MacBreak Weekly 961 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsey, Jason Snell they're all here. Great show coming up for you. Yes, we'll talk about the new iPhone 16E, the replacement for the SE Pros and cons. We'll also mark the birthday of Steve Jobs, who would have been 70 years old yesterday, and we'll talk about Apple's half trillion dollar promise. All that and a lot more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.

This is MacBreak Weekly episode 961, recorded Tuesday, February 25th 2025. Put A Handle On It. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we cover the latest Apple news with our esteemed peerless panel of Apple prognosticators. Andy Ihnatko, here from GBH in Boston. Hello, Andrew.

0:01:04 - Andy Ihnatko
Hello, I'm wearing like we are like that scene in the Wizard of Oz where all of like the munchkins they're not sure it's safe yet but they're kind of coming out a little bit. And that's what New England is like today, because it's 51 degrees and we're like we are going to go out without long underwear but with long pants, but we're going to dare to go out in a long sleeve shirt, without a jacket, and hope that at four o'clock it doesn't drop down to 20 degrees.

0:01:30 - Leo Laporte
We're out of the woods. We've been lied to before we're out of the winter. Nice to see you. Andrew Jason Snell also here. sixcolors.com. Hello Calm.

0:01:40 - Jason Snell
Ladies and gentlemen, he's the man behind the, the Incomparables and the proud winner of an Oscar. It looks like uh, that's an MacWorld Eddy award and I didn't win it. I, I gave them out, so I got to take an. An extra it's an extra fell off the back of a truck on the way out for safe, for safe talking about there?

yes, indeed, but I bestowed so many of them that I thought it would be only right. It's good I appreciate being calledless. I think that's because our peers all left and we are the ones there are no peers, but that's okay, it's okay, it's good to be here, also in the 50s here. But you know it's California, so that's every day.

0:02:16 - Leo Laporte
That's chilly actually.

0:02:17 - Jason Snell
Literally every day. Yeah, hard to find a day at my house where it's not in the 50s in northern California hiding in his fortress of solitude.

0:02:27 - Leo Laporte
mr Alex lindsay of office hours, hello we're approaching.

0:02:31 - Alex Lindsay
I think I think we're gonna hit near 70 today here and, yeah, we've had some balmy weather, having three next couple days weird, I don't, yeah, my, I don't, my, my daughter and I both enjoy cold weather, so we're kind of like the end of the good. The good times are gone.

0:02:45 - Leo Laporte
It's funny. We're talking about the weather like old friends who have nothing to say to one another.

0:02:50 - Jason Snell
You know Mike Hurley on the Upgrade podcast he had to make a segment called Snell Talk where we talk about something other than the weather. That is suggested by a listener because otherwise it was always going to be the weather. So we're steering out into the skid Steer into the skid right.

0:03:06 - Leo Laporte
There's a new iPhone. Yeah, you know, there is a story Kind of.

0:03:10 - Andy Ihnatko
There is a story it's being sold as an iPhone.

0:03:13 - Jason Snell
That's definitely correct, it's made from various old parts and one new part and sold as a new iPhone. Yes.

0:03:19 - Leo Laporte
Bloomberg, Mr Mark Gurman says Apple is abandoning the smartphone budget market with the 16E. It's true, it's $600, $179, $170 more than the old SE.

0:03:33 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I keep trying to figure out how I feel about that. I think what I've landed on after a week is that it's okay that it's a damn shame, but it's okay that Apple is no longer making a budget phone. The 16E is definitely just simply the least expensive iPhone in the lineup. I'm sure we'll talk about it, but it's also like yikes, I mean, I don't know. Versus what's $600 in a Google phone or a Google Pixel phone or a Samsung phone or a nothing phone, an Android will give you. They're much bigger. You get a lot more value on the Android side of the fence, even if you don't want to go as low as $300 or $400. And I'm just trying to figure out exactly who the 16E is for and I haven't decided yet what it is.

0:04:26 - Alex Lindsay
I guess my question also is how many people? No, I buy the phone. I just buy the phone and then I trade them in, I do whatever, but it seems like a lot of the carriers are giving you the phone, I mean all the way up to a 16 Pro with your membership. So I don't know. I think part of this whole thing is that a lot of people are eligible for upgrades or they're getting them with their service, and so I'm not sure that the number. I don't know how many people are paying for that in cash. Again, I pay for mine in cash, but I don't know how many people do that.

0:04:54 - Jason Snell
I guess countries it can be different, but I think you know here's this is going to be terrible because it's nuanced.

0:05:03 - Leo Laporte
But Ben Thompson at Stratechery actually did. I know on the internet. I'm not gonna listen to this garbage. Can we talk about the weather instead, please?

0:05:07 - Jason Snell
and and what Ben Thompson at Stratechery pointed out, like he did, he looked at, uh, iPhone se prices, uh, using you know, uh, basically taking inflation out of it right, so that you can the real value, real cost, and you think that he's winding up to say, see, it's actually about the same. It's not. It's still a price increase, it's just not as much of one as it. You know, the 40% price increase makes it look like a lot. But I will say I think a couple of things are going on here.

One is Apple really wanted to move their entire phone line to the essentially seven-year-old iPhone 10 platform, where you've got OLED, you've got the notch, so it really is the iPhone X. You've got Face ID instead of making Touch ID. They've had that on the production line for a long time, but it's probably more expensive than the old Touch ID and non-OLED display was. And there's that. And then there's Apple Intelligence which, love it or not, apple has decided all of its new models have to have apple intelligence support. And so you put I think you put those two things together and the bill of materials for this thing is way higher than the old se was, and you know what apple is.

Just they're not gonna turn down their traditional profit margin on hardware. They're just not. And so here we are. It does create an interesting kind of like you know, 599, 6599, $699, $799, $899, $999 kind of price spread on iPhones that Apple is currently selling. And the other thing Ben Thompson pointed out is, if you look, we've all been feeling like the SE was a good way for Apple to have an entry into selling a new phone in some markets that do not have the buying power of the big industrialized nations. Um, the evidence is not as strong on that count and this may also be apple sort of admitting that they these are the phones that apple sells are the phones that are in this class and they don't sell a uh, you know, a 420 phone is not really what Apple's entire game is.

0:07:06 - Leo Laporte
Two questions I was talking to Two questions hold on. Is this an example of Apple preparing ahead of time for incoming tariffs, Like they want to build the tariff in?

0:07:18 - Andy Ihnatko
I can't imagine that they would have done that three years ago. I think that-.

0:07:22 - Leo Laporte
They avoided tariffs three years ago, though, yeah well, but I think that this is. You think they'll avoid them this time.

0:07:28 - Andy Ihnatko
I just think that this is more of a world phone. I was talking to another analyst a few days ago who was developing the theory that it's not a single market phone by any means. But part of the mandate of the 16E was we have to have a phone that will compete in china, where we have, where they have amazing, not cheap, not necessarily cheap phones, but mid-level phones, and so that this, if it's okay, it's okay for apple to be the hey you want to buy, if you thought you wanted, by a huawei phone, but for even a hundred dollars less you can get the prestige of this wonderful luxury and of course you know tariffs.

0:08:04 - Leo Laporte
You know tariffs in China, right? So yeah, they don't have to worry about that.

0:08:08 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I mean Apple could reprice it later if they really need to. But I think that that's one of the things.

0:08:14 - Alex Lindsay
That would piss off the president. That's why they call it money, I would say. I would say it's a little bit.

0:08:21 - Jason Snell
They're being diplomatic here, right, I would say that's why they have the profit margins. That's like they can afford some fluctuation, and they do that. They talk a lot about how they get hit by foreign exchange. A lot Tariffs is not foreign exchange, but it's a similar kind of cost that can happen and that I mean honestly.

That is one of the things they do with having their margins where they are is they don't have to float the prices internationally as much as you might think that they do. I'm sure if they got hit by tariffs, they would figure out a way to deal with it. I don't think that's the story here. I think that this is the convergence of wanting to go to an OLED face ID platform, where I think that hardware is more expensive Even now I think it's more expensive than what was on that model and having to do Apple intelligence, because they want to bring parity.

They don't want to sell a phone to people who might, at this price point, buy it for five years and say, yeah, but this doesn't have all of the stuff we've just been advertising to you for the last six months.

0:09:13 - Leo Laporte
There are some concessions, there are some things missing. But let me get to the second question, then we'll talk about what's missing. Second question is do they not still sell older iPhones at a lower cost? Are those off the Not really?

0:09:24 - Jason Snell
Yeah, that's it In the US it's just the 15, which is $100 more than this.

0:09:30 - Leo Laporte
Oh, so there's nothing cheaper than this.

0:09:31 - Jason Snell
No, the 14 was at this price point, I believe, or was at the $100 price point, and they replaced the 14. I was talking to my colleague, dan Morin, about this last week and he suggested it's possible that they're even literally using the production line for the 14 to make this phone right. You just flip it over because they were selling new 14s even though it's a two-year-old phone and they are still selling new 15s, and that's how they get that 100 up price point. So with no Apple intelligence support, which is kind of weird. But you got to do what you got to do, so I think that's what's going on?

0:10:04 - Leo Laporte
The other thing that benefit is that these look like binned A18 chips, In other words, A18s that were made for the Pro but didn't pass muster because-. One of their cores isn't working, so you can sell it as a minus one core CPU.

So and this happens all the- time in manufacture you have, you test the chips that come off the wafer and if they are not up to snuff, you put them in different bins, capable uh, depending on their capabilities. And in this case, uh, apple doesn't really have a place to put binned chips, uh. So maybe this gives them a way to sell.

0:10:38 - Alex Lindsay
Maybe they have a bunch of a18s without the fourth core gpu, I think apple doesn't really talk about what's in the apple tvs right?

0:10:45 - Leo Laporte
well, well, yeah, exactly, yeah, there's places.

0:10:49 - Alex Lindsay
That's the bottom bin.

0:10:50 - Jason Snell
It's all part of their plan too, right, like, I mean, the story of Apple Silicon. We can talk about this a little later with the one new thing that's in this phone. But part of the Apple Silicon plan all along is Apple knows where they're going to use those chips, they know what models they're going to go in and I think at this point they know where they're going to use the binned versions of those chips too, and they've got a whole little strategy of this will go in the pro phone and this will go in the non-pro and this will go in the E and this will go in an Apple TV or an iPad, and they have this kind of plan about where all of those chips including the ones that are, you know, tossed in the bin, are gonna go, so, uh, they did discontinue the se right, so that's gone it's gone and this is yeah, and the 14.

yeah interesting.

0:11:33 - Andy Ihnatko
That is a little bit heartbreaking 430 for an iPhone to get you in the door, either to get you in the door or to make sure that everyone in your family can use the same services, the same content, the same controls.

0:11:45 - Leo Laporte
I thought that was pretty, a pretty important thing, but you've always said that, alex, that uh, you know the kids get the uh all the cheaper iPhones there's no cheap iPhone anymore.

0:11:57 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I I think. I think that some of the math might also be that they look at what you end up buying, because whatever the base price is, you go in and go oh, it's 4, 4, 49 and they get you in the door. Andy said but then you, but by the time you go, oh, I really need a little more ram or I need a little more that they're seeing where they're best.

Yeah, yeah, so they. So I think that they oftentimes find that people aren't buying that that lowest cost one, and if they are, oftentimes they're shifting, shifting over to lower, even lower cost android phones so there are two things gone now from the apple lineup.

0:12:25 - Leo Laporte
One is the home button. There are no apple iPhones that have home buttons anymore, which is unfortunate.

0:12:31 - Alex Lindsay
I really, I still like the home, I still like the fingerprint better than the eye, than the face.

0:12:35 - Leo Laporte
I do too, yeah and actually I really use the fingerprint on the ipad mini. In fact, when I need to use my password manager, I prefer to use the mini because I can use a fingerprint instead of, especially in bed at night, going like this. And the thing is, I was wearing this hat.

0:12:50 - Andy Ihnatko
It'll make me raise my head six inches.

0:12:52 - Leo Laporte
And it didn't know who I was, so you know.

0:12:55 - Jason Snell
Whoa, where'd.

0:12:56 - Leo Laporte
Leo go.

0:12:58 - Andy Ihnatko
Someone broke into the studio with Leo's credentials, you see.

0:13:02 - Leo Laporte
You see, even you don't know who the hell I am when I wear that. So, uh, I miss that. And the lightning this, there's no more. The only thing with lightnings are they still selling the ip? No, there's nothing with the lightning anymore. Right, uh? No no, or is it?

0:13:17 - Jason Snell
or is no, I think that's it throw out all your lightning cables, kids.

0:13:20 - Andy Ihnatko
You don't need them anymore, unless you got some old airpods or something it's a and there's a third one, although by technicality, uh, the iPhone 14 was the last iPhone, pretty much the last device apple was making. That was sold in a project red configuration, oh that's sad.

0:13:35 - Leo Laporte
I love those red phones.

0:13:36 - Andy Ihnatko
It's not so. The project red line is not completely done. You can still buy a project red iPhone 14 case.

0:13:43 - Jason Snell
But yeah, oh well, oh well, who knows it?

0:13:47 - Alex Lindsay
may be. Oh, you know, I may.

0:13:49 - Jason Snell
I love what they said about, about the 16e in terms of the colors. It says so much about apple's attitude toward this. It's like yeah look, iPhone 15 comes in lots of colors. Iphone 16 lots and lots of colors. Oh, oh, the 16e. Well, you can get it in black or white. Is that it really? You want color, you got to pay. Buddy, color, you got to pay wow, simplify the line.

0:14:13 - Alex Lindsay
It probably also looks at what the the vast majority of people. They're aiming for the middle, I bet you it's uh-huh. I bet you they're hitting 90 of the market unobjectionable.

0:14:20 - Jason Snell
Black and white. Uninteresting, but unobjectionable. Any color you want, as long as it's black or white, you're not colors I, I, I oscillate myself through between dark, gray and black.

0:14:32 - Alex Lindsay
Those are the two, the two that I generally buy.

0:14:34 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, actually what color, I don't even know, because I have a case, because I was the same thing every time there was a pretty, it's that there was a green thing there was one time that I bought like, oh, you know what it was like.

0:14:46 - Andy Ihnatko
It was that winter in New England where it was absolutely. We were getting dumped with snow every three days. It was never ending. And, like sometime around January, I said you know what? I need a little color and some bright. I'm going to get a pink phone case. I got this lovely pink phone case and I loved it until I was taking pictures with it. And the pink if there's any kind of a reflection in a shot, it will show up in that reflection. So that's why it has to be a black case for my watch.

0:15:14 - Leo Laporte
I have the same problem with his hat. Actually, I don't understand why. Who are?

0:15:18 - Andy Ihnatko
you, he got back in.

0:15:21 - Leo Laporte
Lockdown, lockdown. I got this on vacation.

0:15:26 - Andy Ihnatko
That does look like a hat. I got this on vacation. That does look like that checks out. That does look like a hat that someone brought on vacation.

0:15:31 - Leo Laporte
For people who are listening. It's I don't know how would you describe it.

0:15:34 - Andy Ihnatko
It's a very stylish sober One of the Pope's Swiss guards if he's going clubbing later that night.

0:15:39 - Leo Laporte
It looks like AI designed. This is what it looks like it's an AI watermelon. So what do we lose in the 16e? It doesn't have. It does have the interesting that has the action button, doesn't it? But it doesn't have the camera button, right no camera control, but it doesn't have dynamic.

0:15:56 - Jason Snell
Iceland yeah, no Dynamic Island you lost. No Ultra wide band, no magsafe um it's charging is.

0:16:05 - Andy Ihnatko
The charging is lower when it does it does. It does use key charging, but it's only, it's what?

0:16:09 - Jason Snell
seven watts, or, yeah, seven and a half watts again, it's very kind of an, a six or seven year old iPhone in some ways, right where they they're using kind of the older charging, the pre-mag, safe kind of stuff, and those are places where they are, you know, cutting corners. Honestly it's cutting costs or there are specific engineering challenges that they just decided not to bother, uh, you know fixing, because they were trying to cut costs this is a.

0:16:34 - Andy Ihnatko
This is a no millimeter wave, which is not a big loss, unless you live in philadelphia, three blocks from the antenna and that that was almost certainly a cost because it's no longer using Qualcomm's modem chips.

0:16:44 - Leo Laporte
Qualcomm basically owns millimeter wave Now we get to custom silicon, because this is the debut of the C1 modem chip. Apple's been trying to get out from under Qualcomm's chips and licenses for some time, yeah more than a decade and it's been six years since they bought Intel's modem business.

0:17:01 - Jason Snell
But that wasn't the start of it, they were already.

They actually settled their lawsuits with Qualcomm about two months before they bought the modem business from Intel.

It's kind of funny coming up six years ago, but they were working on it before then and struggling, and then they decided that they would get an infusion of talent and some intellectual property from Intel. And then you know again, almost six years pass and here is the C1. But now that it's here, this is the start of something very interesting, because one of Apple's goals is to control all the key parts of its products, and I would say that if your number one product is a cell phone, then maybe the cellular modem is an important part of that. And it's a first go and we'll see how it goes. But in the long run this could be potentially interesting because, as with all the Apple Silicon chips, apple gets to design these things as they go, specifically for Apple software, specifically for Apple's hardware. They know what hardware is going to be used where. That's been the playbook for Apple Silicon, and they're also working on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips. So there's a lot that they're trying to integrate of their own stuff here and that could have benefit.

0:18:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and this wasn't just a middle finger towards Qualcomm.

It would have been justified just because Apple does not want to be under the thumb of Qualcomm.

But Johnny Cerugy had an interview, at least did answer some questions from Reuters that were very interesting.

Answer some questions from Reuters that were very interesting, one of them pointing out that because it has the ability, they can design it the way they design all Apple Silicon ie to work for this specific use case, for this specific thing. They can do things like extend battery life by figuring out that, okay, I know what app is trying to use the modem, I can tailor its performance before this particular use case, because I know that I don't have to go high gain, I don't have to really blast things through. The user will never know the difference. And then also, I know we've had our hearts broken so many damn times, but the idea of integrating the modem chip into the SoC and essentially the idea of, oh, so maybe there'll be an Apple Silicon like M4 or M5 in a MacBook that will have a modem built in, so we could have a MacBook that has some cellular broadband maybe someday. So yeah, there's a lot of potential there and a lot of things that will actually help out the user other than battery life.

0:19:23 - Leo Laporte
Are we worried about, or is Apple worried about, still having to pay qualcomm license fees? That's unknown. Right with the new modem.

0:19:30 - Jason Snell
Well, I mean they settled um, but they do have patent fees I mean I like how he said it's not just because they hate qualcomm.

I mean, they hate qualcomm, but that's not just the only reason you do this. It will get them out from under having to buy parts from qualcomm patents. Patents do expire, so over time the cost of paying Qualcomm for stuff is going to be less and less, and presumably they've got their own patents that they picked up from Intel that they're doing as they go here, and so you may end up seeing a kind of an agreement at some point where Apple and Qualcomm agree not to pay each other or something like that. But you know. But Andy's absolutely right about the benefits here. Now Johnny Sruji talking about how. Oh well, now we can prioritize because we know what the you know the quality of service. Basically, we know what process you know what processes is most important.

I mean, I'm sure Qualcomm has stuff like that too, but this goes to the heart of it, which is Qualcomm.

Whatever their chip features are are for a wide audience, right, it's for everybody who might buy that chip, and maybe, if they do some OS-specific integration, it's probably going to be for Android, because most of their customers are running Android and not iOS, and so if you're Apple like, I'm not convinced that that's not a feature of Qualcomm's chips, but it's probably not the way Apple would do it, the way Apple wants to handle it.

And if you're Apple, it's probably not the way Apple would do it the way Apple wants to handle it. And if you're Apple, it's just like when there were Intel Macs You're just a customer. Even if you're an important customer, you're buying a product off a shelf that is not built for you, it's built for lots of people and when you bring it in-house, it's only built for you and it's only for your products and your operating system. And fundamentally, even if colcom is the best in the world at this which I think they are right now, at least there is benefit to being apple and saying if it's not in our priority list and if our products don't need it, it's not going in our modem because we don't care.

0:21:20 - Alex Lindsay
And colcom can't do that well, and also the you know, almost nobody should do this, by the the way, unless you're Apple.

0:21:27 - Leo Laporte
Unless you have the hardware, the engineering. Well, Apple even failed at first. Yeah, Apple's failed.

0:21:30 - Jason Snell
Apple failed, intel failed. Apple bought Intel's business and then six years passed, right, yeah, exactly, it's hard.

0:21:37 - Alex Lindsay
What they're doing is really hard. But I do think that Tim at some point in some one of the earnings calls mentioned like it. You could hear that they just view everything outside of their own chips as legacy. I think they called it legacy hard, you know, legacy components is what he called it, and so you can tell that they're kind of interested in every chip that they don't make or design that's sitting on the iPhone right now eventually ends up in. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if five years from now or 10 years from now they're just a piece of silicon that is your phone.

Yeah, that just goes in, it's all. It's all, it's the whole. What the phone does every year is just this thing that they completely control.

0:22:13 - Jason Snell
Unless there's radio interference issues or something, but otherwise I think absolutely, they just want a package, that is, an Apple package that has your entire device in it.

0:22:21 - Alex Lindsay
Which is less expensive, more stable, you know, know, like it has all kind of faster, more efficient, like all they get all the things out of not having to go back to the board, back to the board, back to the board, back to the board to to do things and so and there's just nobody, and again it gives them a place where there's nobody else that can really do that, because, apple, you know they, they're the crux arms of, of, uh, of phone making, um, where they remember, though they don't actually make the chips and they have a problem with tsmc.

0:22:50 - Leo Laporte
At this point, being in taiwan, I think so yeah you know what's funny, I think?

0:22:54 - Jason Snell
I think maybe some of these chips the wi-fi chip and and, and maybe even the cellular chip will ultimately be on on legacy nodes, which is like, yeah, built in arizona on the on the large, they don't need it all to be down at three nanometers. And then they do the thing where they put it in a package and they build it as so it becomes Alex's single widget, but it's actually coming from different foundries. I mean, yeah, we could always say, well, what about TSMC? That's the truth, is Apple's whole business is what about China and TSMC?

That's a fundamental thing. But yeah, I think to Alex and Andrew's points too. Like just to reiterate Apple doesn't necessarily have to beat Qualcomm at its own game. It can, I think, given the track record. You have to say, Apple Silicon people are really good and they're probably going to do a good job with this. But even if they're just sort of level with Qualcomm or even a half step behind because they're building bespoke chips for their own OS and hardware, there are going to be so many benefits that you simply can't get, because Qualcomm is not going to make a custom chip for Apple and do exactly what Apple wants, Because why would they? That doesn't make business sense for them, but Apple can do that.

0:24:04 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and many times Apple is a step behind a lot of things, but it's the ecosystem that they've built out, all the things working together, that make up for that step, and over time they often catch up. It's one of those things. Whether it's maps or other things, they start behind and then you just see them slowly, just spend money. They just outspend you all the time to.

0:24:26 - Leo Laporte
to get to that other point, do we have um any benchmarks yet, or is it or yeah?

0:24:32 - Andy Ihnatko
uh, geek, uh, geekbench results have have come out. So, yeah, it does have one fewer uh, one fewer uh, cpu, gpu, gpu. So in in graphics intensive stuff, I think it's something like 17. I have to. I've got it in the notes here um, but no cellular benchmarks.

0:24:50 - Jason Snell
I think yet right, not yet no yeah, that's all that.

0:24:53 - Andy Ihnatko
All they've done. All the the benchmarks just also confirm, like some of the internals, well, and they're not official benchmarks, those are leaked geek bench right, benchmarks right so we're still waiting for.

0:25:04 - Leo Laporte
I don't know who does benchmarks anymore. Anon's gone, tom's hardware. Do you trust them? Some of us, yeah, somebody. Will you do them?

0:25:11 - Jason Snell
please.

When they come out, I mean yeah, I'm about to go on vacation, so, like you know, smell you later everybody but maybe I'm sure I mean running geekbench isn't hard and I'll tell you as somebody who has had pre-release hardware, I don't for this, but I've had pre-release hardware. I don't for this, but I've had pre-release hardware and I get mad when the Geekbench numbers come out, just like I was mad last week about Mark Gurman's report about the iPhone 16E because I got that briefing too. Everybody, or no, not that one, the Vision Pro one and like I knew all those things too, and somebody just talked. Well, it's very maddening when you do all your benchmark work and then somebody just forgets to check the box that says don't upload this to geekbench. And there it is on geekbench because those numbers are generally exactly right.

0:25:51 - Leo Laporte
Those are real numbers so you could. So if I look at each geekbench, those are, those are reliable.

0:25:55 - Jason Snell
Yeah, but I mean it is what it is I mean. The fact is, every a series processor that exists behaves exactly like every other a series processor, and the only difference here is it's down a GPU core from the iPhone 16, so the GPU numbers will be whatever 20 but we, but we want to know what the cellular data rates are.

That's the real thing, and we and we, we don't know that, although they Apple talk confidently about, I mean, I, I feel, I feel it's worth predicting that there will be some sort of a faux scandal about this, because, um, I actually, if I, if I had to do a specific, because everything that Apple does, remember that is the real scandal that Apple had to slow down the Qualcomm modem because the Intel modems in some of its phones were so slow that they made the other ones look bad too good, right people were treasure hunting the right iPhone.

0:26:41 - Leo Laporte
You don't want the Intel modem chip, oh boy that's why it's in the 16E.

0:26:45 - Jason Snell
That's why the C1 is in the 16E. If it ends up being scandalous that the C1 performance is below the performance of the Qualcomm chips and the higher-end iPhones, which may very well be the case.

0:26:57 - Alex Lindsay
It will be For sure.

0:26:58 - Jason Snell
What's going to happen is Apple's just going to say, well, it's buy the more expensive phone if you want faster cellular. And so they can't do this with the mainline iPhone yet, because that would be really scandalous, but for now it's safe for them to do this. But there will be something like that and I bet you, even Apple already knows what it's going to be, because they made choices in the design process and they know the profile of their modem.

So they're going to know what's weird about it and somebody will discover it and there'll be a blog post and then it'll be like another blog post that copies that blog post. You know how the internet works today and it's it'll. They'll affix a gate to it and see one gate I don't know, and then we'll all move on because the.

0:27:38 - Leo Laporte
Actually, the scoop would be if it were as fast as the high-end uhcomm.

0:27:44 - Jason Snell
That would be quite a scoop.

0:27:45 - Leo Laporte
That would be a story.

0:27:46 - Jason Snell
I think even Johnny Struji even Johnny Struji and Mark Gurman, in his reporting on this, says you know, the C1 is a step behind, but that's okay. The C2 gets close to Qualcomm and then they're hoping that the C3 will actually be competitive or ahead of Qualcomm. But that's a few years out, right, few years out right. But I, you know it may be. I think it's next fall that he's suggesting, which would probably be a c2, that they would actually put this in the mainline iPhone. The rumor is that that thin iPhone we've been talking about might get the c1.

0:28:14 - Leo Laporte
But again, here's what it's an outlier here's what ming chi kuo is saying on x. Following qualcomm, broadcom's wi-fi chips will also be replaced by apple's in-house chips at a faster pace. My latest industry survey indicates that the new second half 2025 iPhone 17 models ones coming out this fall will have Apple in-house Wi-Fi chips versus only the slim iPhone 17, which will have the C1 modem chip. So that implies a C2 in the higher end iPhone 17 7 no, I think.

0:28:45 - Andy Ihnatko
I think qualcomm has disclosed that the apple will still be providing, still going to be buying a lot of qualcomm modems this year well, that tells you that this one is not as fast right I think, so, yeah, I, you know, I don't know, there was also some reporting or people who think that, uh, uh, that the modems in the 16, in the in the 17 series are going to be MediaTek modems.

0:29:07 - Leo Laporte
Oh wow. Who are they when they're at home?

0:29:10 - Andy Ihnatko
huh. Yeah, I mean both things can be true. They can still be using Qualcomm modems for the rest of the iPhone 15 line and the iPhone 16 line. I would not have imagined that. But yeah, I mean the idea of them moving towards making their own Wi-Fi chips, being slower about rolling out C1, their modem chips throughout the entire line. That says something about their confidence, if this is true in their Wi-Fi system than in their modem system.

I think once these things actually ship, I'm sure we're going to see a lot of people really hammering them, trying to figure out where its weaknesses are. What situations can it handle? Are there any bands where, yes, it can technically handle it but it's really not very good at it? Or it will absolutely burn through the battery trying to maintain a connection in that state, that state and that's also not to say that there won't be an update to the firmware, to the OS that basically fine-tunes battery performance, fine-tunes modem performance, to basically take all that information they get from these first few million beta testers and use it to really lock down what the design of the C1 should have been and what the design of the C2 should be.

0:30:21 - Leo Laporte
We shouldn't ignore the loss of the UWB chip in the 16. That's a big deal because of home home automation. Uh, we were talking about this on twit. Jennifer pattison twooey said you know there's locks coming along for apple home kit that use uwb.

0:30:37 - Jason Snell
Yeah, you won't be able to use those with the 16e right, and a lot of car locks and, of course, air tag precision is using uwb, as well as the finding each other using two iPhones that have uwb, where I did that, uh, yeah a football game with my wife, where I was able to find where she was using the uwb and I was like, okay, she's right down there, 40 feet away, you know, and and so, yeah, this is the uwb.

It's a little thing, but I do think it means that there are lots of asterisks on this phone, right, a lot of like well, you can get this, but that one phone doesn't have it.

Magsafe is an example where it's like you could say oh, the iPhone 16 family has all these accessories except all the MagSafe ones don't work with the 16E it is. I mean, it's obviously Apple doesn't care. I mean it's obviously Apple doesn't care. And I think that this is the same attitude about when we talk about Apple pencil having like too many pencils and too many confusing places and all of that. And, like you know, apple would like everything to be crystal clear in its product lines, but if push comes to shove and the alternative is hurting the product margins, well I think it also messy is fine.

0:31:42 - Alex Lindsay
I think. I think it's also that Apple. You know it's the same.

You know the reason that the um, uh, the reason that the CD is 72 minutes long is because someone walked into a Sony think, and when you look at these things you know like it could have been it could have been twice as long if we picked a longer thing or twice as short, um, but the uh, I think in this case, you know you go to the executives, you go how much you know someone in marketing or or whatever, says this is the number, you know it's, it's 599 or 699 or 499, 8.99, yeah, and everyone sharpens their pencils and they just make decisions about what are the things that we think people make decisions.

0:32:29 - Leo Laporte
You know why are they buying it? Why are they buying this? Explain why it's the 16e, not the se. Maybe they're thinking we're probably going to update this more than every four years every two years is my guess.

0:32:40 - Andy Ihnatko
But yeah, something like that yeah, that's what pixel, uh google does with a pixel phone. That's what Samsung does.

That's what even with their a series pixel phones, yeah, and they meaning that those are yearly, right? Yeah, exactly, they they up, they do the major updates, or for the pixel, they do the major updates in now, august, but every spring they come out with the, the a series. Matter of fact, the pixel 9a is supposed to be coming out sometime in the next couple of weeks. Uh, and it will probably. That will probably be uh 499, if they only recently changed their prices from 450 to 499. It's going to be the. The thing is the.

The thing that I don't. I don't think the 16e is weird or is a bad phone. It's just that I look at the list of things that have been left off of it and it really does seem like a phone that they took things off of, as opposed to. They designed this to be the anchor phone, the bottom of the chain in a certain line. When you look at the Pixel 9a, when you look at even the Samsung's 24 series, the 2 series phones, they look like they were holistically designed. As we've got X amount of dollars, we've got to hit this price point, let's build a holistically well-designed phone, whereas for the 16E it does feel like here are the Legos that we have available. So there's going to be a bunch of walls that have some weird red bricks in it. We can't do anything about that. The fact that it doesn't even have thread support again seems like an odd omission, and I wonder if there was an engineering reason why they couldn't do that, yeah, or a chip, that there was a cheaper chip.

0:34:10 - Jason Snell
I mean, you're absolutely right. There's a reason this is the 16E and not the 16, is that it's not the. I mean the 16 is the base, the 16E is a sub, you know, sub brand below it and beneath it, and that's just what it is now. And they obviously had a price to hit, probably something like we got to make this phone for $420 of bill of materials, and they, you know, and they're like well, what about UWB? And they're like nope, that puts us over the line.

It's like that scene in Apollo 13, where they're trying to figure out how to be under the power budget. I mean, and I think it is interesting to know why they, which ones they chose to throw overboard, although I don't think we can definitely say it's because they don't care about those things, because it's not just the cost of the part, it's the cost of putting that part in the phone. And they might've said, well, we could put the MagSafe stuff in there, but if we do that, it's got to be aligned in a certain way and then we're going to have to redesign this other part that we're reusing from some other phone and they're like no, no, no, no, no, don't do it, and some of that. Sometimes I think that's what goes into this stuff too.

0:35:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Is anybody surprised that they didn't just go with hey, we've got, it's got, uh, it's got a great camera here, the features. It seemed weird that they have to say oh no, no, no, you think it seems. Just because there's only one hole doesn't mean that there aren't two lenses there. It has a magical, mystical telephoto lens built into it. Trust us.

0:35:33 - Jason Snell
It's been two years. They've been saying that same thing, though, because it's that center crop on the 48 megapixel sensor. Yeah, I mean they're trying to make lemonade.

0:35:42 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, but this phone has one hole. My old phone had two holes or sometimes even three holes.

0:35:47 - Jason Snell
Ah, but what is a hole inside a hole, but just a hole, andy.

0:35:52 - Andy Ihnatko
Can you hold a hole and no hole in both hands at the same time?

0:35:56 - Leo Laporte
When a hole is not a hole but a half. Let us take a little break and we will contemplate that. Good, good time, good time for a break good time to think and then when we return the answer or not no, oh no.

0:36:15 - Jason Snell
You're right. Leave him with a cliffhanger.

0:36:17 - Andy Ihnatko
Leo, leave him with a cliffhanger do not, do not tip the vessel of wisdom, Jason.

0:36:25 - Leo Laporte
You're watching MacBreak Weekly. Andy, Jason and Alex, the old buddies, unite every week every Tuesday to talk Apple.

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On, we go with MacBreak Weekly. There is no answer to the koan. That's the answer. Ha, ha.

0:40:50 - Jason Snell
One hand clapping yes. What is that sound? It's the sound of the hole in the hole. So this is a good show. We're having a good show today.

0:41:00 - Andy Ihnatko
Istimundus Verben what.

0:41:09 - Leo Laporte
The UK. All right, let's talk about it. You remember that the uk investigatory powers act, aka the snoopers charter, had apparently been used. By the way, this is all uh inside scoop from bloomberg and others, because it's never, never revealed. Right, it's supposed to be secret, but apparently they sent an order to the folks at Apple saying you must provide us with keys to people who use advanced data encryption, not only in the UK but worldwide, which is obviously a bridge too far. We were wondering what Apple's response would be. Apple has announced no more ADP for the UK, which, by the way, confirms that they must've gotten the note. Yeah Right, I guess the story was true.

0:41:57 - Andy Ihnatko
It is. It is slightly good news, cause that means because if they, if they had complied or been forced to comply, that means that people could have had their data seized, basically at the whim of the UK, without being informed that this is what has happened.

0:42:13 - Leo Laporte
And not just people, not just British citizens, but anybody.

0:42:20 - Andy Ihnatko
No, exactly exactly a step backwards, because now end-to-end encryption in iCloud backups is no longer an option for anybody in the UK. It does mean that they're back at. If they want to get access to the iCloud data, they have to have a court, they have to do something through the courts. They have to basically show the paperwork to Apple and basically put a. It's no longer a secret that they can't actually talk about or disclose to their users. So if we're looking for something good to say about this and realize that Apple is absolutely happy to do all that. There was another story that I didn't put in the notes because it was a little bit, I don't know, it was just really funny.

Someone who a burglary ring who was targeting professional athletes, got identified and arrested because they were, because they were taking pictures of themselves, hey look we got selfies those jewelry and and basically was backed up to their iCloud. And after, after they were suspected, the police said hi, apple, uh, could we get like their their iCloud photos? Apple said let me see the paperwork.

0:43:19 - Leo Laporte
Great, sure, here you go yeah, and that's germane, because it proves, if you you ever had any doubts and we've seen this over and over again that Apple does have the keys to the iCloud stuff.

0:43:38 - Andy Ihnatko
And they're willing to work with law enforcement. Enforcement is when they do things like what the FBI did a few years ago or what the UK did, basically saying install a backdoor in your security so that we can access and bypass encryption. At which point your security? At which point Apple says there is no such thing as a backdoor that does not compromise security of the entire device for everybody. We absolutely will not do that, yeah.

0:44:02 - Leo Laporte
Now I think it's pretty clear that this does not answer the request, because they wanted access to everybody's stuff, not like worldwide, worldwide, um, it just means that you know, and they're still doing business in the uk, which means presumably they're still, you know, have to respond to uk.

0:44:19 - Jason Snell
So request. My question is what happens next? And we don't know the attitude inside the UK government.

0:44:25 - Leo Laporte
Right, but I do wonder it may be a face-saving point for both.

0:44:29 - Jason Snell
Yeah, exactly right, Like what they're doing is saying, okay, what we're going to do is and they're not. There's been a lot of hype about this where people have been saying, oh God, apple put in a back door. It's like no, they used to have the front door open.

0:44:49 - Leo Laporte
And then they said you can close it if you want. And now they said in the uk, you can't close it right like that. That's, this is an existing hole that's been used for a long time. We've also pointed out that a lot of people, including everybody in this panel, don't. You don't need to use it, yeah yeah. But I think you're right about saying people is there?

0:44:57 - Jason Snell
is there a face? This is one of those politics things is. Does this allow the uk to kind of declare victory, even though they're not getting everything that's in the law? Because the risk is, if they push Apple on this and say, no, you need a backdoor, it needs to be everybody worldwide and if not, you're going to be in violation of our law, they risk a bigger confrontation with Apple, and I know as ludicrous as this is to think about it.

But like I don't know if they win that one, I don't know if Keir Starmer wants to risk having Apple say how many employees do we have in the UK and all those people at Battersea and everybody who uses an iPhone and a MacBook in the UK? And how do you feel about being the government that, because you're overreaching with your snooping, is going to lose Apple for the entire UK? Honestly, if I'm Keir Starmer, I go to whoever has been asking for all this and I say keep it quiet, shut up, stop doing this. We are at a good status quo, but we live in a weird world where you never know what might happen. But I just I feel like that is such a broad overreach to say we want all your information everywhere in the world If they call Apple on that point, I mean Apple said in this statement that, like we will not make a backdoor, we will never make a backdoor period.

0:46:17 - Alex Lindsay
Right and I think that's going to be interesting. I mean, combined with the promise of 500 billion dollars of investment, whether it was booked earlier or not, you know, I think that some of the pushing that's happened both in the UK and the EU may find larger resistance. I think Apple's positioning itself well to get some air power, you know, to get everybody off their back. So I think that, on top of what Jason said, I think that they may not want to take this any further. Anyway. There's no reason to get into a fight that they don't have to with the US government that is probably not going to look as kindly on this stuff as the last one there was already some saber rattling about it, where, basically, a senator was basically sending a letter saying that this is you're basically trying trying to, you're basically demanding access to the private information of Americans.

0:47:08 - Andy Ihnatko
We will not tolerate this. This is, this is a cyber attack. Put this aside to aside with Trump's rattling about how we don't all of your all of your rules to protect quote, unquote protect data in the EU and the UK for your citizens are a direct attack on United States technology companies. We will not tolerate that either. This is again pick your battles, go back home, regroup, have a tea, go watch Paddington 2, and then come back and decide what you really want and how you can get it.

0:47:40 - Leo Laporte
Jason Tim Cook addressed this at the shareholders meeting yesterday.

0:47:44 - Jason Snell
Yes, oh, I don't know about that. I'm not a shareholder. I know that they talked about their.

0:47:53 - Leo Laporte
DEI stuff, but I didn't see anything about this specifically. I thought you wait a minute. I was giving you a softball question. That wasn't such a softball, is it? Somebody quoted it says Jason Snell. Um, somebody quoted. It says Jason snell. As the legal landscape around this issue evolves, we may need to make some changes to comply, but our north star of dignity and respect for everyone and our work to end that.

0:48:16 - Jason Snell
That's about the dei. Oh, that's dei.

0:48:18 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I thought it was about uk encryption and that's from the bbc article. You know it could do double duty. It could do double duty. Our commitment to people will never waver.

0:48:28 - Jason Snell
Their statement that they released that said we will not do a backdoor. You know we never will. I think is how it ends is the statement that they've made on the matter and I think that's probably all they'll say. It makes, at any point, a hell of a canary if they ever change that. But I'd say they know what they're getting into when they make a statement like that and I think that that is them saying to the UK government you know, try us if you want to push this further.

And yeah, if the US government, the EU as well, like any other government, is going to look at this and be like no, you do not get access to our people's data.

0:49:03 - Leo Laporte
It's a victory. But it's our people's data, but it's a victory it's a victory for the uk.

0:49:09 - Jason Snell
It means you can't use adp in the uk, so that the iCloud keys are available to every law enforcement agency in the uk right and they're by the five eyes right so it's not a victory for apple, it's a victory for the uk.

0:49:20 - Alex Lindsay
It's apple caving it's the. It's the. The keys that no one's using are now back in.

0:49:25 - Leo Laporte
You know like well, at least you say no one's using it.

None of us are. But I would imagine if you are a dissident, if you're a political activist, if you're a politician, if you're a member of the CIA, you use ADP. The the sad thing is I was about to turn it on. Now I know it's just going to put a big bright star on my forehead and maybe it's not next. It's not the, it's not the UK government, it's the US government who says good, we'd like Apple to turn off ADP in the US as well.

0:49:54 - Jason Snell
I think, that's inevitable. But yeah, well, that's what I'm saying so.

0:49:57 - Leo Laporte
This is a victory for the UK, not Apple. This is Apple caving in?

0:50:02 - Jason Snell
I think it not. I think it's Apple reverting and trying to pick its battles and trying to again get, letting everybody sort of. I mean Apple is not declaring victory. Apple's statement is not a positive one. They're grumpy about it, but I think that you can overreact to this and say, oh, Apple caved. It's terrible, but, like Apple literally said, we're not going to do what the law says in terms of giving a backdoor key to everything that's encrypted. We're not going to do that. We're just going to put that door back open and not let people in the UK close it. And that is partially a regression, it's true.

0:50:38 - Leo Laporte
But I think Apple's assuming that most people don't know what our listeners now know, which is that Apple has access to everything stored in the iCloud unless you turn ADP on.

0:50:48 - Jason Snell
Well, it's not everything and we'll hand it over. It's not everything, but it is a selection of things, not messages.

0:50:52 - Leo Laporte
right, messages are still in the ending.

0:50:54 - Jason Snell
No, because your messages back up.

0:50:56 - Leo Laporte
They're stored in the clear.

0:51:02 - Jason Snell
If you do an iCloud backup, apple keeps the key so that if you lose your device and you don't know your password, apple can reset and give you access to your stuff. But as a result, if a law enforcement agent can come to Apple and says we want that terrorist's phone backup, including their messages, they can get it via their iCloud backup. Now I should also say for people who are really in, you know, want this to be private and don't want Apple to have it, you can do a computer backup of your phone that is encrypted, that you control and Apple doesn't have a key to. But if you want to do a cloud backup on Apple servers, all of that stuff is subpoena-able. Basically.

0:51:44 - Leo Laporte
This chiefly catches those bozos who stole the sport figures watch you know travis kelsey's watch, because travis was on the road. If those guys are morons and they got caught because they posted their selfies in the iCloud but I think it's widespread misunderstanding that that that stuff's not encrypted in iCloud and Apple will hand it over.

0:52:04 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, if you're doing anything sensitive, you should not be in iCloud and Apple will hand it over. I mean, if you're doing anything sensitive, you should not be using iCloud Like you know, like, and that's been the. I mean you shouldn't be putting things in the cloud if you are doing sensitive things, like you know whether that's good or bad or whatever the amount of data.

0:52:18 - Leo Laporte
Can I turn off iCloud completely on an iPhone? Can I like prevent it from uploading to the cloud?

0:52:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, you still need to have an Apple ID, but you don't have to sync to iCloud. Okay, yeah, and if you don't sync to iCloud, all the services like passwords 95 Mac had to compile. The reassuring list of here are all the things that Apple does that uses end-to-end encryption, like in apps that aren't affected by this, things like health data, journal, data, messages in iCloud, payment information maps, stuff like that. So, again when I say it's not a win on any level, but I do like the fact that, instead of having hi instead of law enforcement, having their own set of keys to iCloud and being able to walk in, check out whatever they want not necessarily, but again, because this order was secret for all we know they did want a door that they themselves could open and walk in. They wanted a tool for for harvesting data.

It's it's not as bad as as it. It's not as bad if they're they have to again convince a court that, yes, we need access to this data. Here are the reasons why, and there is paperwork that basically creates a trail that everybody can then backtrack and follow, as opposed to. We are very concerned about these non-white people who have been hanging out near this place, where people are kind of upset about brown people, so we just want to paw through their photos just to make sure they're not taking pictures of switch boxes or whatever. Paw through their their photos just to make sure they're not taking pictures of switch boxes or whatever. Uh, because things that things that seemed ridiculous maybe eight or nine years ago don't really seem quite so.

0:53:52 - Leo Laporte
so despite all of apple's protestations. Your stuff is private and etc. Etc. Well, everyone should understand.

0:53:58 - Andy Ihnatko
But if you're using the cloud, we always must comply with the local laws and regulations of the countries in which we operate.

0:54:06 - Jason Snell
They have it on the line on the phone every time and the whole for messages and your messages conversations. The whole is the backup. So if you can't have that advanced privacy protection turned on, if you turn off your phone backup, then your messages are end-to-end encrypted and Apple doesn't have to do that Because the other person does the same thing, right, because it's on their.

0:54:29 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's the problem. Yeah, are you communicating with somebody who's using iCloud, so never mind.

0:54:33 - Jason Snell
And this is the problem, and I know I said this a couple of weeks ago but like okay, so you signal. But I'm telling you, government in the world is gradually going to make that's right any large enough company that sticks out as providing an end-to-end encrypted service. It's going to make them not.

0:54:49 - Leo Laporte
You know what we don't know we don't know if the united states has sent a similar national security letter to apple. We don't know if the uk has not sent a similar letter to signal. We don't know that because that stuff's all intentionally kept secret. So here's the thing uh, don't turn on adp, because that's a saying hey over here. And it's very likely that, uh, I shouldn't have done that. I put myself out of focus. Hey, over over here. No, over here. And, and furthermore, that's okay.

0:55:20 - Andy Ihnatko
The facial recognition software from the nsa won't be able to identify.

0:55:24 - Leo Laporte
If I put the hat back on, is it? You're already wearing your pattern disruptive shirt. Well, the hat helped the hat helped.

0:55:30 - Andy Ihnatko
I can't get your bearing and distance.

0:55:34 - Leo Laporte
And, furthermore, if you want privacy, you need to stop putting stuff on the internet.

0:55:38 - Andy Ihnatko
You need to take control of privacy on your own level and not simply trust that flicking a switch on on piece of software that came pre-installed on your, on your, on your hardware is going to do it for you yeah, and it's a little disingenuous to say, well, we've turned it off for the uk.

0:55:52 - Leo Laporte
So there, because the uk still has, as asked for, access to people in the us as well right but again again.

0:56:00 - Alex Lindsay
I think that it's. I don't think apple's ever claimed that they're protecting your iCloud. You know that's not been one of the things the when they added this, this feature. This is when this started to move down the path.

0:56:11 - Leo Laporte
Um yeah, this was their response to what they knew was going to start happening. Right, what they?

0:56:15 - Alex Lindsay
what they knew. Uh, what they have always said is we're not going to give you the keys to the phone, like we don't have, you know, we're not, we're not, we're not breaking into the phone for you, we're not going to build something so you can get in, but that's always been their line. And and I think that taking this out is saying hey, there was a safety belt that the UK actually had a had a scissors to cut and we're just going to take away the safety belt. So you know that, that you're not like don't, don't, you know, drive more carefully, because that safety belt isn't actually there. It could have been cut. And so I think that the thing is is that if you and the problem really is and the crazy part of this is it's easy to say I mean, these intelligence agencies are always like, you know, if we don't have all the data, something goes wrong, it's not going to be our fault because we did everything we could, but they have so much data, they have so much data about you and it is so hard Like sure you, so much data about you and it is so hard like sure you.

You know you hide your stuff in signal or whatever, but they have. They have every phone, every connection that it's made to other phones. They have who you stood by, everyone around you, um, they have. Uh, how you were standing, when you were standing next to them, you, they have. If you have two phones in your pocket, one burner and one regular one, they've attached both of them to you.

Like you know, like it's not like you know, as soon as you walk and you move, they both they can the accelerometers will tell them exactly where they're. Where they're, you know, there's two people, there's the same person holding two phones. Now both those phones belong together. You know, all of this data is something that they have, that all these intelligence agencies all have now, and what they're talking about is, I mean, something that, yeah, sure, the photos are good for trials, but when it comes to terrorists, trials aren't nearly as important. So the you know, so them gathering data, getting the photos, is nice, but it, you know, the data that they're fighting over to get together is good for CSAM and it's good for other things like that, but for terrorism it's not nearly as valuable as all the stuff that they already have and it's almost impossible to avoid giving to them.

0:58:15 - Leo Laporte
Well, don't carry a cell phone, that's for sure that's problem number one it's the first thing Jason Bourne does well when the scared woman gets in the car, he takes her phone and throws it out the window.

0:58:27 - Alex Lindsay
You got my battery out and smash it.

0:58:29 - Leo Laporte
I was watching the Jackal Day of the Jackals throws. Throws the phone out the way. Yeah, you know, actually there was a great show I can't remember who was there were be. He was being chased and he threw the phone onto a truck that was going the other way so that they would chase the truck. Now that's using technology.

0:58:48 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, that's using it the right way. Yeah, I saw that and that was a recent show. I can't think of what it was. It was the agency or something.

0:58:53 - Leo Laporte
I think it was the agency Great show. So just a point which is despite you know, uk demands, apple refuses, no no, no this is all but that's not right.

0:59:09 - Jason Snell
No, no, if apple had caved, truly caved, what apple would have done is not said anything. It's not saying anything and inserted a, a key that they control, and everybody who's got their data protection product true, so that they could read it, because that's what the uk demands more.

0:59:23 - Alex Lindsay
You're right, they could read it because, that's what the UK law demands.

0:59:25 - Jason Snell
They could have built a whole system to do what the UK wanted and instead what they did, is they turned off a feature for some users that effectively gives the UK what they want in country? For the people who currently have it on, they'll have to turn it off at some point.

0:59:41 - Leo Laporte
Do you think Kash Patel, the new director of the FBI, has not sent in a similar request to Apple?

0:59:47 - Jason Snell
I mean we'll find out because I know he has I I don't know for a fact I'm pretty sure he has this is look, the the whole advanced data protection thing is the canary right, because it's literally a system built where apple doesn't have the key. It is apple saying this is the one part of our entire cloud infrastructure where we have a key. Why don't we make an optional add-on feature where we don't have the key? It is apple saying this is the one part of our entire cloud infrastructure where we have a key. Why don't we make an optional add-on feature where we don't have the key? Because they and what they're trying to do is forestall laws like this one that say you have to have a key. They're like uh, or because it used to be. If you have a key, you have to.

Let us see it and they're not really forestalling it, they're just get doing a canary so they throw the key out the window like a phone for Jason bourne, and they're like no, look, we don't have the key. The problem is, if they make it the law that they have to have the key, what do they do then? And so that's where we are. But like, so, this is I, I it.

1:00:36 - Alex Lindsay
The whole product may be a canary where, if it just starts going dark in various countries, I think that's probably likely that's why yeah, that's depressing it puts them in a position to be able to tell you without telling you, that, right, if they say we've stopped doing it, you know, what you don't tell you is if apple and google pull a signal from the play store, from their stores, which I imagine we're going to see in the next year it's possible, I wouldn't be surprised.

1:01:04 - Jason Snell
Or? Or signal removes itself from app stores in countries where it's been made Meredith.

1:01:09 - Leo Laporte
Whitaker, their CEO says they would to do that. Yeah, um, I hope she. I hope she backs it up with action. I mean I am mad. Why would the UK send this to Apple and not to Google and to signal and to every Microsoft and everybody else? I imagine they did. These things are secret, remember. They're not supposed to be revealed. It's only thanks to some good journalism that we even know that this happened, and you're right because, apple announced okay, yeah, we're pulling adp and and also one other thing is hope.

1:01:41 - Andy Ihnatko
If you want cause for optimism, it's not because a reporter just dug and dug and dug and turned this up. It's because some people on the inside were absolutely aghast and angry about this and that was gonna. That was gonna leak for sure. So we can. We can hope that in a country like ours, which are very much noted for very rambunctious citizens, uh, that if something similar were to happen, that it would. It would be, it would be leaked out somewhere.

1:02:08 - Leo Laporte
But the optimism conjecture um, yeah, it's a good story, interesting story. I hope that you will all take the moral of that story, uh, to heart. Um, let's take a break. More to come in just a bit. You're watching MacBreek Weekl Andy Ihnatko, Jason Snell, Alex Lindsay.

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Apple has announced, kind of in the same vein, that it is not able to detect pegasus spyware in one half of phones. I don't understand why it's just half. Explain that to me. Pegasus is the spyware used by nation states for the most part, uh, for zero click attacks on iPhones. In other words, you wouldn't know it's installed, you wouldn't have to do anything explicit to install it. It you know, it sends you a message and and then you're, then they're in. Uh.

Apple has, of course, tried to thwart this and in fact it's even notified people. You maybe you've received it. Uh, with notifications saying you know we have detect. What did it say? It's uh, there are, there are attacks on your phone. We think maybe it's insecure or something like that. I've seen them. Uh, it sent warnings to iPhone users in 100 companies, 100 countries, last summer. It sent warnings to iPhone users in 100 countries last summer. However, a new report from iVerify says that's not 100%. They can only detect it in around half of the devices. Now this is a little bit self-serving, because iVerify sells a $1 app that lets you scan your phone.

1:05:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Is it credible? I didn't know how to process this one myself, because you could cut and paste this and put it on that company's website and it could read like an ad, almost on the one hand. On the one hand, it's they're doing something that's in their best, in their own best interest. On the other hand, they would know if they were writing software that can detect this. They would probably be familiar with this sort of stuff.

1:05:31 - Leo Laporte
They say, 18,000 people downloaded iVerify Basic it's a dollar and scanned their devices and they detected 11 new cases of Pegasus in December. The fact that it's is it just a dollar flat fee uh, that seems like they're not really trying to make a lot of money out of this. Um, yeah, that's not a good point.

1:05:56 - Andy Ihnatko
yeah I mean, if you're being attacked by pegasus spyware, it's not like it's not like someone who's trying to get out your crypto wallet or anything like that. It really you are the target of a nation state who probably would very much like to silence you one way or another. So that means that the direness and importance of having this warning is in inverse proportion to the number of iPhone users who actually will require this kind of a scan on their phone. But yeah, I mean, if I were on that list, I would definitely be downloading this app right after reading this, John Greenewald.

1:06:29 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and it is 99 cent one time purchase.

1:06:31 - Andy Ihnatko
So it's not like. It's not like this.

1:06:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so they say, in other words, that we were able to find new infections that Apple did not know about. In half the cases, they said the targets had not received threat notifications from Apple.

1:06:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and it's very explicit. Apple detected that you are being targeted by a mercenary spyware attack that is trying to remotely compromise the iPhone associated with your Apple ID. The attack is likely targeting you specifically because of who you are or what you do. Although it's never possible to achieve absolute certainty when detecting such attacks, apple has high confidence in this warning. Take it seriously, we're not talking about something that you don't want. Apple intelligence.

1:07:11 - Leo Laporte
To try to summarize that it's well, I just, I just paid a buck, uh for the? Uh for the app. Um, let's see, uh, if I, let's see if I pegasus on here. Uh, it does have a notification system. They have a pro app, so maybe that's, but let's, so they're ready to scan, run a scan that checks device integrity. Um, for the pro app, you'd pay more for continuous monitoring, I guess. But if you at least just want to scan, um, so it looks like I don't have Pegasus installed, whoopee, there's always tomorrow. Yeah, I mean, I guess you have to take this with a grain of salt. This is a company that makes money on this, saying that it's detected more infections than Apple.

1:08:01 - Andy Ihnatko
Still, it's again. It's like when there's one of those news stories about, hey, my Apple Watch detected AFib and saved my life. It's like all you have. When there's one of those news stories about, hey, my Apple Watch detected AFib and saved my life, it's like all you have to be is one of those 1% of the 1%, of the 1% that it actually gives you information that might again, in this case, save your life, to say you know what glad I spent that dollar. I'm glad that I came across that news item. I'm glad I listened to Mac Break that day.

1:08:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, all right that news item. I'm glad I listened to mac break that day. Yeah, uh, all right. Um, I guess we should probably uh talk about apple's half trillion dollar promise. That's a lot of money. It's the same amount of money that, uh, a open ai, oracle and softbank have promised to spend for their Stargate AI investment. Apple has promised the Trump administration, in the wake of tariff threats, to invest more than half a trillion dollars in the US over the next four years. 20,000 jobs will be created, the vast majority focused on R&D, silicon engineering, software development, ai and machine learning Probably stuff that apple would be doing anyway.

1:09:10 - Andy Ihnatko
Yep yeah, that's. That's what a lot of a lot of financial reporters are basically saying that, after looking at this is basically money that they have either already committed or were definitely going to be spending. Another analyst looked at this and said that the amount of the, the rate at which apple has been spending in the past and their needs for the future some of these numbers are absolutely insane and they're kind of doubting. They're basically claiming hollywood bookkeeping of a sort that yeah, it's. They're obviously putting a lot of money into the economy and this is other. This is another opportunity for apple to mention how much they pay in taxes and how many people they employ. We're the good $3 trillion tech company that controls everything. We're not the one of the bad trillion dollar tech companies that controls everything.

1:09:54 - Leo Laporte
But this is PR, this is diplomatic PR. This is more handling of the president.

1:10:01 - Jason Snell
It is the handling of the United States government, and I say that because, if you would like, you can call up, on Apple's website, the press release from January 2018 that says Apple accelerates US investment in job creation $350 billion contribution. And the press release from 2021, when there was a different president. That was Apple commits $430 billion in US investments over five years, including a new North Carolina campus which, by the way, has not been built yet and is on hold, although they say they're going to build it eventually. And that's the thing is. Look, they are managing their relationship with the US government. They want to let whoever's in charge in the US government say oh, apple is a good American company that isn't just doing everything overseas, they are spending money in America. And, yeah, a lot of this is stuff that they would already be doing, but some of it probably isn't right.

1:10:52 - Leo Laporte
Sounds like a step up if they promised Biden $430 billion over five years.

1:10:56 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it's an extra $70 billion.

1:10:58 - Leo Laporte
It's another $70 billion over four years, I think the question is how has their behavior changed?

1:11:01 - Jason Snell
And I think the answer is they know now that politically they need to spend a little bit more money in the us, so they are and that's good.

1:11:08 - Leo Laporte
That's what. That's what the whole point of the tariffs was. Yeah but, I mean to encourage companies to do it in the us it is.

1:11:15 - Jason Snell
So it is part pr. But I think that, like you know, some of it is probably like yeah, we'll build a factory there, because now we've calculated that the money we would send bill, say, building that factory somewhere else is not worth it, given the scrutiny that we're under. But a lot of this is just again. There are a lot of kind of lazy stories that are like well, of course this is just sucking up to Trump and like it is, but it's bigger than that, because they did this with Biden too. It has to do with the fact that our big American tech companies that stand astride the world like a colossus suddenly became like a target of people in politics who said we got to regulate those guys. We got to. You know, even though there are big companies, we still got to regulate them because they're big tech and they're bad. And this is Apple's way of saying oh, no, no, no, no. Look how good we are. And if you look at those press releases, you see them. They will list the app economy.

1:12:06 - Alex Lindsay
They'll talk about independent software developers who are part of the economy and how much they contribute and they will list states they will.

1:12:14 - Jason Snell
They'll say we've got a server farm in oregon and another one in north carolina and we just opened a new campus in texas and we got this in nevada, and I mean that is like the apollo program, apollo program having at least one part supplier in every single congressional district right.

1:12:28 - Leo Laporte
This is exactly so. Here's the paragraph from the press release. The $500 billion commitment includes Apple's work with thousands of suppliers across all 50 states, direct employment, apple intelligence infrastructure data centers, corporate facilities, apple TV productions in 20 states. Apple remains one of the largest US taxpayers, having than 75 billion in us taxes over the past five years, 19 billion dollars in 2024 alone. But you know what I also have to say good on the us government for putting pressure on apple to to rehome this stuff, right, right.

1:13:07 - Andy Ihnatko
No, this is why I personally and I'm only speaking for myself here this is why I find this concerning and galling that, yeah, this company, apple, is not going to make any money unless they are investing in their own company, and that also means investing in resources in the United States, and it's also been in their best interests no matter who won would have won the election in january to get as much manufacturing out of china as possible. Mostly they're putting that in india. They're the congratulations. They're manufacturing, I think, 25 percent of the uh, the iPhone 16 and 16es this year and next. But the thing is they're also adding credibility to the Trump administration.

We heard about this first not from Apple, but from Air Force One. Trump basically saying oh yeah, I had a really great meeting with Tim Cook. We're talking about the tariffs. They decided they're going to do this. And because of my guidance, because of whatever he put a post on Trump's social, on he's, they're decided they're going to do this. And because of my guidance, because of whatever he put a post on Trump's social, on truth social, all all caps. Of course, apple has just announced a record $500 billion investment in the United States of America. The reason faith in what we are doing, without which they wouldn't be investing 10 cents.

1:14:22 - Leo Laporte
Thank, you or an Apple. Yeah, we strong on the hell out of of them, but either way it's. I mean, I would rather see Apple spend the money in the US than India. Now, I know we have listeners in India who might feel otherwise, but, speaking as an American for an American company, why don't? It's?

1:14:40 - Andy Ihnatko
good, I'll end this my part unless they're, unless it's bs unless it's just, it's. I just, I just, I just think that when you invite an administration to use yourself, use the company for pr purposes, to basically create credibility where otherwise there might not be much for or not yet for tariffs and for whatever strong-arming golden age of america stuff that trump is pushing, I feel as though that means that tim cook is, in some has to be held responsible partly for co-signing on the policies of that administration.

1:15:13 - Leo Laporte
Well, let me ask you this, that's all. Is there any negative to apple investing and moving as much as it can out of china into the united states?

1:15:23 - Alex Lindsay
I don't think it's moving out of china into the united states. It's moving out of china into vietnam and it's moving out of China into Vietnam and India and Brazil and other places like that. The kind of stuff that they're talking about Wouldn't it be better if they moved to the US. They can't. We don't have the capacity to do what we're doing in China. We do not have the people. Well, let's make it that. How do we solve that?

1:15:42 - Andy Ihnatko
That's a 20-year problem Like it is not like we won't be using phones. Let's not forget that Biden was doing that with the Chips Act. We're trying to achieve that as well.

1:15:50 - Alex Lindsay
It is but it's a 20-year problem, like that's at best 20 years, and we won't even be using these phones. I don't even know what Apple will be doing when you're able to get hundreds of thousands of tech. The tech that's required to do these is hundreds of thousands of people being trained to do something that we've given up on, you know. And so, like we're trying to go, we're trying to, you know, do this hard curve. I agree that we need to have you know more of that uh, skillset, but I don't think that that's really coming back Like it's not. It's you know, and and it's a very rare. These are in the United States. These are rare skills and most of those skills actually sit in. From what I understand, most of them sit in the defense industry, because that's the stuff that has to be done here. So so the Raytheons, the, the, you know, those types have these really really fine machinists and so on and so forth, but but outside of that, most of it is those are really expensive projects that have, you know that pay what it takes to have an American work on it, you know, and it's. But even then, it's a rare skill, you know, to have those kinds of being able to use those kind of tooling, and so I think that I think that's the challenge.

Really, I don't think that they can bring. They should be bringing. We should find things that people should be doing here. It's not like we can't invest in people being productive, but I don't think that trying to build phones is going to be one of those. I mean because the phone will have to cost twice, twice as much, and we again. The amount of training that it would require is makes, you know, a trip to the moon. Look like a walk in the park, like you know, it is an incredible. It would have to be a near space launch of of work, and there's no guarantee that we would win. You know, there's no guarantee that they would pay off.

1:17:31 - Leo Laporte
You know, like it's just well, it's good, then we're doing it in houston, right, this they're. They're building a quarter million square foot again a server manufacturing facility.

1:17:40 - Jason Snell
And wait a minute, apple doesn't make servers they do for private cloud computers, their own servers themselves and, and actually I saw somebody say that's an interesting angle, which is maybe they make servers. They do for private cloud computers, their own servers that they're building themselves, and actually I saw somebody say that's an interesting angle, which is maybe they feel more comfortable making servers. Remember, we have all those rumors and stories that were never really proven about, like China inserting spy hardware inside of server builds Well you build it yourself in the United.

States. Maybe you feel better about that too. I think, Apple's a global company, but it doesn't hurt. I think this might have changed their trajectory a little bit, but I think more this is about optics that it got to be the point where people were like oh Apple, all they do is they're not really American, all they do is make their phones in China and, first off, it misses the fact that the vast majority of Apple's engineering is happening in Cupertino.

1:18:30 - Leo Laporte
Well, apple kind of you know, Apple admits that there's a problem by saying designed in California.

1:18:35 - Jason Snell
Well, yeah, but at the same time, I think the perception was Apple's not really an American company. Apple's actually doing everything in China, and so part of the PR here is just to say that's not true, that we have lots of stuff that we do in China. Part of the PR here is just to say that's not true, that we have lots of stuff that we do in China. And it's true, and I are in California and in the rest of the United States, and that's true too. It's a global company, but but it's fighting against this perception that it has abandoned the United States, and that's not true either. To Alex's point, I think they do a lot in the United States, but there are limits to what they're able to do here, since they're completing in a globalized world. Now, if globalization vanishes in the next 20 years, well, everything's going to be real different then, but for now, this is where we are, and the things that come back to the United States are highly automated, like that's.

1:19:18 - Alex Lindsay
What I mean, that's what you're going to see more of is when they, these big investments, will be in R&D and it'll be in building things, where there's a lot of machines doing those things, doing as much as they can to do it. It's not going to be hiring the same number of people in the United States that are working overseas right now. That's not a viable solution, and so I know that people want it to be, but it just isn't.

1:19:38 - Leo Laporte
Look, here's a picture of an Apple employee getting trained to use advanced EUV equipment.

1:19:45 - Jason Snell
Everybody's happy.

1:19:48 - Leo Laporte
I like it that he's's. You know he's american because he's wearing his baseball cap backwards.

1:19:51 - Jason Snell
Are they severed or are those just?

1:19:52 - Leo Laporte
this definitely looks like the severed floor. I don't know, might just be me. Uh, they both, you know. Oh, hey, isn't that great. He's wearing airpods max. How many airpods max you think are worn in factories around the world? That's a very expensive headphone for ear protection. Anyway, I love it. These are clearly staged right. I mean, maybe they aren't. Maybe those are real Apple employees, not not actors dressed in black t-shirts dressed in black t-shirts. Uh, anyway, and again, I want to support it. I, you know, I I'm not, everybody knows I'm not the biggest fan of the president right now, but, uh, I am in favor of American companies. However, we have to convince them absolutely moving more manufacturing and jobs here. I think that's a good thing for our country.

1:20:46 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, yeah, I'll I'll say is that I don't like the idea that this is apparently mostly smoke and mirrors.

1:20:54 - Leo Laporte
It was that's what worries me.

1:20:56 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it has to be genuine, you know we couldn't have done this under biden but under trump. These opportunities and also, of course, putting a little pressure on us, which the government is, you know, sometimes required to do to make us do the right thing. Essentially, I don't think anything has really changed, but again, once you, I would be saying the exact same thing. If this were, if this were a Biden, the Biden White House which it was in 2021 when they did this in 2021 when they did this.

If this was a kamala harris white house who was tweeting out, hey, the we could. We managed to convince tim cook to do this I would be saying, no, you didn't. And now tim is an apple, is allowing themselves to be exploited to legitimize someone who's trying to put over some very very sour because that was in the white house.

1:21:41 - Jason Snell
I will say this press release gets released if kamala harris is the president too.

1:21:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, of course exactly move it and maybe don't make it smoke and mirrors. Maybe make some jobs here. Wouldn't that be a good idea?

1:21:53 - Alex Lindsay
apple's made a couple jobs here, like it's not, it's not like that.

1:21:55 - Leo Laporte
They haven't hired anybody in the united states no, I agree I understand, I think I believe this is more like showing your work of the country. Yeah, for just the five things you did last week, yeah but it is it's work.

1:22:05 - Jason Snell
It's saying, yeah, we are here, here we are. It's not necessarily like I mean Donald Trump is going to say oh well, I talked to Tim Apple and he said 500 billion. And so I look at me and he did in fact say that. But from Apple's perspective, they're just like look, look at us, we continue to invest in America, where they're not saying thank you so much to the government. They're letting them take credit if they want to. But this is more like showing their work that yes, we are a legitimate American company who invests in America.

1:22:36 - Andy Ihnatko
And speaking of showing their work, at least again for the things I've been saying that might sound nasty against Apple, at least Tim personally and on behalf of Apple, not as a personal statement has been standing behind the DEI initiatives that Apple has been pushing through. They're not backing down Other companies are having to. Well, we have to close these offices and we have to change this officer from a DEI officer to a personnel officer. But even during the shareholders vote, the shareholders meeting, which again some group basically put it on the shareholders agenda that, oh, we vote for Apple to basically get rid of DEI initiatives, tim, it was voted down by shareholders as everyone thought they would. They said our strength has always come from hiring the very best people and then providing a culture of collaboration, one where people with diverse backgrounds and perspectives come together to innovate and create something magical for our users. We will continue to work together to create a culture of belonging where everyone can do their best work and will remain committed to the values that have always made us who we are.

And the only stick of butter they gave the Trump administration was basically saying again quoting here we've never had quotas or targets at Apple and as the legal landscape around these issues evolves, we might have to change.

We may need to make some changes to comply, which is fair. If they basically can't sell anything to the government while still having an actual officer that has the initials DEI in it, it's a loss. I would love to see them fight it absolutely to the last beach, to the last stone, to the last person. But I don't see a huge difference as long as they are still protecting their people, as long as they're still creating a place of actual diversity and inclusion and safety for everybody. Change the name of a title from DEI to human resource manager pre-potentate is a small change. Again, I would love to see them again fight all the way down to the mattresses on this. But I appreciate that If something has been made illegal in the United States of America and they're no longer capable of doing it, that is a much bigger ask than simply saying no, we're not going to do it, than standing that firm.

1:24:50 - Jason Snell
And I think that's why he said we'll retain our values. Regardless of having to adjust based on the laws, we're going to retain our values and that those are our values. It's funny you mentioned all the companies that just sort of like, oh yeah, let's sweep all that stuff away. It's almost as if those companies never really believed in it and this is a great opportunity for them to get rid of it. And I will say what you will about Tim Cook and Apple I do think they believe it.

1:25:16 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and that doesn't denigrate the efforts at Google and elsewhere. It's always a long, long discussion and the weather the political and the commercial and the social weather allows the people who are arguing for DEI in 2016, 2015, 2018, 2020 to win the argument and win supporters and to win the day. And sometimes the weather changes and they have to try to get the exact same things done, their same priorities, the same values, without using language that will simply set people off. I hate that. This is the reality we live in, but that's the reality we live in. But again, you're absolutely right. Bravo to Apple for leaving it.

Tim did not have to say anything. This was a stupid request to cease DEI efforts question that was put on the shareholder ballot. Again, there's a conservative group that's been putting that on shareholder ballots everywhere. They could have just basically saying okay, you're ready. Yes, we don't have to respond to this at all. The fact that he made a clear statement saying, yeah, we don't, we're not going to back down from this. This is a core value that we don't feel as any need to get rid of. Uh, that's something they didn't have to do.

1:26:26 - Leo Laporte
And the fact they did absolutely should get credit for well, I guess we've covered that story. So let me go back to the story we were talking about uh. Apparently, tim Cook was uh at the White House on Thursday and, according to the president, he told him he was going to stop two plants in Mexico and we'll build products in the US instead, and will build products in the US instead. Now, apple did not announce that. That wasn't in the press release. Is that credible? Is that something Apple was doing anyway, or is that made up? We don't know.

1:26:56 - Andy Ihnatko
Doesn't sound like it. There was a fact checker that I read yesterday that basically was trying to figure out what Trump could have been talking about. Bloomberg says it's not clear what manufacturing facilities Trump was referencing.

1:27:07 - Leo Laporte
They parts from a couple custom companies in Mexico and that was part of Foxconn has a manufacturing presence in Mexico, but it's it's planning to expand its footprint there um, anyway, I mean, oftentimes these quotes are not acclimated to reality.

1:27:24 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it's just made up.

1:27:26 - Leo Laporte
Trump told reporters later Friday he and Cook met at length. He's going to start building. Trump said Very big numbers. You have to speak to him because I don't remember. I assume they're going to announce it at some point and Representative Frapple did not respond to requests for comment, so I don't know. I don't know.

1:27:42 - Jason Snell
I got to say though, this is how you manage the president of the United States. Give him a win. Tim Cook, he's good at this. He was good at this the last time. He's good at this. He's not going to be perfect and we're not going to love everything about it, but he sees some existential threats for Apple in being perceived as being an enemy of the United States. They don't want to be that. They want to be a good example. And this is where you say look at all these things that we're doing. And then, when the president just blurts out, like oh, I talked to Tim and it's great, and they're going to do a bunch of great stuff, like that's not bad for Apple. You may not like it.

1:28:16 - Alex Lindsay
And the soft thing is, the next thing is going to be you know Tim's having conversations and going. You know it's crazy that the Europeans are telling us what to do, like that's a thing you know.

Like like that's a you know, and it puts them in a much bigger position to to have Trump start to well that we see that. Then we see, like, when we, when we see that three or four weeks from now, we know this is the seed for the conversation that occurs that next, that would not happen because he'd let him dangle if, if they didn't make the announcement.

1:28:45 - Jason Snell
He'll also be at that Houston factory when that first server rolls off the assembly line. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:28:50 - Andy Ihnatko
But that too is an ethical question for Apple. Again, it's a boilerplate and again understandable diplomatic language when they are told by China or another country to take all VPN apps off of the app store. They have to comply with the laws and regulations in the countries they operate in. But when it comes to, we're going to try to use our influence with this administration to use the diplomatic might, the economic might and maybe even the military might of the United States government to tell the UK and tell the EU that, yeah, we're not going to pay any of the fines that you levy against us, us Apple, for not opening up our app store. We're not going to make changes to our hardware or our software as required by your laws. We are going to ignore all of your laws because we've got a big guy who can basically wave a big stick at you.

1:29:47 - Alex Lindsay
That I don't know if that, if that, if that's going to happen.

1:29:50 - Andy Ihnatko
That's an ethical issue.

1:29:52 - Alex Lindsay
I don't think they're going to ignore them. They're just going to tell them to back off and the and the issue is that spotify and all those companies are using their political, their political engine to to create those laws in the first place. Like you know't come up with them. The European Union did not come up with these on their own. These are their companies telling them that you have to defend us from those companies. This is all a proxy battle between these companies of where they are, and I think that we probably should be properly jaded in the conversation.

1:30:25 - Andy Ihnatko
We disagree on this point, and that's all I'll say let's take a break when we come back.

1:30:31 - Leo Laporte
Uh, I could talk about severance. That would be fun.

1:30:34 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know, we'll have, we'll find something uh, you're watching, I swear, I sent you that email.

1:30:42 - Leo Laporte
I got your five points, I fed it to AI and it can't make heads or tails. That's the thing that scares me is the idea that AI could decide who to hire and fire. That's isn't that exactly what we were worried about?

1:30:55 - Jason Snell
I mean, the hiring is already happening. Right, that part's already happening.

1:30:59 - Alex Lindsay
AI hiring. Yeah, like when you really, when you put your resume in, there's a you know there's there's AI that's going to look at your resume and make a bunch of decisions. The HR won't see 90 to 95% of the people who apply to a job because the AI goes through and just sorts out all the things that are not. Oh yeah, that's, that's an issue, isn't it? Yeah, so, so it's, it's already, and people talk. People talk about gaming the ai by building your resumes in certain ways.

I don't know if it's oh really, yeah, wow, but it's, but it's all making sure you put the things in that it's looking for that kind of thing. My name is poindexter q.

1:31:35 - Andy Ihnatko
No, people call me drop tables rm star little johnny drop tables yeah exactly, uh, let's take a little tiny break.

1:31:46 - Leo Laporte
Alex lindsey, andy inaco, Jason snell, freeze in that position and we will return momentarily with MacBreak Weekly.

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All right, all right. All right, let's move on to less uh difficult uh uh problems here. I don't know what those would be. Um, Macbook air stocks dwindling, confirming a imminent according to mark german release of an m4 Macbook air. Yes, we said last week, march, right, yeah, that's imminent. We're at the end of the month march is itself imminent now.

Yeah, yes, it comes in like a lion and then sells m4 Macbook airs yep okay nothing more to say. We don't have any better date than that. It could be march 31st, right?

1:35:41 - Jason Snell
we don't seem to have any idea exactly when, but it's coming and this is all the signs point to it. But it makes sense.

1:35:48 - Alex Lindsay
Next question about the air. Jason, I think you've had both sitting around. Have you tested the mics at all between the two?

1:35:57 - Leo Laporte
You're all into these new mics, aren't you?

1:36:00 - Alex Lindsay
You love these Well we're looking pretty closely and it's that there is the because. What we're looking at right now is we have a problem with Michael Krasny's show of people remotely using their computers, or they're very good writers, very good hosts, very good, but they're not techie.

Yeah, and even sending mics sometimes is problematic, and so we were like, why don't we just send them a laptop, um? And but in the marketing of course it says studio mics for the mac pro, Macbook pro, and they say, uh, um, air, for in the air. It's like high quality beam forming or whatever, but it's not the same, like it doesn't. And I don't know if you've tested that to see you know oh, this generation.

1:36:42 - Jason Snell
I'm not sure if I have um, but I believe the 15 inch air is a little bit better. It's got some more features than the 13. My guess is that the pro is going to get you better sound, but it's been a little while it is I mean I I've recorded a couple podcasts with people where it's been a

little while I'll know later this afternoon it is. I mean, I've recorded a couple of podcasts with people where it's been very clear that they were on the laptop mic and it used to be a showstopper Like I can't record on the laptop mic. And in these last couple of MacBook Pro generations, I mean because Apple started talking about studio quality microphones back with the last Intel MacBook Pro, yeah, and it was like I'm going to stop you there because I do this for a living and it's not, and they're like, well, you know, it's kind of like what does studio mean? Now I feel like they're actually it's like the boy who cried wolf. I feel like they're actually kind of getting there now where you could talk into a laptop and actually sound good m3 Macbook pro.

1:37:40 - Alex Lindsay
That sounded better on the Macbook pro than they did on the on the mv7, and the reason for that was they just couldn't find a place to put the mv7 on the desk right and so it was too far away and everything else. And then they just, and then when they turned it off and they started talking to us, I was like what are you using right now? And they're like, oh, this is just the mic on those, and that's when the wheel started turning of like it's not a Like. In post we can fluff up, especially for recording double ending, which is what we do. So with a, you know, a relatively good recording, because we're sending the laptop out, we can put our own software on a record like AIFF and like it's not even like compressed, you know. So we get even better you know we can control it.

1:38:19 - Jason Snell
I'll make you a deal. I will when the M4 Air comes out, because I don't think I have an M3 here anymore. When the M4 Air comes out, I will do some mic testing Just for you, Alex versus the M4 MacBook Pro.

1:38:35 - Leo Laporte
When are we going to?

1:38:35 - Alex Lindsay
get an M5 MacBook Pro Is that in fall.

1:38:38 - Leo Laporte
So, this wouldn't be a bad time to buy a MacBook Air M4, yeah.

1:38:42 - Jason Snell
When it comes out, if you're in the market for an air, they seem to want to update them every year with the new m chip.

1:38:47 - Leo Laporte
They're in there every year there's a cadence, though right m like they're opposite ends of the year, opposite halves of the year sure seems like that that the spring is for the Macbook air and the fall is for the Macbook pro.

1:38:58 - Alex Lindsay
And for now, and do we think, do we see kind of a tiktok where the one version is a bigger jump than the other? I mean, obviously the m1 was a huge jump but the other ones have been a little more incremental from the.

1:39:11 - Jason Snell
You know it's hard, it's hard to say, I think in part because the all the drama around the three nanometer process where they did the m3, which was a big jump in a lot of ways, but it was also that three nanometer process, and then the M4, they were kind of like it was a smaller jump in a lot of ways but they were going to a more sustainable process. So it's hard to say and also varies within the chip models. I believe, like the M3, the mid-range chip, the Pro, did not gain as fast as the max did that they. They sort of separated those and so we don't have enough, I would say to to know the pattern, because I think the chaos of that three nanometer transition they had to do twice is kind of like washed some confusion into it. We're still looking for a pattern there, but it looks like so far.

What I would say is don't think of it as monolithic, because not only are the multiple chip models but there's like the multiple parts that are inside that package and sometimes the GPU cores get faster and other times the CPU cores are what gets faster and other times it's the neural engine that gets faster or there are more of them and it looks like, basically, if you think about apple's chip, it from the outside it's like one, two, three, four, but it's actually like 10 different things and they push them all forward. You know they do push them all forward, but maybe at different rates year to year, so it can really vary.

1:40:36 - Alex Lindsay
I mean the. The problem really is, I think for apple eventually with this and the same problem with the ipad is that is that the M1, even though for 90% of the market the M1 still probably does what it needs to do as fast as it needs to do it.

1:40:52 - Jason Snell
We use M1s for like eight gig M1s for office hours and we have eight up to eight 1080p videos coming out of one computer and it's just like doo know it's like a 50, 50 percent, 45 percent, something like that, like it's not even pushing hard if the Macbook air m2 that is currently for sale is not the best value you have ever gotten for a mac, it's that 699 m1 at walmart, like the. Yeah, and that's apple's. I mean, we talked about it here, that's Apple's. I mean, we talked about it here. That's Apple's biggest problem is that the Apple Silicon Macs are so good that you don't really need to replace them because they're so great.

1:41:29 - Alex Lindsay
Even now, I mean, and even I think that's still the problem, and I think, again, this comes back to software development and who you engage and so on and so forth. You know I think I talked about last week my kids are still using their they. I bought them a pro, you know, the pro first pro iPad at 13 inches. They still use those Like they still, they're still running and they still. And the problem is that almost all iPad software does not push hard enough to um to move it forward. Like you don't feel any difference between an older.

I have my two, my two iPad pros that I use as interfaces at this point. I mean, I still use them for other things, I pick them up and go take them somewhere, but a lot of times they're sitting here as interface controls. Um, you know, I don't feel like I need to get a new one, like I don't, like I'm I'm kind of like I don't know There'll be some feature. Now what's interesting is is that I do feel it on the vision pro, like I can feel the Vision Pro getting pushed. There's some of the hardware, some of the stuff that I am downloading or working with people when they get aggressive about it. I do feel it hitting the ceiling as far as how hard it can go.

1:42:36 - Leo Laporte
You make me feel that we should have a Vision Pro segment, and yet can we, Can we Uncle Leo? Well, okay, let's do it. It's time for the extremely short vision pro segment. I hope that was immersive, sufficiently immersive for you vision pro watchers. Um, they did add a new arctic surfing video. Is it good?

1:43:09 - Alex Lindsay
oh, it's okay I like to surf in the arctic seems cold it looks cold, I mean, I, I think it I'm still in the zone of. It works really really well from 5 to 20 feet and doesn't feel that great. It doesn't feel bad. But the wide shots, the high shots, all the other stuff, I'm kind of like well, that feels like 2D. It doesn't feel like anything. I'm like eh, yeah, but when you get close you're like whoa.

1:43:36 - Jason Snell
It's not. What I'm learning now is that when they're doing the wide shots shots, what works is that it's immersive, right, like I love those shots of the snowy norwegian you know bay where those people are surfing, because I was completely just immersed in that scenery. And so there's the travel logged element. Yeah, there's no 3d effect there really to speak of, but it doesn't really matter because it's so immersive. And then, yeah, when you get closer in and you're seeing those people, that is a different effect, but I thought that was a good one. I thought that was a great example of you know, don't watch it when you're feeling a little cold, because it's chilly, there's surfing In the shower.

1:44:14 - Alex Lindsay
A woman just comes right out she walks out in her bathing suit and walks right into the water into the water.

1:44:20 - Jason Snell
Where?

1:44:20 - Alex Lindsay
there's snow and I was like that's not right.

1:44:22 - Leo Laporte
Does it feel colder because it's in a Vision Pro?

1:44:27 - Jason Snell
No, because the Vision Pro keeps you warm. It's blowing warm air on your forehead the whole time. Did we talk about the Rodeo one?

Because I just wanted to mention the Rodeo one is hilarious because, although it's big Rodeo bowls and it's very exciting, it shows you the limits of apple doing this because and Alex knows what I'm about to say here uh, he's gonna have experienced this undoubtedly which is they follow a rodeo, uh, a bull rider, and we meet him and his family and all of these things, and it's leading up to the big moment at this rodeo in utah where he's gonna go out there and he's on the bull for like two tenths of a second and he, he gets thrown and that's it and they picked the wrong guy.

It shows you that, like they're like, it doesn't matter, we're still doing this video. We put a lot about these.

1:45:14 - Leo Laporte
I always am impressed when documentaries pick the person who gets the gold medal, like, oh, they must have shot everybody right and then they took throughout the lot.

1:45:22 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yeah we did, we did um, we pixel corded battle bots quite a few times and that's what we did is we picked the top 10 and shoot them all we shot them all, and then you have a nice documentary.

1:45:34 - Leo Laporte
You won't believe it. He was a long shot, but he went all the way. Yeah, yeah, exactly, and we talked to his mom.

1:45:41 - Alex Lindsay
So you know, I think that the other problem problem is that it's a little soft. It just didn't feel like the wider shots felt like they were a little soft. Again, when they're really close it feels really good. But that was the only thing that I. You know it's nice that they're putting stuff out. I think a lot of us are really excited to see what happens when people get the camera. You know that's the big thing that's going to be the shift.

1:46:01 - Jason Snell
Although with that new beta I guess we haven't talked about this, right, because there was just the Gurman report but Gurman didn't get it all.

That new spatial gallery that is not in the beta yet but will be, but they've already announced that it's going to be in the Vision OS 2.4 beta is interesting because that is a gallery to promote spatial content, not immersive content, and so it's like 3D images, 3d videos, panoramas, which aren't even 3D but they are cool in the Vision Pro and it's basically a curated app run by Apple that will point to content from Apple and elsewhere and the question is just how much of that is going to be cool 3D content like videos. They showed a still of Jason Segel on the set of Shrinking and I'm like is that your whole content Is a picture of Jason Segel? That's 3D, but I don't care. But what's interesting is they know that those things are cool on the Vision Pro and it's fascinating to watch over this last year as Apple has tried to sort of like go oh, oh, people like that. We should make a thing to do that.

1:47:12 - Alex Lindsay
I did feel like the spatial was not something they thought was going to be that big of a deal. It was like a little experimentation, but it's definitely paying more.

1:47:20 - Leo Laporte
You can go all the way around, Jason Segel.

1:47:24 - Andy Ihnatko
He is quite a lemon drop. Let me just put that out.

1:47:28 - Jason Snell
It would be more fun if that was a spatial video behind the scenes, right where we could watch that. But they're trying and the guest mode seems like it's going to be way better. Again, not in the first beta where you're going to be able to. It used to be you had to put it on yourself and put it in guest mode, and all that. Now your friend could just put it on in guest mode and then it slides up on your phone or your iPad and you can say, yes, give them guest mode access. You let them use these apps and then you can actually even tap and it will do the automatic kind of workflow to push a uh, an airplay session to your phone or our iPad so you can see what they're seeing, and that's clearly customer feedback.

1:48:05 - Alex Lindsay
I mean a lot of times I just stopped. It was so complicated, especially when you have a lot of apps. I just want to show you the six apps that you should look at.

1:48:13 - Leo Laporte
Exactly.

1:48:13 - Alex Lindsay
There's five or six apps that I want to show, but now I've got 50 or 60 apps on there. I can't like, okay, now go over one more and then go back to this one and everything else is has been pretty painful and I just stopped. I was like, okay, that's enough, I can't.

1:48:27 - Leo Laporte
Two, four is going to be a big update. Apple intelligence this is all coming out in April.

1:48:31 - Jason Snell
Apple intelligence First step beta just dropped last week. Right.

1:48:35 - Leo Laporte
Writing tools. Image playground Genmoji oh, that's exciting, yeah, yeah, well, I mean, they were behind, right.

1:48:41 - Jason Snell
It was like Apple announced Apple intelligence, but said no Vision Pro. Essentially.

And now it's like actually in this cycle it is getting Apple intelligence as well as everything else. Plus they've done that spatial gallery. Plus there's a Vision Pro app for the iPhone which will let you I mean it'll auto download or auto appear. I guess If you have a Vision Pro, you can also just add it from the App Store if you want, but it's going to have marketing stuff in it about here are some things you should get but you'll also be able to set downloads of media and of apps to go to your device so that they're there when you put it on, which is good. I mean, that's what I use that for the MetaQuest. It's a nice feature to have. And then the improved guest access. So you know, gradually I mean not a few months, every few months there are more features that make the Vision Pro better. It's good that they're doing that.

1:49:33 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, my guess is that the spatial gallery will be at least in beta by April 7th. I'm going to call that day.

That's the first day of NAB and I think that you know that's when you're gonna want to talk about it with video professionals and talk about that. I'm hoping that they find a better display for some of the spatial video, in the sense that that blur thing that they do around the outside edge is not necessary and not desirable and it kind of ruins the experience. And you and and so you know, like them and I've gotten kind of sensitive to it because, and so you know like, and I've gotten kind of sensitive to it because stream voodoo doesn't do that. So the videos that I send to someone from stream voodoo doesn't you know they're nice, they're edge to edge and they look perfectly fine.

I'm like I don't understand what Apple's doing with the soft edge thing, you know, but I don't. I don't appreciate it and I also don't like the fact that the only time I can hear immersive audio is with, if I put it into immersive mode with that horrible soft edge, like I just the edge doesn't. I don't know. I don't know how it was designed and I don't know why it's still there, like it's just it. It is a complete waste of time and it's it's a detractor and you can't do it with any of Apple's tools. You can't watch a video that you shot as big as you'd like it without having that blur on the outside edge, and it's just super annoying, like yes yeah, I was surprised that spatial gallery had to wait for, had to wait this long to actually appear.

1:50:53 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean almost most of the systems 3d systems I've used, going back to cardboard, like one of the one of the. They know that one of the things you're going to want to mess around with is I want the 3d experience of, of enjoying certain content. Here is a very rich app for, and a very good environment for, actually collecting all that stuff and experiencing it, and it just seemed kind of weird that that wasn't a priority for for the initial release.

1:51:18 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, well, I think that some of it is because they're putting up other people's stuff. So with Apple, sometimes the issue is when it comes to spatial gallery. I mean because you have a spatial gallery that comes with it, which is photos, right. But for other people's spatial gallery, I think that Apple gets into permissions and privacy and figuring out time to figure out the ins and outs of privacy, appropriateness, safety procedures, you know, all security, all those things become a thing. I will say, as someone who's been taking panoramas with their phone and owns a couple of Thetas, that all that history has paid off, because when I open up photos, I've got 800 images that I already can just sit there and jump into.

1:52:06 - Jason Snell
And they're 2D but they're spectacular, so I'm glad they put them in the gallery.

1:52:09 - Alex Lindsay
I can't wait until. I mean, when you look at the conversion, it's not perfect, but the conversion on many of those where you just now press down on an image and say, oh, I want to be that image, to be spatial, their their conversion of 2d to 3d, it's spectacular, it really is portrait mode finally paying off for them because they're using, I think, the same technology for that?

1:52:31 - Jason Snell
yeah, it's, it's um.

Vision pro right now is a combination of them struggling to like they're not the most high, the most high priority platform, so it's some stuff just is slower or late to arrive, like Apple intelligence, and then also, you just distinctly get the sense that they are coming out from under a whole bunch of dogma that was put on them by people early in the process about it's got to have this and it's got to have this.

I was reminded of this because there was another I forget where it was now, but it was another quote from, I think, johnny Ive or one of his people, where they were talking again about how fundamentally we didn't want I was offended by VR headsets and we didn't want to cut people off and it led them down this whole path of having those cameras on the inside and generating 3D eyes that go on the outside and all of that, and there are other features like that in the Vision Pro that I do think the people who are on the team now know exactly what this product is, but I think they're still kind of digging out from initial assumptions in the building of the product back before it shipped. That aren't right and they probably, those people probably knew weren't right but they were baked in and they're kind of like chipping away at some of that stuff.

1:53:39 - Alex Lindsay
I think that, but I also think that they're finding what this is. Why they had to build the headset was that they're finding what works, rather than there's a certain amount that you can in the lab. You can say this is how people are going to use it, and then they use it in a different way, like I. Um, one of the reasons that I really got into ambisonic uh recording was because it really makes a difference in the headset, like when I'm watching something I really want to hear, I find myself wanting to hear air around me. Um, you know where I hear a little bit of the environment and it did not occur to me that that was going to be as important as it has become for me, and I wouldn't know that if I hadn't been shooting and recording and putting it together to to figure it out.

1:54:18 - Leo Laporte
Anything else.

1:54:19 - Jason Snell
I just said that our discord. Leo enjoys this segment very much. It's restful, it's peaceful, anything else you want to talk about. I enjoy the dancing, it's just a good. I mean to wrap it up it's nice that there's another beta with more features in Vision Pro, because it needs them right. It's obviously the whole complaint about it. I think the number one complaint, other than the price, is does Apple care? And they're moving, not necessarily as fast as we would like, but they keep moving, like there's always more Vision Pro stuff and it continues.

1:54:52 - Andy Ihnatko
And we'll see what happens at WWDC, but it's good stuff that they're working on now. I'll just say that I just want them to do an image playground that can create 3D images or 3D objects that you can then just basically play with and say, oh, give them a hat. Like, okay, now I want them holding a golf club.

1:55:06 - Jason Snell
Yeah, we should say I mean that's actually one of those good points, which is the Apple intelligence that's in. There is just the 2D Apple intelligence from all the other Apple devices. It's not like they're like aha, now Image Playground has depth. I mean it should, but it doesn't.

1:55:24 - Leo Laporte
And that's just because they imported the existing ipad apple intelligence. The other thing you should see the new uh 3d generation app that anthony nielsen talked me into buying this morning. Pika, this is this. Took the still of me in the hat and made it a video, so, and it's almost 3d. None of this is a still.

1:55:41 - Alex Lindsay
This is not uh this one and the 3d stuff's coming there's. There's a program called, I think, shapey or shapely, um. That is that you can give it a text prompt and it'll give you a 3d model. Or what I do is I'll, I'll give it, I'll have it. I'll have mid journey render an object over a plain white background and then take it into shape I think it's shape b or shapely. I take it into there and I tell it to become it, make that and make that an object, and it will make it. If I make a character, I say make that object running and it'll be running. You know, like it's so the 3d and it comes out as like an fbx. I mean I could take it into unreal engine. You know like, so it's so.

These, those tools are coming. They're obviously much more complicated, but when you look at a lot of what AI is generating, it has a 3D space, like it's generated. It doesn't know that it's in a 3D space, but it is a 3D space. It's building 3D objects with geometry, and so an Apple's is way more simplified and much more like. It feels like we're only a small step from them taking those simplified objects that they use for Genmoji, um and and and the playground and turning those into 3d. So I don't I don't think it's that far away for apple to do that.

1:56:49 - Leo Laporte
I wouldn't even be surprised if we saw that at wwdc feels like such a dead-end technology to me, but that's just uh, and that's the vision pro segment now you see, now you know we're done talking the vision pro. Yeah, zazu pits uh, what else? Classic movies in the house uh, apple is going to enhance its intelligence with Gemini. It already has chat, gpt, uh, and now, apparently, according Apple Insider, gemini is on its way.

1:57:29 - Andy Ihnatko
That's the Google AI yeah, so smart to cover all the bases. People, yeah, people. People have their favorites and there's no front runners right now. For esoteric reasons or because I can't subscribe to four twenty dollar a month AI services, this is just the one that I chose to subscribe to.

1:57:46 - Jason Snell
Looks like this comes from somebody named Aaron Paris, who is a code sleuth, who dug this up and then 9to5Mac reported on it and it's basically like this is the third generation version. You know me, Leo. I like to go back to the source.

1:57:59 - Leo Laporte
Thank you. No, I do too. I'm with you 100%.

1:58:02 - Jason Snell
So is this? Is they basically? They have a thing that's like a tech, isn't?

1:58:04 - Leo Laporte
this funny aaron works for mac rumors, so mac rumors to nine to five, to apple insider.

1:58:10 - Jason Snell
Okay, keep peeling the onion uh, so this is basically a configuration file that says yes, we are going to get you to choose. This is the worst kept secret in some ways, because literally at wwc apple. Well, they didn't, but they it was that thing where they were like chat, gpt, and then later they said oh, of course in the future we'll work with others, like maybe gemini, who knows? It's like to name one of them instead of just say who knows who for example, google gemini to name.

It is very unusual for apple and I think that was the wink. You're right, like we told chat gpt, they would go first, but who knows what might wink follow in the future like google gemini.

Yeah, it makes sense the shadow giving people choice, and I would say it benefits apple to say you know what? Uh, these, these various world knowledge uh spots are commodities, almost Like pick your poison, we don't care, we'll integrate with all of them. I think that's a good thing for Apple to do, too right Like good for customers, good for Apple. Be, ecumenical about it.

1:59:15 - Andy Ihnatko
They can't own AI. At this point, they can't even make a play towards laying the groundwork for owning AI. You may as well make the iPhone the most AI-compliant Catholic device out there. Just like you know, apple earlier on said we can't, we're not going to basically own Wi-Fi networks, we're just going to make hardware that is the most easy to use with Wi-Fi everywhere.

1:59:36 - Alex Lindsay
So yeah, well, and I think that again. I think that early days, you know, all these external services are 90% of the solution. If Apple is successful five years from now, they're 10% of the solution and Apple has to figure out how to. That's a gradient that Apple can choose to do, but the good news is that once it's really working well, they can go at the pace that they want to.

2:00:01 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, speaking of things that were dug out of, I looked at the code. 9to5mac was looking at the code for the Developer One beta of 18.4 and saw that the list of device categories iPhone, ipad, apple Watch, reality, homepods, whatever now there is a new type of device in that list called Home, that these things were so yet, yet another piece of suggestion that we are going to see a friendly home herbie type robot that listens to you when you're sad or a square ipad screen?

2:00:35 - Jason Snell
one of those ipad screens? Yeah, one of those. Innovation is on a gradient. Didn't german say that it actually is going to require 18 4 and so they have to get 18 4 to to across the finish line before they can ship the product. So that would make home. Maybe that's it, maybe it's just Apple Home, maybe that's what it's called, I don't know.

2:01:06 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, and I think that Apple I mean. I do think that the cameras and everything else make a lot of sense, especially cameras, because you're sitting there like you can kind of try to integrate with them. But apple building they know a lot about cameras.

2:01:10 - Andy Ihnatko
So being able to build something you feel is totally tied into the network, um, I think might make sense. Yeah, face id on in a, in a mobile form or in a household form.

2:01:13 - Alex Lindsay
It'd be very interesting there's a lot that they could do. You know, like they could you know and um be a much more accurate face, I need to just walk up and open your door. You know that kind of thing more accurate face.

2:01:24 - Leo Laporte
I need to just walk up and open your door. You know that kind of thing. Yeah, uh, steve jobs would have been sad to say 70 years old a couple of days ago. Monday birthday's on the 24th, oh, so yesterday, yeah, uh, 70, didn't make it. Died at what? 51, 56, 56, okay, uh, steve jobs archive has published a new um footage of uh well, I guess this isn't that new. This came out in july of last year, so where is the new thing? That uh?

2:01:52 - Andy Ihnatko
well, there's a couple. There's a couple things. California has nominated steve jobs for, there's a new series of of one dollar coins from the us mint and california wants steve jobs to be the face of the american innovation coin. So in general circulation, um, the governor, governor has a nice little post about how, the, the nomination or the how that's what he wants to do. No, no knowledge about what the design would be. Uh, but there are. I hope they don't use the or the book cover photo because it's kind of played out. Also, it's one of the least humanistic photos of steve that are out there. There are a lot of photos of steve that are just charming as hell, where you see the, the light in his eyes, not the laser beams from his eyes, and the his biography photo was a little bit laser beamy they published, uh, on the occasion of his 70th birthday, an internal apple employee communications meeting held in 2007 which, uh, the archive which is at stevejobsarchivecom says was the first use of make something wonderful.

2:02:53 - Leo Laporte
Um, so you know, I'll leave this to you to watch the whole thing, but, uh, I think that's pretty cool that they posted that video from an internal company. For some reason I can't play it back. It must be my own machine, but worth seeing. Steve Jobs archive.

2:03:13 - Andy Ihnatko
And Tim Cook posted something nice on Twitter. Of course, a very nice portrait of Steve. Steve saw the world not just as it was, but as it could be. His vision continues to inspire us to push boundaries and create the future. Today, on his 70th birthday, we honor his legacy and his enduring impact.

2:03:30 - Leo Laporte
Oh, nicely done oh, that's, that's really sweet. Let me pull up that photo. Yeah, it's a nice photo. That's probably in the same photo shoot that the Walter Isaacson cover maybe looks like it yeah you know again, warmth and light as opposed to laser beams.

It's he could do both they just really they just turn down the key light, that's all turn it up and you get laser beams. Uh, I think that's enough, uh, for today. Let's get to our oh. I should mention that automatic has a re-released beeper uh now combining textcom, so all of its messaging. Beeper, remember, was the app that was trying to put apple messages on the android uh thwarted by apple some years ago. Automatic, the company behind wordpress, bought them uh in 2023 and uh, I guess they now have a new version of their messaging app, renamed beeper. They used they used to used to be textcom and I guess uh messages is in there. I'm not sure how that works.

I'll have to download it and uh, and see you know you may have to have a mac running it or something like that. It's in iOS test flight or there is a desktop version as well. The new beeper Mac OS, iPhone, ipad. There's an Intel version. There's also Android, windows, chrome OS and Linux versions. That's probably who it's mostly useful for. Is people running those horrible other operating systems, not running a Mac? We're going to take a little break when we come back. Your picks of the week, gentlemen, and uh, I have one, thanks to john syracusa. Yes, I knew someone would take it.

2:05:13 - Andy Ihnatko
I was leaving. I thought for sure Jason would have it well I should let leo beat me.

2:05:19 - Leo Laporte
I should let you have it, because he is your buddy. I don't know. I have used it. I'm using it right now.

I'm using it as I speak, but we'll talk about that in a moment. I just want to remind everybody that this show is on the air thanks to the generous support of our club twit members and to invite you to join the Club. We really appreciate the folks who have, because it makes a big difference in our bottom line. We are ad supported and it's wonderful. Advertisers cover about 95% of our costs. You guys cover the other 5% and, honestly, if it weren't for you, we'd have to make it up somewhere else. We've closed our studio, we laid off people, we cut shows. We're right down to the bone. I don't know where else we would cut. So thank goodness for the club. And, incidentally, we're not asking you for a handout. We give you some value for your seven bucks a month. Yeah, that's all. It is seven dollars a month. Of course, because you're a supporter, you get ad free versions of all the shows. You get additional shows we don't do anywhere else. For instance, Stacey's book club coming up on Thursday. We streamed that live, thanks to the Club members, but after the fact you have to go to the club.

Twit, uh, twit plus feed. Uh, we will be talking about Micaiah Johnson's sci-fi thriller, those beyond the wall. You also can watch our photo time coming up, march 6th Chris Marquardt. Again, the assignment is the word bold Micah's crafting corner, plus a lot of other things that go on in the club, including our fabulous Club Twit Discord, which is a great hang, not just when the shows are on but all the time. We quite enjoy our club and I think you will, too, find out more at twit.tv/clubtwit, and. Thanks in advance. I'd love to see you in the discord. Uh, I will do my pick of the week just because I have been running it. Jason, you want to explain?

2:07:15 - Jason Snell
John Syracusa, uh, the accidental tech podcast, and, of course, he used to write the giant book-length reviews of mac os 10 for the first, uh decade plus of mac os 10's run. He was a web developer for many, many, many years. Uh. Quit his job because podcasting. Let him do that, which is kind of amazing. And now he has released several esoteric mac apps, the latest of which, I think, is his biggest chance to be a crowd pleaser. It's called Hyperspace, and what it does and, believe it or not, it does this this is not just hype. It is actually true. It finds duplicate files on your Mac's hard drive and removes the duplicates while leaving them in place. To understand how this works, you have to understand how.

2:08:06 - Leo Laporte
APFS and other modern file systems work there's something called a soft link and a hard link. A soft link is an alias we all know about aliases and you wouldn't save any space deleting aliases. But hard links are links to the inode and this is what you get, by the way, when you say duplicate the file In the finder.

2:08:29 - Jason Snell
It duplicates instantly, even if it's a giant file, because it's not copying the file data all the way over.

2:08:34 - Leo Laporte
It's making a link back to the iNode.

2:08:37 - Jason Snell
Right. It used to be in file systems on the Mac that it would just make a full duplicate and write that to disk, and now it doesn't. It knows it's on disk and you can have multiple pointers at the same data and what it. I believe it's called copy on write. So the idea there is if you've got a giant picture that you're going to open in Photoshop and you've got two copies of them and they're using you know one, you know well. Let's say I don't know 100 megabytes of data and you open this picture 100 megabytes it could be much larger than that, but let's say it's a small picture and then you edit it and then you save it. When you save it, that that is now using new data because it can't double up the data but initially it's only using it in one place. Now that the problem is that sometimes you'll get files on your disk that have come in from different paths but they're the same file and they are taking up 2x, 3x, 5x. Sometimes there are shockingly a large number of duplicates on your drive.

I have on my home directory on this Macbook, 3000 of these, yeah, 97 gigabytes worth I know where a lot of them are and a lot of listeners may find this too is I found that a lot of mine came from zip archives from like GitHub projects or other projects like that, where the zip archive doesn't have the ability to do this. They've got different directory trees with the same files in them and, anyway, what hyperspace does is it scans your files, it finds the duplicates, and what it does is, rather than letting them all take up space they all share, it converts them so that they all share one file of space.

And so if you've got 1,000 1K files you will then have, instead of 1,000 K, you'll have 1K or meg or gig or whatever it is, because they can all share that same space and it doesn't from the outside it looks no different. If you edit the file, nothing bad happens, it will just update it and then that will be using its own space. But there's a lot and Leo just found it and I found it on my system too A lot of completely unnecessary duplication.

2:10:41 - Leo Laporte
And where is this coming from? This is a mistake in the way apple's handling these.

2:10:46 - Jason Snell
No, I think I think it's downloads. I honestly I think a lot of this comes from downloads and installs that are inefficient, because you know, but for a long?

2:10:53 - Leo Laporte
time I've been, I've been downloading to the temp folder, where it gets erased periodically. For that very reason.

2:11:00 - Jason Snell
That's not bad. That's not bad. Yeah, I had not bad. Yeah, I had like a keyboard driver, and what it did was it installed all the different supported drivers in their own directories.

2:11:08 - Leo Laporte
Can I see what files it's going to?

2:11:09 - Jason Snell
Yeah, there's a view item after you scan and you can view them one by one.

2:11:13 - Leo Laporte
I think I have to purchase it to do that.

2:11:15 - Jason Snell
No, I think, yeah, I guess.

2:11:18 - Leo Laporte
I haven't purchased it.

2:11:19 - Jason Snell
Yeah, you should be able to. Haven't purchased it. Yeah, you should be able to. Yeah, so maybe it's not going to let you view them until you purchase it. So it's got an interesting business model. You can just make a one-time purchase for an amount of time if you want to solve this once and then forget about it, or you can subscribe if you want to keep it forever. But I think a lot of people will probably say, oh, you know, I'll buy it for a month and run it and then I won't worry about it anymore, because it sort of solves your problem. But you might be surprised at how much space you might save. I'm stunned.

And it's very clever that he lets you scan it so you know how much space you might save.

2:11:49 - Leo Laporte
Nice job, john Siracusa, you just got to have APFS.

2:11:51 - Jason Snell
So if you've got a RAID or something like, I have a big server with a RAID and it's running HFS Plus and it won't work with that, it's got to be APFS.

2:12:00 - Andy Ihnatko
Can I also say that if you've ever met, if you know John Syracuse, it is such a John Syracuse app because he knows that the trick that it's performing is somewhat technical and will probably not be familiar to people who just want to free up some space, there are buttons you can press that will just give pages and pages of signature John syracuse a highly, highly readable and understandable explanation absolutely what it's doing because because a he's human enough to know that people are going to worry about.

Well, is it actually going to be like deleting files that it thinks are duplicates but are not? On and on? It's like no, I want to reach. I want to make sure I know what what people might be thinking. I know what might scare them. I want to reassure. I want to make sure I know what people might be thinking. I know what might scare them. I want to reassure them and I also want to educate them, which is 40% of what I love about John Sir Crease.

2:12:52 - Leo Laporte
Only 40% Okay.

2:12:54 - Andy Ihnatko
There are a lot of things I love about John Sir Crease.

2:12:58 - Leo Laporte
He has some settings that you can say I don't want you to do with these file types. If you're a photographer, maybe you don't want to do that and so forth, but you do have to pay for reclamation. Ten dollars a month, nineteen dollars a year, fifty dollars for a lifetime a lifetime of enjoyment. So thank you, jason, for making it easy for me to do my pick of the week, I'm happy to assist.

2:13:23 - Jason Snell
Supplement.

2:13:25 - Leo Laporte
What is your? So you I forced to go to an alternate. What is your alternate?

2:13:30 - Jason Snell
It's called Framus. It just came out. It's also on the Mac App Store. It is a screenshot utility. It will take your screenshots from devices and frame them, so like if you have an iPhone screenshot, it will put an iPhone around it. There are other utilities that do this. What I really like about Framus it's Mac only, but it's drag and drop and it's pretty seamless.

So, like and there, although there are some other, there's some other apps out there that are good and that are coming along as well. This one has gotten faster to the holy grail, which is, if I have three shots of an iPhone that I want to run horizontally across in a single image, I can drag three screenshots in and it makes an image with three of them. You can adjust how far apart the iPhones are. It's iPhone, mac, ipad, apple Watch, any device. It will put a frame around it. So instead of just a bare screenshot, it's that screen on the device it's running on and of course it's got generic frames. And then you can also pay and then you get specific frames. So you can say I want this to be on a gold iPhone 16 Pro Max and it'll do it. And then you can just output those images and use them everywhere.

And I know this is sort of esoteric, but if you're a developer or a journalist or anybody else who is posting these kind of screenshots, it looks so much nicer to put it in the context of the device instead of it just being a bare screenshot. And Framus it's got. You know it's pretty bare bones, but the fact that it can build multi-device screenshots right out of the box. Man, that's what I want, because, you know, iPhones are tall. If I write about iPhone software, I I kind of want to put two or three iPhones across so that I can have it be wide and fit on my website better.

2:15:12 - Alex Lindsay
So yeah, framus is uh, it's brand new. It's infamous. I don't know how many people need it, but I just bought it yeah, I thought anybody, anybody who knows what, that the pain of. I agree, I put frames around all kinds of things, but I've got all these weird ways of doing it. I was like somebody just does that.

2:15:28 - Jason Snell
It supports shortcuts, which means you can automate the heck out of this thing too and use keyboard shortcuts or just a finder shortcut to say, take these and build me a screenshot, and it'll just do it. There are some other great utilities out there. There's ShareShot that does this across iPhone, ipad and mac, but it doesn't do multiple images yet, and that's where framus uh, like really uh, because it's a mac first, it's uh, it's drag and drop, so you literally just drag them in and and see them in place and it's just it's really well done. So this is from the guy who did. I want to say Dark Noise.

2:16:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, dark Noise LLC.

2:16:05 - Jason Snell
You're right, this is his new app and it's really nice, so Alex and I have bought it.

2:16:11 - Leo Laporte
You know what I like, and this includes John's app as well. These are little utilities that you could probably write up and make, and people are just making them and they have a place to sell them, which I think is great. Uh, that's what the app store allows right.

2:16:29 - Alex Lindsay
I think what I really like are apps that are just do the thing. They do the one thing, they're not yeah, not a bunch of things, they just they do this one thing. They do it really well. It costs 3.99, or, in this case, 20 bucks, but for the kind of I think it has to be more because there's not as many of us that would need it, right? Um, so we're a more vortica market. For the people that need it, it's immediately like yeah, take my money, you know. And for everyone else.

They'd be like if you're going, huh, well that's.

2:16:53 - Jason Snell
It may not be the right one, but as soon as you have a presentation or an article or a video an app like syracuse is too like that is. That is deep down file system stuff and it's in the Mac App Store. I think that's kind of impressive. When he started talking about it, I thought there's no way this is going to get approved. There's no way it doesn't violate some, and the only limitation is that it won't scan things that well scan. It won't remove duplicates from files that don't belong to your user.

You have to be the owner of those files well, that makes sense and he has, he's walled off some like system files and stuff, where he's like I'm not going to break your system, not even accidentally, I'm not going to do it, but uh, but still it's in the mac app store and it's it's doing all this.

2:17:34 - Leo Laporte
So I paid the 10 bucks for the one month, uh thing, so I can run around all my macs and do it, and a lot of this is uh. Media for me is media files, book files.

2:17:44 - Jason Snell
Well, those are gonna be big files too yeah, that's why it's 91 gigabytes and then the dupes just are gone and you get 91 gigabytes back pretty.

2:17:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, let's hope you're right, because I am about to delete a lot of stuff.

2:17:56 - Jason Snell
Do it he was in beta a long time for the longest time it wouldn't do anything. You get to the end and be like, nope, not yet. And then, and then he did a. He pushed a beta version that would let you remove one. It's like you just get one, you just get one. Uh, try it out, but it's everybody seems to have. Uh have had a good experience within the beta and now it's out yeah, uh, dan stutters, stutters in our um.

2:18:22 - Leo Laporte
Youtube says it also shows the power of xcode, and I think that's true. You've got a free development environment, or relatively an expensive development environment, plus a really good way to you know. You don't have to package it, put in a box, get ingram to carry it, you just put it on the app store and this was a power stuff.

2:18:39 - Jason Snell
This was for john and it's in his blog post he says is this first app that he's done entirely using the swift ui development cycle nice he's used swift and swift ui before, but this is entirely using that swift ui approach and that's also. You know, it's fun for john, but it's also really interesting that he he got to step through that love it, love it.

2:19:00 - Leo Laporte
Uh, and so there's two. Let's see Alex l Lindsay what do you got?

2:19:05 - Alex Lindsay
I'm both ahead and behind in this, in this whole like transition, which is what we call 2110. And and for those of this is going to be a geeky recommendation is to take a look at this. I started testing this hardware and I think that you know I've been like, oh, I don't know if I want to get get into this, and now I'm getting pretty close. So I'm getting pretty close, so I have some test units from Blackmagic right now that I've been playing with. I've got to send them back sometime soon, but I'm going to probably end up. This is what happens. Is they send them to me?

2:19:33 - Jason Snell
And then you buy them and then I'm like, can I buy this one?

2:19:42 - Alex Lindsay
They're not fools. No, no is a router like we had before. And now, leo, you've had big routers and you had 40 by 40 routers. This is actually. It has just ethernet in the back. It's a tiny little router, it's a tiny little rack, but it's 48 in and 48 out.

2:19:57 - Leo Laporte
But it only has 16 ethernet ports.

2:19:59 - Alex Lindsay
How do it work 10 gigs 3 gigs each for 3g so so here's the converter.

So you need two boxes. Well, it depends on you know what's happening is a lot of the cameras and all their stuff is going to be supporting 2110, so eventually you don't need any converters. But if you have old sdi stuff, basically this is three in and three out. Um, so this is three signals in three things out they, and that just turns into ethernet. So imagine being able to. And what's? What's happening now is they're building cameras with just ethernet so you need one of these boxes for each three.

2:20:34 - Leo Laporte
Each camera for three, cameras for each three cameras.

2:20:37 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, yeah right, three and three out okay, um, but eventually just trying to add up the bill here I'm sorry right now, but the thing is is this is three, how many alex's is this?

well, so you, so you, you plug three cameras in here, right, and this is five, not 595 dollars. The big thing is that switch that I just showed you is like 2700 it's, it's like a quarter or less of what any other switch in the industry. This is what's been holding this technology up was because the switch was expensive. You know, like, how do you manage all you know, 360 gig back button, backplane, you know, and um, and so, uh, we had to do some stuff. Where I have to do it, I have to send three signals. It turned out to be three. I was just lucky, um, that three signals hundreds of feet away, um, and then have them pop out on the other end as SDI. And so I started testing these, and then I was like, hey, if you go one of those switches around, why don't you send one of those over too? And so, cause we were just doing a point to point, cause I can just plug these in, connect them directly to each other and let them talk to each other, but the but you, just I. Now, you know, I've been very, very slow to give up SDI. Like you know, like, oh, this is like my warm blanket of, when you plug it in, it works. And I'm seeing this, you know, and I think that we're going to suddenly see more and more of this. Like I just got an Ethernet and you know, ndi has been around for a long time but NDI is a little squirrely, you know. It's doing a lot of things on the network. It's talking a lot. This is, uh, you know what they're building new trucks with. You know that this kind of technology and black magic is kind of making it more available and so, testing this, I think I was just like, oh, I could just have a bunch of these in 16. You know ethernet cables and but it's ethernet. Like we're not terminating sdi, we're not, you know. You know, like it's just, it's just Ethernet, it's just 10 gig Ethernet that you're plugging into these to these ports. That's wild and you can take those. And they have got these big 100 gig. They have 100 gig connections so that you can connect them to each other and anybody who's ever had to connect multiple routers what happens is you take some of your ins and some of your outs and there's this weird trade-off that you have to do. That's really ugly and this is going to be a lot, a lot more seamless, so, um, so it's worth it.

For those of you who are in production, who are watching this uh 2110, I think, is I, it's been around, it's not like it's brand new, but I think it's very much becoming. The switch only started shipping a couple weeks couple weeks ago, I think, maybe a couple months ago like it's pretty new, um, and it was what we were all waiting for. Like you can't doesn't matter whether we have all the other pieces if we don't have that, and you can get little single ones that are much less expensive, that are just like one sdi so you could attach it to each camera, kind of thing. This is just what, uh, oh, yeah, you can get a single, okay, yeah, yeah.

And then you get hdmi. So you, you have ethernet, you run, you put a little h ethernet to hd uh 2110 to hdmi, you plug it into the back of your monitor and you just plug an ethernet into it and then it's hdmi from that router to your monitor or to whatever else you want to put it in. So it. It just means that everything becomes ethernet, and it's not just that. It. This means that you know 2110 brings all kinds of new audio tools and video, because these are all now just data, like so 2110 is a standard yeah, it's a SMPTE standard now it's a SMPTE standard for ethernet video.

2:23:52 - Leo Laporte
No, yeah ip-based video.

2:23:54 - Alex Lindsay
Ip-based video okay, yeah, I mean it doesn't have to be ethernet, but it's. It's, yeah, ip, I understand, sure, so, and it's, and it, and we've talked about it as being the future of some of this for quite some time, but I think this is the first time I've really sat down and gone, okay, could I actually use this and start plugging stuff in and moving stuff around? And it's now. I'm now I just look at my copper going, oh, like my SDI, and I was like I don't want to I don't need no.

yeah, if we were building a new studio, we would clearly not use sdi but I would have said two months ago if you're building a new studio to use sdi now you know, like I would, or whatever, yeah yeah, but but it's been literally. That's why I was excited about it.

2:24:35 - Leo Laporte
It's just that it's it's so, with dante you've got ip audio, and with 2110 you've got ip video and technically 2110 can carry audio as well.

2:24:43 - Alex Lindsay
But Dante is the way that we. The big thing about Dante is it just works like it across a network. It works, and technically also Dante does videos. No, but but the I mean 2110, though it doesn't know, it's their own, their own thing. So so, so the. And then of course you got NDI and everything else, and NDI has been very convenient. A lot of people have used it. Tri casters use a lot of that yeah, and so forth.

But it's one of those things that you're not a network engineer and you get yourself into NDI. This is kind of setting this up like you don't have to be a network engineer to understand how to get your cameras to talk to each other, and and so it's. That's the now.

2:25:20 - Leo Laporte
I just use zoom and I don't need any of that yeah, exactly, but but for those of us who still have to get too complicated for me.

2:25:29 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, you know, the big thing for us is that, like getting like I'm doing all these runs right now where I have to go hundreds and hundreds of feet that may be thousands of feet and being able to.

2:25:37 - Leo Laporte
How many cameras on some of your bigger projects, would you have?

2:25:43 - Alex Lindsay
uh, on on the the larger projects that I've done. I don't think I've done anything with more than 20 um, you know, like 20 cameras is is where we start to go.

2:25:51 - Jason Snell
Oh, that's a lot of cameras.

2:25:52 - Alex Lindsay
You know that's like nfl level yeah, oh no, no, we're not close to nfl level oh no no, no, yeah, there are a lot more cameras than us. So, yeah, I don't know how many, but I think it's, it's in the, I think that they're, you know, 40 to 60 cameras from most nfl games. I don't know exactly what the number is, but but the uh, um, uh, but yeah, so it's a lot, it's a lot of cameras nice black magic design again, they're doing it again.

2:26:19 - Leo Laporte
The 2110 converter and the big ethernet switch, yeah, which somehow manages to turn 16 ethernet ports into 48 cameras.

2:26:29 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and the thing that we're all trying to figure out now is also like black magic has this new camera that we keep talking about, and how? Yeah, where's that this we hope to see one by uh, and maybe like so we're hoping at any point we're gonna see see cameras, uh, sitting there, like at least a model that we can like get close to and kind of figure out how big it's going to be for it's going to be exciting.

2:26:50 - Leo Laporte
It's going to be really exciting. Yeah, we're hoping to see it soon. Yeah, thank you, alex, andy and otko. Pick of the week.

2:26:58 - Andy Ihnatko
Uh, great pick this week. Uh, you're probably a lot of you are probably familiar with the bbc radio show desert island discs. It's been on for decades. They interview somebody at length about basically their entire careers, their entire lives, and over the course of this they get to pick. Imagine that you're gonna be stranded on a desert island, but you can plan ahead which eight records would you take with you? And at the end you also get to pick a book and one luxury item, which is fun, but mostly you're walking. They're walking through their lives and careers and talking about these eight. One luxury item, which is fun, but mostly you're walking. They're walking through their lives and careers and talking about these eight, the piece of music they've picked this week. The guest is sir johnny ive, former who likes banana rama.

2:27:31 - Leo Laporte
It turns out. Okay, I will.

2:27:33 - Andy Ihnatko
I will say okay, so he's gen x, he's about my age. I approve of almost every track banana rama. Maybe not because this is a gen x list of bangers. You, you do have the police, you do have it's really an interesting mix Simple Minds. You do have U2.

2:27:49 - Leo Laporte
You do have Harry Ives singing in the rain.

2:27:52 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, this is the best one because this is his little boy. When he was like four or five, he just like saw the movie. He starts singing in the rain.

2:28:03 - Leo Laporte
And he tells a story about how, oh, it's his son.

2:28:05 - Andy Ihnatko
And he tells a story about how, like you know, it was wonderful, it was so cute. And then suddenly he realized that, wait a minute, I've got an iPhone in my pocket. I can record this and talk about how great it was, that like I would not otherwise have like set up a recording session for him, but the fact that Good man, johnny, you got the product plug in Well done. Well, okay, but okay, you can't be cynical when you hear this, because it is freaking adorable.

2:28:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, did he play it, excuse me, yeah, he played it. Yeah, here's the deal.

2:28:32 - Andy Ihnatko
Here's why you want to listen to it. On streaming it from the bbccouk site, if you stream it this week while it's still being on the radio, you can hear the entire 52 minute program with all of the music. If you miss that, uh, it'll be released as a podcast. You'll get the entire interview, but no music they don't pay the license fee after broadcast well again to give it away to like you're not.

You're not going to get the rights to like, give away copies of a youtube song, so that's not gonna that's not gonna work. But and the interview itself is wonderful I mean, any one of us, and a lot of people who are listening to this, have probably read a lot of interviews with Johnny Ive. I learned a lot of stuff that I hadn't heard before, and he just continues to impress you. One section he's talking about the creation of the first iMac and the circumstances under which it was created. But he was also talking about the handle, and to me I just thought that, well, yeah, they put a handle on it because it's a throwback to the original Mac, which also had a handle to it.

But he says, well, this is a time when people were still thinking about computers as though they were just glorified typewriters. They're still very scared by it, and I love it when a designer explains thinking. That makes you see something and understand something in a new way. I don't like when designers talk as though their heads are up their butts by saying, but there's a reason why we used pine instead of white pine. He's talking about, well, in this case where people are intimidated by computers, if we put a big handle on it and it's got it's white and it's contrasting with the rest of it when people walk up to it, there's something that they immediately understand about it that oh, this is a handle, this is where I pick it up and carry it and that helps to break down the intimidation of the users. That like wow, that makes complete sense. That does not sound like BS. When I understand something about design I did not understand before the whole conversation should do that to AI.

2:30:27 - Leo Laporte
If we put a handle on it, would people kind of get it more, you think put a handle on it, but a handle on it makes anything portable.

2:30:34 - Andy Ihnatko
This thing has a handle on it.

2:30:36 - Leo Laporte
The iMac button. The Mac uh, original Mac behind me has a handle on it. Now we have a show name put a handle on it. That's the only reason you understand why I repeated it now. I guess I'm not putting one over on you, Alex lindsey. I just needed to get to work, that's all I all right. Thank you very much, andy and ako gbh. When's that coming?

2:30:55 - Andy Ihnatko
up. I was just on yesterday talking about a lot of political stuff that related to tech, so you can go to wggbhorg, wgbhorg, uh, to stream it. I'm gonna be on a couple times in march but I haven't got my schedule yet.

2:31:10 - Leo Laporte
But always made me mad this week when I worked in radio on the east coast that the fcc decided that w which has triple the syllables of, or, more than that, double u of any other letter in the alphabet. Give me a break. I was so happy when I moved back out west.

2:31:29 - Andy Ihnatko
I can, I can. I will never stop being amused by the, by the appropriateness of a nerdy acronym like www, where the acronym is actually more longer than yeah than the actual thing itself.

2:31:40 - Leo Laporte
Nine syllables, yeah, w-c. It just killed me every time. That's why, by the way, they dropped the W, I think, on GBH. It's just GBH now. Yeah, it's just GBH now. Right, Alex Lindsay officehoursglobal Q&As continue.

2:31:55 - Alex Lindsay
They continue every single morning, 7 am, pacific Standard Time. We answer questions. That's what we do, and every day. You think that today's going to be the day after 1,800 times in a row, every day, including Sundays and holidays, that we won't get any questions. But it just doesn't happen. Oh, there's always questions, there's always another 25 questions for us to check.

2:32:16 - Leo Laporte
I did 19 years of the tech guy. There's always questions.

2:32:20 - Alex Lindsay
There's always questions when people are like how do you do it?

2:32:25 - Leo Laporte
you're like questions, like don't try to make something up so much easier. Something, yeah, so much easier, and what's coming up on uh gray matter uh I don't.

2:32:32 - Alex Lindsay
We just shifted who was going to talk, so I'm not sure who's coming up next.

2:32:36 - Leo Laporte
But but go to gray matter dot show and you'll find out.

2:32:38 - Alex Lindsay
And you'll see the schedule.

2:32:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, absolutely thank you, alex, get to work, get to work, buddy. Thank you, alex, get to work, get to work, buddy. Jason Snell is at sixcolorscom. His podcast is at sixcolorscom. Slash, jason, I actually have a question for you.

2:32:53 - Alex Lindsay
I have reclaimed 97.01 gigabytes thanks to John Syracuse's hyperspace.

2:32:56 - Leo Laporte
But what's this? Switch? Allow fun.

2:32:59 - Jason Snell
The fun is when you're done it has confetti. I missed the confetti damn it, I was doing a show that's what the fun is and during the beta process. It was it. One of the notes was added fun. And then the next step, the next beta was added more fun.

2:33:15 - Leo Laporte
Uh, thank you, Jason six colors dot com, everybody must subscribe and participate and watch all your shows because there's so many great ones. They don't need to watch all of shows because there's so many great ones.

2:33:24 - Jason Snell
They don't need to watch all of them. Some of them will do. Just some of them would be fine.

2:33:27 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's all I ask.

2:33:28 - Jason Snell
I had a good upgrade this week. Mike Hurley had a baby, so Casey List from the Accidental Tech Podcast was my guest this week, and I'm going to have guest hosts for the next two months, so that'll be fun. It'll be fun.

2:33:41 - Leo Laporte
It'll be fun for me that sounds like a great show. Thank you, Jason, Alex, Andy, thanks to all of you who joined us, thanks especially to our club members. We really appreciate you do? We do MacBreak Weekly every Tuesday, 11 am. Pacific 2 pm. Uh, eastern time, that's 1900 utc, and I tell you those times because you can't actually watch us do it live. You don't need to, but you know some small percentage of the audience likes to be there when it's happening so we can watch you in chat. That's nice for us get some interactivity.

We are streaming live on discord for our club members, but also Youtube, Twitch, x.com, TikTok, Kick, Llinkedin and Facebook. So pick your favorite fascist site and watch us live. After the fact, you can join us on the non-fascist twit.tv/mbw. Download audio or video there. There's a link there to the YouTube channel Great for sharing clips with other people, which helps us spread the word. So thanks in advance. Best way to subscribe, though of course, it's free Get the podcast in your favorite podcast client. You'll get it automatically, so you'll always have it the minute we're done. Thanks to John Ashley, our producer, back from his time off. Great to have you, john. Thanks to all of you for joining. We'll see you next time. Now it is my sad and solemn duty to tell you get back to work, because break time is over. Bye-bye.