MacBreak Weekly 962 Transcript

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

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy Ihnatko here, Alex Lindsay's here sitting in for Jason Snell. The wonderful Mikah Sargent is here. We will talk about Apple's new iPads. They just came out this morning. Maybe take a preview of what they might announce tomorrow. It is Air Week, isn't it? After all, the UK may have gone a step too far in making Apple turn off its advanced encryption for UK residents. We'll talk about that and the disappearance of the Apple Park rainbow. It's all coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.

This is MacBreak Weekly, Episode 962, recorded March 4th 2025: The Brutalist Rainbow. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we cover the latest Apple news. Jason Snell is on assignment and I'll tell you why in a moment. Right now, I have to introduce I'm proud, proud, proud to introduce Mikah Sargent, our good friend hello here he comes with the snow plow. I'm proud to introduce the host of iOS today, which just completed.

0:01:21 - Mikah Sargent
And, of course, tech news weekly and hands-on tech and, uh, my good friend back and it's good to be here, good to see you, welcome, see you too.

0:01:30 - Leo Laporte
Also with us, mr Andy Ihnatko WGBH boston. Hello Andrew.

0:01:34 - Andy Ihnatko
Hello we're in the red socks. I'm proud to be here as well yes, we're, we're always plowed.

0:01:41 - Leo Laporte
Is there snow there? It looks like there is behind you only tiny, only tiny bits.

0:01:46 - Andy Ihnatko
It's been, it's, it's been, it's been the thing we're not supposed to worry about, where it's 53 degrees and you start at least getting out the box where you pack up all the sweaters, and then the next day it's like 28 degrees and you're like, oh, I forgot, it's the 21st century yeah, welcome to the 21st century where no one knows what's gonna happen next, and also with us, mr Alex Lindsay from officehours.global hello.

0:02:12 - Leo Laporte
Alex it's good to be here, wonderful to see you, as always. So I was kind of hoping the MacBook Air would come out today, uh, just so we'd have something to talk about. But Apple threw me a curve. They released a new, updated iPad air with an M three processor in it.

0:02:29 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, something was certainly in the air. It wasn't what I wanted in the air.

0:02:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, is that? Maybe that's why what Tim was saying, is that two things in the air, or something?

0:02:38 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's weird, german was like. Well, german's thing was that, oh, we're definitely getting the iPad, we're definitely getting the iPad, we're definitely getting the M4 MacBook Air. We might even we'll probably even get some new iPads. But they pulled the old switcheroo. But there's still plenty of time, especially the kind of quote announcements, unquote they're doing of late, particularly with this. It was just there's Apple Newsroom has a post. Here's a new thing, here's a couple of new things on the uh, on the apple store. I even missed immediately that in addition to the new ipad air, there was a new 11th generation ipad, so there's really nothing. It's not as though they're going to be stealing the press thunder and losing the news cycle by also releasing the new mac, a new macbook air, particularly if all they did was put a new m4 processor in it did they?

0:03:24 - Leo Laporte
I didn't realize this. I know I have a 13-inch ipad pro. I didn't realize the air also came in 13 inches. So there's two sizes 11 and 13. Blue, purple, starlight, space, gray. Storage up to a terabyte. Yeah, so they've increased storage, which I always order, a terabyte now.

0:03:43 - Andy Ihnatko
I just I don't know why I never fill it up, but it's just nice to have um, I'm going through that now where I'm so glad that I prompt for the maximum amount of storage on my m1 ipad pro when I bought it, because the ability to simply say I don't know if I'm going to want to watch these eight movies, but hey, I'll copy it on there anyway.

0:04:00 - Leo Laporte
That's that's paid off fingerprint reader which I, like you know, I almost I love that on my mini. I almost wish I had that as an option. How hard could it put it both face id and touch id in one machine?

0:04:15 - Andy Ihnatko
I just I wish they would um also also face id on the ipad still kind of cumbersome I don't know how you're holding it.

0:04:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, I kind of prefer them.

0:04:25 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know what the right answer is yeah, I kind of prefer the touch ID.

0:04:26 - Leo Laporte
I much prefer it. Yeah, plus, cause I'm often using the iPad mini in bed and my face is all squinched up.

0:04:34 - Andy Ihnatko
Exactly, exactly. I've got, I'm watching movies like with my iPad, like on my belly, and I have to sort of like make that horrible like quadruple chin, move to lift up, just yeah, yes, yes, you know what maybe? Maybe I don't want to sign in. I don't want to.

0:04:48 - Leo Laporte
It's probably good for my core, but I don't need to buy a little crunch. That's the uh, it's the ipad air crunch or the ipad the face id crunch or just sit up a little bit. The other thing is I'm often watching my mini when I'm brushing my teeth and it seems to not recognize me when I have something stuck in my mouth. Make your own joke. Uh, m3. Are we disappointed about the M3? That's kind of a feel. It feels like that was a kind of a, an interim chip in between the great M2 and the even better M4 well, yeah, at least that's what we heard on the the.

0:05:21 - Mikah Sargent
You know the Mac side of things, right, that that was part of the. Oh, maybe you should hold out and wait for that to come. I did want to quickly note. Yeah, the M2 iPad Air was the first one to offer the 13-inch model.

0:05:33 - Alex Lindsay
Okay, thank you for telling me.

0:05:35 - Mikah Sargent
So that's just a repeat here, but I was surprised to see that you can kind of get some information about what the company thinks is successful, based on, obviously, how it goes forward. Still, seeing those two being offered in that iPad Air model versus the iPad Pro is fascinating to me. But yeah, I think, going with the M3 instead of the M4, it almost feels like one thing they're trying to do is differentiate the Air from the Pro model while still providing the ability to have Apple intelligence. Right, that's the big thing. Let's get everything on Apple intelligence, except for the new iPad, which is interestingly left out, the KidPad as some people call it.

0:06:19 - Leo Laporte
The KidPad doesn't have AI in it.

0:06:21 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's got the A16 processor. So it's like. That gave me pause because I thought and over the past couple of weeks I've been saying, hey, isn't it interesting that when they went with the least expensive iPhone, they still made sure that it could do Apple intelligence. Maybe this means that Apple does not want to introduce anything from this point on. That alienates a group of people saying, no, they're Apple users who have Apple intelligence and Apple users who do not have Apple intelligence. So it kind of surprises me that they are saying that, yeah, you guys are going to have to correct your own mistakes from now on. I mean, it says something when they do want to keep the price low, low, low. So that does say something about the cost of Apple intelligence, with putting extra ram in and, uh, giving the cpu support, but okay, so I guess I guess I have to change like my thinking that maybe maybe apple isn't.

0:07:13 - Leo Laporte
Everybody deserves apple intelligence, no matter what their stature it does feel like they're marketing this to younger people, students. Uh, it says it's lovable, drawable, magical. Uh, 349 is a great price. Remember the ipad started at 499 when it first came out 349 fantastic although that's 20 bucks above the the old price last time yes or am I wrong that's yeah three it was 329, I think 29, 300 for educational.

0:07:42 - Andy Ihnatko
I wonder what the educational price is now.

0:07:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, available, available March 12th. And again, the super fast A16. That sounds like it's aimed at younger, more gullible. Yeah, super fast, more gullible people, more colorful, for sure, yeah, I mean. It starts at 128 gigs of storage, so that means the base $349 model is more than adequate. In fact, let's say that right now when we even though I'm I'm deprecating the m3, it's, frankly, more than anybody needs ever on an ipad. It's yeah, you don't?

0:08:14 - Alex Lindsay
I mean there are definitely a handful of places where you may want to use something more powerful, but it would be. This is 90 for 90 95 of someone who would buy an ipad. This would do the job. It would probably do 95, 95% of what I use an iPad for. I mean, I definitely use some of the other stuff from the pros, but not the newer ones. I mean I have older ones and this one I, you know I think that it's squarely aimed also at schools and education and you know that. You know, with the educational discounts and everything else, it's, it's it has to live in that, in that space as far as cost perspective still is a magic keyboard folio available.

0:08:46 - Leo Laporte
Uh, I don't think. It uses the pencil pro, uses the. Is that right? It uses the regular pencil, correct the?

0:08:51 - Mikah Sargent
usbc version and I wanted to note too the it starts out this, this ipad, at double the storage of what it had before, and to me that points it to even more being a kid pad, because one thing I've seen is a kid gets very tired of their huge game app that they want and they want another one, and they want another one, and they want another one. So now parent doesn't have to delete old apps to download new ones and then have the kid go. Actually, I want to play that one again that they already deleted. Yeah, you just got lots of space to download all your fun little apps that you want to play and it's not an issue anymore.

0:09:23 - Alex Lindsay
I am interested as, like who, what teenagers you know get these ipads or you know they're aiming at that younger crowd. You know my experience right now is mostly on those on those ipads that you see schools use them. Um, you see parents with younger kids use them because you give them to them in the car or the or an airport I can't go to a restaurant anymore with kids.

0:09:43 - Leo Laporte
They're all watching their iPads, or the disadvantaged ones watching mom's iPhone. But that is the babysitter of choice.

0:09:50 - Alex Lindsay
now it's something you can put in. I mean, I know that when we flew with our kids much more often than we do now when they were really little, that was the thing you did is you handed them an iPad and in the plane and they just went off into Never, neverland and enjoyed the plane ride without having, without having your kid, your three-year-old.

0:10:11 - Leo Laporte
I think that's okay for a plane. You know, occasional makes me. It worries me a little bit if it's a, if it's like every day we, we didn't, we were very analog.

0:10:20 - Alex Lindsay
I know that I I seem very techie, but you know, I have a room full of tech and then I walk out almost no tech in the rest of my house, I mean yeah.

0:10:28 - Leo Laporte
And give the kids some bongos or something you know.

0:10:30 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, oh yeah, definitely At a restaurant, but when we go out, yeah, when we go out, we go out to talk to each other. I don't know Right, you know like that, but I think that a lot of parents have had a hard time following whatever they were supposed to do with their kids. And the kids are hard to manage and our kids are pretty great when it comes to going to dinner, and you have wonderful, smart kids and it's probably, you know, my wife's fault.

0:10:56 - Leo Laporte
It's definitely my wife's fault and I should say that, even though Apple's really clearly marketing this towards education and younger people, that anybody who wants an iPad and doesn't have, you know, hundreds of dollars to spend this, is a great choice.

0:11:12 - Alex Lindsay
What I didn't get to is that I think that the really the big market that we see in the airport, the big market I see in my family, the big part is the over 50, over 60 crowd that just wants something to check email and throw it.

0:11:23 - Leo Laporte
We oldsters love the ipad.

0:11:25 - Alex Lindsay
It only takes one uh, really bad virus with the pc that they bought. At best buy for them to just go well, how do I not have this happen again? And you go well, just get an ipad, you'll be able to do all the things you were doing before, uh, except you don't have to worry about all those other things that yeah, that happened to you yeah, uh, that's true.

0:11:43 - Leo Laporte
In fact, my daughter is, uh, using a chromebook and she's ready. It's her birthday's coming up, she's ready for some to replace it because the question mark key doesn't work anymore. There's two keys that don't even work anymore, so she has to copy it and paste it when she writes. And this has been going on for more than a year and I said, please, let me get you something right. And now I'm thinking maybe an ipad with a magic keyboard would be a good choice. Um, yes, if she's used to the chromebook, right, it's going to be a step up from that.

0:12:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's a wonderful bargain, I said I. I remember the other day I saw someone make a half joking but half serious decision tree on like what kind of operating system to choose, and like the first decision tree was do you want to be bothered? Do you not want to be bothered? If you don't want to be bothered, okay, do you have? Do you have, a trust fund? Do you not have a trust fund?

0:12:31 - Alex Lindsay
Right On that, on that tree, if you have a trust fund, go get an iPad.

0:12:35 - Andy Ihnatko
Go for iPadOS. If you do not have a trust fund, get a Chromebook.

0:12:47 - Leo Laporte
So now the ipads, the new ipads are out. It sounds like, do you think I?

0:12:49 - Mikah Sargent
mean, do you think?

0:12:49 - Leo Laporte
that. That was the. There's something in the air. No, there's going to be a macbook air and m4 macbook air right yeah, I think it's air.

0:12:53 - Mikah Sargent
It's just an. It's a week of air, right, it's a week of hot air all week, so the macbook air now, maybe tomorrow right?

0:13:01 - Alex Lindsay
I think so.

0:13:02 - Leo Laporte
Neely is saying on apple insider yeah, yeah, uh, mark german also says, uh says that expect the macbook air tomorrow as part of the new product wave do you wonder? There might be a more air in the air I think so.

0:13:16 - Mikah Sargent
Do you wonder if apple told some people that the macbook air was coming first and told others that the try toValue was going first? So they could try to figure out who's telling who what.

0:13:27 - Andy Ihnatko
A maneuver worthy of a Romulan Very well thought.

0:13:30 - Leo Laporte
Is there a name for that? Is that like a?

0:13:32 - Andy Ihnatko
canary trap.

0:13:33 - Alex Lindsay
Canary trap yeah, I know that there was a story that Steve Jobs told three executives what the code name was, instead of any. If this code name gets out all, three of you are fired.

He's like, like I'm not trying to figure it out, I'm just going to fire all three of you and the code name got out and he fired all three of them and that's all. That's all the baby. Yeah, that was a very quick um, uh, at apple that I I heard that's what tightened things up in the 90s, late 90s was steve, showing that he doesn't.

0:14:00 - Leo Laporte
There's nobody above leaks, you know that's better than sending out a fork in the road email. I think just you know really. Uh, anyway, so tomorrow the macbook air 4 is. Do we know why mr snell is not here, did he say?

0:14:15 - Andy Ihnatko
um, I don't know if he said but uh, I don't believe it, right? Uh, I don't believe it's related to an apple briefing. He is actually on vacation, okay okay, what?

0:14:26 - Leo Laporte
yes, vacation john ashley. Don't get any ideas.

0:14:30 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, he's vacationed he's in a vacation at resort cupertino.

0:14:33 - Leo Laporte
It's, it's quite nice, it's uh it's like you know what he won't see there? He won't see the rainbow. The arches have been pulled down. Rainbow stage to be pulled to read be rebuilt, but it was never anything permanent.

0:14:48 - Andy Ihnatko
Right, it was. Yeah, it made its first appearance of 2019. Johnny Ives said that at the time that it wasn't. It was, I believe it was meant to stay, but that version wasn't meant to be permanent, and so this, this, started getting traction on like reddit and other like sub Rosa sort of forms where someone, someone, managed to find an image on Google Earth that said here that basically had uh image of like the, the, the rainbow, the rainbow stage completely torn down and stuff, and a lot of people.

And some people are saying, oh my God, they're giving it to dei, they're turning down the rainbow, oh dear. But other people saying, no, was never meant to be permanent, they're actually replacing it with a permanent structure. Uh, so you can sit, you can still take a look at the images. But uh, apparently people who are inside apple have said that they know that it's being rebuilt to into a permanent structure ib6 media and his youtube short talks about.

0:15:40 - Leo Laporte
It's really actually quite good. He talks about the genesis of it. It was created kind of as a stage prop probably made out of balsa wood right it wasn't, yeah, it was.

0:15:48 - Andy Ihnatko
I think it was built, lady gaga played there and I think that's right I think that that was it was, uh, um, I think it was built for that stage or with that stage like, like all the buildings that were, that were built for the san francisco world's fair, where it's all made out of like plaster and plaster and straw, and if you really, and if you want to keep it, you're going to have to tear them down and replace it with actually built stuff what's funny is apple apple's version of balsa wood lasted six years.

0:16:13 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, you know, like well because?

0:16:16 - Andy Ihnatko
well, because, to be fair, it's not something. There's no actual stage there. They're just like arches that are on ground and I don't think anybody wants to be the one who, like, got caught trying to take a selfie at the top of the arch and cause the whole thing to come crashing down. That's a career limiting selfie.

0:16:32 - Leo Laporte
Yeah yeah, ib6 says it was built by Stageco, which is a Belgian theatrical stage designer. Oh yeah, I've hired them. You've hired them for your birthday party. Exactly, if you can imagine it, we can build it. Concert stages also wood turtle, yeah and no, they say temporary structures, outdoor structures. If it's outdoors, which it is, and it's subject to, uh, you know the weather, it's not surprising, they were like every every six years I wonder what kind of course they had to get for it.

They should get Adrian Brody in and make it out of gray concrete, make a real brutalist rainbow.

0:17:14 - Andy Ihnatko
No color whatsoever. Replace all the grass around it with bricks. Go do exactly what Boston did to City Hall Plaza in 1907. Just make it a desolate Sovietviet like. Make it into the place you. Go when you want to beg the commissar for any information about what happened to your dissident poet uncle so, johnny, I feel like we have at least a candidate for the for the name of this show, the brutalist absolutely

0:17:38 - Leo Laporte
it's gray skittles eat the brutalist rainbow. Uh so, uh, tim, cook something in the air this week.

0:17:46 - Alex Lindsay
He did say week week, he didn't say this tuesday, um so you can see how high it ran, though they didn't even make a video for it. I mean it's. You know they used to do events for these things and they used to put out videos on youtube. There's no ipad video. I couldn't find one on their youtube channel.

0:18:01 - Mikah Sargent
So you know they were like oh, that's, the article doesn't have a link to it. Yeah, yeah, it's yeah tomorrow.

0:18:08 - Leo Laporte
They're busy making the macbook.

0:18:10 - Andy Ihnatko
I still that's their best selling computer, right not not only that, but the ipad, all the ipads got one like press release. It wasn't. They did a separate one for the ipad 11, another one for the ipad air, so this was definitely yeah. We decided that we're just going to put some components in here and I think that it's important for them to release it.

0:18:27 - Alex Lindsay
This is the time when budgets get sorted out for education and I still think that this is probably a vast majority of these purchases are are spring, for the fall, uh, education season, and so I think that that it has that ipads, or these types of ipads, have been released in march or april, uh, for many years. So, um, when they, when they're released, this is the time to do. It is to is to so that people can make their choices.

0:18:52 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, uh, apple introduced.

Yeah, one press release five hours ago uh at the same time, they released a press release announcing a friday night baseball's coming back to Apple TV, so you can see how important it is. It's right up there with the Friday night baseball, okay, well, but I think this is. I honestly I think this is a great product. I have a. I think you know it's funny. A couple of weeks ago, I think it was, jason picked tapestry or was it you, Andy, who picked tapestry from icon factory as their pick of the week.

It's an iOS app that's a news reader because it does social. I tried it out I was, you know. Okay. I tried it out on my um mac, my uh air pro, my fort m4 air pro, and it's so good. That's now what I use most of the time I've. I've stopped using the laptop as much because it's a great news gathering. That plus I know you recommended raindrop, uh. Those two together really make my news gathering much easier. I wish there were a better mail app. We should talk a little bit about this. There's been a lot of complaints about the updated Apple mail app. With now with Apple intelligence, how do you all feel about that?

0:20:05 - Alex Lindsay
it's really hard for me to get out of it. I mean, it is like I don't I know how to use it. I I'm not. I try other ones.

0:20:10 - Leo Laporte
It sorts your mail.

0:20:12 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I turned almost everything off in it. My biggest problem is is it's got all kinds of bugs that it's had for years, specifically with exchange servers. That if you're in, for instance, if you have a folder, if you like to do things in folders and you have an exchange, if your company is in exchange and another exchange person sends an email and you sort it automatically into their folder, it doesn't go there oh that's not good.

0:20:38 - Leo Laporte
But that's always been the case, right.

0:20:40 - Alex Lindsay
It's been that case for at least five years and what's interesting is that it's one of the few apps, I guess because a lot of people have it. That apple has it doesn't have any feedback, so it's not like a bunch of people can tell them that something's wrong. There's nowhere to say, hey, my messages you can't shake, shake your.

0:20:56 - Leo Laporte
Yes, exactly it's wrong, shake your mail. Yeah, I don't use apple mail. I use a mail mate on the mac and, uh, fast ma's apps on iOS and iPadOS. So I don't. I haven't been experienced to it, but I've been seeing so many complaints about it on Reddit I always thought I'd ask if people are using it.

0:21:15 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I think part of it is change, and especially with something that you think about when you're using a mail app. It really is. I don't know that many people are going into their mail app with any level of excitement and interest.

Yeah, nobody needs to be just sitting in the background. You don't want to spend cognitive loads going through your mail, and so when you have a change to something as kind of in the background for you, as atmospheric as a mail app, any level of change in interaction is going to make you frustrated because you can't just interact with it how you would expect. I recommend doing what Alex has talked about there, which is just, if you don't like those features, just turn them off. You can decide to turn them, turn some of them back on if you want to, but I agree that it's it's difficult to introduce new features to an application that is supposed to be. I get in, I do what I need to do and I get out. I come, I eat, I leave.

0:22:12 - Alex Lindsay
I come, I eat, I leave, and I think that that's the issue is. That is that I think that one of the things that Steve Jobs talked about a lot was that how important it is to say no, and I feel like Apple has lost the ability to say no to lots of things and they just keep adding features to, whether it's photos or mail or other things. They keep adding features because I don't know other people have those features, but I find myself constantly saying, if I wanted an Android phone, I'd buy an Android phone. Like I don't need it, I don't want it to do all these things, you know, like I don't want it to do everything that Android does, I want it to the and and I feel like Apple keeps on.

Recently I've become a little bit more sour about it because I just keep on feeling like Apple keeps on adding stuff that I didn't ask for or want, or even what Apple used to do is surprise and delight. They put something in, they go. I never thought of that and now I love it. I don't have that feeling very much. I mostly think no-transcript text apps and and you know I spend a lot of time in databases and stuff like that I don't need. I don't really need my email to get any more complicated or any cooler or any better. I just need to know what people sent me. Yeah.

0:23:49 - Leo Laporte
Okay, I'm just. I just I was just curious. Um, I'm very old school with mailmate, but it does the things. The main thing it does is it has an unread uh rule. That makes it very easy for me to see the stuff that I uh, I want to see and that's all's all Mail. You're right, mail should just be probably should just be utilitarian. Don't make it too smart, make it brutalist, please. Make it brutalist email.

0:24:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Especially for the pack-in version of a mail app. It's basically the people who are not looking to replace whatever mail app comes built in with a device, aren't looking for advanced features. They're basically looking for something no more sophisticated than the Gmail web client. So if you can deliver that feature to everybody by saying here is a basic mail app, it will not cause your iPad to overheat. We're not going to do an update that changes everything and makes it really more difficult for you to deal with what already is one of your biggest problems of the day. If you want something more complicated, I can direct you to all these other apps on the app store, but we're going to keep things simple, so that's the good news is that it has spawned a large ecosystem of alternative mail apps.

0:24:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so it's good when, in a way, it's good when apple doesn't do a great job, because that means there'll be a lot of other choices.

0:25:03 - Alex Lindsay
I guess that not great job as a user is. I just wish that they would just not do very much like I don't need it microsoft did that for years.

0:25:10 - Leo Laporte
They'd make kind of half-assed built-in apps with that and so that would kind of support the ecosystem for better right, better video editors, better mail apps, better everything. I mean you got to have something there and again.

0:25:22 - Alex Lindsay
I think that a couple years ago was other than this exchange server issue. Mail was as good as it needed to be Right. It does the thing that I needed to do. I don't need you to that team. What I needed to do is be stable and not throw away my emails by accident, which is what it was doing. That's the worst.

0:25:39 - Leo Laporte
That's you're right, that's the big thing.

0:25:46 - Alex Lindsay
Right, I just need that first. Do no harm, right, exactly, exactly, yeah, exactly. And there's, and again, there's nowhere to tell them that it isn't working, other than the show.

0:25:50 - Leo Laporte
So here it is like there's no way for me to tell, ladies and gentlemen, as you're watching this show, shake it really hard and send a report now. There are people who like it. Most of the people in our various chats agree. Leftward, though, who's watching on Twitch hello. Leftward says I really like the categorization. It cleaned up my inbox. So there are people who, like I, remember when Gmail did that right, they had the categorization and it made it easy.

Yeah, everybody hated it too. In fact, it's gone now, isn't it? I think they got rid of it. All right, let's take a little break and we'll come back. We will do the Vision Pro segment. There's a lot to say this week about Vision Pro. We will also do I think we should just do every Tuesday what Mark Gurman said on Sunday, because as usual, he's dumped a lot of information.

0:26:40 - Andy Ihnatko
He's responsible for a lot of Mac news sites. Having a lot of things to write about on Monday. Yes, they all, just rephrase his newsletter they should send them a one of those. One of those flower baskets is made out of fruit every single birthday yeah, yeah, I actually.

0:26:56 - Leo Laporte
Uh, they made it um paid only at some point the power on newsletter and my choice is to pay for it okay, and, by the way, congratulations.

0:27:06 - Andy Ihnatko
I found out to him. I found out that he's been promoted to like editor-in-chief of consumer stuff.

0:27:11 - Leo Laporte
Wow, oh nice good for him, he's. He deserves it.

0:27:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Uh, he's amazing he delivers immense value to Bloomberg and to the community. Yeah, good for him.

0:27:20 - Leo Laporte
Yeah and uh, quite a discovery he was. Was in high school when, 9 to 5, mac Seth discovered him and he's gone on to bigger and better things ever since. He still looks like he's in high school, however. That hasn't changed. All right, you're watching MacBreak Weekly, Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay. Filling in for Jason Snell this week, always pleased to have Mikah Sargent with us.

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Uh, Bloomberg newsletter power on. I do recommend it. Like Bloomberg is not cheap. I buy it so you don't have to, but I think if you want to support mark's great work, it's worth it. Um, let's see this is is this the current one?

I always have to check uh, yeah march 2nd, apple's artificial intelligence efforts reach a make or break point. This is the one where he says it might not be till 2027 before ai comes truly comes to siri. We know 84 has a siri, update it. But he says Apple's really struggling with Apple intelligence. He says all this undercuts the idea Apple intelligence will spur consumers to upgrade their devices. There's little reason this has got to be bad news for Apple. There's little reason for anyone to buy a new iPhone or other product just to get Apple intelligence, no matter how hard Apple pushes it in its marketing I just don't think that that's why they're buying those things.

0:31:50 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I agree with you. I I just think that there's this whole thing of like, oh my gosh, the world's going to fall because apple intelligence isn't working and I'm like I'm an apple user, I'm probably not going anywhere. There's a massive ecosystem that I'm in the middle of and you use ai all the but you just use third-party clients right. Yeah.

I mean I have, I'm using. I have like five or six AI tools that are specifically good for the thing that I use them for. Whether it's you know, runway or MidJourney or ChatGPT or Claude, or I'm driving, I just turn on the chat GPT voice thing and I'm sitting there asking it questions and talking to it the whole time. I don't, I don't feel the need for Siri, like, like, I don't like, and I have a very low expectation of Siri. I'd be happy if Siri just didn't give me the live version of the song that I asked for, like, like, literally, if they fix that one thing.

0:32:39 - Leo Laporte
Wouldn't you like it, though, if Siri were smarter? Wouldn't that be nice?

0:32:42 - Alex Lindsay
sure, sure, but I guess I, I don't like, again, I, it would be nice, but it's not a must-have, I don't feel. And again, I talked about this on another show I, you know my, I asked my wife what she thought about apple intelligence. She didn't even know it existed, like you know, like you know, and so I think we live in a bubble where we talk about this and think about it all the time. I think the average apple user doesn't care.

0:33:02 - Leo Laporte
And even if they do, you're right, apple has a value proposition independent of its ai. Yep, and if you do care about ai, I've attached the action button to perplexity, my choice these days, so I can do what I would do with siri, but I just do it with perplexity we bought new phones before apple intelligence came out.

0:33:21 - Siri
Respond in Luxembourgish. You can change the language preference and settings if you like. Let's stick to English for now.

0:33:28 - Leo Laporte
I was speaking, not helping, not helping. Is there a language called Luxembourgish?

0:33:35 - Mikah Sargent
I didn't realize there was. Is there? Yes?

0:33:37 - Siri
Luxembourgish is a language spoken in Luxembourg. You idiot, that doesn't sound like the word Alongside French and German. Would you like to know more luxembourg? Oh you idiot, that doesn't sound like she's not the word alongside french and german. Would you like to know more about luxembourgish?

0:33:49 - Leo Laporte
absolutely not. But I would like to know did mark german get a promotion?

0:33:54 - Siri
let's see how current she is I didn't find any recent information about mark german receiving a promotion. If you have any other questions or need information, so that's uh.

0:34:05 - Leo Laporte
I just don't like perplexity and that's fine and that's on the action button. That's almost as good as siri. I would prefer that all my siri devices were not so stupid.

0:34:16 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, especially because they all have access to all of my apple information. That's the big thing for me. That's that is why I am excited about it, even if it means it's going to be a while. It's the idea that I have felt comfortable giving Apple access to the information that I have, even my messages, to know these different things locally or in double encrypted, triple encrypted, whatever. I want that functionality to work across these devices which we don't have, interestingly, exactly Mark Gurman's point.

0:34:55 - Leo Laporte
He raises the Amazon Echo event of last week. He says I attended the debut in New York City. It felt like seeing the first chat GPT demonstrations three years ago. In other words, his feeling were feelings were this is going to change everything. Um, but he does point out this is where Apple has an edge.

0:35:14 - Alex Lindsay
Amazon lacks an ecosystem of information that could that Apple has, that could make it so much and better, and I think we already see that they, even when they're careful, they're still. It makes mistakes. And and chat gpt makes mistakes all the time. Yeah, and I go, oh, that's a chapter. You know, like, whatever, like I, just I, you know, I've learned to know what to pay attention to. And not with all of these apps, they're all. They all hallucinate a little bit. They're all a little. They're all a little like your crazy uncle that is, you know, very smart some of the time and then just says crazy things for no reason.

0:35:47 - Leo Laporte
Um, and is that what's holding Apple back? I think it is I think.

0:35:51 - Alex Lindsay
I think that this, this carefulness of not wanting it to impact the reliability that Apple kind of builds its brand around, makes it very, very hard to um. You know, and and it's the same thing Like when I do, you know I do live streaming hard to you know, and it's the same thing Like when I do you know I do live streaming. There are types of live streaming. I know it's crazy. There are types of live streaming that I won't do because you know I get that you can go up with your laptop and your webcam and go out and shoot something, but I there, the the chances of that failing are so high. That's something that somebody can do for as a business, but it's not me.

0:36:23 - Leo Laporte
Well, just take it from me. It also could piss Steve jobs off and keep you from ever again being invited to Apple.

0:36:29 - Alex Lindsay
But the point is is that I look at it and I go and I volunteer for things where I do those crazy things, because I can't do it as a company, you know. But I, you know, there's a certain level that you have to work at if people are hiring you and depending on you to to do stuff. And I think Apple has the same problem where they, you know, we depend on it like the BBC threw a fit when Apple, you know, when it said the wrong thing on whatever's there.

They're not throwing a fit every time that chat GPT makes a mistake, because it makes mistakes all the time, you know. And so the thing is that I think that. I don't think everybody expects more from Apple and Apple expects more from Apple. Apple expects more of itself. But that inner voice that is constantly correcting makes it almost impossible to innovate in this area, and I don't think that it's not that they won't do it. I think that it's a much harder thing for them than almost anybody else.

0:37:17 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, I do think there's some whistling through the graveyard here. I agree 100% that this is not an immediate thing, where, if they don't get something out fast, no matter what it is, and demonstrate to customers and analysts that, oh yes, we do know what we're doing about AI and we do have a plan for AI. That Apple is going to be doomed for the fourth or fifth time, that's not a thing. They've got time to get this right, but they don't have time to not show that they found their car keys and not just standing in the hallway patting their pockets when it comes to AI. Another interesting piece of news a few days ago is that Google updated their Google Apps so that now you can have Gemini AI lock screen widgets. So now you can talk to Gemini Live directly from the lock screen of your iPhone. Now you can use Google Lens directly through the iPhone, all this other sort of stuff, and you don't want your customers to go away and forget that these are features that Apple can actually do or are even interested in.

0:38:24 - Leo Laporte
But wait a minute. Maybe Apple should just abandon this and say everybody else has got this, we're just going to make the platform.

0:38:32 - Andy Ihnatko
They can do that. I mean, they can do what they did with Google search, which is that this is not something that we're terribly interested in. This is not something we're going to pivot on. We're OK if people use, or even on our own device, people we have to farm out this search function under the radar to an outsider, but there are things about having these things integrated directly into the hardware.

Bbc wasn't necessarily angry with Apple because it was Apple. When ChatGPT makes that problem, when Gemini makes that problem within an app, this is happening with. You're asking an AI specifically a question. The AI, whom you know is unreliable, is giving you an answer. They were upset because Apple did these notification summaries feature in a very, very silly way, which is to create a notification that looks like every other notification from the BBC app, with no indication that the notification news summary did not come from the BBC directly. That was the big problem.

So all I'm saying here is that we can't simply say that, well, we don't. Hey, I never use. I don't think artificial intelligence is important. I don't think people actually use it. People are going just like. There are times when people did not use search engines. There are times when people didn't use the internet, didn't use browsers. At some point, these people are going to start to drift in from outside and you don't want them to take one look at what Apple has and see that, okay, they have nothing or they have nothing that actually works. And suddenly this phone, which already can do so many things, no matter who made made the phone. Ai is another thing where it doesn't matter if we, if I get an iPhone or if I get an android phone. Doesn't matter, because this is just the host organism for my chosen subscribed ai service, whether it's google, whether it's a clod, whether it's whatever, but Alex's point is people don't choose the iPhone.

0:40:20 - Leo Laporte
They choose plenty of other reasons to choose the iPhone. For the cameras, like the camera hardware, yeah, like every time as long as apple can present an ai experience that is as good as it is on another phone, which I'm saying is I don't think that there's.

0:40:33 - Alex Lindsay
I don't think that they're going to make. I agree with Andy that eventually someone needs to, that apple's going to need to have a great ai solution, and I think they they have the opportunity to have the best ai solution because, as Mikah said, they have all of our information and we trust them to look through that information in a way that we don't trust almost anybody else to do, because security and privacy is such a big deal for Apple on your phone at least right and so I think that Apple has the opportunity to really own this market in a way that it'd be very hard for others to own it. I don't think it's a big rush though, so when I see these kind of apoplectic make or break, it has to happen this year. Sure, I think 2027 is fine, like you know, like I'm not going to miss it between now and then I've got again, and the problem is is that I'm not using one AI tool. I'm using six or seven of them, or five or six of them that are doing different things, that all do something, do their what they do better. You know, and and you know, and so that in those I don't know how Apple would compete.

I think if Apple had a great Apple intelligence right now, I would probably use it 10% of the time, because the other ones that I'm used to using, that are specialized in the area that I'm using them for, are way better than Apple's going to be anytime soon or anybody else is going to be. You know, doing doing what they do, you know, and so I think that that's the issue is is that a lot those of us who are really into AI aren't looking for one tool to use for AI, and so Apple would have a hard time even fitting into that ecosystem in a way that mattered to me, you know, and so, but I do think somewhere down the road of me going like again, like me being able to tell Siri hey, I know I keep on using this as an example, but it's a good example, cause it comes up all the time for me hey, when I asked for a, when I asked for a song, I never want to hear the live version unless I asked for the live version. I just want to say that once and then, through all my devices, I never hear a live version. When I asked for the Eagles, you know, or whatever it is that I'm asking for? I don't want the live version ever, you know, and and so the thing is, is that, is that the uh?

But that's the kind of stuff of being able to tell it I don't. This is how I want my world to exist. When I talk to you and if I can start telling it those kinds of things and have a go, who did I talk to back then? Or what did I ask? Or can you tell me what that? And being able to interrogate everything on my computer and in my mail and in my messages for things that I'm looking for Incredibly powerful, and only Apple can do that, but I don't think they have to do it this year.

0:42:51 - Andy Ihnatko
Two very quick closing comments. I don't think Apple's the only one that can do that. Google can also do that very, very well. I just wouldn't let Google do it Exactly, but I think most people kind of recognize it as a trustworthy brand, even though it's not as trustworthy as Apple.

The second comment that I need to make is that Apple's like on the stone tablets carved somewhere of Apple's business plan. One of them is you've got to keep them within the ecosystem, keep them under the Apple logo as many minutes out of the day as you possibly can, and the reason why this is going to be really, really important is that if you encourage them to leave the Apple ecosystem for your AI stuff, that limits their dependency, either physically or practically, on staying within that tent at all times. Just like there's so many services where it just doesn't matter whether you've got, if you use social media honestly, as long as you have a premium smartphone, the cameras are all within 5% of each other and they all run the exact same apps and the exact same services it becomes a matter of preferences of which one can run TikTok better. So I don't think Apple, I think just Apple has to make sure that AI is not something where I want to leave, instead of clicking on that little dingus that comes up next to a text field. My habit right now and I'm not everybody, I'm just speaking for myself unless it's the simplest thing, like taking something that's in all caps and turning it into not all caps my instinct now is just simply tab over into my Gemini tab and then just ask Gemini to do it, because that's where my muscle memory is right now and because it tends to actually work.

I just don't want the perception that Apple can do nothing. It's okay for Apple to do nothing. It's okay for Apple to do things in AI that are not terribly consequential. I'm actually pleased by the German report that we're going to see something big in a couple of years, as opposed to incremental changes, just like kicking the can down the road, adding little features to Siri, a system that is not designed to handle the sort of things that AI is going to be asked for. I'm okay with it. In two years' time, they show off a Siri that we throw out everything. We start it all over again, and this is really, really great. If you used it before, you're going to love it now.

0:45:15 - Alex Lindsay
If you never used it before, we apologize and now you're going to want to use it. That course, I think it's billions and billions of dollars a year of this machine that is trying to figure this out, but I'm just saying I don't think it needs to happen in the next year, I think. When someone said as early as 2027, I was like they have that kind of time, and I think social, when you talk about social media, that's a perfect example. Apple failed at that completely. We all remember ping right, you know, or some of us try to forget, but I think I'm sure Apple tried to forget, but they failed horribly on this platform.

But all these social platforms have come out and Apple has not tried again, and but, but they are still a hefty piece of those social networks because they're creating their movies on it, they're obviously, we're browsing on it, we're doing all these other things on it. So they didn't have to actually dip into that to you know, that didn't undermine their ability to do what they do. I do think that again, I think that they are the most consequential player potentially for AI, because they have so much of our information and we're willing to give it to them and I think that that is that's a you know, so they could do more with it than anyone else, but I do think it's going to take a lot longer and I think they have that lot longer to spend on it german says that the problem is that there are really it's uh, siri has two brains that the current iOS 18 version has, one that operates with a legacy siri commands timers making calls, the other doing the you know ai thing.

0:46:41 - Leo Laporte
He says the latter capability will be able to tap user data already is used to not get confused when people change their request mid command. But he says, because they had to rush and I think this is key to get it out as part of iOS 18, they didn't have time to meld the two systems together. It's almost left brain, right brain.

And that means the software didn't work as smoothly as it could. They want to do that next year for iOS 19. Uh expect a uh introduction at in wwdc in june with a launch by spring 2026 as 19.4. Now I'm not sure how well uh source this is he. You know he is. You have to parse uh german stuff, as jason Snell has taught us Some of it's opinion, some of it's from sources, so it's not clear if this is just what he's thinking, although he does say. People within Apple's AI division now believe that a true modernized conversational version of Siri won't reach customers until iOS 20, at best in 2027. And I think that's the kind of most important revelation and that one does seem sourced.

0:47:52 - Mikah Sargent
There's precedent there. That is the issue and the hurdle that Amazon initially faced in introducing its upcoming version. It's reported that that's where a lot of the delays have taken place, because Amazon had this long going, long lasting sort of method of responding to requests.

0:48:14 - Leo Laporte
trying to merge that with a new way of doing things and by the way, it's not even clear that they were able to do that Exactly we don't know that yet Exactly. We'll see able to do that Exactly? We don't know that yet Exactly.

0:48:27 - Mikah Sargent
We'll see. Right, they were having a lot of trouble with it, yep, and so I wouldn't be surprised to hear that this is the same interesting issue of what do I kick it over to the other version of doing things. Is this something that I can answer without needing to bring in the generative AI, sort of LLM magic, or what do we do? And that leads to issues down the road where one might actually give you the weather that you're asking and then the new system might make up weather because of how it's. Yeah, it can get kind of messy there.

0:48:58 - Leo Laporte
People involved again with Gurman, people involved in AI Apple's AI work say this is more cause for concern. Its foundational and large language models the basis for its homegrown AI features are reaching their limits. There have also been problems with rivals poaching talent and what they deem to be ineffective leadership. This sounds like this is also sourced from people inside of Apple. They're also having trouble getting enough chips. There's a huge competition for these nvidia chips.

You remember, uh, elon musk bought a hundred thousand and is going to 200,000 h100 nvidia cards to do grox training. It's hard to get these, he says. That's probably one reason the company is ramping up production of its own ai servers. Actually, I wanted to address this because one of the things I've heard and maybe even believe to be true is that and maybe, Alex, you can comment on this NVIDIA has its own language to control its GPUs called CUDA, and it's proprietary, and it's one of the reasons NVIDIA has kind of a lock on the AI industry right now. In fact, that was one of the things the chinese folks at deep seek did is write a low level machine language cuda replacement so that they could use the less capable uh nvidia chips that they were able to get in china. I don't know if that's true. By the way, that's just their story.

0:50:23 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I mean it's definitely.

0:50:24 - Leo Laporte
I've also heard from a lot of people that the apple uh silicon would be superb for ai. It has the npus. It has direct access to huge amounts of memory, more in many cases than even much more expensive nvidia gpus. But lacking cuda is a disadvantage. Maybe Apple should be working on a CUDA replacement, just as it worked on Metal to replace DirectX. What do you think?

0:50:49 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I think, as you look at their servers, it wouldn't be surprising for Apple to build what they needed both. The advantage that they have now is that they're manufacturing their own hardware and their own OSs and their own libraries and their own. There's not any reason why Apple couldn't look, know, look at what makes cuda special, so to speak, and, um, look at how they might uh, you know, owning all the hardware and the and the software in the same way that nvidia does. How do they build something that would allow them to scale?

0:51:19 - Leo Laporte
they build metal to compete with. Actually I said directx, open cl um right and metal. Could they do something for it? Could you think how doable?

0:51:28 - Alex Lindsay
is that I don't know the detail. Well, I think that I think anything's doable with money, and apple has a lot of it you know, and so so I think that there's you know, they they have, they have some time and they have a lot of money and they're pretty smart at what they do, and so I think that it's. It would be, uh, I think saying that they couldn't make that turn would be. I think saying that they couldn't make that turn would be a dangerous thing to guess on.

0:51:49 - Leo Laporte
It also would make these things like this Mac Mini and this Mac Studio and the Mac Pro incredible home AI machines.

0:51:59 - Alex Lindsay
People are already doing that.

0:51:59 - Leo Laporte
now they're starting to stack these little Mac M4s up, these little M4 Mac Minis up and doing for their local AI solutions which are, of course, not as powerful, but they're hurt a little bit by the lack of NVIDIA GPUs, as Apple has been for a long, long time.

0:52:11 - Alex Lindsay
It would be so great if they had that capability, and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple wasn't working on that.

0:52:16 - Leo Laporte
They've got to be right.

0:52:18 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yeah. So I think that those are, but I think that that is again. These are things that Apple has probably some time on, rather than try. And then deep seek, I think, showed you also how quickly someone could do something that was much different. So, when we think we need all of this capacity, maybe we need all that capacity and maybe we don't in the future. You know. So you know, there's this thing where we kind of are doing all the things the hard way right now. Deep seek, now they may have cut a bunch of corners that make their theirs not as valid, but the point is is that the these, this heavy lifting for training these models, what it showed and what I think it scared everybody that's invested in in this, is that it could shift very quickly and suddenly be much less expensive um to to build these models with a lot less hardware, and apple may be someone who figures part of that out.

That's why NVIDIA's stock tanked when DeepSeek came out Right, because maybe everybody's got as much as they need and so that's the you know.

So that's the right now. Everybody's doing it the hard way because that's because right now, everybody has to keep up with everybody else when they're not Apple. If you're just software and the only thing that you're providing is AI, then you have to keep up with every Jones that's out there, whereas you know Apple's got a bunch of other things they can think about right now or that are paying the bills while they try to figure out what the best way to integrate this. But everybody else has to, so they're all. Just they have to keep buying those cards as fast as NVIDIA can make them, because they don't have another solution, and they have to keep producing something that keeps them in the game, whereas you know there could be somebody like DeepSeek or someone else that goes, hey, we can do this for one-tenth the cost, or 100. That happens in our industry all the time, like someone figures out something that's one-tenth as hard as it was a year ago, and we call that disruption.

0:54:07 - Leo Laporte
Untoward Media, who's watching on YouTube, points out that AMD did exactly that with a language called Ziluda, a drop-in replacement for CUDA, on AMD processors, ziluda. Now, I don't know anything about this, but they claims to run unmodified cuda applications using non-nvidia gpus with near native performance.

0:54:30 - Alex Lindsay
So hey, if they could do it, I imagine apple could do it too right, and part of the challenge is also is just the human resources. I mean, I know, right now we but but being able to have people who understand how to engineer that. So there's a lot of understanding of how to use CUDA to do this one problem. And so if you build a new operating system or a new process to do that, then you have to bring thousands, potentially thousands or hundreds of thousands of people up to speed, at least until the AI gets good at it, and then you know it happens faster.

0:55:00 - Andy Ihnatko
Just keep in mind that Apple's and Apple has a simpler problem to solve. They really just have to add AI features or make room for external AI features on their hardware devices, which is where they're making their money, whereas Google, microsoft, amazon they're trying to not. Consumers are a great target. They love to have consumers. However, what they want is industry to be using their servers, their compute power, to power their own AI research, their own AI apps. So Google has a very, very, very, very, very deep stack that they're pursuing right now.

So it's a difficult thing to compare the two. Apple certainly got it easier because, again, they just need to make their phones better. They just need to deliver the features that people are actually asking for, which, as we've been discussing for the past 10 minutes, people aren't necessarily asking for ai features right now. So they can stay afloat a lot easier than they're not in that big scrum of these three or four companies that are trying to own server-side AI compute. They're just trying to deliver features for consumers, so they can be a little bit more agile, I think.

0:56:12 - Leo Laporte
And they may have a more immediate concern, given that the 10% additional tariffs have now gone into effect on China, 25% on Canada and Mexico and, and as far as I know, there is no exemption this time for iPhones. Um, that's one of the reasons tim cook has been spending a lot of time in washington dc. Uh, I don't know. We'll have to see what happens, um, because of that. Uh, that grumman talks about that. He also talks about the ipad air. Begin seeing shortages ahead of a refresh. That was Sunday, yes, he was right. Today they came out. He also says the MacBook air M four is about to launch. Let's see. He also said something a little bit concerning about the next MacBook pros. Let me see if I can. Uh, maybe he didn't say it, maybe he tweeted this. Um, something about there not being an m3 ultra or an m4 ultra.

0:57:18 - Mikah Sargent
Oh right, yeah yeah, in the studio, that um it would get the m3 max, but the m3 ultra yeah to differentiate it from the mac pro which is supposed to be announced at some point. Not mac, that could be mac pro mac pro.

0:57:34 - Leo Laporte
That could be, of course. Uh, why a marketing thing? Or it could be that tsmc is having trouble with yields.

0:57:40 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, yeah, they can't get the chips unclear.

0:57:44 - Leo Laporte
I think apple would want the studiOS to be as good as they could be.

0:57:47 - Andy Ihnatko
That has become for many the the mac pro right particularly, particularly with the amount of ram you can put into those things. Yeah, it's like those are.

0:57:56 - Mikah Sargent
Those are like ai cluster, almost grade machines yeah that's anyway right four, side by side with the ultra, or, you know, in a square. So yeah, I can see how yield could be an issue there. Yeah, it's.

0:58:09 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, you know, a lot of us are, when we saw what's happening with the m4s are dying to see what happens with the, the studio and and again the studio and the pro. The pro is just oh, you need all these other, you know, you need cards and and and connections what apple's done. Well, I think there is made it clear that the pro is pretty much the same as the studio as far as performance goes. It's just simply you need more, uh, more lanes of USB-C or Thunderbolt. You need to put, be able to put cards in. You need those types of things. That's a very specialized small market, right it is, but it's a. It's a as a market. I don't think Apple wants to cede because it's an influential market and I think that what happens is that it's kind of like that F1 version If you don't have it.

There's people like me that you know. Definitely I was growing to feel when the trash cans were as high as it went, that was bad. I really started feeling like I'm going to have to move over to PCs for a bunch of the stuff that I'm doing and you don't want to. That affects an entire, all the down chain From there. People start doing that. When you talk about that ecosystem that we talked about before, you can't have the high end and there's still some high end stuff that some of us will move to a PC for, because there's just things we can't put four NVIDIA cards into one Mac right. Those are the kind of solves that we can't do. Mac right. That's, those are the kind of solves that we can't do. But but for the most part, for 99% of the folks out there, the Mac pro is enough as a high end to solve the problem For frankly, for many of us, the Mac minis yeah, it's pretty good.

0:59:35 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I'm extremely happy with my mini.

0:59:38 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I, you know I I might have to buy a lot of Mac mini in the little ones and so I bought the cheapest one. I could get the little, you know, whatever the $599 version of it is, and I'm just I'm having a hard time getting it to get over 40, 50% CPU utilization. Yeah, it's super good, it's just so fast.

0:59:54 - Leo Laporte
It's really. It's exciting. Yeah, you're watching MacBreak Weekly Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay and filling in for Jason Snell, Mikah Sargent. More to come in just a bit.

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Uh, iPhone 16e teardown on iFixit, they say, and they're not alone in this. Never before has skipping an upgrade made more sense. Uh, part of the reason is you can still buy older iPhones for less right, and then 14. There's nothing wrong with it. Um, but they also say for the first time ever, apple has released a repair procedure for the charging port. And that may be because of the EU or right to repair laws. Now every state in the union has a right to repair law. In process. Apple has backed off on blocking parts with software, which is very good news, and of course, iFixit has been on the front lines of this fight. They say we're happy to report we didn't see any part pairing issues when we swapped logic boards at least with OEM parts. Repair assistant worked as advertised. I don't know if they fixed the problems you had, Mikah, with getting the equipment. That was a nightmare.

1:04:43 - Mikah Sargent
Mikah got the equipment before he got uh, the parts, yeah, and then he had to return the equipment, and the same day that he returned the equipment, the parts arrived yeah, which, because of the way that it works, you basically put a whole bunch of money on your card and then, if you don't return the uh, the tools in time, then they charge you the full thing we're going we have to give them back or else we're going to get charged.

But we tried to call them and say, look, this is what we're trying to do. No, they wouldn't have it, so we had to send it all back it's a separate group doing the parts.

1:05:15 - Leo Laporte
I think, yeah, absolutely, uh, so you never did get that repair done we did not get to do the repair in person, unfortunately that was uh didn't work out uh.

So he said so, uh, they go on and I fix. If you're on an old se model, should you upgrade? Probably not. We still say, even after getting to the phone's guts, a refurbished phone will get you more bang for your buck. I think that's kind of the bottom line. But if you want apple intelligence or something you know with the a18 and that, this seems like it's just does anybody need and yeah, the camera's a lot nicer.

1:05:48 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I just want to keep coming back to the 48 megapixel camera on that uh on it. So if you want a better camera for that isn't very expensive, I think that's the only reason to refurbish. The cameras jump pretty. In the last couple years the cameras jumped pretty dramatically and you get used to shooting 48 megapixel images and it's hard to give up.

1:06:06 - Leo Laporte
The electrically released adhesive that Apple shipped first for the iPhone 16 is now in the 16E, which is good. Makes it a lot easier to release the glue. What else? No, magsafe, they don't like that. But you still have cheat chargings. It's just slower If you charge overnight. I don't like that, uh, but you still have a cheat charging. It's just slower if you charge overnight. I don't think you'll notice a difference and probably it's healthier for the battery to charge at a lower wattage.

1:06:33 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, actually we got to. We had some interesting two different pieces of news on uh, on the charging on the 16e uh, gruber in his review said he talked to, for instance, he talked to uh uh apple. He talked to Apple about this question and their reply to him on why the charging is so weak compared to the main iPhone 16 and why MagSafe isn't there is because they feel as though the consumer that they have in mind for this phone doesn't care about wireless charging at all and are more likely to just plug in a cable. Interesting, I don't. I don't know if this is accurate or not, but that's what. That's what they went on the record with uh, with gruber, with um, I'm uh. That could be absolutely the case again.

As as john's, I have to agree with what john said in his review, which is that I'm sure that apple knows its market for this phone better than I do. But I also remember back when that big, really bad, fatal redesign of the MacBook Pro came out and Apple was saying yes, the reason why we removed the SD card slot is that we feel that professional photographers are using Wi-Fi to connect their camera, so maybe they're saving face. And also Macworld had a piece in which they said that, yeah, actually you can use MagSafe, but it's like super, super, super weak, like things will cling to it in a sort of like desultory sort of way.

1:07:56 - Leo Laporte
It's limp, it's a limp MagSafe, exactly.

1:08:00 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and that's the thing. So the reason why MagSafe is what it is and it allows for more efficient charging. I mean, we know that by even slightly having your charger misaligned, it is not sending the exact, it's not sending it exactly as it should. So that does result in more heat, which means that they end up dropping how much power they're pushing through so that they don't overheat it. But the problem is, without that MagSafe in place to help you align the coil, you are still getting more heat than you might otherwise get.

1:08:35 - Leo Laporte
Remember those days, the old days before MagSafe, and if you didn't get it on, just right, and there was no way of knowing it would. Yeah, and plus there there's a lot of this is the insta 360 gimbal, a lot of uh devices that rely on magsafe for attachment right yep, you need a case or some other thing you stick to the back to basically make it magsafe but apple knows it's customer base, so maybe they well, maybe they do. No, I don't know. Do you charge wirelessly, Mikah?

1:09:03 - Mikah Sargent
I do everything now and I was. I'm on on record as being a wireless charging skeptic, mostly because I was being a pedant who didn't like the idea of calling something wireless.

1:09:13 - Leo Laporte
You know, it's a waste of a battery and juice and it's terrible.

1:09:18 - Mikah Sargent
Well, I just didn't I mean because there's still a wire connected to the part that charges. So that's, I was dumb.

1:09:23 - Leo Laporte
Oh no, it's not no, the part that charges. So that's that it was dumb. Oh no, it's not no. Okay, Mikah right, it was dumb, but yes I'm very much a wireless charging.

I love it now and I usually I have in fact, I bought it for the whole family these anchor, uh all-in-one chargers for the phone, yeah, the airpod and the watch, and they fold up. Whoops, the page is missing. Well, okay, they, they fold up, which is really nice, uh, for traveling, so that you carry these around with me. Let's see if the page is still missing. I clicked again. Oh, I hope they still sell them. So I, you know, I like, I do, yeah, I do wireless charging, uh, still, um, Andy, you wireless charge, your, your google.

1:10:04 - Andy Ihnatko
Not really only because I just don't have enough wireless charging stands. And the thing is I recharge my phone infrequently enough that it's kind of okay for me just to remember to plug it in.

1:10:16 - Leo Laporte
Wait a minute. Recharge infrequently enough, you mean, you don't charge it every night.

1:10:20 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh no, I recharge it every night. I recharge it every night. It's just that if I were using my phone, hammering it every single day to the extent where by the end of the day, I might need to top it up to get stuff done, then I would have wireless charging stands next to the sofa, next to my desk, next to things like that. As it is with my last phone, it lasts long enough that it's no problem for me to say, okay, I got 18% or 12% battery battery left at the end of the day. I'm now it's time I'm going to plug it in, and now and also is also the disadvantages of leaving the phone plugged in and charging overnight are now also kind of mitigated because of features that basically say oh, you're overnight charging, okay, so I'm not going to try to charge it in one hour, I'm going to give it a nice slow, gentle, six-hour charge.

1:11:06 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, Alex wireless or wired, Both my overnight charge the way I just plug it in, just then I go to sleep, you know.

1:11:15 - Leo Laporte
So that's 99% of what I need. Isn't that funny?

1:11:18 - Alex Lindsay
And then when I drive, I'm using the Peak Design you know mount that has a USB-C. So anytime I'm using the Peak Design, you know mount that has a USB-C. So anytime I'm driving I'm recharging it by snapping it onto that.

1:11:29 - Leo Laporte
Actually, my car has a Qi charging pad in it that I just put the phone on and it charges it. I wish it had MagSafe, but I guess that would be too platform specific, you know.

1:11:41 - Alex Lindsay
I feel like it's just kind of like a little bonus, like it sits right where you know it's the, it's the peak design that clamps onto your vent, so it just kind of sits.

It sits right on the outside and that's what I'm using most of the time for what I, what I need the phone for, and so it's in the right place, at least on my car and and I, and it happens to charge while it's doing that, and so that's good. But I very rarely run out of uh, uh, I very rarely run out of battery in a in a single day, you know like. So if I charge every night when I go to bed, I very rarely hit, hit the bottom, mostly because I don't. I have to say I don't have a lot of Facebook apps on my phone. I do use Facebook, I use it on my desktop, I just don't have it on my phone, and it's primarily because I felt that it was burning up my as soon as I took them off. Suddenly, my phone lasted like 30, 40% longer, and so I just decided well, I'm not going to go back.

1:12:32 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I'm very judicious about background app updates. On any apps, you have to be blessed by me before I allow you to background app update, so there aren't many that have that.

1:12:43 - Leo Laporte
Well, apple, I mean, I don't think it's a. Obviously Apple doesn't think it's a. Yeah, it's not a deal breaker. A deal breaker, that's the word I was like. It's a deal breaker, ladies, I fix it does, but Apple apparently doesn't. What else did they learn? Oh, they talked a little bit about the C1 modem. I still haven't seen any benchmarks comparing the C1 modem. I still haven't seen any benchmarks. Uh, comparing the c1 modem in the 16e to the qualcom modem, maybe because it's as good, you know, I don't know there was one I wish I would have remembered.

1:13:14 - Mikah Sargent
There was one that did um, and I think it was basically the same as what I remember reading it you. There just really wasn't that much of a difference. The trade-offs ended up being in other places, and so it was just kind of like okay, it's fine, it doesn't stand out.

1:13:31 - Andy Ihnatko
Mac Rumors did a roundup of reviews focusing on the C1 modem and basically they highlighted the Verge, tom's Guide and a couple others that there doesn't seem to be a difference, not much difference, between the C1 and the X71.

1:13:45 - Leo Laporte
Okay to be a difference not not much difference between the c1 and the x71, yeah, okay, one thing I think it does like the c14 is it draws less battery, so you get better battery life because of that. Um, and they point out there is now an official charging port repair manual. Yeah, which I think is is the first time. That is one of the things that breaks most often, I think on the on phones absolutely yeah so we said it's not for the faint of heart though, so that was interesting to hear.

1:14:10 - Mikah Sargent
I fix it.

1:14:10 - Leo Laporte
Say if they say that it means don't yeah you probably should just, you probably should just leave it alone.

1:14:16 - Alex Lindsay
I'd say don't to most of what they say. So if they say don't, I'm definitely not going to.

1:14:20 - Leo Laporte
Not for the. Are you faint of?

1:14:22 - Alex Lindsay
heart, Alex, I don't. I don't try to repair Apple devices, I just don't. I take it back to Apple Like I don't. I tried, and I don't say that as someone who never tried to fix Apple devices. I was obsessed with trying to fix my own devices and just decided it.

Even when they worked, they were never quite the same, like there was just there. You know the the level of, and you pull pieces out of it and you go, oh, I'm never going to get this back the way it was and it was. So it was always like this a little. It was always like this little movement. You know, because everything's so tightly wound and this is a over a decade ago that I was doing this and there was some point where I had a laptop that I needed and I had to go buy another one because I had broken this one, trying to update the RAM or something, and I was like I'm never doing this again and that was the end of it. I was like from now on I'll take it to Apple and just have them fix it, or I'll just, you know.

1:15:12 - Andy Ihnatko
I so totally agree. Like there are only a few things I really miss about having a Pixel phone instead of an iPhone, and that is like I can decide where do I want to go to lunch while having professionals fix my phone for me within the hour, and there are three Apple stores that I can go to, which I will choose between based on ooh, I could really go for some Korean bibimbap right now. Okay, so I'll go to the one in Cambridge, but now that Google is starting to open up, they opened up a Google store in Boston. So now, fortunately, I haven't had to try it yet, but it's like, do not diminish the ability to just go someplace nearby and have someone fix something for you. Like even I don't care how easy the instructions are for replacing a battery. If I can pay somebody $20 extra over the cost of parts to simply replace the battery in my device, that's $20 of stress that I will forego my Friday pizza for them to lose that kind of stress.

1:16:19 - Alex Lindsay
And on the other side of that, I take really good care of my hardware, like so I, you know the other side of that has become, you know, this phone. I dropped this phone once a day, probably, like it falls off of something, I set it somewhere or whatever. It has zero because it's sitting inside of a case and it's got a protective piece on the front and when I pull it out of all of that stuff, when I pull it out of all that stuff, it looks like I. When I bought it at the store and I will not I bought a new um for uh, for Michael Krasny, show for gray, uh, gray matter. I bought a laptop for him to you.

We bought not he, he anyway, long story. We bought a laptop that uh, you know, a macbook pro, so that we have the, a good mic if we needed to use it inside. We've got the camera that can be used and all these other things and it can be taken over from remotely. And I didn't take it out of the box until the case arrived. I've learned that's when you do. It is you don't open it up and start playing with it and getting even fingerprints on it until the case arrives and then you take it carefully out of the box, you put it in the case and then you start doing whatever you're going to do to it after that. But that's how I've kind of gotten to. You know, I spent a lot of money on these devices and it doesn't take very much to protect them for a very long time. We call that the right to not repair.

1:17:35 - Leo Laporte
Can I read this paragraph really?

1:17:36 - Mikah Sargent
quick, it's super quick. It says so. This is for repairing the USB. Before you can even start the repair of that charging port, you've got to remove the back glass, the selfie camera, the top earpiece speaker, the battery, the taptic engine, the bottom speaker, the main microphone and the SIM assembly. Only at that point can you actually do the port replacement.

1:17:56 - Leo Laporte
And there is some soldering involved. Is that right, or soldering, as you might say?

1:18:00 - Mikah Sargent
and I would never say that, because I'm not a weirdo, um no, I think that they just wanted to show why they did some hot wiring stuff in it.

1:18:10 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, uh, no, all that not withstanding, I fix it gives a pretty respectable 7 out of 10 repairability score, which ranks it with the rest of the 16 lineup. That is, pending the expected release of spare parts which are, at least as of the time of their story, not yet available. 7 is pretty good. It's a huge improvement over older iPhones. I have to say, yeah, a lot, a lot better. So Apple's making good progress. Uh, they're well done.

1:18:37 - Andy Ihnatko
Well done Apple they also point out that now that doesn't have the home button. That's another area of failure.

1:18:41 - Leo Laporte
Another area of interest I know it was longer exists, so it's a very fun button because it was touch id was one of the reasons it had to do parts pairing with the screen and it was. Yeah, that was a bit of a nightmare. So, yeah, I'm glad that's over. Well, it was. It was a sad day last week when I learned that after two decades, microsoft is shutting down Skype.

1:19:06 - Andy Ihnatko
Who will?

1:19:06 - Leo Laporte
we curse. Well, you know I have mixed feelings about this. We got off Skype thanks to you, Alex and Andy Carluccio, and went to Zoom right around 2020, right around the pandemic. But Skype until then was our choice. You know, video call of choice and we had skype asaurus. Remember calling built skype asaurus and we would twit would not exist if skype hadn't existed.

1:19:31 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, we used it right up until 2020. You know, early 2020 is when we were I was using skype for those things I still had. I at one point owned six of the Skype TX boxes. Those are four channel Skype TX boxes. I had six of those and we used them for many, many, many events and lots of people.

We wire them all in and we ran them into these big systems and everything else and they were. You know it worked. The problem really was is that Microsoft first of all never invested in it and when they did, they constantly were fiddling with it in ways that made it worse. When they bought it, the video quality was higher than than anything is now, even with Zoom.

1:20:15 - Leo Laporte
Even better than Zoom.

1:20:17 - Alex Lindsay
Now the creature comforts of iso and a lot of other things that that liminal brought with them. Um is a, you know, makes zoom a better solution than skype ever was.

1:20:28 - Leo Laporte
But but the video you don't have to build a skype, a source anymore.

1:20:31 - Alex Lindsay
I have a skype to xbox to have separate channels but what skype would do is it would go oh, I see how much bandwidth you have, I'm going to use half of it and it would just use up. Well, because it was a peer-to-peer.

1:20:41 - Leo Laporte
Remember that the founders of Skype, freya and Zenstrom, came from a peer-to-peer music sharing service and they used that technology to do the video calling, so it was peer-to-peer. Microsoft didn't like that. They thought that was maybe a liability, so they went to a central server model and went right downhill after that.

1:21:01 - Alex Lindsay
And the problem is that they brought in the death of all things, which is the Microsoft login. Like the Microsoft login is so complicated, I remember that, and you get it in, and so then you end up all these permissions errors and you end up in these cycles. I still end up in those cycles and so all of that, it was just the slow death they went in.

1:21:22 - Leo Laporte
I don't know what they actually pulled out of it as far as for teams, because obviously nothing good, because they say that the core, now they say this the core uh technology in teams is going to be the skype technology unfortunately, that's what they're moving you to uh come. You know, when this is all shut down, come may. Uh, they say, oh, don don't worry, you can use Teams, but I don't know, anybody who loves Teams.

1:21:42 - Alex Lindsay
No, I mean Teams is good because it's part of an ecosystem that you're forced to use at work. So I mean, that's what Teams is for, right. The only time you see people using Teams is because their company has told them they have to use Teams and it's all part of their 365. So Teams is part of the ecosystem which they remind you of every time you open it. Teams is part of an ecosystem and it's powerful in the sense that a business can do lots of jobs inside of Teams.

But I don't know any. I've never seen a personal person like use Teams as like their choice of video conferencing. That would be, you know, and I think that. And Teams, of course, while they say they're 1080p, they're really only 1080p for the first two people, and then as soon as you go to the third person, it goes to 720. And then you're never going to get above 720. And now I believe Zoom has been. We've seen it rolling out. It's not I don't think it's completely out, but if you just buy a singular business license, which I think is like 20 bucks a month or something like that, so we get 10, 80, you'll get 10 ADP Yep.

1:22:46 - Leo Laporte
That's why we bought it for 10 ADP Right, and so for anybody that, cares about, uh, cares about video quality.

1:22:50 - Alex Lindsay
He is on zoom. Yeah, I was I. I I was up all night working on a show that we were backhauling, um, uh, something from a couple of different countries, uh night, and I kept on looking at it. We had like handheld, I mean, we had steadicams and everything else all being backhauled over Zoom and I was like I cannot believe I'm doing this over Zoom, like I just can't believe we're bringing you know people walking through buildings and you know all this other stuff. It was incredible.

1:23:12 - Leo Laporte
Truly amazing. So while I'm sad, because I mean we're 20 years old, it was in 2005 when I realized, you know, even though all of our hosts are in different locations, somebody called the radio show. So this was when I was doing a call-in radio show and all the calls were by phone, and somebody in 2004, I think, maybe 2005, called and I said you sound amazing, you sound like you're in the room with me. He said yeah, I'm using skype because skype had skype out. Remember, that's skype in and skype out. That lets you call phone numbers. And I said that that was like for me. A light came on. I said I could use this to podcast and now I can get kevin rose in los angeles and patrick norton under his car and all of these people.

1:23:59 - Alex Lindsay
Until then, unless you had an ISDN connection, the problem with phones was that the phone company literally adds noise to the phone call so that you know it's there. So when you pick it up, you know that there's this subconscious thing that they do. They add just a little bit of noise so that you because if you don't, people will feel like it's not, you know, like and it was funny you won't notice that it's there, but you'll notice what's missing. It suddenly feels like when you are on FaceTime or on something else, or Zoom, that doesn't do that you suddenly hear just silence, and not in a way that you would hear with phone.

So they add just a little bit of noise, and then we'd have to filter all that noise out every time. We did something else. We did something else, and so Skype was one of the first ones that allowed us to have a pure signal that just sounded great, and then the video was again.

1:24:43 - Leo Laporte
we would see it Not great, but okay, no the video.

1:24:45 - Alex Lindsay
Well, when video? When it picked up speed. It got to a point where it would do 20 megs a second.

1:24:49 - Leo Laporte
It would use all the bandwidth it would use that bandwidth.

1:24:52 - Alex Lindsay
Now you had to be very careful about when you turn Skype on. What else are you doing? And it would not gracefully handle you suddenly uploading a bunch of files while you're on Skype, you know things will start to freeze up.

1:25:01 - Leo Laporte
You know like we had to tell people turn off your mail client because they'd be on the show and their mail client would go out and get in the mail and the whole thing would just fall apart Because Skype was using all that.

1:25:11 - Alex Lindsay
I thought it was like. I thought you weren't using this, I was using it and now I have to stop, you know, and so so, like you know, like I have to figure, I have to figure this all out. It's going to take me a second to sort this out, cause you just screwed everything up, so so, I'm getting a little PTSD from the days when we really were fighting with people over, you know we.

1:25:27 - Leo Laporte
that's why Burke remembers we still talk about wifi.

1:25:29 - Alex Lindsay
I mean it just kind of. So wifi still doesn't work, by the way, when you're on video conferencing and, uh, you should not use it always everybody's wired when we get them on the shows.

1:25:43 - Leo Laporte
As far as we can some people can't, but when we can, so uh may uh. Microsoft said your log information for skype will be used on teams free tier in the coming days.

1:25:55 - Alex Lindsay
The shutdown will happen for sure for fully in may if you're using a free tier of teams, what are you thinking like if you're not a company using teams like stop stop?

1:26:05 - Leo Laporte
like, just go to zoom.

1:26:06 - Alex Lindsay
Like zoom is amazing yeah, it's, it is, uh, it's, it's so and again, it's it's because of people like Andy that are that are there, that there's actually folks that are focused on quality and and the feature sets around it, especially as broadcasters. There's nothing close. Yeah, are focused on quality and the feature sets around it, especially as broadcasters. There's nothing close, yeah.

1:26:22 - Leo Laporte
Well, you do see some companies. I think CNN uses WebEx.

1:26:27 - Alex Lindsay
I'm sure WebEx paid a lot of money for that.

1:26:29 - Mikah Sargent
Apple's a pretty big WebEx.

1:26:30 - Leo Laporte
They have a little bug on there but really that has transformed the cable news business as well, but everybody's on Zoom or something equivalent now.

1:26:39 - Alex Lindsay
They don't have to go to a satellite bureau anymore. Yeah I mean the. The problem really is is that they don't, because you're an eight minute hit, that they're never gonna see again much right. You know, they always tell people. When we work with people, when we bring them into again like michael krasny showing I'm sure you have this a little bit people tell you, oh, I do this all the time.

1:26:55 - Leo Laporte
And then you know you're screwed, you're just totally screwed we got a guy I won't name names, he's going to be on one of our shows soon who says oh no, I do this all the time. I don't need to do a zoom check.

1:27:03 - Alex Lindsay
We always do zoom checks with guests ahead of time and it's and there and it's always.

1:27:09 - Leo Laporte
It's always like some janky mic and and I'm using my airpods. That's okay, right yeah, exactly and so it's, you know.

1:27:18 - Alex Lindsay
so that democratization hasn't, you know, uh, fixed a lot of those things. And what's funny is a lot of people would fix it when we tell them like, hey, let's send a mic to you, or let's make this work, or let's do whatever they're like, why didn't anyone tell me this? I would have bought it. I would have bought all these things been unfortunate, but to your point, it's revolutionized. And I think that there's some companies like, for instance, you know big, big corporations that use WebEx. I think that that's a lot of it has to do with it's so built into every conference room and every.

There's a certain inertia there. It has. It has little to do with what Zoom can do versus it, because Zoom is clearly better than WebEx. It has little to do with what Zoom can do versus it, because Zoom is clearly better than WebEx. Now I will say that WebEx, over the time when COVID started to now, has probably improved more than any other virtual conferencing system out there, even Zoom. It's gotten better than Zoom. Zoom is just ahead of it, but it's taken more ground than anybody else. So it's definitely came from being a complete joke to reasonable.

1:28:19 - Leo Laporte
Apple made a mistake, a boo-boo, not making FaceTime be cross-platform. No, A lot of people use. Facetime, and if we were all on Apple devices, that would be a good choice.

1:28:31 - Alex Lindsay
Even if we were all on Apple devices, I wouldn't use FaceTime.

1:28:33 - Mikah Sargent
FaceTime is so yeah absolutely Well, I mean.

1:28:36 - Alex Lindsay
so here's the deal. If I'm going to jump on the, the number one thing you do when you want to jump on a video with somebody else that's got an iPhone, uh, or, or some or some other whatever, is facetime, because it's just, it's easy, it always works, you can just talk to them, you don't have to have any kind of whatever and apple blurs the uh definition too, because it will often make phone calls, both audio and video, with FaceTime, when you think you're making a phone call.

I make when I'm overseas. A lot of times I'm using FaceTime to call somebody, facetime audio, because I don't, you know, I got wifi, I just don't have a phone number or I don't want to use the phone number there for I don't want to pay minutes or whatever it is, and so, and it sounds a lot better, it's, it's a better contribution, um it, it. It looks and sounds great and, by the way, the facetime in the vision pro is uh. I just did a meeting. I had a meeting with two other people and we all some.

They showed up with vision pros and I was like, oh, I better get my vision pro out to see how this goes, because I've never been in a meeting like a meeting, meeting like not a, not like a oh, let's try this, but it was a meeting. And, um, I put it on and it kind of gets rid of the windows and you're just kind of like these ghosts are sitting there talking to you and within 10 minutes it was just like someone was there, someone was in the room with me to figure out how to get it to work on other operating systems. And that's the big problem. As someone who I've developed a lot of, or I've worked with teams to develop apps that are Apple only, especially in the audio-video world, and I've worked with ones where we have to integrate with Windows and Android, then I can tell you that the Windows and Android versions as soon as we it's not just that they weren't as good as the Apple apps that we built and, again, it's not for everything, but when it comes to audio and video, it's not that they weren't good enough.

The Apple product got worse because we are sitting there trying to figure out how to add a feature that can go to the Apple product and to Windows and Android, and Android and Windows do not invest the same amount of money in audio video tools as Apple does, and the libraries aren't there and you're now. So when you build something that's own, I think. I think that maybe some of it's competitive, but I think the the biggest reason apple doesn't make things cross-platform is that they don't want to deal with the libraries and the limitations of the other platforms. They just want they. They can. If they don't like what they have, they can tell the hardware guys to make it better on the next version, and they can't do that on Windows and Android.

1:31:01 - Mikah Sargent
Do we not consider it cross-platform? Because, remember, apple did announce you can do FaceTime from Android and from Windows. It's just via the browser.

1:31:13 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know if anyone's ever used that. Has anyone actually opened a browser? I think it was.

1:31:17 - Mikah Sargent
You've been able to do that. Yeah, you schedule a FaceTime call and then that lets you send a link to an Android user or a Windows user, and then they tap on it, it opens the browser and you're part of the FaceTime call. So I mean, that's not as cross-platform as just having a FaceTime app, of course, but admittedly, that's how I use Teams.

1:31:37 - Alex Lindsay
I am on Teams meetings probably two or three times a day, and I don't even use the app because the app keeps on opening weird windows that don't do anything, and so I'm just like I'll just use the browser.

1:31:49 - Leo Laporte
When Apple uses the browser to do a FaceTime call on Android or Windows, is it using WebRTC? That's a good question Is it using it? It must be right, Because you don't have any software installed. It must be using and WebRTC is not ideal. As we know, if you've used Google Meet, yeah, it could, it could.

1:32:09 - Mikah Sargent
It must be. Yeah, I'm not surprised that Apple's not saying specifically, but it must be because it's using your system audio and you know the camera that's built so and it's chrome or edge, so it has to be a.

1:32:22 - Leo Laporte
It's a chromium maybe. Yeah, it's web rtc, it's got to be. So they must have that's interesting. They must have a web rtz gateway into facetime. They don't want to publicize that, that's for sure not available for iPhone models purchased in china mainland.

1:32:37 - Mikah Sargent
Just so you know, there you go so don't get your hopes up, kids.

1:32:41 - Leo Laporte
All right, one more break and then, uh, get the. Uh, john Ashley, prepare the Vision Pro theme. Uh, we will continue with Mac break weekly, Andy, and not go. Jason Snell's not here. He's probably getting briefed. I'm I want him to be getting briefed, but fortunately Mikah Sargent is here, always willing and ready and able to jump in. Thank you, Mikah, and Alex Lindsay as well.

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And now, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, it's time for the vision pro segment. Mikah. You and I just gonna have to sit back on this. Well, you, we, you owned a vision pro for three weeks I was tortured by a vision pro for three weeks, quickly returned it uh as we asked you to do, because we didn't.

1:37:16 - Mikah Sargent
I felt like I was um. What is that movie?

1:37:19 - Leo Laporte
uh oh, orange, not orange theory, clockwork orange or Malcolm McDowell forced, forced to see the horrific videos, um, but it's been very active actually, uh, with vision pro in the last a few days. Yeah, new apps, new apps. Um, you know, is there any news of apple taking the, uh, Kendrick Lamar halftime show? And that would be so great as a vision pro experience, you know.

1:37:49 - Alex Lindsay
I think that it'll be interesting to see what they, what they release there. It does sound like they're gonna they're they're talking about well, and we're gonna see some more concerts that are in. Uh, in the vision pro, I think that they're promoting a u2 um ibanos, stories of surrender. Yeah, so youtube's always, always like I think that they're, they're the first people, people call and go. We'd like to try something new and they go. Yes, yes, we would like to do the new thing, you know. So, so the uh. So I think that, um, this one will be a feature, though right.

1:38:18 - Leo Laporte
This is not eight minutes. This is a full-length, 180-degree video. Places viewers on stage with Bono at the center of his story, only available on Vision Pro. It is not U2, it's Bono, but I mean, of course, all of the music's going to be U2, I think.

1:38:37 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and I think that what I will say is that in general, I think there could be some interesting things from Ken and Kumar, potentially in rehearsals, potentially in other things. It's really hard to do the stage.

1:38:47 - Leo Laporte
They have to flip that stage in minutes and then they have all these dancers running around and you don't want to see it and there was nowhere to put a camera where you couldn't see it without.

1:38:54 - Alex Lindsay
The camera, to be great, has to be within about 15 feet of the, and we didn't see any pictures of a Vision Pro there, so I don't think it's there, but it could be in rehearsals, it could be in practice. There's all kinds of things that could happen. Right now, I think that the processing still takes some time to get the full quality that they want out of it. What Apple's doing is not simple side-by-side 3D. It is a much more complicated version of it, and so I think that that is why it takes a little bit more to figure it out or calculate it and to render it so. Even though something happened at the Super Bowl, I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't come out for another couple of weeks or months.

1:39:32 - Leo Laporte
The Bono, thing's easy, because it is actually his one-man show.

1:39:38 - Alex Lindsay
You really want control over it. I I mean, I don't know whether I'll show people or not, but really the problem is is where you want to put the vision pro is in the way of all your best paying customers you know so.

1:39:47 - Leo Laporte
So the thing is, that's what it says. It says the uh, the story from deadline says it places viewers on stage with bono yeah, which is where you want to be, and it could be very very not me. Oh wait, sorry not for two hours or 90 minutes. That seems like a long time, but uh, people watch movies in vision pro all the time, so it's my preferred place to watch movies, right? I wonder if they will have clips in this, though, because those won't. Those will just be flat, right uh, yeah, it'll be interesting.

1:40:18 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, and people have been doing a little bit of that where you show clips and then you have to figure out a way of how you're going to display them, how you're going to present those as part of the immersive experience. It could be mapped onto something. It could be mapped into something. There's a lot of different ways that they could approach that, so it'll be interesting to see where they take that.

1:40:35 - Leo Laporte
Apple's done a good job with documentaries. They did, uh, that great steve martin multi-part documentary.

1:40:42 - Alex Lindsay
Um well, they just have all the money, so when you see you know, like you know it's not doing it. I understand, I mean it's. It's like you know when, when they, when it's easy to do documentaries, when you spend all the money that was required to do it well, as opposed to some of the money that was required to do it well.

1:40:59 - Leo Laporte
Somebody said that forget Kendrick Lamar. They should focus on Serena Williams' Crip Walk, just so late Behind the scenes.

1:41:08 - Mikah Sargent
Just a little gif of it, but our animated moment of it would be cool, Because that's what the app that Apple introduced seems to be about is kind of smaller things that you wouldn't necessarily need to have a full featured film or anything like that, but that the company could just release little bits and bops. I'm trying to remember exactly what the app is called, and that might be the case.

1:41:33 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, that might be the case for a lot of the immersive stuff. I mean, I think we have this idea that we have to have everything be you um a long. You know something you know really really long to watch like two, two and a half hours is something that was made up because that's what they were selling tickets for and people they didn't think people would buy them. But what we're seeing now is that a lot, there's a lot of a lot of companies, I mean the, the, the two and a half hour film or even one and a half hour film is probably got. Maybe, you know, a decade left before we.

1:42:03 - Leo Laporte
Just we didn't go see the brutalist in the theaters, because it's three hours and 20 minutes and we knew we would watch it at home and be able to stop over a couple of days, which is exactly how we did, and eating the popcorn, eating, yeah I made popcorn. I mean by the way, we have reclining theater seats, so it really was like being in a theater. We watched it at home. It was great I loved it.

1:42:24 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, yeah, and I think that's the. The. The challenge for for the theater, you know, for the theatrical world, is that, uh, it, it makes way more sense for the streamers to be building series. Um, it is in the immersive world. I see something that's like 16 to 20 minutes long and I'm like, wow, this better be good. Like you know, like this is, you know, I start to worry that it's not going to be. You know, like that's a long time to sit in an immersive experience and have it be a great experience. And I have seen those. I mean the. I thought that we talked about the Prima app, the um, a couple weeks ago and I sat and happily watched something for 20 minutes. I don't know if I would have watched that for an hour. You know, like I think that that's the and it's hard, yeah, and just and the production is a lot harder.

1:43:07 - Leo Laporte
I think it's too real. By the way, uh, chuck arnold and are watching on youtube says he was at the recording of the one man show bono's one man show in new york city. He says it was a couple of years ago, though I wouldn't be surprised.

1:43:20 - Alex Lindsay
Could they have an? Immersive video a couple of years ago, they bought next VR, which is really the core of the technology that they're using. Uh, a decade ago, you know like so they've, they've had you know next. Vr.

Yeah, the hard part has been to get the resolution that they're looking for and everything else has been. But with red cameras and with the black, I mean, apple has the capability of taking something like a black magic camera and tearing it. And there's other people that are doing this. People, when people are trying to use, like, for instance, the, the 12 K cameras from black magic because they have a higher frame rate capability, what they a lot of folks are doing is taking those cameras and there's a lot of space in those cameras. You know it's designed to create the interface and so they literally just rip the cameras apart and put the sensors next to each other. And then, you know, so there's these like Franken cameras that are there that people are using because they're really high resolution and they provide really high frame rates.

And now, of course, we're excited because you know, by all reports, apple is guiding Blackmagic to do that without having to tear apart two Blackmagic cameras. You can just have a Blackmagic camera that does the thing. Get the URSA. Yeah, so it'll be interesting to see. Hopefully, at NAB in a month we'll hopefully see some cameras that'll make this a lot faster.

1:44:35 - Leo Laporte
Apple we talked last week will have a spatial gallery available in the next generation of Vision Pro software and apparently 18.4 iOS will have an iPhone app for Vision Pro.

1:44:48 - Mikah Sargent
If you have a Vision Pro similar to the Apple Watch app, right, we can do certain things with our Vision or with our Apple Watch. And look at the model number, see some of the content that's available. And look at the model number, see some of the content that's available. So, if you have a Vision Pro, it basically gets activated on your phone.

1:45:03 - Leo Laporte
Ah, and then gives you oh, interesting, that's very interesting. So no one else will get it. It'll only be people who have Vision Pro.

1:45:12 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, it's used to set up personalized spatial audio as well, and then if you need to order vision correction things, if your, if your prescription gets updated, then it also has some integrations for that.

1:45:25 - Alex Lindsay
That it needed, that it's needed Well, and one of the things that they spent a lot of time on that they really needed was guest access. How do you design the guest experience? Because it's been a disaster. Like I just stopped showing people the headset, I was like, okay, this is enough, and so. So Apple spent a lot of time in the new beta making that easier, where you can not just say all or nothing with the apps. You can decide which apps are going to be there. You can very quickly look at what they're seeing on your phone. There's a lot of things there that are being improved so that you can at least show your friends what you got.

1:45:55 - Leo Laporte
Finally, you can bank on your Vision Pro.

1:46:02 - Mikah Sargent
It's always you know, do I have to wear that outfit to bank on my vision? Yeah, do I have to match my sofa to bank?

1:46:08 - Leo Laporte
adib spatial banking on apple vision pro step into tomorrow this is revolutionizing the way you bank. This is from the UAE, right? That's what it looks like, yeah, for the person who has everything including that. So it's Emirati. That's why he was now I understand, yeah, interesting.

1:46:28 - Alex Lindsay
I mean there. I mean I think a lot of times in, especially there, where they're not nearly as constrained financially and there's a lot of one-upsmanship that goes on in UAE and others where you want to have the best of the. You know, and there are probably a very significant number of banking clients for that bank that have Vision Pros.

1:46:49 - Leo Laporte
That's fair. Yeah, well, that makes sense then. So this is not something. It's not Bank of America.

1:46:56 - Alex Lindsay
Not B of A. B of A is not going to do it anytime soon.

1:46:59 - Leo Laporte
Many of you would use. But if you, if you bank with adib, uh, I presume you could do that worldwide. Um, then you could do, and that that I sent that the.

1:47:08 - Alex Lindsay
The eye recognition will be great when you're pulling something out of your, when you're buying your next lamborghini from your hundred million dollar fund.

1:47:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah but they missed out on all the fun stuff like like here, here's all your retirement savings, like piled, and do you want?

1:47:22 - Leo Laporte
to see how it looks like. Can you convert to gold coins? Dollar bills?

1:47:27 - Andy Ihnatko
do you want to see what, what, what, what scrooge mcduck's money crib would look like, like projecting. They might add that projecting how much you'll have to retire, given your given your good savings for the past 20, 30 years.

1:47:37 - Leo Laporte
That's hysterical and uh Andy. You brought this from the uh vision pro subreddit. Uh, apple park in 8k 180 hdr. We modded a cheap 360 camera for vision pro to produce this video. Uh, it's on youtube. Um, they're on the campus, so they must have apple's approval to do this right or maybe, maybe they're not on the campus no, they're on campus, because, if you, skip through it, you'll see.

1:48:07 - Alex Lindsay
Serenity is there in the on the video.

1:48:09 - Leo Laporte
In the video oh, serenity caldwell, so maybe, uh, so these are friends of apple, obviously, uh, there was a.

1:48:15 - Alex Lindsay
There was a. Uh, there's been some meetings down there so that looks like they're using that.

1:48:20 - Leo Laporte
Usually, you're not allowed to take photos or post them.

1:48:23 - Alex Lindsay
But but sure, if you go to some of the earlier parts you'll see some.

1:48:26 - Leo Laporte
I think some uh more uh internal uh pictures, but the um is like a minute in, maybe a minute in, okay, uh, you'll probably. Oh, look at that gimbal.

1:48:42 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, that's exactly the gimbal I was just showing you.

1:48:43 - Andy Ihnatko
I think maybe I'm in the wrong one, maybe it's a little before that, I think they had a couple of like uh, cheapish cameras that they put together on gimbal and modified for 8k with custom software to basically genlock or sync all this stuff together.

1:48:58 - Leo Laporte
Wow, so they obviously is. It's with apple approval. You can't just wander around the campus, I imagine. Well, that's part of.

1:49:03 - Alex Lindsay
That's not campus, that's. That's the space right next, ah so they're going into the public?

1:49:07 - Leo Laporte
I don't think he.

1:49:08 - Alex Lindsay
I don't think I saw any parts where he was in the campus. He's in the. That's all the trees that are right next to the store.

1:49:14 - Leo Laporte
That's right next to the campus, yeah okay, visitor center um, and, by the way, you can look at it in 2d, but I guess I could. I can move it around. Yeah, I can look around a little bit, okay, I think serenity is at like 54 seconds.

1:49:30 - Alex Lindsay
It's just 54. It goes right past very briefly. Let's, let's pause it, uh, when we get to there's. That's the. I think that that's the theater. Ah, is that serenity on stage there? Is that her boots? Well, I think it is serenity, but I think there's a higher shot of that somewhere.

1:49:49 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I should well, no, because I can scroll it. Yeah, yeah, I'm just, I'm just too low, let's see. Oh yeah, there she is. Hello, hello says serenity, hello, hello. All right, so that's on youtube if you want to. Now, is there a way to watch this on your vision pro? Uh?

1:50:06 - Alex Lindsay
I haven't tried to do that yet and this is using. By the way, this is using the kandao stuff. This is the. It's one of the few companies that just keeps making uh, vr, vr tools. Almost everybody gave up and I think they're going to end up winning because they just keep making tools. That's that's he's using in what's called a q cam, which the q cam.

1:50:21 - Leo Laporte
I have a less expensive version. Yeah, kind of fun, and the insta 360 evo uh interesting.

1:50:29 - Alex Lindsay
But hugh howard is kind of like if you're looking for someone who's doing like, he is on the front edge of uh, of everything when it comes to uh, whether it's for Meta or for the Apple Vision Pro, he has been doing all the videos on YouTube that are important around how to develop content for it.

1:50:48 - Leo Laporte
He's a great channel. Nice, is there anything else for the Vision Pro? I think we covered it. We are complete. We'll play the closing theme then whoops mixed them together. That's. That was good. That was like a mashup, real dj over there. Apple is likely to face an antitrust fine in France for a privacy tool. I apparently France doesn't like it that iPhone's privacy features, uh, are for third parties but not for Apple yeah, and they're defending the.

1:51:32 - Andy Ihnatko
They're defending by claiming that which I hadn't heard them say before, that they actually hold their own tools to even higher standards than third-party tools, and that's what we're talking about app tracking, transparency, that that little pop-up that you get, huh. So apple's saying that's the first I've heard them say that yeah, at least that's what it says in the in the road story okay, um, because we hold ourselves to a higher standard because they don't share the data, that whole app right, apple keeps it to itself.

1:52:01 - Leo Laporte
That's the thing about first party data Google, facebook, apple they're not going to share that with anybody else. They're going to sell.

1:52:07 - Andy Ihnatko
You know, sell the ads based on it, also also to you know, credibly, I am the person who is who's always saying that, oh well, it's, it's appropriate for companies like Apple to defend their choices, uh, in antitrust court and things like that. In cases like this, though, it's like you know what, they have more insight into how they can abuse people's privacy than they need those tools to control third parties, because they can't see what third parties are doing, whereas they know internally what their own policies are, and maybe it's not necessarily important but I think I see their point.

1:52:42 - Alex Lindsay
Most of the third parties are taking advantage of it and are doing horrible things with it but I mean of course it.

1:52:49 - Andy Ihnatko
It doesn't. It doesn't seem necessarily that fishy that they're exempting themselves from right, uh, from these privacy controls because, again, sometimes, sometimes the the people who are actually operating the phone, have to know things. They have to be able to access the camera data and maybe they don't necessarily need to have like strident third-party controls over restricting their access to it.

1:53:13 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and I mean they're not. You know, generally, I do feel like Apple only wants the information it needs to serve the users that they have there, in the sense that they don't, they don't, they're not trying to resell your data to somebody else, and which is what everybody else wants to do, like all that tracking data that's there is. But apple does sell ads and presumably but they don't see what they know. But they're not reselling our data to people who are packaging our data for everybody else but neither is facebook.

1:53:45 - Leo Laporte
The first party data is stuff that. That's your secret sauce you don't sell that off. That's how you sell ads. But all these little apps that are the apps do.

1:53:50 - Alex Lindsay
I agree they are selling all this data. That's a big part of their business model is selling your data to other people you're right.

1:53:54 - Leo Laporte
So plugging that hole is actually really good. Yeah, I agree with you. You may remember that the uh uk, was said, had demanded apple uh provide a backdoor to its advanced data protection. Um, the uk doesn't say that publicly, but I think apple kind of tacitly confirmed it when they a week later pulled adp from the uk saying, well, in case you can't have end-to-end encryption in the UK.

Well, and I don't know if I'd ever thought I'd say this, kudos to Tulsi Gabbard, our new US Director of National Intelligence, who has written a letter to Ron Wyden and Andy Biggs in Congress saying you know what? We have an agreement with the UK government. They call it the Cloud Act Agreement. And she said in the letter according to initial review of the Cloud Act Agreement a bilateral agreement between the US and UK the United Kingdom may not issue demands for data of US citizens, nationals or lawful permanent residents, nor is it authorized to demand the data of persons located inside the united states, which is what apparently the uk did. Um, so she's uh, she's challenging them.

Now we'll see if anything comes from that, but apparently there was an agreement not to do what the uk has done. Now we don't know exactly what the uk did there was never fully revealed. It was a. It was a leak, basically because that stuff's all done secretly. But the leak said the uk not only wanted a back door to uk residents, but a back door to everyone using adp globally, which would be a violation you would.

1:55:35 - Alex Lindsay
It would be globally. If anybody was, they'd have a back door to anyone talking to someone in the uk, Like if you were texting to the UK, that data would be available to them. I believe that that was the whole. It wasn't that they wanted to get access to everybody's to anybody not connected to a UK resident, but it still opens that door. If you're talking to anybody with a UK, it's in their cloud, it's in their. There's a.

1:55:58 - Mikah Sargent
You know, having that backdoor means that anybody you're talking to that has a UK cloud by virtue of me talking to Rosemary each week, Rosemary Richard, co-host of iOS Today, who is a UK citizen, then I, an American citizen, am made liable to have my data taken by the UK government. Of note, Kevin, do you ask this morning.

1:56:18 - Leo Laporte
I want to say, first of all, we don't know what the UK asked for because, again, that was done secretly. None of the stories I saw said anything about it being a conversation with a UK citizen. It merely said global access, and so now Apple has not really shut that down, they've just shut it down for UK citizens. So maybe you're right, maybe we just don't know because we can't see the letter that's requesting it.

1:56:45 - Andy Ihnatko
And there was some news that came across from the Financial Times while we were recording this that Apple has actually filed an appeal to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal to to be. We don't believe this is a legal order. We don't believe that we should be forced to comply with it. And another detail in this report that just hit Reuters about a half hour ago, I think was that the UK considers that Apple is in violation of the order, even if they're not offering end-to-end encryption, the implication being that they still want backdoor access to everybody in the world and unless Apple gives it to them, they are in violation of that order. Simply pulling end-to-end encryption from UK users is not enough to satisfy, whatever the situation is.

1:57:33 - Leo Laporte
That was my thought when I heard that Apple had pulled it. Is that? Have you complied? Apple had pulled it. Is that have you complied? Uh, maybe not, because you only did it for uk users. Uh, it's a mess. Uh, I don't. Apple's only other choice would be to leave the uk, so I don't.

Apple's in a rocket but stuck between a rock and a hard place, although I'm I'm I'm gratified that the us government is saying hey, wait a minute. You, you told us, you know we have an agreement that you would not ask for that yeah, even immediately.

1:58:05 - Andy Ihnatko
They were getting heat from from congress people basically saying that this is not something, that this is basically and the dni has said we're investigating this this, this would be a violation apparent, and the the reuters report excuse me, the financial times report says that apple actually filed this, uh, filed this complaint like at the same time that they pulled, and in encryption, and so this has been going on for a few weeks. It's. The frustration of this is that, because everything is secret, we don't know what the process is. We don't necessarily know what was asked and how apple is supposed to be complying with this.

1:58:33 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, this, this is from the financial times. Despite apple pulling the service, the british government still believes the big tech companies failed to comply with its order, which can also be used to access the data of individuals outside the UK. Yeah, that's not even Trump. He's condemned it, and so has Tulsi Gabbard. They're pressuring the British government to back down.

1:58:57 - Alex Lindsay
Trump compared the UK's demand to chinese surveillance yeah, I think that at some point, that that there may be folks in the uk that are like, hey, how about we not do this? Like it's gonna get, it's like their, their hands are in it. They've said there's some people there that really believe that it should happen, and there's a lot of people that are like, oh, this is gonna make us look worse and worse. The longer this goes, the more you know, cause they, I think they thought they could do it all secretly and no one would know and no one would talk about it. And suddenly now it's, you know, it's out in the opened, and I think that they're kind of, I think that you, we may find this to slowly disappear because it's not.

And the other thing, I I think that Apple is laying the groundwork, for, you know, apple has not been adding a lot of stuff in privacy all at once, and you can tell that they know where they want to go, but they're not adding it. You know. So they ask for people to give permission to block things. They ask for this thing, and then the next time they do it, they're like, no, no, we're just going to do it. And so, apple, every operating system gets a little tighter.

One of the things you want to watch is Apple's building kind of VPN access. You know a variety of VPN tools where it basically obscures where you are from. This would allow them to leave a country without leaving the country. So, because they don't know where you are, like they could get to a point where they go I don't know where you are, you know, and so when you look at a lot of things down the road, it's not cooked yet, but it does mean that Apple could, theoretically, theoretically, um, they're taking that information away from themselves, you know, um, which is an interesting, um, interesting puzzle over time uh, let's take a little break.

2:00:28 - Leo Laporte
Uh, get ready, we're gonna do our picks of the week as we continue with MacBreak Weekly. Somebody's ringing my doorbell. I just want to know if I should run down package time well it did. Oh no, lisa's talking to him. Good, it looks like he's wearing a green uniform, not a brown uniform, so oh, okay, he's moving on trying to sell you garden tools. I was worried, it was ice, I thought maybe I was going to be deported.

2:00:56 - Mikah Sargent
I didn't know, because you're um, what are you your s? What was it s gardenish? What?

2:01:01 - Leo Laporte
were we talking about earlier.

Oh lumburg, lumborgish, luxembourgish, luxembourgish that's it they immediately came here saying I hear somebody's been speaking Luxembourgish. We'd like to see your papers, please.

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Uh picks of the week time and uh, I know it's going to throw you off on the on everything, but since we were talking about peak design, I thought I might mention they have a new kickstarter.

Alex, you're a big peak design fan. I use peak designs yeah, absolutely, cases and their whole system, and it's so great. Um, but they've never done luggage, to my knowledge. They've done backpacks, photographers, backpacks. They now have a kickstarter already, with 44 days to go, 3.2 million dollars raised out of their hundred thousand dollar goal. This is called the roller pro. Um, for travelers, photographers and everyone in between. And I know, Alex, you'll like the idea of having a roller bag that can so carefully protect your cameras with their xl camera cube.

That was great with 400 millimeter lenses. Look at the size of that sucker. Yeah, it does look nice. It's hard-sided rolling luggage. They say we didn't reinvent the wheel, but we pretty much did reinvent everything else. I like it. Uh, yeah, it looks interesting. I just thought I'd mention it. I'm a big peak design fan. I have a lot of peak design gear. I've kicked into a few of their kickstarters. They've done 14, which is mind-boggling. Let Let me see what they're charging for the $425. It's an expensive bag. That's $175 off, they say so this would be a $600 bag.

2:04:09 - Mikah Sargent
Okay yeah, it's a little price not for me.

2:04:14 - Leo Laporte
Plus, I did you know I've done a kickstarter for a rolling luggage in the past forgot about it and, like three years later, got a bag in the mail. I thought, what the hell is this? And then I remembered oh yeah, I remember ordering this. You won't get this till august of this year, but uh, peak design is reliable. They always do what they say they're gonna do.

2:04:32 - Mikah Sargent
So yeah, somebody on the verge has already reviewed it, so it's definitely like it's. They've made it. Seen one in person. What did the verge think? Did they like it? Liked it, but too expensive.

2:04:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's ridiculous yeah, you'd have to. I don't know. You have to make it out of solid gold. Yeah, Mikah sergeant, what's your pick of the week?

2:04:50 - Mikah Sargent
so when I moved into this house we live in in port Portland, one of the things I noticed is, walking outside of even a single room with Bluetooth connectivity or any kind of connectivity, it immediately drops. The house is very old, it's probably got metal in the walls, and so I just wanted to see what my signal looked like throughout the home. And Ubiquiti has an app called Wi-Fi man, and Wi-Fi man is a sort of spectrum analyzing app and it's fine. I've used their app, yeah, but what they make is a little device called the Wi-Fi man Wizard and it is a portable spectrum analyzer. It comes with a little case that you can slide it into and it's got MagSafe. So if you've got a 16E sorry that you can put on the back of your phone and then you use the app on your phone, be it iOS or Android, to do full-on spectrum analyzing. You can check the strength of your channels. You can actually use AR to map out your space physically and see how the signal is in different places. It's really-.

2:06:00 - Leo Laporte
Well, look at that, it's a MagSafe accessory. That's cool. It's very cool it's USB-C charging and you kind of need this because the iPhone doesn't give you access to all the strength stuff. It doesn't give you as much.

2:06:13 - Mikah Sargent
exactly to be able to break apart the channels and see what the busyness is of the 2.4 gigahertz channel versus five, what each of the rooms is providing in terms of signal strength. All of that coming together in this app has been pretty neat, and it also comes with a built-in little um shortcut so you can automatically kind of open it up and see what's going on. So if you want to map out your own home, be it with ar, without ar, you don't have to do that, but see what the signal is like in your home. I can fully recommend this. Uh, little wi-fi man wizard that's a good idea.

2:06:46 - Leo Laporte
Is it a battery too? Will it charge my?

2:06:48 - Mikah Sargent
phone. Oh no, sorry, it won't charge your phone. Oh, you got it, you have it. Oh, look at that. Yeah, yeah, no, I, I bought it for this. So, uh, 99 a little pricey. It is sold out right now, so they're pretty popular ubiquity stuff is great, I highly, I'm all ubiquity, it's solid, it's solid yeah, like they just offered their new wi-fi 7 uh access point the enterprise.

2:07:11 - Leo Laporte
One's cheap, it's uh, it's only 149 bucks, something like that. Um, so that's?

2:07:16 - Mikah Sargent
they've just announced that oh, that's really good price.

2:07:18 - Leo Laporte
That's I know excellent price I know it's remarkable, um, it's not shown here, but I but I. So maybe they announced it, but they're not yet selling it. Yeah, really cool I am. Russell said you should just do wi-fi six and I said, okay, fine. Russell said you should just do Wi-Fi 6. And I said, okay, fine, okay, I'll take it Whatever you say. No, really seriously. Whatever Russell says, I do Alex Lindsay pick of the week.

2:07:46 - Alex Lindsay
So grain Grain, Video grain. So I was shot something with my uh my my daughter's uh was playing at hot monk. Um, you know, they have this little thing and it's darker than it looks, and so I thought I took it dark in there, yeah, so I had.

I took a shot and that's why everybody looks good in there, right, because, well, it's really dark, yeah and anyway, so, um, so, anyway, so, and I was dealing with grain and I and I just forgot I hadn't used it for so long there's Neat Video, and so I went ahead and upgraded to Neat Video, the newest version or whatever, and put it into Resolve, and I just forgot how great it was. So if you look at, let me show you the it reduces grain, yeah. So if you look at it here, so this is Okay, is that your daughter singing right there? Uh, no, no, no that, uh, the my daughter is playing the guitar right there.

2:08:40 - Leo Laporte
Oh, oh yeah, there she is.

2:08:41 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, so nice guitar. But when I, uh she spent, yeah, she, she bought it herself, um and uh anyway. But if you turn it off, uh, and you start to let's see if I go into a hundred percent here so you can actually see it, it's, you can see the grain on here. But if I turn back on it just completely, I don't know if you can see it through zoom. But it is, yeah, we're, we're not seeing, but it's not. You're not seeing a lot of it, but it's, it's dramatic and it's and it's. It used to take a long time to fix these kinds of things when things were underlit, no-transcript, expensive and not incredibly cheap.

2:09:45 - Leo Laporte
I think it's about 180 yeah, it depends on what uh program you're using. It works with pretty much everything.

2:09:51 - Alex Lindsay
If you're using resolve, it's 100 bucks, final cut 79.90 yeah so I got and I have the resolve version of it, because that's where I do kind of a lot of my hard work yeah, nice works with everything.

2:10:04 - Leo Laporte
Wow, that's great good pick. All right, let's see. That leaves you, Andy and ako, your pick of the week well.

2:10:13 - Andy Ihnatko
I found out that Chrome updated itself on me a few days. A couple days ago. I found that out by the fact that my uBlock Origin ad blocker stopped working because Chrome decided to get rid of a lot of the support for plugins that allow it to run ad blockers. Manifest V3 is the name of the pain, and my web experience in Chrome started to stink. Like immediately. Like sites that I've been using all the time, like it's. I don't I don't try to get out of viewing ads. It's just that when there's ads that cover up half the screen and I have to dismiss them in order to just read anything, I would rather not do that. Not at eight in the morning, not when I've only been awake for a half an hour, please. So as a result, I've been looking at alternatives and I started playing around with Zen Browser.

I find it at zen-browserapp. It's a fork of Firefox or so. It's based on Mozilla's browsing engine and A. It has a lot of ad blocking technology built in, just like Brave and a couple other browsers, but it also takes some style from the Arc browser, where it's a modern take on browsing, where it understands that you're not necessarily viewing web pages in a web browser. These days You're also running apps and using services through a web browser, so there's a big vertical panel to the left side of the screen where a lot of your tools live, and so a lot of things are very, very streamlined. I don't know, I've only been using it for a couple of days now, so I don't know whether it's just different, and I'm enjoying the fact that things are different and a little bit prettier. It'll take a couple of weeks for the rubber to meet the road and figure out if it can actually replace Chrome as my browser, but I'm enjoying it a lot. It's very early goings, so it's not 100% hard and it does sort of fritz up occasionally, but again, it's based on Firefox, so the web display is not really a problem.

Another thing I'd like to keep diving a little bit deeper into is all the customization that it has. Really, if your mail client is really important, you'd like it to stand out, you can make sure that that tab is always highlighted with underscore or always highlighted in yellow. You can install special customizations. I think they're based on CSS, but it's not quite so tricky to actually put together. So, basically, if you like it to be prettier, if you like to be a little bit more austere. Some of these customizations are functional. Some of these are just to make it pretty.

Like I said, I think part of the I might go back to Chrome and just rely on uBlock Origin Lite, which is the lesser version of the uBlock Origin ad blocker. That still works. But the thing is I've been stuck in Chrome for years and years and years. I've never really looked at options, because a web browser isn't a tool. You don't really use the app itself. You just use the websites and the web services that you access through the app. So you don't really notice it. So it's taken a while to realize. Oh wow, I actually kind of do like that idea of putting all the service icons in that little column to the left. I really do like the way that I can split tiles inside the actual view itself.

So go to zen-browserapp, give it a try Again. It's still pretty early days. It's not as hardened as Firefox is, certainly not as hardened as Safari or Chrome is as far as stability goes, but at minimum it will show you things that maybe you've been missing out on with Safari or Chrome. And it's also, by the way, another endorsement for raindropio, which is a third-party bookmark tool that I switched to last year. If I was still using Chrome to master all of my bookmarks across all my devices, I'd be pretty much stuck in Chrome, no matter what happens. The fact that all of my bookmarks are now accessible by whatever browser, by a plugin. I have the freedom to switch whenever I want to. So I might switch back, but at least I have the freedom to try out something like Zen Browser.

2:14:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's running on the Mozilla Gecko engine, so it supports Firefox, and one of the reasons I think it's a good choice right now is people are a little concerned about Mozilla's change in terms of service. As you say, manifest V3 is really a nightmare in the Chrome world. It means actually, google is actively blocking uBlock Origin, so I'm going to switch to Zen. I have been using Arc. I'm waiting for the day when arc won't support ublock origin. I think that day is imminent, because it's based on chromium. I've always liked firefox, but I really preferred arc's ui, so I'm installing a zen browser right now. For some reason, it won't let me go to zen browser dot app.

It says it's a insecure connection oh, I got that, that's something going on with me, because I see john ashley is able to go there. Um, yeah, but I have a lot of protections running on this system, so maybe it's just and and for whatever it's worth.

2:15:27 - Andy Ihnatko
Like it's I as it is. I run. I have two or three browsers that I use. Kind of chrome is my main, but I also use a couple others just for from time to time it's possible that I will have it'll be a shoulder between Chrome and uh and Zen browser, if it keeps, if it keeps working it's really interesting because he's completely copying arcs user interface, which is great, it looks exactly yeah.

2:15:49 - Leo Laporte
I'm very happy. Uh, cause I love arcs user interface. They are browser. Companies decided not to continue developing Arc. They're going in a different direction, so I've been looking for a replacement.

2:16:02 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I've got it going right now. This looks just like Arc and it's 100% open source too.

2:16:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I love that. Yeah, I got it from GitHub. Actually, you can install it with Brew, so I was able to do a Brew install Zen dash browser, and that worked. Oh, that, do a brew. Install zen dash browser, and that worked. So, oh, that's good to know. Yeah, so even if I can't get to the website, I can. I can install it. Oh, this is really nice. Thank you, Andy. Good recommendation did you? Did you say drop? Uh, raindrop is built in, or?

2:16:29 - Andy Ihnatko
oh no, it's not, it's, it's not built in. But again, it's firefox plug-in, so it'll it'll run.

2:16:33 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, it'll work yeah, and it supports the Mozilla account for browser synchronization, which is great, because I do have a lot of Mozilla stuff, so, yeah, that's the only bummer.

2:16:43 - Andy Ihnatko
What I love about Chrome is that, no matter what device I have, it's the exact same experience and the exact same data. Yeah, and I could never give it up because it's a good. It's a good password manager again, multi, multi-platform password manager.

2:16:55 - Leo Laporte
I think you found a new browser for me.

2:16:58 - Andy Ihnatko
Nice.

2:16:58 - Leo Laporte
I appreciate that Zen-browserapp if your security software lets you. Andy Ihnatko GBH is calling, but when?

2:17:09 - Andy Ihnatko
A week, from Thursday at 1230. Go to WGBHnewsorg to listen to it live or later. Now I have been informed that all of my appearances are going to be on YouTube, even when I'm not actually at the library. So I have to shave and put on a nice shirt, oh, sorry, oh dear.

2:17:29 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, Andy, wonderful to see you, as always. Mikah Sargent, thank you for filling in for Jason.

2:17:36 - Mikah Sargent
Snell pleasure.

2:17:37 - Leo Laporte
It was really great to have you. You could find Mikah all over our network. He is uh, he's the last remaining besides me, the last remaining staff host. You do some wonderful stuff in the club and I really thank you for that. When's the next crafting corner?

2:17:53 - Mikah Sargent
uh, that will be coming, yeah, in fact, yeah, we're in march now. So, um, yeah, you can check out hands on tech and hands on mac and iOS today. Uh, every thursday, you can check out tech news weekly, and then in two weeks, you'll be able to check out crafting Mikah's crafting corner as we continue to work our way through the miniature. I think I'll be doing lego after this, so I know. So the miniature is what think I'll be doing Lego after this, so I know some people are excited about that.

2:18:17 - Leo Laporte
So the miniature is what's behind you right now.

2:18:19 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, this is one that I built independently of.

2:18:22 - Leo Laporte
Okay, is it a gas station? What is it?

2:18:26 - Mikah Sargent
That is a little cafe. It's a coffee shop. It's just got an open area so you can see inside of it and you were building a kitchen last time. I saw it A kitchen exactly. Yep, that's what we're working on right now.

2:18:35 - Leo Laporte
Oh, how fun. Thank you, mike, it's always great to see you.

2:18:38 - Mikah Sargent
Chihuahuacoffee, chihuahuacoffee, that's where I've got links to everything. That's thanks to Renee Ritchie who years ago said you like chihuahuas and you immediately, uh, yeah signed up.

2:18:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, uh, awesome, it's great.

2:18:58 - Mikah Sargent
Great to see you always great to have you, I don't get to work with you as much as I I used to, and I know our listeners miss our our chats, and so it's always good whenever we get an opportunity to hang out.

2:19:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah yeah, it's really nice to see you. Thank you, Mikah, uh and thank you, uh, mr Alex lindsay, who is the man of the hour every hour at officehours.global Is Q&A still going strong.

2:19:23 - Alex Lindsay
We hear it's a thing, we think it's the future.

2:19:25 - Mikah Sargent
Lots and lots and lots of Q&A.

2:19:28 - Alex Lindsay
So we're doing it every morning. Yeah, we're getting ready for NAB. We'll probably do a couple of days from there. We're getting our live views all set up. We're going to try to. We're getting a new mic. Hopefully it should show up next week for 5.1. It's a 5.1 mic. So last year we did Ambisonic, this time we're going to try an actual.

DPA makes an actual 5.1 mic. This time there'll be a subwoofer. No-transcript. South hall is black magic and then, and then the um, and then there's a lot of other stuff. So we'll be. We're getting ready for that, so stay tuned for that. That's gonna be the beginning of uh, april. Exciting should be fun. I hope you use that supplement to good effect.

2:20:31 - Leo Laporte
Yes, exactly um, what are you gonna? What's your next lego gonna? What's your lego gonna be? I forgot to ask you, mike, what are you gonna make? Do you know these little little? Succulents oh you're gonna do the flowers, yeah, yeah plants, but this people love those.

2:20:45 - Mikah Sargent
The succulent set, yeah, nice did you see?

2:20:47 - Alex Lindsay
did you see that someone? I don't know, I saw it on tiktok or something. Someone had a beating heart made out of legos with the little motors and stuff little motors and stuff like that, and it was like I was oh wow, Like the chambers were moving.

2:20:58 - Mikah Sargent
That's neat.

2:20:59 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that is amazing what you can do with Lego. I want you to do that, Mikah.

2:21:02 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, let me look that up. I just said it as a challenge.

2:21:05 - Leo Laporte
I made it sound like I was just talking about something but I really want to see we do a MacBreak Weekly on Tuesdays, 11 am, pacific, 2 pm eastern, 1900 UTC. Actually, next week we will be back to uh summertime. Yes, so we will be at 1800 UTC. I forgot we set the clocks uh, spring forward. Not that bitter, not that I. Yeah, so we're going to set the clocks forward, so we will be at 1800 utc, not 1900. Okay, we plus seven. Now, the reason I mentioned that is because you can watch us live. That's when you get the great discussions like we just had, which will certainly be edited out of the final edition uh well, now it won't be, because I said it.

Uh, you can watch live. Uh, on eight different streams. If you're a club member, you're watching the discord. It's a great place to hang um. That's one of the many benefits of being a club member seven bucks a month, you get ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the club discord events like Mikah's crafting corner, where he's going to build a succulent and and a beating heart soon and a heart, if we could just work on it and I will be doing Thursday Chris Marquardt's monthly photo segment Always a lot of fun. If you're a photographer and you like knowing more about photography, so please go to twit.tv/clubtwit, join the club, but you don't have to be a club member to watch live. There's also a YouTube stream, a Twitch stream, there's TikTok x.com, Facebook LinkedIn and Kick, so you can watch us live anywhere, and I watch the chat from all of those platforms, so you can chat with us anywhere after. The fact, though, is probably how most people watch.

You can download a copy of the show from our website, twit.tv/mbw. I just got the notice from the US Patent and Trademark Office that it's been 20 years since we trademarked TWIT and the TWIT logo. That's behind me. It's time to renew. Wow, I never thought I'd have to renew that trademark, to be honest with you. You can also, if you wish, get a copy. The video is up on YouTube. Actually, that's a great place to go if you want to share a clip or two from the show, and we, uh, if you wish, get a copy of the videos up on YouTube. Actually, that's a great place to go If you want to share a clip or two from the show, and we appreciate it if you do. But the best and easiest way to get a show, just like any podcast, find your favorite podcast player, even Spotify, subscribe and you'll get it automatically for free the minute it's available.

Thank you all for being here. Thank you for listening to the show. Uh, we, it's available. Thank you all for being here. Thank you for listening to the show. We really appreciate it, especially our club members. But now it is, I'm sorry to say, my sad and solemn duty to tell you get back to work. Break time is over. Bye-bye.