picture of your daughter that is no longer blur. She's no longer motion blurred uh, she's now got portrait lighting on her. The background is blurred, so you can actually see her picked out from all the other girls that are in the background.

33:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's where ai photos is going to have to come through, because that's going to be fair coming very soon, and maybe this is a mistake in marketing, but apple's computational photography, I mean certainly apple is in the lead.

33:12 - Jason Snell (Host)
Yeah, in that right man, that's a I doing, they've been doing ai and apple photos for years now and they never called it ai they called machine learning, the magic wand that automatically rebalances all the settings and and still puts the sliders in so you can edit it later. That's all machine learning based image analysis. They've got a bunch of controls that are not called like detailed photoshop controls. They're called like light and brilliance, and those are all actually composite features that are being slid around in the background so you don't have to worry about it.

33:46
They, what they didn't do I mean part of it is their philosophy right is. They took a light touch because they worry that you could over artificialize a photo, and so they, they try to not do as much as that, and and their, their steadfast refusal to do a cleanup tool.

34:00
Uh, that was on the iphone and the ipad. There was one on the Mac. That was okay until Apple intelligence. It's a frustration but, like Apple in photography, is actually a place that they've been pushing for, you know, seven years at least now, in terms of photos and in terms of the camera app.

34:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they should have said something like we were AI before it was cool, they've said it.

34:24 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
There's things that they they talk about like and they that are neural you know, the neural uh processors and everything else, and so they'd be using that to frame that.

34:32 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
Hey, we've actually been working on Apple intelligence since 2017. When our machine learning photography people in our photo group said, wow, read the, read Google's paper and said, wow, this could be incredible. Let's as we're, as we're designing neural hardware for our photo stuff, let's also make it so that we'll work great with these llms and I think that's exactly.

34:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tommy hermanston, in our chat, points out that topaz has just released something called have you seen this project, starlight? Yeah, here's an example of a nasdaq photo uh, the original on the left and the cleaned up Starlight version on the right. This is also yeah.

35:09 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
AI. Yeah, imagine how incredible it's going to be when you go. Finally, you can go back into the photos that you took with your iPhone 2, your iPhone 3, you know your original digital camera from like the early 2000s, and it, it's, it's been all your photos and simply say could you back make this look like it's not crap, like it's not a 640 by?

35:25
Go back through all your photos and simply say could you make this look like it's not crap, like it's not a 640 by 480 thing that I got that was recorded onto a floppy disk.

35:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've been using iMovie to make a photo tribute to Lisa's mom, my mother-in-law, and you know. They gave us a whole stack of photos. A lot of them are photos of a photo. In some cases they are photos of a photo. In some cases they're photos of a photo on a computer screen. Yeah, when you blow them up they're horrible. But if I could, maybe I should see if can you download this, because that would really. Yeah, I need something like this and, yes, I think in a few years that should be built into the iphone and iphone well, they already have.

36:00
Uh, since they bought pixelmator, they've already got uh super resolution that's right stuff that they have, they rolled it out.

36:06 - Jason Snell (Host)
Uh, it's just in pixelmator now, but pixelmator's got it as an aside, that that the the purchase is finalized.

36:14 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
There was not an announcement, but now on pixmos.

36:17 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Hey, now we're proudly part of the Apple family yeah, I saw that yeah, and if you're wearing the Vision Pro, you can sit there and just point on any photo that you have in your photo library and it makes it dimensional, like 3d, and it is amazing, like you, just like, like it was, you know, like I grew up always wanting to have the uh, you know, the, the little um, uh, you know I can't think of the name of the little thing you go down between Um and uh. But looking at little 3d photos, you know, and uh, I'm amazed that I can just push on every photo I've ever taken and I know that video is probably um six months away or a year away. Well, that's what this topaz thing is it's for video.

36:55
It's video ai six they call it and and what, what, but I think that what apple's doing is that making it 3d video from a 2d source you know like it's using and because it's doing 3d pictures. It does 3d stills from a 2d source, you know like it's using. And because it's doing 3d pictures. It does 3d stills from a 2d source right now and it's, it's doing it, and so you don't even need the stereo to take the picture. Um and uh, it's, it's, it's, it's amazing, you know.

37:17
So it's, it's coming together, you know like it's like you know again, I think that these are the little things that do make a difference for me and and I will say, you know, I complain about the the photos app, but being able to open up my camp, my, my camera, I take a picture and go, oh, get rid of that. I just push down on it and it's gone, like it's just, you know. And then I I don't even say anything, I don't type anything, I just push on the item it selects oh, I know what you mean. And then I let go and it just disappears from the photo and it.

37:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I found that it's been pretty seamless, so yeah, Well, I'll try photo meter on those, uh, on those old blurry photos, if you well and you know the next few years are going to really push that forward too.

37:55 - Jason Snell (Host)
right, like all this stuff is getting better so fast that the idea that you could take something that's old and I mean I, I've already done that with some film scans and then you you upgrade them and then you run through spatial analysis and you're, then they're in 3d on the vision pro, like you could just it's, it's, it's all happening really fast.

38:12 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Yeah yeah, my, my uh grandfather was a geek and shot like family stuff in 16 millimeter in the fifties. So I'm trying to get, so I'm working on getting those films and having them scanned and then, and then put them into this just to see what happens, cause I think that it'll be amazing.

38:28 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
I mean I've, I've. Even just a couple of years ago, I was blown, I have to. I, the water high watermark for astonishment still comes down to my favorite picture of me and my dad. Uh was just a quick selfie in my dad's kitchen. Uh, cause I got, uh, I got got an early digital camera and I want to show him how it worked by taking a selfie. This was before we had a selfie. We knew what selfies were. You just turn the camera around, even if it was a film camera, and it was such a beautiful natural reaction. He's smiling, I'm smiling, it's spontaneous. It's the expression that I associate with him when I think about him 10, 13 years later.

39:07
But the thing is, because it was just a blind selfie, half of my face is cut off and just to give I think it was Adobe's tools an impossible task, I just say, okay, fill in. I want to recrop this as an 8x10 and fill in the rest of the person on the left's face. And I'll be damned. It wasn't 100% perfect, but it was close enough that, with 20 to 30 minutes worth of work, nobody would have questioned. It looked like me. They filled in the rest of my hat, the rest of my hair. It helped that my facial features were mostly in frame. It didn't have to invent a left eye, but I was was like you were supposed to fail miserably at that and I was supposed to make fun of you. I wasn't supposed to be almost in tears grateful that I have a nicely, nicely composed photo of my favorite photo of me and my dad and that was two years ago, good heavens need to take a break.

39:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We'll be back. We have some more uh, including an exciting new feature. Uh, on your apple t. Oh, never mind, but uh, psych, psych. I think you guys know where I was going with that one uh.

40:14
First a word from our sponsor, z scaler, the leader in cloud security. Over the last few years, it's become really apparent. Over the last few years, it's become really apparent that the billions and billions of dollars enterprises have spent on perimeter defenses, on firewalls and VPNs, so that the a record $75 million payout to ransomware in 2024. See, it turns out these traditional security tools aren't really protecting you like you'd like them to be. For one thing, the VPN expands your tax surface because you have public facing IPs and bad actors have something to latch onto. In fact, they're doing it faster and better than ever before, thanks to AI Plus.

41:10
These VPNs struggle to inspect, as do the firewalls, encrypted traffic at scale. What does that mean? Well, once a bad guy gets into your network, it's presumed he's a good guy, he's an employee. So lateral movement is you can access all your data, anything, every app, and that means the bad guy's gonna be able to find your emails, find your customer information and exfiltrate it. They encrypt it and exfiltrate it and your firewall can't see it, doesn't know what it is and lets it out. So you're getting data loss via encrypted traffic and other leakage paths, and bad guys are just exploiting your traditional security infrastructure like crazy. They're using AI to outpace your defenses.

41:51
Really, the time has come to rethink security. You can't let the bad actors win. The perimeter defenses are not enough. Those bad guys are getting through. They're innovating, they're exploiting your defenses. That's why you need Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI.

42:07
So the key here is when you say Zscaler Zero Trust and AI Zero Trust, it means just because somebody's in your network doesn't mean they can move around willy-nilly. They can download stuff, exfiltrate stuff. No, plus, zscaler hides your attack surface, so the bad guys can't see your IP addresses in your apps. They're just invisible and they can't attack what they can't see. So no more lateral movement. Your users are connected only to specific apps, not the entire network. Every request is continuously verified, based on identity and context. If you don't have permission, you can't do it. So if you're a bad guy, you just stymied right.

42:50
And it simplifies security management with ai powered automation. For instance, zscaler zero trust plus ai analyzes half a trillion transactions every single day and it uses ai to find the real threats in all those transactions, the needles in those haystacks. You couldn't do it without ai. Hackers cannot attack what they can't see. Protect your organization with Zscaler, zero trust and AI. Learn more at zscalercom slash security. That's zscalercom slash security. We thank them so much for supporting MacBreak Weekly. You guys knew exactly where I was going. I got all excited when I read this article on six colors that apple and netflix have finally made made nice, and I was gonna be seeing netflix on my apple tv was a sweet couple hours wasn't it, it was a wonderful, pretty nice couple hours.

43:50
Couple hours netflix said whoops, I like your, I like your six colors, when you actually create a whole feature and then well, joe rosensteel writing. On six colors wrote. Netflix deeply regrets accidentally making netflix a better product for its customers but it's like. It's not like you like ran into the, we thought we'd have a really big profit or expense.

44:10 - Jason Snell (Host)
Here's the thing so the story is this is apple tv tv app integration, which is they're the one streaming service that is right saying where you can so when you search apple tv you can't find your netflix stuff and if you stop watching something halfway through it, it shows it in your up next and it shows you the next episode, and it's just really nice integration for everybody. But netflix, and right to the point of it, does seem a little bit fake, like how could it be? Just, oh, it was just a technical error.

44:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I actually had a comment they even have this screen right no, so this is it.

44:41 - Jason Snell (Host)
So I heard from somebody on blue sky, a guy named Mike Welch, who said, as someone who has written the code to implement this feature, there is no way it accidentally happens, and he speculated that they might have been planning to do some AB testing in the app about it. But it makes me think and I thought this the moment that they yoinked it that this does not strike me as being like a thing that happened all in error. It strikes me as being a thing that either they haven't signed all the contracts yet, or they are planning a rollout, an announcement of this and this wasn't it, or and so and so they rolled it back. But but the more I hear about this, the less likely it is that this was.

45:25 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
You know, a text file changed somewhere and magically this feature appeared, because that's not how it works what it looked like to me, as someone who's been in the depths of many of these companies, is that, uh, a team probably some meeting mentioned they were working on it and everyone said okay, and then they did it. And then an executive somewhere way higher up said what are we doing here? Why is this the case? Like, who did this? And they turned it off.

45:52 - Jason Snell (Host)
I, I hear you, but the apple netflix data impasse has been like a really high profile for quite a while, and these would be people working in the TV app. So I don't believe that they built it just for fun and launched it and then an executive got word about it. My guess is more that they were building it for a purpose and then they misconfigured something and launched it. It was on their dev server and they actually launched it.

46:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My guess is more that they were building it for a purpose, and then they misconfigured something and launched it.

46:17 - Jason Snell (Host)
It was on their dev server and they actually.

46:19 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
You know, the funny thing is is that I realized that Netflix is so not present for me on a general basis because they're not in that app. Like I don't really like I go to Netflix every once in a while and I have to admit that because it's not in the rest of the ecosystem I, every month, I go. Do I watch? Do we watch enough netflix to to like stay subscribed? Because I just don't and I realize it's partially because I can't search for it and I can't figure out like I think you're an outlier, alex.

46:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hate to tell you, but uh I watch netflix all the time and there's a lot of stuff there it's just very inconvenient because, uh, I can't, I can't see it in my. Uh, what are you watching on tv? Oh, there's all sorts of good stuff on netflix. I can't remember off the top of my head. I'll have to log into my well from gromit.

47:02 - Jason Snell (Host)
Well, I just I just canceled my netflix after you did there since the beginning, because and it's a combination of i- don't think a lot of their programming is for me. They raise their prices again and again, and again. But to alex's point, I will say the moment that in those heady three hours where this was happening, I did have this thought of like oh you know, I would probably watch netflix a lot more if it was properly integrated diplomat excellent love the diplomat, highly recommended night agent yeah, first step first season was good.

47:31
Second season is not as good, but it's there, band of Brothers it took us a while to get through the Diplomat because we would forget that we were watching it Right.

47:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So Alex is right to that point. It's bad for Netflix. Why is it this way? Is it Apple? Is it Netflix? Netflix?

47:47 - Jason Snell (Host)
doesn't want Apple to know what its users are watching on. Netflix is basically it. Netflix doesn't want to do sharing. That's part of it Data sharing with Apple but the other part of it and this is the part that bugs me. But I can see their point, but I don't like it is philosophically, netflix would prefer that when you think of streaming, you think of opening the Netflix app and seeing what is available and they as number one streamer.

48:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they don't want to be alongside disney and max and peacock, they want to just have it all be netflix and I get that which is single-handedly made f1 a huge sport in the united states, netflix coming as the sure. Next really good stuff on netflix I. Just because you don't watch it, alex, doesn't mean other people aren't. It's the number one streamer jason had the same right.

48:36 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
It was the last for me. Every time it the time to make a decision, which is what everybody does, is when they raise the price, you go. Am I really watching this? And and the problem is is that I do use the apple app so often that, um, I the diplomat, I got halfway through the the first season and then forgot that I was watching it. When I go to, when I open it up like I don't know where, like right now we're watching x files I don't know where, which is in hdn again, by the way, just in case people are wondering um, I don't know where x files is, to be honest, like I don't know what service it's no, I don't either.

49:14
I just know that I go to the apple tv yeah, I go to apple tv and I go, oh, that it says do you want to watch the next episode, you know, and I go, okay, and it'll be sitting right next to reacher and right next to the pit, you know, and are the, which are the things that I have a tendency to watch, and I see them pop up, but I don't, uh, have any sense, I agree it hurts them, but uh, it obviously doesn't hurt them enough, since they are, in fact, the number one streaming uh provider, and by a long long shot the other problem is that they're I think they feel they have leverage over apple because they do share data with some other streamer boxes, just not with apple.

49:49 - Jason Snell (Host)
Yeah, and I think you know, I think it's an executive level and there was some there was a lot of penetration of Apple TV versus, say, Roku.

50:01
Well, it's not. It's not very big, the Apple TV hardware box, but keep in mind, this would also integrate data sharing with the TV app on the iPhone and the iPad, like it's all kind of of a kind kind. But but you know, I would argue and I think Alex would probably argue too that it is in many ways, the nicest of the streamer boxes and although it is a small percentage, it is a, you know it is going to be cause it's indexed with Apple. It's going to be a a wealthier set of users. It's people who care about their streamer box in order to buy a dedicated streamer box from Apple and pay that extra money.

50:33
It's a pretty good audience that you would think that Netflix would want to serve, and I think that their idea that like well, no, just launch Netflix, is not like I mean, I missed what was a great British baking show when it came back. I missed it because it was on Netflix and I didn't see it in my up next queue and like I think it's bad for everyone. That's what frustrates me is there seems to be like a corporate policy going on here that is not about serving the customers and I think it doesn't benefit Apple and it doesn't benefit Netflix. But here we are, which is why I'm going to take away from this that maybe it's going to change. It didn't change last week Like we hoped, but maybe this means it is going to.

51:12
It is going to change because because it would be better for Netflix subscribers on Apple devices to have this be integrated with it. It's stupid that we.

51:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Roku has 48% penetration in North America. Apple has eight.

51:26 - Jason Snell (Host)
So in the last month I have bought the latest top of the line Roku box, the latest top of the line Google TV box and the latest top of the line roku box, the latest top of the line google tv box and the latest top of the line amazon fire tv box to go with. And this is all because mark german at bloomberg wrote a story where he referred to the apple tv as a laggard um because it hasn't gotten updates or something. And it's like my thought was wait a second. Apple's hardware is so over engineered for the boxes what are you talking about?

51:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think this is widely known. This is a big issue. Youtube tv and I pay 10 bucks a month for this has 4k. It had the super bowl in 4k. Its codec is incompatible with the apple tv. You won't get their upscaled 4k on the apple tv. You will get it on your roku. That's your google tv that's. Are you sure that's not?

52:11 - Jason Snell (Host)
yes, apple that it's been about a year now that that codec is supported okay so that should change. I watched the super ball in 4k on an apple tv, on youtube tv it's not. It's not true anymore, but my my point being those those, that's a big deal though, those boxes. There are a lot of those boxes out there, but you know what the truth is that this market, the embedded video player market, it's primarily things that are in your tv and those are very slow and very bad yeah, samsung's probably the dominant well, and roku.

52:40
There are a lot of roku tvs out there too, and then if you buy a box, a lot of the streamers that get bought are super cheap. I bought the good ones and I you know I've got some. I've got some opinions. Roku is super generic. Amazon is really, but so full of ads that it makes me curious every time I use it.

52:58
And Google is pretty good, especially if you have YouTube TV, because then the integration is pretty direct. But I would say in no way is Apple TV a laggard. I would argue that it's probably the best experience, even though Apple has fallen asleep at the switch when it comes to tvOS and it's missing lots of things like supporting fast channels. Joe Rosenstiel, who we talked about earlier, wrote a piece on Six Colors, I think last week about how Apple has completely missed the boat on the fastest growing segment of streaming, which is live streaming channels with ads. They don't have a live guide of any kind, except some sports stuff, and it's a huge mistake that they need to get on board. But despite all of that, like that apple tv box, it's really good, it's really fast, it works really well. There's so much to like about it, um, and so I think that you know whatever eight percent of the streaming box audience buying those things. It's a good product and netflix should probably serve its customers on I mean it's, it's the bmw of of doing this.

53:53 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
You know it's a good product and Netflix should probably serve its customers on it.

53:55 - Jason Snell (Host)
I mean it's the BMW of doing this. It's a luxury car experience.

53:59 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
It is definitely at not nearly the cost of a luxury BMW. But I will say, as someone who streams to these things, who has to look at the back end and look at what we can and can't do, it's somewhere between five and 10 times power more powerful than the next one down, like you know, like, and it's like it is just so much more horsepower there, and so when we want to send the highest bit rates, when we want to send the highest quality, when we want to send Atmos and Vision, when we want to send all those things to a, to an endpoint, it's so much better than everything else. They, they, they. If they didn't upgrade it for a decade, they'd still be, you know, twice as good as the next one up.

54:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
if they, if the other, if their competition updates every year have you tried the uh or have you looked at the nvidia uh um box? Yep, they're good. I think that's a pretty darn good box with it's got ai upscaling built in. Yeah, I don't like the interface very good like so I yeah, I think that's a terrible interface.

54:53 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
It's android tv, but I think that we, we forget that, like, the way to add value, the cheapest way to add value to a product is interface and training we were just talking about this this morning, office hours is that when you have a bad interface, it doesn't matter. Like I, you know, microwaves have a bad interface and so all I know how to do is time and start, like you know, because, because they have a horrible interface and no training, you know. And so the thing is, is that, um, it doesn't matter whether your product can do something. If it's hard to get to the dial, then you're really just dealing with geeks, you know, like you know. And so to get general people to use something at the at its highest level, you need to build an interface that allows them to easily do that, and most of the industry doesn't get that, like, just you know, they just don't get that.

55:33
Interfaces are important. I mean, you can see by when you look at their interface, you know, and the folks that care, um, you see great interfaces because they, they know that that matters, you know, and so, um, and so I think that that's the problem. The nvidia shield is is fine, I mean, it's fine, it works well, it's powerful? Does it give you everything you want? Specs wise, it's not. It's still not as powerful as the apple tv. It's not okay. So and so you want, of course, it's like three or four years old now the current version but yeah so, but it's, it's still.

56:01
It's still not as powerful as the apple tv, but how old is the apple tv though?

56:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the 4k apple tv is a couple years old too yeah, but what I mean?

56:07 - Jason Snell (Host)
what else is it supposed to do? Like, right, I mean it's it's so overpowered for all this stuff.

56:11 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
It does feel like Apple. I mean, it feels like Apple wants to be able to do some more in the future, and you just feel like they're just not turning things on because it's like, why would you overbuild it to this degree? So you know, that's the unknown is why they're not putting more into it. Like, for instance, you know, apple could easily the newest, the newest Apple TV supports, I believe, 2.1, hdmi or whatever it could do 4k 120, um and deliver content that you're that we're streaming at 4k 120. And if they just flip that on for sports, um, and decided to do MLS or MLB with 4k 120 and build a pipeline for that, well, they're now showing you something that you can't see anywhere else.

56:53
You know, and the and I think you know, and I think you know like, and those are the kind of things that apple could do. And then, of course, it could be a great gaming platform if they were able to get games on it that people wanted to play. You know like it's, you know the arcade is fine, but I mean, I forgot about the arcade, like when it came out. We played with it for a little while and then we were like, okay there's no games here that are that much fun to play for a long time Will we see a new 27-inch mini LED backlit studio display?

57:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the rumor, and if so Feels right Feels right to me, it's basically Right timing.

57:27 - Jason Snell (Host)
Mark Gurman said, I think, or maybe the display analyst Ross Young, but the idea is that there's no interest from Apple in revising the Pro Display XDR Like. That seems like a dead product and it was fine because it was too expensive and it was really inappropriate and it was just a weird product. Studio Display, on the other hand, very popular, it's good right, despite its price, I mean.

57:49
Alex mentioned the Mercedes earlier. Like Studio Display when it came out and especially now. Like it's too expensive but it's an Apple product. It works exactly as you'd expect an Apple product to work. I have two of them Like it's good but it's also showing its age. There are better backlighting techniques you could use. They need it needs a better webcam. So doing a new version of that, maybe ProMotion, as a good pairing for modern MacBook Pros, modern Macs, like if they're coming out with a new Mac Studio, good time to do it if it's ready. So yeah, I think the Studio Display has actually been a success. The fact is there aren't a lot of Mac compatible monitors that give you the resolution that Apple expects in all of its devices and there are a few now. But like I think Apple learned its lesson last time it abandoned the monitor market, which is without Apple to sort of plant the flag, it gets really thin on the ground for Apple users who are looking for external displays.

58:45 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Yeah.

58:46 - Jason Snell (Host)
And, by the way, alex, there's also.

58:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Breaking Bad there's the Crown. Adam Sandler's comedy hit Love you, ripley. Did you see Ripley?

58:55 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
You would like ripley because it's black and white and it was, I thought, the last. Really, it makes me horribly uncomfortable no, no no, this is a series. I know it's well. I saw the movie and it made me. The storyline makes me so uncomfortable that I don't know I don't watch tv.

59:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's much, it's. It's really beautifully done. Uh, you should just look at it. Look at it. Yeah, you should just look at it, but you'd have to have a netflix account to.

59:14 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I have one. I mean, I have one right now. I said I haven't quit yet, but I'm I, I american primeval was was violent but but pretty good.

59:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, I'm just looking at all the things I've watched.

59:26 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
Uh, there's a bit of good stuff there, I mean the problem is there's a lot of great stuff in the library, but how much time do I spend like actually going through it? It's like at some point I, I'm. I'm with jason.

59:36
I also like canceled netflix as soon as, as soon as the uh new waltzing gromit film came out like an outlier for having it, and it's like well, no, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not suggesting there's a big stampede, but I think that I think that the tendency is for people who are in any way like budget conscious, and that does.

59:53
That concludes people it's well, for what? For if you find that I when was the last time that I found myself spending like two or three days watching stuff, that, watching a series on netflix, I can wait until like a whole bunch of stuff sort of backs up and suddenly great, I'll take another. I will take one month of netflix, or two months long enough to watch the stuff that I wanted. That's been backing up really good.

01:00:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Black Doves was amazing. Probably wouldn't have heard about that, but it was a really good series of course, killing Eve who didn't love that? I can go on and on and on, and the problem is there's so much good stuff on so many places.

01:00:29 - Jason Snell (Host)
Andy pointed it out. There though you're, you're listing the catalog, catalog, and like I've seen all that stuff right.

01:00:34
I've seen all that stuff and if I was only subscribing to Netflix I would dive deeper and maybe catch the stuff I've missed. But if we're talking about what's coming out month in, month out, netflix has chosen to, you know, do a lot of stuff. That's kind of like in the middle. They haven't had a lot of big hits, they have a few and whoever they're targeting and they are targeting a huge audience worldwide they are number one.

01:00:56 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
they are television right, they're like Network television was back in the day, so they are broadly programming to keep everybody on.

01:01:02 - Jason Snell (Host)
They have their occasional hits that are enormous, like squid game.

01:01:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But also just huge you know so.

01:01:08 - Jason Snell (Host)
But but I I have to admit I. Yeah, house of Cards was huge, but it was huge 15 years ago. If I wanted to watch it, I would have watched it, and I'm done now when I look at what shows make me interested, week in, week out, that are new, that I want to see. Netflix shows have been almost never on my list. Occasionally something like the diplomat pops out there.

01:01:27
But when they start charging you 23 a month, yeah to get the ad free, the base ad free plan or whatever. And they and it previously was 20 and previously it was 18. They just keep ratcheting it up because they make so much money off their ad plan. That's. That's where. I think, Netflix is less appealing. They're you know, they are TV, they're number one, they're playing it like that, but personally, just personally, I don't find their new shows that interesting and and their price is ridiculous.

01:01:55 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I find them competently written, but not great. Well, it's TV.

01:02:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's network TV.

01:02:00 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Yeah, and the thing is that I don't have time. I guess I feel like I don't have time for that. I don't have time for it If I feel like the dialogue isn't nailing it. I'm watching the Pit right now on, I guess, max.

01:02:15 - Jason Snell (Host)
That's max yeah.

01:02:16 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Man, is it good? Like it is really good, like just really feels. You know there's something new about it. That is a new take on something that we've seen a thousand times, and that's why I tried to watch it. But I don't want to watch another doctor. It's just show. Like every time you ask doctors they're like this is, this, is what it's like, you know, and and um, just what I need for you, but it's anyway.

01:02:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I find life in an emergency room you know, I really like it.

01:02:41 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I'm enjoying. I started watching Paradise, which I you know, I I think my wife and I are watching Paradise together, which is good um the I would well.

01:02:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
White Lotus is back. I mean, come on now, but I but the thing is, is that?

01:02:53 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
for me like these, these shows that end every week, that I have to wait another week, like the old days. Yeah, I'm kind of over that.

01:02:59
But that's what netflix pioneered and netflix dumps the whole thing every time. Well, and. But the problem is I don't even want to see all season. Like my family, we pick up, we pick an old show that we can watch every night, you know, or three or four nights a week for a long time, and right now we started X-Files, which means the rest of this year, like that's what I'm watching. And that wasn't. That was that. They stopped making that 20 years ago, 25 years ago. And so the thing is, is that? But I don't have to, then I don't have to think about, you know, like something particularly new, and I and my wife and I watch other things. My kids watch other things. I mean, it's all. We all have these other. There's other things that we watch, but I don't find myself going to Netflix, going, oh, I'm gonna watch, like I. I felt like the what was it? The night shift? I just felt like that wasn't very well written, like I just felt like it was.

01:03:45 - Jason Snell (Host)
I feel like a lot of the Netflix stuff falls on old tropes, which is like I the diplomat, was pretty well returned to my return to my original point, which is, at this point, netflix is not trying to program to be prestige TV, like so many of the other streamers. Are it's programming to be CBS? It's programming to be sort of down the middle loop but for the whole world.

01:04:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's not CBN. I think, you guys, I think there's a lot of stuff.

01:04:06 - Jason Snell (Host)
Well, I mean, there's a lot of stuff, but it's more middle of the road, because they want to reach a wide audience, which they do. That's the thing is prestige tv we're talking about. Everybody else wants to be hbo and they want to be nbc, like, and that they had way more viewers on nbc than they did on hbo and and netflix is in that mirror was pretty amazing and it's not. We're not, leo. You're literally listing yes, yes, black mirror has a new season.

01:04:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They have no no shows on netflix, but I'll just, but this is okay.

01:04:32 - Jason Snell (Host)
Well, first off, I subscribed until a month ago or until like two weeks ago, and second, I in case people who love netflix are saying, oh well, it's because you're a bunch of old guys and the the youth, they love the netflix yellowjackets both of my kids I asked both of my kids if they wanted to keep our netflix subscription, because I have, uh, two peop two kids in their early 20s. I thought, well, they what are they like? They love netflix and both of them were like meh, we don't need netflix.

01:04:58 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
So why tell me I watch youtube?

01:05:01
probably pick one, no they're watching every other streamer that I subscribe to okay yeah, my, my kids are youtube, youtube tv and then and then everything else like they, because they do watch some. They watch, uh, what it like Jeopardy on YouTube TV, like that's what they like to watch for whatever reason an old Wheel of Fortunes or whatever, but not Wheel of Fortune, the one where they guess what people said. I don't know what it is, but outside of that it's just YouTube. And YouTube Premium is something that everybody notices in my family.

01:05:32
If, for some reason, I changed my credit card and we had like a week of ads and that was the only one that everyone really noticed, quickly I forgot. In the same time I lost Netflix for like six months. No one in the family noticed, you know, no one noticed it was gone. And so I think Paramount, I think, is doing pretty good work. You know I watch a lot of Paramount. If I was going to list them right now, outside of youtube and youtube tv, which is a kind of a non-negotiable in my family, um, it'd be apple tv, paramount, max. Those are the ones that I feel like. Those are the three, and then maybe disney are the three or four that I would feel like we would need to keep on for everyone to be happy, you know, but I think that disney is maybe, and Netflix is definitely on the fifth of the five.

01:06:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So we agree that Apple is going to do a new studio display. We can move on. I don't know, I mean that's what we were talking about, I think that's how it started. Yeah, Lilyhammer.

01:06:27 - Jason Snell (Host)
You know that was a Netflix show, Lilyhammer.

01:06:29 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Good show. Sure, the one thing that I am interested to see is if they release a new laptop. Sure, the the one thing that I'm I am interested to see is if they release a new laptop, I mean I don't know if it's going to happen this week or there's room m5 laptop.

01:06:40 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
There have been rumors I think german said no later than march for the updated macbook air. That's soon.

01:06:48 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Yeah, all right, and the and the. The thing that people aren't paying attention to that we've run into for doing podcasts is whatever apple's doing to those mics is, you know, supernatural yeah, you mentioned that last week. Yeah, and so we're, we're looking for the air, because, I may start, we were sending mics out to people.

01:07:04
I may just start sending them a laptop like here's a laptop. People would like to open it up and start talking because it's just, it's um, it's so much less work, you know. So I'm interested to see if they, if that upgrade comes in and if they make it any better than it already is. But the last one, the M3, really took it to a different level.

01:07:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's take a break. More to come. I have many more Netflix shows I can drop on you and I'll. I'll do that later, but I keep making a list Our show today, brought to you by 1Password.

01:07:32
There's a name you've heard a lot lately. I got a rhetorical question because I know the answer, but I'll ask it Do your end users always work on company-owned devices? Sure, they do. They never bring their phone or laptop in. They always use IT-approved apps on those devices. Well, of course, right, no. So how do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all those unmanaged apps and devices? Well, one password has figured out a great answer to this question. It's called extended access management one password. Extended access management helps you secure every sign-in for every app on every device, every device, because it solves the problems traditional IAM and MDM can't touch.

01:08:17
Think of your company's security. Like the quad of a college campus, there are nice brick paths between the buildings, the company-owned devices, the IT-approved apps, the managed employee identities. And then there are the paths people actually use, the shortcuts worn through the grass that are actually the straightest line from point A to point B. Those are the unmanaged devices, the shadow IT apps, the non-employee identities, like contractors on your network. Most security tools just assume everybody's taken those happy brick paths, but of course many of the security problems occur on those little shortcuts. But of course, many of the security problems occur on those little shortcuts. 1password Extended Access Management is the first security solution that brings all these unmanaged devices, all these shadow IT apps, these identities under your control and make sure that every user credential is strong and protected, every device is known and healthy and every app is visible. 1password is ISO 27001 certified, with regular third-party audits. It exceeds the standards set by various authorities and is a leader in security. 1password extended access management it's security for the way we actually work today, now generally available to companies with Okta and Microsoft, entra and Beta for Google Workspace customers. So right now, secure every app, every device, every identity, even the unmanaged ones. At 1passwordcom slash MacBreak, all lowercase that's 1, the number 1, p-a-s-s-w-o-r-d dot com slash MacBreak and we thank them so much for their support of MacBreak Weekly 1Passwordcom slash MacBreak. Use that address. You support us too when you do that.

01:10:04
So Apple apparently making many, many iPhone 16 Pros in India. Now China's not too happy about that. 9to5mac reporting China's deliberately hampering iPhone production in India in three ways. Apple wants to boost its iPhone production in India to 25% in the next few years, but the Chinese government I mean for obvious reasons is not crazy about that.

01:10:41
Two reports in the Financial Times say China appears to be making it hard for engineers to go to India. The Financial Times says Beijing is tightening its grip on cutting-edge Chinese technology, aiming to keep critical know-how within its borders. Hey, don't we do that too? I think we do with euv. We don't let the chinese have it. We don't let them have the latest nvidia gpus times goes on to say among the companies to be hit is apple's main manufacturing partner, foxconn, which is, of course, uh in based in. Well, actually, aren't they uh? Is foxconn taiwanese? Anyway? They, their major factories are in china, but they would like to have more factories in uh in india as well as other places. Chinese authorities also propose new export controls to keep the key battery technologies in country.

01:11:35 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Um, I mean, they want to they want to keep a hold on. They want to know that they can yeah of course they do and the problem is is that china's doing all these things.

01:11:42
Scare the bejeebers out of all the people that are doing work there. And the united states talking about, you know, uh, tariffs and everything else. This is not. It's not a good place to do work, and so they're. They're trying to make and so, as people are leaving, they're like, hey, how about we hang on to some of this work and how do we make sure that we slow that down as much as possible?

01:12:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
um, but they're telling the legacy component manufacturers in china that they can't establish plants in india either, and of course that's one of the big advantages foxconn china has is, all the suppliers are right there um.

01:12:15 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Well, they also means that all those supplies are being flown in. So at any point in time china could close the border, cut it off, and the indian uh plant can't continue to move forward. So when it says they make them, they don't make them from the ground up, they assemble them there, right um? So that's the real, that's the real challenge, that that I mean china's trying to figure out a way to stay. Hang on to it.

01:12:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not sure this is a small component of a global trade war that is rapidly emerging that is going to making all these overtures to invading Taiwan, like if they weren't doing that.

01:12:57 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I think a lot of people if if they weren't worrying everybody that that someday this is all this dance is gonna end Like that's what? Because if China goes into Taiwan, like, everything ends like you know. Like you know, the United States is not gonna allow us to be a importing stuff. Well, maybe they will now, I don't know. But it gets much tenser, much more tense if China makes an actual attempt on Taiwan. But everyone's worried about that and you can't move this pipeline over a year.

01:13:27
So all these manufacturers are spending the next decade trying to diversify away from China to minimize the amount of exposure they have to the country, regardless of the 10% tariffs and all the other stuff. It's China's threat against it's A their attack on our information. They're trying to get information from us from every way, shape or form. I mean, at this point, I don't think it's safe to buy anything that's owned by a Chinese manufacturer. That makes something that interacts with your information like your personal information is probably not safe. And number two is they're threatening Taiwan all the time and all the seas around it. That's a huge destabilizer and that makes everybody, you know, want to not be there. You know, and it feels like. It feels like a really big unforced error, but we don't know what china's needs are. I mean, they're on a demographic implosion that will probably you know that they don't figure out something else to do. They're going to have their own problems anyway.

01:14:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The good news is tiktok is back in the app store it is so there you go so you can install it again. For some reason, uh google and apple both uh were reassured by a a letter they got from uh the us attorney general, pam bondy, saying the ban on tick tock wouldn't be immediately enforced. Oh well, in that case they put it. On thursday they restored to the tick tock app uh in in their respective stores I don't know how much.

01:14:59 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I mean, I don't think any of this really impacted anybody it's just weird because I mean the cost to them.

01:15:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Reason they pulled it down is a huge cost to them, potentially five thousand dollars per download or per per download, right, um, that's, that's a significant, um you know penalty. So I understood why they pulled it down. I really don't understand why they put it back, because this letter is not exactly saying oh don't worry, you're indemnified, nothing's going to happen to you. They say we're not going to do anything to enforce it immediately yeah, that's.

01:15:38 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
I mean that's. That reminds me of something that I've read about how Vladimir Putin works, which is that but you know what we're? We are not going to go ahead and take bribes. Senior officials like we're not. You're, you're our guy, you're going to work great it's okay but then. But then that means that, oh, by the way, if we ever want to get rid of you, we will simply charge you with taking bribes. Now, that's like the godfather thing, but it's like normally, should I ever need your services?

01:16:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, at some time, and that's you may never come.

01:16:07 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
That time may never come I mean normally a multi-trillion dollar corporation would like something more than hey, I, I I wrote you a little love note saying that, pinky swear, we're not going to prosecute you.

01:16:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, I have to think there was more yeah, exactly then that, yeah something in the background than this letter from pam bondi. I just don't. I don't feel like that's sufficient to reassure apple's lawyers, who did not rush to put it back in the store when the president put this. You know the 75 day. Hold on it.

01:16:38 - Jason Snell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, they must've gotten some reassurances. But you're right, it's just a letter, a love letter from Pam Bondi, and you can take it for what it's worth, right? But they, I think the comp, the calculation there is, they've got the money, if it really came to that, and they've got a letter now that they could show to somebody and say we were reassured or whatever. But also there's the counterbalance of making the administration angry at you if you don't do it.

01:17:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that the stick? I mean, we know what the carrot is. Is that the stick is like, hey, if you don't put it back, we may not, you know.

01:17:11 - Jason Snell (Host)
Everything that they've done, that all the tech companies have done, is we do not want to be on the wrong side of the trump administration because and and you know what it it's it is symbiotic too, because you know I keep saying this but like, these are great american corporations and it would be hard, I, I would think, for an American president to disfavor an American corporation over foreign competition. But, that said, they know that they could be in trouble because there's all sorts of investigations going on, so I think they are treading lightly. And so they didn't. Probably what happened is somebody in the administration was like why have google and apple not put tiktok back on the store? And they're like well, they're worried about this. Well, pam, write him a letter. And here we are.

01:18:01 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
But then they feel like they need to do it now but they do have a really big stick within brendan carr, even before he was sworn in as a commissioner, he basically, he basically exactly he basically again his big demon tweet about how you're all part of this censorship cabal, tech, cabal, and essentially saying that, by the way that we have, we don't as chairman of the fcc, the fcc does not need any special laws or anything to basically ruin your entire day because, uh, section 230 basically says that we need you. All you have to do is have a good faith effort that you're moderating your forums and your publications, uh, uh, in, in, uh, in the interest of the public. All I have, basically all I have to do is say that you're not doing that in good faith and suddenly, if you want to be sued by everybody, including the president, for 20 billion dollars for defamation, that's going to happen. So it's a very scary situation.

01:18:54
I would really hate to be in it. I would love these people to. I would love these CEOs to take a firmer stand. However, I do appreciate that they probably have to. It's probably like being any country in 1938, 1939, saying let's not start a skirmish because in two or three years we might have to fight an entire war. Let's make sure let's save all of our warfare for when we actually have to fight I would.

01:19:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would hate to be a ceo. Yeah, right now it's just. The uncertainty is palpable and I don't know how you run your company.

01:19:28 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
You just do the best you can, I mean it looks amazing yeah, very yeah, tread lightly read very carefully yeah um, yeah, I mean it's life in a banana republic, like yeah, when I'm working, when I'm working overseas you're, you're just paying attention to who's running the country and what are the rules that they've decided on for this week, and you have to just dance with whatever those rules are, and and uh, but that's, uh, it's.

01:19:54
It's not. It's unfortunately not that uncommon the rest of the world, it's just that we, as americans, haven't had to experience that anytime recently in our, in most of our lifetimes, you know.

01:20:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's the hard part we had an illusion about the rule of law or something. Apple is finally letting you merge two apple ids. Well, that's nice. This has always been kind of a thorn in people's side, that if you have an apple id and you want another apple id, how can you move the two together a lot of people in the early days of the app store had an account that they used to buy stuff I do both separate from my iCloud accounts to do other things and Apple has let you log into the App Store and other places separately from your iCloud login in order to facilitate this.

01:20:42 - Jason Snell (Host)
And it's a huge problem because you end up in very. My friend, stephen Hackett, was in the position where he was like he had storage on the one account but it wasn't in his family, and then his family needed more storage and it fell down this whole rabbit hole. I think he ended up putting that old account in his family, in his iCloud family, as a fake person. This is better, right? The idea here is that you can basically take account one and transfer all of its purchases and there's a bunch of caveats, but in the end, you can take all of those purchases and stuff from account one and push them into account two should I do this?

01:21:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, right now I have a itunes account all my music, uh, is under that and I have an icloud account all my tv shows, all that stuff under the uh. So I have two separate accounts. I guess it'd be nice to merge them. Why did I do that in the first place? When you set up a new Mac, it gives you the chance to to do that. Um, is that going away?

01:21:41 - Jason Snell (Host)
well, I I wonder if this is step one of a larger process that makes Apple no longer, at some point, allow you to have a different Apple account assigned to your purchases of apps versus your iCloud account. I do wonder if the way that this because they could have built this tool five years ago, 10 years ago, and they probably should have, but they waited till now and I don't think they've been working on it for 10 years I think it's more likely that they finally have a motivation for it, and maybe it's this to slowly, over the next few years, kind of push everybody to get you know all their purchase onto a single account you cannot do this, by the way, if you're rushing to your apples, uh, in the eu, united kingdom or india, for some reason.

01:22:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because reasons? Yeah, migrate purchases from one apple account to another apple account. If you're an apple account is used only for making purchases. Yes, these purchases can be migrated to the primary apple account to consolidate them. All right, there are some caveats. You have to be signed in by both. Make sure the secondary account isn't a member of the family sharing group. But it is right, because I share my my, you have, you have to.

01:22:50 - Jason Snell (Host)
You have to uncouple it from your family and then merge it in. What's going to?

01:22:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
happen to Lisa when I do that? Is she not going to have access to all the family shared apps?

01:23:01 - Jason Snell (Host)
Correct, although she could log in with that account to get them, but then she'd lose her apps that are on her account. But what you do is you do it in one fell swoop. It's like shutting off the power to change some wiring. You would pull it out, all of the things would break and then you'd run the migration.

01:23:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it would all come into your account and be good then. And then eventually I could say to her okay, now you're in my family, but just don't use that old account anymore.

01:23:25 - Jason Snell (Host)
Right, because now all that stuff would be in your account and therefore in your family group and would come in that way. That's the idea.

01:23:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So reluctant to do this.

01:23:33 - Jason Snell (Host)
Yeah well, I would say I. Actually, I would say don't do it unless you have a reason.

01:23:37
There are people who have reasons, who get frustrated by this and, like I said, my friend Steven is a good example of that. But if everything is working fine, just leave it. But it's almost like you know if you need this, you know if you're like you've been frustrated by this kind of confusing setup. But I do wonder if, in the next few years, apple will start nudging people this way and saying, well, really, you should only have one Apple ID on a device and, um, you know that that may happen, but right now it's, it's optional some people are on social media saying that they tried it and and basically they've lost access to a whole bunch of stuff for at least 90 days, while apple works through a support ticket.

01:24:17 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
So yeah, just make just make sure, go the support document, go step by step by step and make sure that, like like jason said, don't do it just for the hell of it, do it because it will solve a problem that's been stymieing you for several years it also has a bunch of limitations, like, uh, you know, you need to not be actively using apple music with it, you need to be.

01:24:34 - Jason Snell (Host)
You need to not have any ongoing subscriptions, you need to cancel all your subscriptions, oh, and let them, and then and then resubscribe on the new account. Like there's all of these limitations to it that are very complicated.

01:24:45
So I, yeah, don't do it on a whim, force me to yeah, but I mean, this is this is, I think, a value of a show like this is to say look, this exists, it's an option you may need it in the future, in which case now you know it exists. If you have been feeling this way for a while now, you wish this was something you could do. You can now do it, but don't do it just for fun. Right like it's not fun don't do it.

01:25:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I definitely read the apple support document because there are a whole bunch of caveats. I mean, yeah, just a whole lot of them, and I think already I see a few stumbling blocks. My Apple one account is on my iCloud account, not on my music, tv show account, apps account, which is probably part of the problem, but I I use test flight on one of them.

01:25:31 - Jason Snell (Host)
I, yeah, this is oh yeah a lot of developers reporting that one of the things this does is it takes you out of if you use that for test flight on one of them. Oh yeah, a lot of developers reporting that one of the things this does is it takes you out of if you use that for test flight. It takes you out of all of those test flights.

01:25:39
They all break and you can't just re-up from the interior location you have to get a new link from the developer and it turns out at least for now, they may fix this because this was a maybe it was a bug, but like, if you try to get your old link to go back in and sign in, it would say sorry, you're already on this test flight, even though it was your old account and not your new account. So they would have to generate what's called a public link and send that to you and then you could be added back to the test flight. A lot of developers really angry about this feature because it broke a lot of people's test flights.

01:26:13 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
Yeah, this is why, when I or anybody else think oh God, this is such an obvious thing that Apple should let me do, why don't they let me do it? Sometimes it's because it's strategic, sometimes it's because they don't care, and sometimes it's because for reasons beyond our fathoming doing this simple thing, because they didn't think about this 14 years ago, when they set something up and they included some sort of a library. Oh my God, is it terrible.

01:26:36 - Jason Snell (Host)
There's so much technical debt here, right, like there's obviously huge amounts of technical debt about the whole Apple account infrastructure and the App Store infrastructure. I'm sure that when Apple set up iTunes with music purchases which is where this all started with the DRM wrapped music purchases they built the whole thing that became the foundation of the App Store, started with the DRM wrapped music purchases, they built the whole thing that became the foundation of the app store. I'm sure at that moment they were not conceiving that what they were building would ultimately have to honor and support all of Apple services. That would be a thousand times bigger than what it was at the time for 20 years, 25 years, right, and so it's all that tech debt that's sitting there and you can see it. That's the thing I think is most fascinating about this story is all those caveats.

01:27:18
There is a detailed technical reason why every one of those caveats is there, and you don't want to know the reason, because it is a it is a database format or it's a legal contract about the DRM key that is used, that is, with the vendor of the app or the movie or whatever, like there's a whole, like you don't want to know, but you can look at that list and and see oh, like ad said, this is why they haven't done it before, because it's not how. How hard could it be you?

01:27:47 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
could implement this feature in a month, it's like no, it's really hard. I I have problems when it gets confused between my dot Mac and dot me. Yeah, I mean, you're the one that changed it like, like I, I've been using the same thing for you know, and or our iCloud and mobile me.

01:28:04 - Jason Snell (Host)
Remember that, oh man yeah, so it's so yeah, why did this happen in the first place?

01:28:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
how was I allowed to have two Apple accounts? Because the account you were using?

01:28:16 - Jason Snell (Host)
for purchases was not necessarily your account. There were a lot of people who did this where it was like then you set up an iCloud account or you had a MobileMe account.

01:28:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought I was being smart.

01:28:25 - Jason Snell (Host)
A lot of them was you had a MobileMe account and then you had an account attached to your email address. Also, at some point you could just sign up as a screen name and they've undone that recently. So, uh, and they've undone that recently. But, like so, you end up in this position where you've got like oh, here's my email address for this, but I already signed up for mobile me with a you know, jay snell at mecom, and now you've got the two and then 15 years passes and here we are you forgot why you did it in the first place?

01:28:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, one of the accounts is my, is my regular email. One of the accounts is a dot mac email. What a mess. I'm not going to touch it, but I do think the day is coming when apple's going to say oh, by the way, you can't do this anymore, and then I'm going to be sad, very, very sad. Who is matt? Is it gemel or gemel? You were writing about this gemel.

01:29:18 - Jason Snell (Host)
He's a author, he's a former computer programmer and he does a bunch of stuff now, including write books and and, uh, still does some computer stuff. Uh, in scotland and he wrote a piece about how he was going. He spent the last a few years as ipad only and he went back to the mac and what I like about the half years he's been using an ipad as a full-time computer really does add to the uh and serving as engineer. The enterprise yeah that's what I was going to say.

01:29:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't take much more of this captain in recent years we got an emergency use shared household m2 macbook air, so for so some reason he decided he decided even after eight and a half years. He's going back to Mac.

01:30:01 - Jason Snell (Host)
What I like about this is so many of these stories have appeared and they're always angry and they're like, oh, the iPad is terrible and all that. And everybody goes see, I told you whatever battle they want to fight at that moment. And what Matt's story is really good about is I don't agree with everything Matt wrote, but I really like the fact that he's really clear eyed about what's bad about the iPad and what's bad about the Mac because he's kind of in this neutral space where he's able to look at the Mac now he's.

01:30:32
he's a long time Mac user, but not for eight years, and sees all the things about it that as somebody who used an iPad for eight years. He now looks at it and, instead of taking it for granted, it's like, well, that's just what the Mac is like. He's like, no, that's dumb, why does it do it that way? But in the end he decided that there were too many things that he wanted to do and he really wanted, like, a desktop setup with a big screen and stage manager doesn't really do a very good job there and it's not really great at multitasking, and that's what I can't believe he's writing python, ruvi and javascript code on his ipad.

01:31:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you can do it.

01:31:05 - Jason Snell (Host)
You can do a lot, but I I think that he he anyway it's I I actually liked it more, not for why he went back to the mac, but once he got there, the way he was able to define like things about the Mac and PCs in general, desktop computers in general, that as an iPad user, he now looks at and thinks this is so primitive. Why do we do it this way? But I just if you're a computer nerd like we are, I think it's a really cool perspective that I hadn't seen about deep into the iPad and what it is good for and what it can do, and also then deep back into the Mac and having a different perspective about it. It's just a good. It's not at all what you would expect from a piece like this. It's long, it's thoughtful, it is balanced and it's smart.

01:31:52 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
Yeah, but that's why it's important to be ecumenical about these things. Yes, if you, if you're an iphone user, try android. Try android for a couple of days. Or try mac user, try windows or linux for a couple of days. After the first rash subsides, you will find out that you'll, you won't, you won't wish that that you, you won't want to switch out of mac, probably. But you will say, damn, it's so easy to do this on this platform. Why can't I do this on my ip? Why can't I do this on my iPhone? Why can't I do this on my Mac? And for the iPad? I mean, we've been having this conversation as a community about oh, I can use my iPads as good as a computer, particularly after Apple decided to have a line of commercials saying that, essentially, the iPad should be treated like a regular computer.

01:32:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What's a computer, Daddy, I mean?

01:32:36 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
it's just a different type. I'm as much as I hope I'm hoping for some sort of reunification between multi-touch and uh and macos. I appreciate the fact that the ipad is still excellent at what it does, the mac is still excellent at what it does and they don't necessarily never, as they say in scotland, shall the twain meet.

01:32:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You take the high road and I'll take the lower, he says. Like many people of my background and Nationality have a bit of a Calvinist streak, I tried not to use things or enjoy things because of how I'd feel if they were taken away from me later. That's a very Celtic kind of attitude towards life. It's like I'm not gonna like this because I, as soon as I do, they're gonna take it away from me. Now I won't. You know, it's interesting, we talked not gonna like this because I, as soon as I do they're gonna take it away from me now, I won't you know.

01:33:25
It's interesting. We talked a couple of weeks ago about tapestry icon factory's new kind of a new and improved rss reader and, weirdly, because I moved all my news feeds into it uh, I've been using my ipad a lot more. It is now my preferred device for the kind of news gathering I do, for the shows that, plus raindrop, have made a thanks to you, andy, have made a very nice pair and it's really changed my workflow a little bit I'm really cool.

01:33:50 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
I'm really glad I'm in a position that I can actually have both, because yes if I'm going to new york for or four days, like unless I need video, unless I do need to do a podcast with video, it's like there's. No, the Mac is not only overkill, it's not fit for purpose for all the things I want to do for three or four days, like, including three and a half hours on a train, including like doing some work in a coffee shop, and the fact that it complements the Mac so well. It justifies the amount of money I spent on it. It's worth having both.

01:34:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I would hate to try to use emacs and common Lisp on an iPad. Yeah, you know that's my preferred coding platform and it's you know you're gonna have a PC for that and again Mac, there's their pots.

01:34:32 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
So there are a lot of positive things about the, the Apple ecosystem, as right now, right in front of me, I've got my MacBook Pro on the table, which is running the Zoom, and on top of that, in a stand above it, I've got my iPad Pro, essentially running as an external display, all the different ways that, and it's not a special thing, it's not a special app, it's not a oh, thank God, it's working right now. It's just what the iPad does for me. And I, again, I, I I'm not the. You know that. I'm not the sort of person who can or wants to spend money frivolously, but when I said you know what I, when the, when the iPad went into M one, the same CPU as uh, as the max, I said you know what? I think I've got $1,200, $1,300 for a really, really good iPad, given that I was already a really large iPad user, and it's absolutely paid off. Everything that I hoped it would be, it has been.

01:35:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I agree with you, Jason. This is a really good piece to read, just because of the pros and cons from somebody who's completely ecumenical. He says, for instance, the iPad's slow, which I never really put two and two together. He has an M4 iPad Pro. It shouldn't be slower. But he says Macs are much quicker in terms of the responsiveness of every part of the interface and the interactions.

01:35:48 - Jason Snell (Host)
Right, he says there's a lot of animation in the iPad interface, there's a lot of tap and hold kind of things that you have to do because it's a touch first interface whereas the mac, you know you can do a lot of keyboard shortcuts or very quick click and it knows that you're clicking or you're or right clicking and the ipad has to wait and see yeah, I feel like I'm faster on the mac.

01:36:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not. The ipad is slower than the mac, I'm it's.

01:36:10 - Jason Snell (Host)
You're faster on a mac for many things but I found it really amusing that he's he was taken aback when he went to the mac about like every download he does. It says do you want to let me download it from this website? He got all those warning dialogues that we've been plagued with for the last few years in the mac and he's like, what is going on right, like, and because for him it was new, basically, and I'm that's an interesting that is a different perspective.

01:36:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we've, we. We're the frogs in the boiling water. He's the frog that jumped in while the pot was, while the pot was hot.

01:36:39 - Jason Snell (Host)
Yeah, for sure, for sure. Um, I also like I mean I actually, even though he's writing his kind of exit interview from the ipad like he does make it clear, like he's not doing it, because he says you can't do write a book or design things or program on the ipad because he did all those things and you can say I prefer not to. But I like that. What Matt says is any argument that you can't do these things on the iPad is not true, because he did them.

01:37:04
He just has decided, for various reasons, that the Mac is a better place for him right now. And he even says at one point I'm a different man than I was eight and a half years ago. I have kids and school and I'm just a different person. And I, half years ago, I have kids in school and, like, I'm just a different person and I have different priorities. And that's that ecumenical view, I think too, which is like to the right tool for the right person at the right moment. And that's why this is a special kind of piece, because it's not just I hate the iPad and I'm switching back to the Mac. It's not done in anger or anything, it really is just sort of done at a remove and with some wisdom, and matt's a good writer. So yeah, it's for people who think about this stuff. It's a fun.

01:37:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a fun read he points out max decay in a way that ipads generally don't yeah, more maintenance required a lot more maintenance, yeah, my I was downstairs.

01:37:50 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
My daughter has the original mac, the 13 inch ipad pro or whatever that I bought when it first came out, and she's still watching YouTube on it. I mean, that's the challenge I think for Apple, though, is that is that you do have um, you know, and on the other side of that, my son just built a PC from scratch for me and, in fact, on this most recent trip I did not bring a Mac.

01:38:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I brought the iPad Pro and was fine is because I could do that main. That and I think this is probably true of everybody that one main thing that I have to do every day, which for me is check news feeds and bookmark them for the shows, uh, worked so well on the ipad I didn't need the mac. Now, one thing I did miss is my high-end mail program on the mac. I didn't have anything comparable on the ipad. So yeah, you know there's pros and cons.

01:38:41 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
And, frankly, my dependence on my iPad with my MacBook has meant that it's such a big drawback when there is an app that is not triple cross-platform. My daily word processor is Ulysses, and I love the fact that. It doesn't matter if I start or continue a project on my Mac or my iPad. It's all synced via iCloud. But I really wish I owned an iPhone so that I could use Ulysses on the iPhone not to start and finish projects. But oh, I want to add this to this project and because there's nothing like that for Android, that's one of the points in favor of switching back to iPhone, and I hate that.

01:39:25 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I mean I, I know that for me notes is such a you know, I think people never look at note like think about how powerful notes are, but for me notes means that everything's everywhere, everywhere. Like'm in a meeting with someone, I open up my phone, I give it a good title and I sit there and I can sit there on my phone, I can type it on my computer and all of it's all integrated together and I think that that is the thing, that that ecosystem is really important. But I find myself I have on my desk, I have five or six Macs and two iPads and all kinds of other stuff and I do find what we've been talking about I just switch gears all the time, like I'm just you know the iPad is tactile. That's what I really use it for is tactile stuff. And then the stuff that Apple hides we were talking about this in keynote like Apple hides features that are only available on the iPad.

01:40:15
Like, if you want to, like I was showing my son how to animate stuff on on. You know you can do it with keyframes, where you can just drag something around on on your in on your iPad and do it, and I do think that it is slower, like there's definitely like there's so many things I do on my Mac. I would never think about doing it on my piece, on my, on my PC, but on a, on my iPad, um, but but I think that the stuff I do on my iPad I would never do on my Mac. I don't find them to be. I guess it's never occurred to me that I would do one or the other. When I go traveling, I have an iPad and a laptop and I just make a decision about which one I'm opening based on my behavior.

01:40:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's the ideal situation and for people who can afford it, it's probably the best way to go. But I was surprised the iPad made a pretty good companion for our trip.

01:41:05 - Jason Snell (Host)
I've traveled I mean a little bit less now, but there was a long period there where I only ever traveled with an iPad, if I could help it, and not a MacBook Air. And I just took a trip this weekend. I went to LA for a few days and I just took my iPad Pro. And I just took a trip this weekend. I went to LA for a few days and I just took my iPad Pro and I actually brought the magic keyboard just in case I needed something came up and I needed to write something or something, which I used it once, and then the rest of the time I just had it in the regular cover.

01:41:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh see, I have a keyboard. I use the keyboard case.

01:41:33 - Jason Snell (Host)
So it really is basically a MacBook Air. It's a laptop at that point it's a laptop.

01:41:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just a completely different os. Yeah, what is what? Is there a good ipad? I use mail mate on mac and I know that for a lot of people it looks like a 20 year old program, but the power is really great under the hood. What is what do you guys use for email on your ipads?

01:41:51 - Jason Snell (Host)
apple mail for me. It's the only place I use apple mail is on ios. Yeah, I use I use uh. I use. Apple Mail is on iOS. I use MimeStream on the Mac. Mimestream looks pretty cool.

01:42:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you use Gmail and the Mac MimeStream is the best.

01:42:06 - Jason Snell (Host)
It's great, but otherwise I'm using Apple Mail, unfortunately.

01:42:11 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I don't travel enough. So for me I have Apple Mail and I just am not very responsive when I'm traveling. Like I just like when I'm traveling you can get ahold of me. If you know my text, you know like I'm super responsive when I'm on my phone and I just tell people, hey, I'm traveling and I might not get back to you for a little a couple of days and so I don't, but I don't travel enough that it matters.

01:42:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The reason I use Mailman, I find for mail. The only way mail is useful to me is if I have a lot of rules that do a lot of pre-filtering on the mail to make sure I don't miss the important stuff and I can find the stuff that's not important easily.

01:42:50 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
And so I don't know if there's anything that could do that on the iPad. One of my complaints with mail itself is that there's no way to give Apple feedback. Feedback like, for instance, right, if I have an exchange server and someone else has an exchange server and they send me an email and I have any kind of filter like move these into a folder, yeah, uh, apple mail deletes the data. It just it, just it literally just it just wipes it out on the way in. It says I got a mail. It like, literally, I have to check the email on my phone but on my computer. It's for for years, it's been this way, five years. But there's no way for me to tell apple that other than the show, because there's no feedback on mail going.

01:43:24
Hey, by the way, your, your exchange servers aren't getting along, um, and it's deleting. It's deleting my emails like it's as if they didn't exist. People were saying like you didn't send me an email, you didn't read my email and I didn't get it, and so the and Apple and it's just Apple mail and it's just on the Mac, and it's just if you put a folder where you take the exchange and put it into a folder. So then I stopped using filters and that's why I'm not very responsive. Yeah, but I'm. But but the idea of going to another mail client, I'm just like, oh, oh, I got so many accounts and so many things and like I, the idea of doing it was, I think about it, and then I go back to what I'm doing.

01:44:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean, I probably could do the filtering that I do. I moved off gmail to fastmail many years ago, so I I would love to use my mail because, uh, it looks really great, but the filtering that I do, I just don't have any. I don't know what I can. Maybe I can, I don't know.

01:44:18 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Maybe I do it all on the fast mail on the server side because I just I fundamentally don't like email. So yeah, I don't either. You used to say don't call me, email me. Now I just say you can text me if you don't have a text, like, but definitely don't call me. Like you know, text me and ask if we can have a conversation like are you free right now? Like I'm definitely in that that generation? I don't know, I'm not that generation, but that mode of like no one like are you really calling me out of nowhere?

01:44:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know, I agree, really do that. My own daughter calls me and I said why don't you text me ahead of time? I can't. My own daughter I say text me. She's. You'd think she's a millennial, that she would know how to do that. But no, she said I don't like to text, I want to call you I'm fine with people talking.

01:44:59 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I just want to know when they're calling.

01:45:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, yeah, just text me ahead of time. That's all all right, we're gonna do the vision pro thing in a bit. So, uh, by the way, john ashley taking the week off, is he on vacation? Is? Uh? Is that what happened, anthony? Is he going somewhere? He's not. He's not under the weather, he's just on vacation. Yeah, yeah, good, I'm glad our guys I think, anthony, how many vacation days do you have accrued? Our guys won't take vacations. Um, I'm pretty sure I'm.

01:45:25
Uh, you're way over lisa keeps saying anthony, take a vacation, I got. I got a week in a couple weeks so good, I'm coming.

01:45:35
I I like it when our guys take vacations. So Anthony Nielsen filling in for John Ashley this week. So I'm warning him get the Vision Pro sound, because we're going to play the Vision Pro theme in a moment. But first a word from a sponsor, a dear friend MacBreak Weekly, brought to you by, literally brought to you by CashFly. I just did Matt Levine's podcast. I hope that comes out. I think it's supposed to come out this month and he asked you know, we talked about how we met and all that, and he is the founder of Cashfly.

01:46:09
He came to me almost 20 years ago when we were kind of in a crisis. I could not figure out. We had hundreds of thousands of people downloading our various podcasts and I couldn't figure out how to do it. I had, I was borrowing bandwidth from AOL Radio. If you'll believe that. I was using BitTorrent. We were just like cobbling together all these solutions and Matt came to me. He said let us handle it, we can do it all for you. And and they have. And I love cash fly.

01:46:39
For over 20 years, cash fly has held the track record for high performing, ultra reliable content delivery. They serve over 5,000 companies, one of the reasons we love them. They're all over the world, 80 different countries, and you know they have been so great for us for almost two decades now. They're the only CDN built for throughput, ultra low latency video streaming. They can deliver video to over a million concurrent users with less than a second latency. If you're a gaming company, you'll love lightning. Fast gaming delivers downloads faster, zero lag, glitches or outages. If you deliver images on the net, you'll love their mobile content optimization. It's automatic. It will optimize your images so your site loads faster, no matter what size screen, no matter what size device, and you don't even have to think about it. The thing that made a big difference to us is the flexible month-to-month billing. We didn't know what our bandwidth was gonna look like from week one to week two, and there were spikes all over the place, so it was great. They were very flexible with us and then, once we figured it out and once you figure it out cause they'll do this for you too you'll get discounts for fixed terms.

01:47:53
The whole point was you could design your own contract when you switch to cashfly, and they're always adding new features. For instance, they just added a managed object storage. They have a new object storage solution designed to increase speed and reliability to industry leading levels, because the hardware get this is based entirely on nvme, which makes it really well suited to users who have a large number of small objects. Of course, still completely S3 compatible. It will easily integrate into your Cashfly MOS S3 or any other tool set you've designed. There are no this. I love this. Unlike S3, there are no egress or ingress costs. You just play a flat volume fee. They just added a new pop, a new point of presence in Austria, in Vienna, which is great for us. Our Central European listeners should see significant improvements in latency and average transfer speed. Now, if you're a reseller, you will love the new features added to the reseller portal. You can now be classified as a reseller, have numerous full accounts under your reseller account, each of which can operate independently, but the billing stays centralized. You'll like all the new features. Check that out.

01:49:03
Cashfly they deliver rich media content up to 158% faster than other major CDNs, and we've been doing this for a long time. They allow you to shield your site content in their cloud. All our content goes directly to them, which means we have a 100% cash hit ratio. Allow you to shield your site content in their cloud. All our content goes directly to them, which means we have a 100% cash hit ratio. No slowdowns for a cash miss. Everything's already there and with CashFly's elite managed packages you really do get the VIP treatment we really have. Your dedicated account manager will be with you from day one, ensuring a smooth implementation and reliable 24 seven support when you need it.

01:49:39
The whole story of how matt and I met and how he saved us is on that podcast. I'll let you know when it comes out. Meanwhile, you can learn how you can get your first month free at cashflycom twit. I know you've heard me say it. For almost 20 years now, bandwidth for macak Weekly is provided by Cashfly at C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y dot com slash twit. Thank you, cashfly, thank you, thank you, Thank you. And now, ladies and gentlemen, it's time for the Vision Pro. What do you?

01:50:10 - Jason Snell (Host)
see, what do you know?

01:50:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time to talk to Vision Pro the nba apple vision pro app now has a 3d tabletop view. You ever want to have stephan curry and lebron on your table?

01:50:34 - Jason Snell (Host)
now you can yeah, this is a tabletop kit, which is a thing that apple rolled out a little while ago, and the nba app got updated to use it they're so cute put objects on a surface basically little tiny eight foot tall people playing on my table.

01:50:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Have you tried it?

01:50:51 - Jason Snell (Host)
I have not tried this one yet, haven't had a chance I think that's that's cool. Here's a a little footage this is like that f1 app you talked about. That was the sort of like concept of how you could do a sporting event in a 3D space. So you put this down.

01:51:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You feel like you're actually in the bad seats, way up at the top of the arena looking down.

01:51:13 - Jason Snell (Host)
Yeah, but you can place it higher or you lean down or whatever you want to do, and it syncs with the audio of the broadcast yeah, there is uh.

01:51:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
According to uh upload vr, who has this story, a half second delay between the live stream and the representation. Um, yeah, I mean you expect a little bit of that. Tabletop is currently available for a few games per night. The nba plans to make it available for all league pass games next season. You do need a league pass application. That's at 15 a month, but if you're a fan you've got that. We saw baseball.

01:51:46 - Jason Snell (Host)
Do this to. All the leagues are now doing the thing where they've got cameras everywhere and they are 3d plotting and logging every single move that every single athlete makes, and this is one of the things you can do with it is. You can then pipe that into a uh, a model and represent the actual action and animate it right on the field, which is like the mlb app didn't have players, I think, last year. I wouldn't be surprised if it does this year but it had, like ball trajectories and things like that and like this is yeah, this is where it's all going.

01:52:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If they, if f1's coming back in march, if, if they, if they brought this laps app back with the tabletop racetrack, right, yeah, I would buy. I would literally go out and spend 3500 on a vision pro crazy as that sounds but what a way to watch the race that's.

01:52:31 - Jason Snell (Host)
I mean, that's what we've been saying about vision pro is. All it really takes is some amazing killer app and you will get a class of person who will just buy it because they want the NBA courtside immersive or live Broadway theater or whatever you know, or F1.

01:52:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's a better video of the uh of the.

01:52:48 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
NBA, and that's one of the things is is just like with the F1, uh, being able to see things at a different angle, oftentimes like right now, the angle now the angle that we're showing here is okay. It's something you could have in the theater. One of the things that we found when we were shooting I was shooting some NBA stuff we found that we could get way more vertical and you wouldn't see the jumbotron the way you think you would, and so you were almost over, right over top of the court and you could see the plays way better. You could understand what was happening. Yeah, the court, and you could see the plays way better. You could understand what was happening. So when you see it right from above, you suddenly go oh, I see, I understand what.

01:53:22
And we get that a little bit with football because we can get up so high with the you know, and so and so suddenly you understand like, oh, this is what this is, this is how they're blocking, or this is what the screen looks like and this is what, especially if you have an expert there that's drawing on it and talking about it. But the point is that you can see those angles in a way that you can get angles from these kinds of things in ways that you could never get unless you had access to the catwalks.

01:53:49 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
And also the really big deal is the ability of the viewer to look at what they want to look at. Because sometimes, especially with a game like basketball, where you think that it's like, okay, it's just pan left, pan right, pan left, pan right. But maybe your particular area of interest is what about the people who are at the middle of the court, who are just basically waiting for the ball to move to the other side, for the dunk to go? You can actually take a look at that and make sure that you're seeing what you want to do.

01:54:16
Baseball is going to be so much huger for that, because every time I see live baseball, there are times when obviously I'm not necessarily following the ball. It's like I want to see what that third baseman is setting up for. Or I want to see, like, where the left fielder is playing, because, like you say, oh god, he came in a little bit and now he's like shifting a little bit, okay, something, something's. He anticipates this batter to to go to left field and then for this other thing to happen, whereas if you're just watching TV, it's like, again, the pitcher batter duel is always engrossing, but sometimes you just your attention is someplace else the part of it, part of it's also controlling the narrative.

01:54:52 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
You know, one of the problems with football, for instance, with American football, uh, is that, uh, there's a penalty every every play, there's a couple, there's probably five or six penalties every play and the refs are deciding which ones are egregious enough that they're gonna. It's, it's all a subject, it's all subjective. It's not like what were they holding? Half of them are holding they're always, you know they're always holding.

01:55:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they have to say is it Kansas City?

01:55:13 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
oh then we won't call it well, but but you know, like it's, it's like you know there's certain players like you know, like, as a stealer fan, you're like, well, tj watt gets held every play, otherwise he'd get a sack every other play, right, and so, and then we'll take, take all the fun out of the game and so um and so. But for me, I would just watch, I would just want a camera on tj watt and then I would just complain on twitter, you know, and like, you would know, yeah, like, because I would know. And and if you, if you, if you let people watch things too closely, they'll understand that. And and then you have to try to explain to them like, hey, we can't call every. Do they have this for?

01:55:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
other sports? Can you do it in baseball? Is there?

01:55:48 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
these are harder. The basketball works really well for this. This r d has been going on for a long time. Basketball works really well because it's the right distance, you know. So it's the court is small enough that it's large enough that you don't get so close to people. You see how the resolution of the 3d, but it's large and it's small enough that you can get your arms around it.

01:56:09
As far as digitization, the problem with baseball and football and even hockey to some degree, um, but hockey's hockey gets into that it could do what what you're doing in basketball as well, but with um, with baseball and football, the fields are so big trying to digitize that it's coming um, but it's more difficult than uh uh and it's more messy than than basketball. You know football. The problem is there's a lot of intersection between the players. In a way, there's some intersection between the players uh in, uh in in basketball, but not nearly at the same level as football. So so it's just it that those occlusions of capture makes it much harder to capture that's what baseball's perfect the players hardly interact at all exactly what it is is, except that they're really small on a big field.

01:56:53
oh yeah, so the thing is there's just like you know, basketball sits in this kind of happy space, it's perfect?

01:56:59 - Jason Snell (Host)
No, it is.

01:57:00 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
If you do boxing, you really want to use pure video because, like dimensional video, like immersive video or whatever looks great in MMA and boxing and wrestling, because you're close enough that all that you know the 3D feel really feels 3D, and as you go bigger, then your these, these other ones work better. So it just depends, right, right uh, let's see.

01:57:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did apple have a press briefing on the vision pro their nine to five mac? Thought they were going to have one on friday.

01:57:32 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
Yeah, but you would know, jason I wouldn't know no, I didn't see any mention of it I'd say, I'd say mark german.

01:57:39 - Jason Snell (Host)
Uh, mark german seemed to have a really detailed report about what's going on intelligence and uh, if people were briefed.

01:57:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Somebody, I guess, talked to mark german, I don't know being counterproductive, but it was a full sunday slate, wasn't it of his power on newsletter. Yeah, I was trying to bookmark it and I realized I can't pick the one thing that this is about. I would.

01:58:05 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I would love to see there was. I think he talked a little bit about the, the idea of making the guest mode a little bit better, which I think would be huge. You know, I've given up trying to show people the vision pro like it's just too many, it's too many clicks and too many things, and trying to show people the vision pro Like it's just too many, it's too many clicks and too many things, and trying to get them to the right apps, like I. What happens right now it's all or nothing, no apps, or all your apps. The problem is I got tons of apps I can't. I can't just expose unless Jason may know something I don't know, but I can't expose the eight apps that I think you should. You know, like I want you to go in as a guest and here are the eight apps that you should play with in the order that I want you to play, you know, and so that you understand what the headset can do, and that's not a doable thing.

01:58:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There was some speculation that Apple might be allowing third parties to sell the Vision Pro. Anything come of that.

01:58:51 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
Yeah. So someone found an app that basically seems to be like a standalone app version of a demo fit, and you use that discovery to speculate that maybe big box stores are going to get it, maybe third parties are going to get it. Uh, again, they've, they've got stock, they got to move it. So maybe at this point they realize and they they know enough about the, the, the setup process and the trial process that they can let someone who does not have an apple badge actually lead that, lead the demonstrations all right and um civ 7 on the vision pro oh god, I I put that in because so the?

01:59:32
uh, it's the most beautiful tabletop like looking vr game I've ever seen. This is the sort of thing where if I wouldn't be worth $3,500 to buy a vision Pro but he is using a I should point out, a meta Quest.

01:59:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, exactly, it's not so they had.

01:59:46 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
They had a release video that's coming out like in a month or two and it's only available for, like, meta Quest, uh. But that's like, oh God, why is this not available for vision Pro? Because this is, uh, again the sort of thing where it would help me to. I would be not only inspired to get a Vision Pro, I would be inspired to cultivate friends who also have Vision Pro so we could play this.

02:00:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you're a Civ fan.

02:00:10 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
I like the game. I've never really gotten into it, but it's like I like Settlers of Catan, but I love the idea of having this a live board game, exactly. But but the idea of having this like complicated terrain, that sort of manifests in front of you, it's pretty cool. Yeah, little things hitting each other. It'd be like, oh, that looks like fun I think it would be better in vr.

02:00:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I I, when civ 7 came out last week, I uh played it for you know a couple of days. It's it's okay. I mean I'm I'm not a civ kind of guy, but uh, um, it would be kind of cool in vr, might be kind of really neat to be able to look at my people click on their little heads yeah, tables.

02:00:49 - Jason Snell (Host)
I'm remembering like uh, back in the old days I played there was bungee game called um myth yeah uh, oh, loved miss that that was basically like warriors on a field, armies on a field, and you had to like walk them around and I, I was thinking the games like that would be fantastic in tabletop mode on something like a vision pro, because you could have a whole battlefield. It's like somebody who paints miniatures and does war games, except it's a video game and they move right, right. Um, that's really interesting. That that's. Those are all fun potential applications. I will say there's just this uh, there's a tabletop game for vision pro that uh currently exists and it's nothing interesting.

02:01:31
Right, it's like battleship and uh, and a couple other like and hearts and stuff like that. But I'll tell you this once those objects get put in your space in augmented reality, it's amazing how real they look like you forget that they're not really there and that that means there's potential for games like this to be played in tabletop modes do you remember jerry ellsworth?

02:01:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
she used to come on the show quite a bit. She started a company called Tilt 5. The whole idea was you would wear these augmented reality spectacles and then you'd have tabletop gaming. She was so cool I don't know if it took off. You had a set of them, didn't you? Anthony the tilt fun? Yeah, you were trying to get rid of it, as I remember. Uh, yeah, I think we gave it to one of the somebody get it one of the fans in the studio, but oh, I mean, it was a little. It's uh like there were some issues, but like the premise was good. It was the same idea of this. You know, it was a dedicated tabletop gaming thing. You had to have though it was weird a special table cloth that you would use and you'd wear these glasses.

02:02:45 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
It was just a little projector lenses or yeah, glasses with projectors, and I'd bounce it back to your, into your eyes, it was just a little too awkward.

02:02:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think there's vision pro will get us there at some point there's moments in all of these.

02:02:56 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
You know there's games that go oh, this would be great if they did more of this. Like you know, obviously, robo recall on the on the, on the quest or on oculus when it came out, um, the, the htc one where you had the little arrows that you shot at. You know you're gonna get sore firing at all these little folks that are trying to run at you and everything else, um, and and you feel like, oh, this is the future. But then you just don't see more app, you don't see more games like that. You know that's. That's. The problem is really getting it all in one place and then having enough of them that people feel like it's necessary yeah, um, all right, that's our.

02:03:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's it right. Anything else to say? Is there any new? Uh, anything any? Where's the camera? Is the ursa out yet? Is it coming soon? Where do we stand?

02:03:45 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
it is the rumored to be before neb. Okay, so we're hoping that.

02:03:51 - Jason Snell (Host)
So you know like it's right nab.

02:03:52 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I mean it doesn't sound like a lot of people will get them. I mean I'm hoping to get mine by august, you know. So the, the uh, but, um, I think that, uh, you know NAB, uh, we, we hear the, the. Usually what happens with black magic is whatever they have announced throughout the year before gets delivered by NAB, because they don't want to stand in the booth and explain why it's not there. So I think that there's a lot of pressure to have it done, um, or have some of them done before then, um, so I don't think we don't expect to see a lot of stuff there, but I think that I do think it's going to create a huge flow of content.

02:04:27
I mean, there's a lot of people that I know that are I mean, all of us are on the list. Everybody I know has put ten thousand dollars down and is on the list and trying to figure out like when, anybody who's done any vr. This is the camera, you know, and so they're all hungry to get the camera and start shooting and so, uh, so we'll see what happens before, uh, uh, before any, I mean at nab and then the next over the summer. I think we'll see, probably see footage from it. Maybe some footage at nab um and then a bunch of footage promptly at WWDC. Good, and that's the no, no, no.

02:05:02 - Jason Snell (Host)
I mean I don't think we caught it all Like. What Gurman is saying is that there's a Vision OS 2.4 with Apple Intelligence. Oh yeah, they're going to finally bring Apple Intelligence to the platform with 2.4, which is expected, he says, as early as April, but that there could be a beta as early as this week with the usual stuff that you'd expect from Apple intelligence and an app you know, an app for spatial content on the device, whatever that means, but that's like a new showcase app for spatial stuff on the device. And, and yeah, as we mentioned, the revamped guest mode, whatever that means. But there's plenty of opportunity for improvement there.

02:05:40
So we were talking about the anniversary of the Vision Pro a couple of weeks ago and one of the things I said is you got to give them credit. It's not moving as fast in certain areas as we would like, but the Vision Pro has gotten appreciably better with software updates over the last year and this is a really good sign that there's another one coming that's going to add more stuff in and the fact that it was the platform that was left out of those Apple Intelligent announcements in June. It's getting a little late, but it's getting it in the cycle that everybody else got Apple Intelligence. So they're pushing the ball forward and we'll have to see how they implement all of this stuff and whether it's actually useful or not. But I like that they're working on it and I like that some of the stuff that Mark Herman's reporting on here it suggests that they're working on the areas that we all know they need to put work into, so that's a good sign.

02:06:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anybody should I call it? That's it.

02:06:35 - Jason Snell (Host)
That's it, we're done talking the vision pro.

02:06:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, all right, little break and then your picks of the week. My friends Alex, lindsay, jason Snell, andy and Akko. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. We're so glad you're here. Many of you watching live.

02:06:59
It says zero people watching live, but I'm sure that's undercounted. Uh, if you are watching live on one of our eight platforms, uh, youtube, twitch, xcom, tiktok, linkedin, facebook, kick. Oh, and let's not forget our club twit members watching in discord. It's great to have you. Oh, I see 500. Was it 900? No, that's the episode number. Well, I, I don't know how many people watching live. Usually it's around a thousand people.

02:07:25
Most people watch the show after the fact because it's a podcast. You can download it, watch it at your leisure on your device or on youtube and places, or on our website website. If you are a member of the club, you get a special version of it. You get the ad-free version, which is a very nice thing to have. You also get access to the Club Twit Discord where you can watch live and chat with other people watching. But of course, the Club Twit Discord continues 24-7, so there's always a great conversation waiting for you. People to hang out with, good friends await, and we have special events in our club, things like Stacy's Book Club, which is coming up on the 27th, micah's Crafting Corner. Did we do that already this month or is it coming?

02:08:13 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
up.

02:08:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel like it's coming up tomorrow for some reason. Yes, tomorrow, it is tomorrow, all right, that's always kind of a fun chill hang, as the kids say. We do the photo thing with Chris Marquardt in there. Yeah, 6 pm Pacific tomorrow. Michael's Crafting Corner, stacy's Book Club I'm quickly reading those beyond the wall. Very good book, really fun. We're going to have a lot of fun talking about it. Our next photo time is march 6th. Bold is the word of the uh of the week of the month. All of this for seven bucks a month. It seems like a pretty good deal. If you're not yet a member of the club, and we would really love it if you would please go to twittv club twit and join. Um, we'd love to have you twittv club twit pick of the week time.

02:09:05 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
Andy and akko kick it off for us uh, I was looking ata, piece of software that I'm not really ready to talk about yet, so instead I'm going to recommend like one of these, buy it for life, sort of things. Uh, this is one of the oh, the tom binn bag.

02:09:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ah yes, tom binn, synapse back. I bought one. You recommended this many years ago.

02:09:25 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
I still have mine and I wanted and I thought was, I thought it's valuable because I I think that I recommended it. When I first got it, they said they actually, they actually sent me one to try out, and it was one of those terrible, terrible situations where it's like I love it, this is perfect, and now I have to buy one for my own, because I'm really not allowed to accept something for my personal use. I gave it, I gave it away, uh, but this one it's been, I've been using it for, I think, something close to 10 years now. And look at this thing the straps, the straps are not fraying or not pulling out anywhere.

02:09:56
There is very, very little wear and tear on this and I use this all the time. It's this one. It's available in several different sizes, but the recommendation of the 25 specifically is that this is like the perfect size for again, like two or three or four days in New York City when I'm traveling on an airplane perfect carry-on size. It's also perfect for when I'm walking to the market. I can basically put nearly a week's worth of groceries in there. The straps are beautifully curved and implemented so that it feels super, super comfortable on your back. It has a waist strap, has a chest strap so you can hang things off of it. The only thing that might turn off some people and it turned off me at the very first time is that it doesn't really have any organization inside. It does have a couple straps. So, again, if you've got clothes inside there, it'll strap it down and it has an inside pocket, uh, here, and it's got an inside laptop pocket, but it doesn't have like a million pockets for, oh, this is for your pencils and this is a pocket that holds your cd, your cd wallet, um so, but the thing is like, what it does have is large size pockets that you can really really set up exactly the way you want. And by the time you have this for like a few weeks or maybe a month, you will figure out exactly what each one of these things is specific for. And, to be honest, it's much, much better for me to organize it by having in individual pouches, individual bags that I've sourced from here and there and everywhere, in individual pouches, individual bags that I've sourced from here and there and everywhere, and basically pack it up. That way it unzips all the way to the bottom so that when you are packing for a long trip you can pack it nicely from the very bottom to the very top.

02:11:49
Uh, but mostly I just want to say that this is just I've it's. It's not a cheap, obviously it's not. It's not cheaply made and it's not cheap. This uh version of the 25 is 250 dollars, uh, which was the most I'd ever. Mostly at that point, the only time I'd bought, I don't think I bought backpacks.

02:12:08
I simply, like, would speak at conferences and use the free backpack they would give me as part of the speaker thing, uh, but the fact that I've been using this every week, sometimes every day, and I can't see a single piece of damage on this. It seems like this thing is going to last absolutely until 10 years after I die. This really is a bide for life thing, and if you don't need something that's as big as this, they do make it in other sizes. They do make it in like day pack sort of sizes, but they also make it in a range of colors. Highest recommendation Again, it's rare that you have a situation where I can recommend something again 10 years later and I cannot fault it at all. I'm not going to buy another one because this one is still in perfect shape. I just absolutely love it.

02:12:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So highest recommendation Tom Bin's Synapse line of backpacks tom b-i-h-n, if you're looking for it on the internet. And yeah, I've had mine for ever since you recommended yours. So yeah, 10 years or something, yeah, thank, you every.

02:13:12 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
I pack this every week for my trip here to the library with all that, my podcasting stuff and it feels like I'm aware of how heavy this backpack is, but it doesn't feel that way, it's just beautifully balanced.

02:13:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't remember it costing so much back in the day. Now it's 10 years ago. Yeah, it was a long time ago. I'm just logging in now to see what I bought and when. Uh, jason snell pick of the week.

02:13:33 - Jason Snell (Host)
Well, inspired by andy I'm, I just took a trip with a new backpack that I bought because likewise I used to use. I had a Brent Haven backpack that I got at a conference and I used it forever and I even bought an identical one on eBay when it was dying and then used that forever and I thought, you know what, maybe after 20 years you should buy yourself a backpack guy. So I did. Mine is a little bit different. It is the Bellroy Transit backpack and they also have one called the Work Pack.

02:14:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That sounds fancy.

02:14:05 - Jason Snell (Host)
It's really nice. It's got a separate exterior padded enclosure for your laptop and or iPad. I can travel in that without any trouble. There's also a little smaller enclosure in that padded space that will fit a small e-reader if you want to go that way. There's a zipper pocket for your sunglasses right on top, which is completely unnecessary but fun. And then the bulk of the space is a very large space that is shaped in a really nice way where you can essentially pack for a few days with your clothes and your bathroom bag and all of that in this separate space away from your computer. And so that's where I can pack for a trip, a short, like a weekend trip, and not even bring a carry on. And then, of course, on the other side, just as with Andy's backpack, there's a couple of different mesh bag enclosures that you can put other bags in or just put loose stuff in.

02:14:53
Airpods are a good one for up here, and then I just love the extra clever stuff. So there's a there's a whole front document pocket here, a place to put pens, place to put your wallet, place to put your id, maybe your phone when you're going through security, and then, tucked in on the back on the side. My old backpack had a had a pocket sticking off of it where you could put a water bottle or a can of soda or something like that. And this, this doesn't have that and it made me sad until I realized there's a secret compartment right in the back in which you can slide that water bottle and either leave it unzipped sticking out or a shorter one. You can put it in there and zip it right up, and there's even a secret tag location where you can fold their tag over, and the Bellroy tag is itself a pocket into which you can slide airpod or not an airpod, you can slide an air tag.

02:15:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they have a hand it's 80 less than the top bin bag. Is it better? Is it a?

02:15:48 - Jason Snell (Host)
better value than andy's bag. I don't know, because I haven't seen andy's bag except on this very show, but if you're looking for a, uh, what I like about it, they have a smaller one. That's actually really nice if you're not packing that much stuff, but this one is versatile enough that you could go for, you know, three or four days with your computer and your clothes and stuff.

02:16:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, this one is more expensive. That's the transit backpack plus $319.

02:16:12 - Jason Snell (Host)
Mine is the $179 transit work pack and the. Bellroy bags are also very nice, just like the tom bins are, and I think what andy and I are trying to say here is treat yourself to a good backpack and stop using that backpack that you got in 2003. Okay, get a nice one. They're modern, they got lots of good features.

02:16:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do it, that's all my recommendation is, uh, the toomey backpack which I've had for ages. It's what I carry with me on every trip, including that trip to the rock show. I didn't put any rocks in it. I don't know which model I have, but these are even more expensive than the bellroy and the tom bin. But I have a kind of a thing for packs and, uh, the tummies are quite nice somehow I ended up on the bottom of the cost list.

02:17:04
Yep oh yeah, you are the cheapest thing, at least today, like you, holy cow wow this is uh, uh, this is the tactical 511. Oh wait, but we're all doing backpacks. I figured.

02:17:16 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Well, I well, I figured I had something else, but I was like well, we're all doing bags.

02:17:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a tactical backpack. Oh, it, says Lindsay.

02:17:26 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Yeah, it's got a little like Velcro thing for another $8. You can order this on Amazon. Can you get it say FBI or police? Mine says Pixelcore. It's the old Pixelcore sticker.

02:17:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, look at that. So these were our standard issue.

02:17:37 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
So when you were hired at Pixel Core, we just handed you one of these bags and put your name on it and stuff like that. We're like, okay, here you got to put your name on it and then I also put it on the handle, because we would have like eight of them stacked together. But you know, the big thing is tons and tons of pockets on the inside. This one's almost it's got you can put, you can add webbing to the outside, this, this, these straps, which I put tripod, a tripod into Um, and so I just hang, I hang a tripod when I'm doing it, when I'm out in the bout, um and uh, it's almost indestructible.

02:18:10
That backpack has been on six continents, so so it's, it's uh, it's um, been, uh, just thrown around for many years and it seems to have survived. But the big thing is having all the little pockets I know where everything is and all these, you know it's like I don't know. There's like 25 pockets built into it. It's kind of like a Scotty vest but a bag, and so you know what we're going to say, andy.

02:18:33 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
I was just going to say A I love 5.11. I'm actually wearing my 5.11 tactical pants, my tactical pants, my favorite utility pants. But the only thing that I wish that my bin bag had was at least a section of that webbing that your backpack has, because it's like a molle, like tactical webbing, so that you can actually buy a third-party pouch and put it on the outside. So if there is something you want to have quick access to from the outside, you can quickly can just add it and customize it the way you want and then it's got this soft area on the back.

02:19:02 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
This is actually where I put my lap. I can put my laptop and my my iPad in here, so it's right against my back, yeah and then it all mine too yeah and then it fits.

02:19:12
It fits my and it fits this. This is the bag that my headset goes in and that goes uh, uh. So it uh all of those things that just kind of thump into the bag. I used to want to have all these compartments, but I mean for my, you know, all the soft compartments, but I found that once I could put it into my back, right behind my back, it was to to manage that way, so yeah.

02:19:38 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
I mean what you pay, just quickly. What you pay for is comfort, the difference in not just durability but the way again, the way these straps on this bag are laid out. I almost, if I pack this correctly, I'm aware of the weight, but it's not dragging me down, and that's, I think, the difference between a hundred dollar backpack and a 250 or 300.

02:19:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'm sure this was a very expensive backpack, but, uh, it's also very comfortable and it has my name on it, but I don't have my last name, just the first name online, and andy, you'll be happy to see. You recommended some time ago these little portable lights. Yes, and I have this attached to my backpack in case the plane flips over and I need to get my make my way out of it. Never, never, yes, if it's upside down, this comes in great handy and if you know, if you want people to find you, you can have it be a flasher. You recommended those some time ago and I put a bunch of them. Yeah, yeah, this is I. This, this has been all around the world with me, so I guess this is also a.

02:20:41 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
Humans are weird creatures. It's like. The more you use it, the more you're like. But this is my traveling companion. It's like I've tossed this on the beds of 100 different hotel rooms, being exhausted through 100 different adventures on many different continents, through a hundred different adventures on many different continents. It's like I would. If, if this thing ever did break down, I would be. My instinct would be to replace it immediately, but I would say maybe there is somebody I could send this to that could fix it. I don't care if it looks ugly, I just want my, my, I just want my backpack with all of my wear and tear on it.

02:21:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think this ended up being mine because it had so many pouches. But also I like leather and this is a nice brown leather thing. I mean just it just looks nice and feels nice.

02:21:27 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Anyway, I didn't know it's gonna be backpack week. I had to run down the hall, figure we saw the opportunity we took it I'm an influencer and a thought good idea look

02:21:36 - Jason Snell (Host)
you are a thought when I said when I said yes to being on this show every week, the one thing that I gave me pause was does that mean I have to do a pick of the week every single week? It's a lot of weeks in the year, there's a lot of things to pick. So, yeah, andy has a good idea and I'm like, oh great, backpack time, let's do it yeah, why not?

02:21:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
why not?

02:21:55 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
I have certainly purchased many of andy's recommendations, including that can I also add that if you, if you're doubting the power of each of our recommendations, realize that, like every one of us, had this thing nearby handy yeah, that's true it's still being used every single day. We didn't have to go and run to the basement and go into a closet to find out where we stored it.

02:22:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's there because, no, this is what we carried into the office, or whatever today yeah, I just, I literally just took mine to Tucson with me and, uh, everywhere I go it goes with me, it's my carry-on. That's important. That guy has to have a carry-on. Mr Andy naka, when are you going to be on gbh?

02:22:37 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
next. I was supposed to be on thursday, I got bumped to monday, so monday 1pm uh, go to wgbhnewsorg to stream it live or later lovely, so nice to see you, andrew.

02:22:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Alex lindsay is at officehoursglobal. Always a lot of fun every morning. Learn about every kind of media production, and on and on. It's just incredible. Seven days a week, seven days a week. So there's also the uh, the YouTube channel uh, which is office hours global, and the records of five days a week.

02:23:08 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
On the weekends we still meet, we just don't stream it. So the uh and then on, and then we also have uh. We have evenings Mondays and Thursday evenings, and we're already scheduling. Tuesdays and Wednesday evenings are on the way, but I'm not on the show. Oh okay, you don't have to be there for everything. I'm on the Monday night show. I show up relatively often for and it's just a little each one of them is like we're using different technology to do the show and we're also it's usually a slightly different format. So we're kind different technology to do the show and we're also, um, it's usually a slightly different format. So we're kind of constantly playing with the ideas I think actually I won the backpack wars.

02:23:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was just looking at the tumi prices for the high one.

02:23:49 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
Yeah, exactly, yeah they do have a mall presence that they got to pay for.

02:23:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, wow, I didn't realize. I'm sure when I bought it it wasn't fifteen hundred dollars. Uh, mr jason snell, six colors dot com. It's a must read if you are into the mac or just into great writing and people. Your last update with mike hurley before his paternity.

02:24:17 - Jason Snell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've got. I've got like eight weeks of guest hosts coming in for upgrade because Mike is having. Mike and his wife are having a baby next week.

02:24:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you did your Apple draft, which is always a fun.

02:24:28 - Jason Snell (Host)
We, we did. We did a draft this time because we don't know exactly what's going to be announced and when. That is a it's a fun game we play where we try to predict what's going to happen, and this time the solution is it's things that will happen between now and when Mike returns from paternity leave, so we have basically an eight-week window. So we were predicting, like, not just the iPhone SE, but maybe there'll be a MacBook Air, maybe there'll be a new Apple Home product, who knows? And it's a funny time frame of of eight weeks. So, uh, we'll see what happens, but it was a nice way to send him off to talk about when is all the things he'll miss?

02:25:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is the baby due this week, or maybe?

02:25:06 - Jason Snell (Host)
do, I think end of this week beginning and next? I think so he's, but he's off as of, uh, the end of this week thank you, mr Snell thank you, thank you, mr notco.

02:25:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, mr Lindsay and thanksko. Thank you, mr lindsay, and thanks to all of you for being here. We do mac break weekly every tuesday, 11 am, pacific 2 pm eastern time, 1900 utc. Of course you can watch it live, but really why? You've got a, you're a busy person. You should just download it. You can go to our website, twittv mbw. There's audio and video versions there. If you can, I always recommend the video version. I just saw a blog post by somebody who said if you're a podcaster and you're not doing video, you're really missing the boat. We've been doing video since like 2009. I mean, I guess we were a little ahead of the game. In fact. Actually, alex, you started MacBreak as a video podcast.

02:25:59 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
We started doing twit. I remember, I remember, uh, we recorded it at the at um, at those bars we do we go to bars and it was a bar and uh, the first one was recorded in. Uh, it doesn't exist anymore. It was the uh a bar in uh larkspur landing. Remember we, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, in the, in the, wherever you came in, and uh, that was fun we did one at the apple store.

02:26:21
I told leo where everybody got hacked like yeah, we can edit it all together. And then I spent I had to pull an all-nighter to figure out how to do it. I was like multicam.

02:26:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've never done multicam oh, those were the days we've figured it out. Now it's all just zoom, right, yeah. Yeah, ecam and zoom a lot easier than all those xl2s but lots of people like to listen.

02:26:41
You know the guy said even if you're in the car, download the video version. You can listen, but you'll always have the video. That's a good point. You can go and refer to it and you could see my flying toasters on my original mac classic. Thank you, jammer b. You could see that it's leet time right now. You could see the mac break. You know there's all sorts of stuff you can see on this show, including our beat up old backpacks yeah, lots of backpacks, but if, if you don't want to download them from the website, there is a video channel on youtube. There's a link there at the website twittertv slash mbw. Best way to do it, though subscribe in your favorite podcast player and you'll get it automatically the minute it's available. Of course, club Twit members get special ad-free versions as well.

02:27:21
Join the club, we'd love to have you. Thank you everybody for being here. It is my sad duty, however, to say you got to get back to work because break time is over, bye-bye. Stay on top of tech trends without the time sink. Twittv's short-form podcasts are built for busy leaders like you, delivering essential insights in minutes. Hands-on Mac and hands-on Windows provide quick tips for Mac and PC, while hands-on tech quickly addresses common tech challenges to keep your operations running smoothly. If your conference room needs an upgrade, home Theater Geeks explores the best screen and sound systems. And if you like watching the shows, join club twit to get full video access, ad-free versions and more. Get tech knowledge that matters on your schedule. Download our short format shows now at twittv or your favorite podcast player.