MacBreak Weekly 963 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, Alex and Jason are here. Jason's back from his vacation and guess what? He did? Get an Apple briefing All the deets on the new MacBook Air with the M4 in it, and the Mac Studio with the M3 in it, why it might be the fastest Mac ever and the best AI machine. Anybody sells that and a whole lot more. Coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.

This is MacBreak Weekly, Episode 963. Recorded Tuesday, March 11th 2025: The Blue and the Gray. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show we cover the latest Apple news. There is news to be had and thank goodness it's the return of Jason Snell, who did, in fact, get an apple breathing, but he was also on vacation.

0:01:06 - Jason Snell
I was poolside writing about new max how about that? And I'm back here wearing my sky blue t-shirt and committing to the bit. Where did you go?

0:01:16 - Leo Laporte
Hawaii. Oh, I'm so jealous.

0:01:18 - Jason Snell
We're in Hawaii, uh, kawaii beautiful, just you know, 82 degrees and breezy and beautiful and I had a good. People are like how was your trip? I'm like perfect great. We had a great time. It was my wife's uh and my uh 30th wedding anniversary and it was our first trip there without children since so it was nice, yeah, nice, welcome back.

0:01:43 - Leo Laporte
We missed you. Thank you, Alex Lindsey's also here. officehours.global and 090.media. Where did you go, uh?

0:01:50 - Alex Lindsay
I, I went to see. Uh, I went to a concert with my daughter. Oh fun yeah. Who shot asap rocky? Who did? You see, I saw a flip turn at the uh fox theater, which I have never been in. Have you been to fox theater?

0:02:03 - Leo Laporte
oh, it's beautiful and unbelievable.

0:02:05 - Alex Lindsay
Unbelievable theater.

0:02:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's an old theater classic old-time vaudeville house movie theater geometry, like it was.

0:02:12 - Alex Lindsay
Like I was like I don't understand what I'm looking at here, but I love it, you know like these different layers and everything else. And so this bangkok flip turn that my daughter knows and I barely know, but I'm learning to love them. They're're pretty good. And so Crooked Kings and Flip Turn, and then I'm going to see Mike the Electrician on Friday, so I'm just doing a lot. The Illegals are back, joey, we're going to see.

0:02:35 - Leo Laporte
The Illegals. Are you going? I think we might be at the same show, yeah.

0:02:38 - Alex Lindsay
Malachi and I are coming. We're going to take some low-light cameras. Oh, I'll look for you. I was talking to Joey about it. So that's going to be at Rancho Nicosio.

0:02:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Nicosio is a fun place to see because it's open air and fun. Yeah, it's good, although last time we were there, we were in the front row for Is it open air?

0:02:52 - Alex Lindsay
I thought it was just open air.

0:02:53 - Leo Laporte
Well there's inside too, it depends. There's a big open air area and we were dancing in the. They said no dancing, sit down, they're very gruff.

0:03:13 - Alex Lindsay
We're never coming here again. Sorry, maybe for a chamber music orchestra, I don't know. Yeah, the um, I uh, I used to live a mile from, less than a mile, half a mile from rancho nicole. I've never been in the concert area so I've never seen. So I'm looking forward to it this weekend. Uh, fun, yeah, my uh, yeah, I'm. Yeah, I called the guy and he's there. I was like he's so gruff, like I don't. They are a little gruff.

0:03:31 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because they have a great spot. Yeah, exactly, anyway, nice to see you. Yeah, and of course, andy Anako, who is bringing his receipts today, so he prep yeah, I.

0:03:42 - Andy Ihnatko
I just have a premonition that for the first 43 minutes of this it's going to be like you talking to jason and me and Alex going, occasionally remembering to lean into them. Oh, uh, huh, oh, and then well, let's start.

0:03:58 - Leo Laporte
Jason is wearing sky blue. Yeah, blue, sure, uh, I think you wrote that. Well, I have to see it in person because it's probably just silver, and is it?

0:04:10 - Jason Snell
I mean, you tell me yeah that's silver with a little bit of blue doesn't match your shirt, so here's the. It does not match my shirt because my shirt has color in it. Um, okay, so here's the deal. When, um when, apple told me that they're doing this in our briefings that we had while I was poolside- they said, you know Sky Blue, and I'm like oh okay, all right, sky Blue.

And I thought to myself it's going to be what they do, which is it's going to be silver with a hint of blue, like everything else. And then I got it and I opened the box and I thought to myself I can't believe that they do this sky blue product and they send me a silver Mac book. And so I went back to the manifest from the Apple editorial reviews group, which lists all the specs of the model that they're shipping to you, and it says sky. And I thought, okay, and so I pulled out a silver Macbook and like my silver apple tv remote, and I put it all together.

Uh, and you know, it's not the same as silver, right, and at certain angles, and I mean apple's art that they supplied people, that they posted when, uh, they did the press release, like they usually are, on a like a neutral kind of off-white background. All their photography is not quite white, which bugs me because my website's background is white, and so you get a little off-white box around it that sometimes I remove in photoshop because it makes me so mad. Anyway, this time it was like off white blue, it was like trying to push your brain toward the blue.

The truth is, yeah, I mean, in certain, in certain light, in certain angles, you can see that there's blue, but the way I would really describe it is there's silver and then for starlight, there's a kind of yellow gold undertone that comes out a little bit, and then you know, so, that's over here in the middle of silver, and on the other stretch now we have sky blue. That's over here in the middle of silver, and on the other stretch now we have sky blue, which is that same silver, but with a little blue undertone to it. It is incredibly subtle and, as a as somebody who would really like Apple to take a shot at making a MacBook air in a bright color, just to see what that would be like, they're not going to do that and I think they just philosophically believe that, um, that laptop colors should be restrained, because you never know where you're going to be using a laptop. I understand the argument right. It's like you don't know what context it's going to be in. Um, if you want to take it into a business meeting and it's bright orange, you're going to be making waves. If you walk into a Starbucks, everybody's going to be like well, check out that guy with a green laptop. Whatever it is, I get it.

I wish they would try it, though, because it would be more fun, and it's a MacBook Air, it's a consumer laptop. Why not let people? They do it with the iMac, for Pete's sake, why not try it with a laptop? Anyway, they didn't do that. Instead, it is sky blue, which is basically bluey silver instead of silver, or gold of silver, and well, even the midnight is uh, which is the fourth option, because they got rid of space gray. I have a midnight, the midnight. I have a midnight too, and it's beautiful, but it's basically a black laptop, right, that, if you look at it at a certain angle, sort of seems blue. So it's like the inverse of these, but also kind of the same philosophy show me again, show me, let me.

0:07:21 - Leo Laporte
Let's see it so we can really. Yeah, I see a little blue. When you took it out, did you say funny, you don't look bluish.

0:07:29 - Jason Snell
I literally thought they sent me a silver laptop, okay. And I thought to myself I bet they didn't. I bet this is what sky blue is and out of context, because that's the truth of it is out of context. It just seems like a silver laptop.

And I think that's what they were going for. I think they want. I think they want it to be subtle because they I I think apple believes the standard laptop look for apple is a silver laptop and that they should all sort of be like space gray is really just out of context. You might think space gray with silver, because it's also just silver a little darker. So I think that apple really philosophically thinks their laptop should be more or less silver or black. Maybe we're getting some of those dark gray now and that that's it. And like I don't agree with it, but I at least understand they clearly got bitten culturally by the G3 iBook back in the day with a tangerine and the blueberry and all of that, and they have not made a colorful laptop since. So I mean I wish they would try.

0:08:24 - Andy Ihnatko
It's too bad, but they didn't try this time so that's really too bad too, because, unlike a phone, you don't complain about a phone because hey, you're just going to slap into a case anyway. But now, like with the thermals on modern notebooks are so bad that you really can't put a plastic case over it, unless you want to put a translucent case, which I like to do, or transparent.

Yeah, I mean those, those stickers from dbrand and what are kind of cool, but it's like, yeah, if you want more customization if you want to personalize your macbook air, you should put stickers on it.

0:08:51 - Jason Snell
I mean, that's basically my look at my daughter's laptop. It's covered in stickers and it's like, okay, you could do that, that's great, but it's anyway it's. It's the most exciting thing, leo. To change the subject slightly is well.

0:09:02 - Leo Laporte
I just want I know I know what you're going to say and I just want to say this the color is the least interesting thing.

0:09:07 - Jason Snell
It is it's the thing we led with, but it's one of the few things that changed in this.

0:09:10 - Leo Laporte
There are only a couple of changes in this model. Well, there's a big change, which is the price.

0:09:15 - Jason Snell
Yes, that is.

0:09:18 - Leo Laporte
So the story.

0:09:19 - Jason Snell
And I think this is the story. What happens is, when you use new hardware, it's more expensive to make and then over time it becomes less expensive to make. And this is always true, right? You build something first and all the parts add up to costing, you know, $1,000. And then in a year they all cost $980. And in two years they cost $950. Just over time the price comes down, your margins can go up, and so Apple believes firmly that the Air should start at $999. That that is a really. They want a sub-thousand dollar laptop.

And when they went to the M2, they couldn't do it. The M2 Air started at, I want to say, $1299. It was not cheap. It might've been $11, but it was not $999. They kept the M1 around and then, when the M3 came out, they moved the M2 Air down to $9.99 because it was a year old. It was an old model, but the new MacBook Air still couldn't cost. It was, I think, $11.99, $10.99. It was not there. With the M4, they've finally gotten back to it. So it took them two and a half years, almost three years, but they are back to the fact that for $999, you can get a base model and now it's got 16 gigs of RAM instead of eight. It's 256 storage, which, you know, for people who watch MacBreak Weekly is probably not enough.

But for a lot of people. It's fine if you're doing mostly stuff in the cloud anyway and 16 gigs RAM right, if you're doing mostly stuff in the cloud anyway, and 16 gigs RAM right, and the 16 gigs RAM is huge and that's at $999. And what it does for me. I'm curious. I'm going to work in the boys here. I'm curious what Andy and Alex and Leo think about this.

0:10:55 - Leo Laporte
He's busy on his tech.

0:10:55 - Jason Snell
I'm trying to work him into the conversation here, but for me this eliminates a whole raft of things where it used to be. What mac should I buy? And I'd be like, well, well, because the m1 air. It was clear it was the m1 air, but in the m2 m3 air it's like, well, that m2 air is a year old, but it's a pretty good deal at 9.99. It's all wiped away and they stopped selling those models, except in certain countries, but basically they're gone off of applecom. The answer is just get the 9.99 m4 air. It is the easy default Mac to recommend to almost everybody and that is the most impressive thing about the new MacBook.

0:11:32 - Andy Ihnatko
Air. Yeah, 100%. I've always thought that it's really important for Apple to have a sub-$600 Mac mini. Better, sub-$500. I'll take sub-$600. But it's also really, really important for them to have a sub-thousand dollar MacBook. Even if they have to cut some of the features of it, even if they have to cut some of the storage of it, the entry price should not break $1,000, because there are people that are consider themselves lucky to be able to get the base model MacBook Air. So this was a really, really big deal. And the second effect of that is that one of the things that sort of perplexed me for the past couple of years has been when you send somebody into an Apple by the time you, when the price when the base model Air was a couple hundred dollars more.

It's like here are two nearly identical MacBooks. One has a fan, one does not. One is a little bit thicker, but it's only a big deal. If you wish you had room for one extra paper comic book in your laptop bag than not. This puts extra distance between the two and makes it really really clear it's still. Here's the one that is maybe your second, here's. You have a Windows machine at home or you have an iMac at home, but you have a portable Mac to go. This is the one to go for, even if you're not necessarily using it as your primary Mac. So this is. It adds clarity to the product line.

0:13:05 - Alex Lindsay
I agree. I think that it is a. I think what's interesting there is that it, the price, makes a difference. Also, it's very clear between the Mac Pro I just got a Mac Pro a couple of weeks ago for the Michael Krasny show that we're doing and the the. We got the Mac Pro because of the USB. I just need more USB inputs. But that's a pro request, right, that's a pro request. It makes sense to be a pro. You mean the MacBook Pro, right, MacBook Pro, yeah. So I got the MacBook Pro because I wanted four inputs. You know I didn't want the two that the Air comes with, but it was very clear and it was like oh, I can see that I know what the difference is because I'm, I have a pro need. If I did, if I wasn't recording things, if I didn't need to plug in mics and other things to it, I would absolutely have gotten the air. Yeah, you know, and especially at $999.

0:13:55 - Jason Snell
Yeah, the price differential. So even if you go to the 15 model-inch is $1599. It's the same chip, right, but it's got that really nice screen and it's got more ports and it's got a bunch of stuff. So there's a very clear which, andy is absolutely right, there was not before. There is a very clear reason why the M4 MacBook Pro exists and why the M4 MacBook Air exists. There are different products. There's a big price difference between them. You understand why you choose one or another.

And again, for people like us, we get asked all the time what Mac should I buy? My kid's going to college, what should I buy? It happens all the time and there have been periods where it's been zero clarity about what to do. You got to do a whole questionnaire and you're like, well, do I need whatever? Zero clarity about what to do. You got to do a whole questionnaire and you're like, well, do I need whatever? And I love a moment like this where it's like no, you can get the best chip, the current model $999 to start.

If you want to add a little more storage, go ahead. $1,199 if you want to get the 15-inch model. It already was a great computer and in an era where we have inflation and a lot of prices are going up. Apple has pushed that thing back down to $999 to start. Now, if you want to spec it up, apple will reap all the rewards of huge margins and all the up spec. But the fact is $999 for an M4 Air with 16 gigs of RAM and a 256 SSD still pretty great.

0:15:23 - Leo Laporte
And if you want to update that that's the student machine. Right, it is. That's the machine. You should get a student.

0:15:28 - Jason Snell
This would be my standard. If my kid's going to college, what do I get them? It's the 999M4.

0:15:31 - Leo Laporte
Especially since nowadays they store most of their stuff in the cloud. Anyway, you don't need more than 256, I think I think so.

0:15:39 - Jason Snell
I mean unless you're working on graphic. I mean, like the people who need more will know, but like it and even then you get, you get an external drive.

0:15:47 - Alex Lindsay
You're better off keeping your media on an external drive. Anyway, yeah, it's a great deal it is.

0:15:53 - Jason Snell
You know, we. It's funny because we we do a lot of parsing of like, well, what's apple doing here and who's this for, and all that. It's kind of refreshing to be just like, yeah, this is it, like this is almost I mean because almost everybody buys a laptop.

0:16:04 - Alex Lindsay
This is the best selling mac.

0:16:06 - Jason Snell
Um, I looked it up uh, we don't know how many laptops apple sells out of, uh, versus desktops, because they don't report that anymore. The last year they reported that with, I think, fiscal 12, and I looked up that number, I did, I did my, I did my research 75 of the macs they sold in 2012 were laptops, and it's not, it's not less, yeah and so, and then this is by far their most successful laptop. Maybe you know they make a lot of profit on the macbook pros, but they sell, and if you talk to somebody in an apple store, um, they'll tell you that you know, a mac, an iMac or a mac mini might go out the door every so often, but the macbook airs just fly off the shelves because that's the, it is the definitive Mac right now.

0:16:47 - Leo Laporte
For anybody who wants a computer, that's probably the computer to get.

0:16:51 - Jason Snell
Pretty fuss-free concept of $999,. You get an M4 Mac and you'll be able to use it. That's the other thing. Apple keeps comparing these things to Intel. You're going to use this thing. You can use this thing for seven, eight years no problem, honestly, yeah, and the.

0:17:07 - Andy Ihnatko
And one of the nicest, one of the things that kind of made me is making me wonder. Gee, I know my M1 MacBook is still running fine, I have no complaints about it, but maybe I could. Maybe I should buy a MacBook Air. Just just the simple fact that now you can actually have two external displays plus the internal uh display at the same time Because for me the difference between a real desktop replacement is having two actual external displays at the same time, that's pretty big. That's a really nice bonus.

0:17:36 - Leo Laporte
I got to say. It's a little annoying, though, that Apple still or now puts Apple Intelligence in this specs everywhere, like that's something.

0:17:48 - Jason Snell
Yeah, we'll get to that in a bit.

0:17:48 - Leo Laporte
they have corporate alignment on Apple intelligence as a feature that they want to promote almost everywhere, if you want to do AI locally, you wouldn't buy one of these doesn't have enough storage, doesn't have enough Ram, but most people are not going to do local AIs, so right?

0:18:01 - Jason Snell
well, it'll do, whatever the Apple intelligence model is It'll do Apple intelligence.

0:18:05 - Leo Laporte
I'm not saying that Right, that's not AI, that's just Exactly.

0:18:09 - Andy Ihnatko
Silliness. Well, and you have the Mac studio for that too. So that's.

0:18:13 - Leo Laporte
If yeah, well, we'll get to. Yeah, might as well get to that. So this is a great, this is a well done Apple right.

0:18:25 - Jason Snell
I mean, that's the argument.

It's like if you need to go above what the Air delivers, you should get a MacBook Pro, and they start at a lower price than they ever have because they have that M4 model, which is a lot less of a sad second citizen than it was back then.

I should say this is also the thing where they, after, I think, a studio display came out and everybody kind of gave them stick for the camera, the center stage camera they put in there and with the iMac and MacBook Pro last fall they started putting 12 megapixel ultra wides in there as their webcams and they followed that up here. They're not all exactly the same Like the iMac camera doesn't look like the MacBook Pro camera exactly and the MacBook Pro camera doesn't look like the MacBookbook air camera exactly, but they're all a cut above what was there before and because it's an ultra wide, that does center stage, even if you don't want to use center stage, it means you can use the little interface now to kind of zoom it around and pan it and get the exact shot you want in the webcam. So an upgraded webcam like everybody uses, everybody's on a zoom, call everybody's on.

Yeah and you don't need more than 1080p for any of that right, you don't, you don't need, so they've got this 12 megapixel thing that then they can slice and dice and it does look better, especially in, you know, in low light, where the old camera didn't do as well. This one does a little bit better. All of them look good in good lighting, but in bad lighting, which is where most video actually, that's happened. Yeah, uh, it's, it's better, so that's. That's the other major thing, other than just bumping the chip from m3 to m4. The major thing that happened here that I think people might care about, other than that one little color option and the price, is that the webcam's better and it is, so that's good how's the mic?

0:20:00 - Leo Laporte
I keep on asking about the mic oh, you care more about mics than anybody I know, Alex.

0:20:05 - Jason Snell
I promised you that I would do some A-B testing of the mics in the M4 Pro and the M4 Air, and I will, but I haven't yet.

0:20:16 - Alex Lindsay
Why don't you call us back on the M4?

0:20:17 - Leo Laporte
Air with just the array mics.

0:20:20 - Alex Lindsay
Studio quality mics or whatever yeah the reason that I keep on coming back to it is because we keep on sending mics out to people and we end up with sending people and they can't figure out how to make them work with their PC or they can't make it. And I'm just like can I just send a laptop to somebody?

0:20:33 - Leo Laporte
That would be ideal. Open it up.

0:20:34 - Alex Lindsay
Open it up and I'm going to run Splashtop or something like that.

0:20:37 - Leo Laporte
A 999 laptop.

0:20:40 - Alex Lindsay
That's all you need and then have them. You know, I'm just going to have them send it back, but I'm just going to. But the point is that you don't even know anything, Just open it, put power on, open it up, let it connect to Wi-Fi and you're done.

0:20:49 - Jason Snell
We'll try it out. We'll try it out and I'll give you some samples and you can see what you think.

0:20:52 - Leo Laporte
Three mic array with directional beam forming baby, it's all about beam forming for people. Uh, in this, the market for a macbook air, probably you're right that most of the advanced usage will be on zoom calls. Yeah, you know, to go into class or talking to friends or whatever they're doing so that's fairly important.

0:21:17 - Jason Snell
Yeah, the mics didn't change and the mics are not up to the spec of the pro mics of the pro where they're they're doing. You know, studio quality is their claim on the pro, it's not their claim on the air I know they've been talking about studio. The quality of those mics is better than it used to be. They should not have called that. Yeah, whatever it was that last generation intel macbook pro. They said it had studio quality mics and I tried it and I don't know what studio they tested it in.

0:21:44 - Leo Laporte
I guess I could change to my laptop mic on here.

0:21:51 - Jason Snell
Producers are going to scream at me for doing this.

0:21:54 - Leo Laporte
You don't think I should do this.

0:21:56 - Alex Lindsay
You can, please don't, please don't.

0:22:03 - Jason Snell
I mean, I can't stop you per se he froze because he was he's doing it oh he froze because he was trying to change it. Yep, he's gone Amazing.

0:22:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Listen to your producer.

0:22:16 - Jason Snell
Always listen to your producer. It crashed.

0:22:20 - Alex Lindsay
It crashed, zoom. It didn't sound like a studio. You don't sound like a studio anymore I.

0:22:27 - Leo Laporte
So now I'm on the studio, I'm on the on the microphone, for this is for the n3 macbook pro. Don't sound like a studio. How about if I get really close to it? Does it sound better?

0:22:36 - Alex Lindsay
hello not really yeah it's just not able to overcome your. Uh.

0:22:41 - Leo Laporte
Okay, your room, I'm gonna switch back and this is gonna. Sorry, john, this is gonna crash it again, probably. I don't know what happened. It froze everything. Everything it's back, it's back. You did it sounds. I don't know why it crashed. Sorry, I won't. No more experiments turns out physics. It's hard to beat it's hard to beat it's a little teensy, weensy microphone six feet away.

It's not good. All right, enough of that. Let me take a break and then we come back. What you really want to hear about, which is the m3 ultra, the new studio uh, which ben thompson says is the best AI desktop out there for local models, better than anything on the PC side. That's an interesting claim. We'll talk about it in just a bit. You're watching MacBreak Weekly with the sky blue, jason Snell. If, when we come back, your shirt is silver, how would you know?

0:23:43 - Jason Snell
Is it blue or is it silver? The latest internet sensation.

0:23:49 - Leo Laporte
That's Andy Ihnatko, WGBH in Boston, and, of course, Mr Alex Lindsay from officehours.global

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We thank them so much, not only for their support on a Mac break weekly, but for helping us keep our company safe. That was a scary moment. I mean. Fortunately, our staff knows better than to do that, but especially when you're remote like we are, it's not like they could just go down the hall and say, hey, Lisa, did you send this text? They can't. You know she's at home.

All right, Now let me go to Stratechery, because Ben Thompson, who runs this very I think prestigious analyst site stratechery.com said Apple is now making. This is right above the story. That says Apple's bad week, but I won't talk about that one, but we'll get to that. But Apple is making one of the best AI computers out there, which is true I think we've said this before because of unified memory it has access to for the price you might say. Well, that studio is $3,000 or $4,000, but that's still less than a single NVIDIA with all that memory. These are ai machines. Um, did you, do you have jason of you, lucky dog? M3 ultra I?

0:29:36 - Jason Snell
I do not. I am one of the people that they sent an m3 max to and not an m3. The verge has the ultra. They sent me the ultra last time but I guess I I'm not ultra enough for them this time.

But Ben's point is I mean it's good because the idea is the Apple Silicon architecture has shared memory and that means that you know that enormous amount of memory, that the M3 Ultra and all the RAM and all the GPUs you will be able to run some full AI models, like big AI models, on it because you have that power and that's a cool angle, right. Like most people aren't going to do that, but he's pointing to it, I think, for people who wanted to do it now. I had that thought that some of those AI researchers in China who have various export restrictions, I wonder if they will go out and buy Mac studios Cause they're like, oh, this is going to be, cause it's expensive but it's going to be a bargain compared to the other hardware. And it also says something about maybe the future where Apple Silicon has an advantage because they can task their RAM for their GPUs when they need to, which is something that you can't do if you're not doing pooled memory, yeah, yeah.

0:30:52 - Andy Ihnatko
There are a lot of people around as soon as, as soon as the to hit the store specking up like what is the most expensive Mac studio configuration, and $14,100, but and that's with five, 12 gigs of memory and 16 terabytes of storage, and it's not. But and that's with 512 gigs of memory, 16 terabytes of storage, and it's not.

0:31:06 - Leo Laporte
And it's worthy, worthy of comment go price an nvidia gpu with 512 gigs of memory right, right I'm that's the point, right, yeah?

0:31:13 - Andy Ihnatko
exactly, but the the. The real point is that like, yeah, it would be nice if you had something where you could really build from the ground up your own custom uh ai computer with all the specs that you actually want, with all the slots. You could really build from the ground up your own custom AI computer with all the specs that you actually want, with all the slots. You could fill with as many GPUs as you want, but at the very least Mac Studio gives you enough configuration options. That 512 gigs of memory that's usually what most people want. Again, additional GPUs is a big deal, but it's not as though the m3 ultra is any slouch in the gpu department either. So it it tamps down a lot of the complaints, the historical complaints about the lack of a real mac pro to but the way that most people, a lot of people, define a mac pro.

0:31:55 - Leo Laporte
So let's talk, uh jason, about this m3 ultra.

0:31:59 - Jason Snell
They're shipping an m3 when the m4 is now in the ipad, the macbook air, presumably a macbook pro m3 is out of almost everything now this is the last m3 product well, no, because they introduced the ipad air, it's also running on an m3, yeah, um, and the ipad mini, I think it's also, or no, it's running on an a series pro.

So, yeah, it is the most of those. Uh, original three nanometer process tsmc chips are out, but the but a few of them are in and there's a question about, like, are they binned and hanging around or are the processes still going? And I don't know enough about chip manufacturing to speculate about that. But this process it is weird, right, because it's an m4 max or an m3 ultra, and you know what that means is that it's single core performance. The m4 is faster, but you don't buy an ultra for single core performance. You buy it because it's got twice as many cores and twice as many gpu cores and huge memory bandwidth 80 up to 80 gpu cores because it's double the number of cores that are in the M3 Max. It's mind-boggling.

0:33:06 - Leo Laporte
The other thing is a lot of people. You only have 40, you poor fella.

0:33:09 - Jason Snell
Yeah, a lot of people view the Ultra as being just two chips stuck together of the previous generation. There is an aspect to that where that's true, but this is not just two M3 Max chips stuck together, and you can see it in the specs. The M3 doesn't support Thunderbolt 5. The M3 Ultra supports Thunderbolt 5. It's almost like and they're never going to do this because it's Apple right. They're very simplified when it comes to a lot of their branding, but I would tell you this is not an M3. It's like an M3 and a half.

0:33:47 - Leo Laporte
It's probably on the same process as the m3, but like it's, it's the same, it's a different it's a different chip like it. They engineered new stuff into the bandwidth is 800 gigabytes yeah, bytes per second and again in the past ultras.

0:33:59 - Jason Snell
Their max ram has been double the max ram of the max. This is more than double. This is quadruple 512 gigs.

0:34:07 - Leo Laporte
It's quadrupled, so they've increased the memory bandwidth and the memory max and it's almost as if they said how could we build the ultra ultimate local ai machine? Right, because those are the things you care about. It's the ultimate, and a lot of things a lot of things there's a lot at 512 with 80 cores you know, what do you need 512 gigs for? In anything besides ai, what do you need 512?

0:34:30 - Alex Lindsay
gigs. You know there's there's all kinds of scientific calculations, there's there's um, but there's also like things like that I work on in photogrammetry. Uh, there's a variety of things that you need to pull a lot of things into ram, but ram is okay. Ram is extremely important because you work.

You work with the image in ram yeah yeah, so it's, and it can be a mixture of it. It doesn't have to work in ram. It's just that what happens is is that, like I have some projects that I can't open in less than 64 gigs, like it won't, it literally just won't open, um, and so that's the. You know, that's really the challenge, and so, um, uh, you know so the so 512 is at a whole nother level, and then it also speeds up a lot of those processes if it can hold it all in in unified memory as opposed to going in and out of the heart, the unified memory. You want to keep it as much in there, um, as opposed to going back out to storage, and so it's.

0:35:21 - Leo Laporte
It's pretty incredible let me uh read you. You just posted it in the in our discord chat, jason, so uh, I will read the actual quote from ben thompson's stratechery. What that means in practical terms is apple just shipped the best consumer grade ai computer ever. Now, by the way really important to make the distinction that we're talking about running it locally. Most of the time when you use chat, you know you're using chat, gpt or deep seek or any of the a you know, claude, you're almost certainly using on their servers with their RAM and their processors and all that, and that's that's kind of the normal usage. But what if you wanted to run it locally? What if you wanted to run llama or deep seek locally? You can, because those, because those are open weight ai models you can download the model and put it on your machine. That's what we're talking about here. He says a mac studio with an m3 ultra chip and five gigs, 512 gigs of ram. So that's how much?

13 000 how much storage you want you know, oh yeah, okay can run a four bit, a four bit quantized version of deep seek r1, which is a state-of-the-art open source reasoning model. I don't use the word open source, ben does. I prefer open weights. You're not seeing the source code Right on your desktop. It's not perfect. Quantization reduces precision and the memory bandwidth is a bottleneck that limits performance. 800 gigabytes a second, really, but this is something you simply cannot do. Do and this is important with a standalone Nvidia chip pro or consumer. The former can of course, be interconnected and you see people doing that big, building these giant. You know, multi, multi-processor, multi-gpu boxes for great expense, but that costs, he says, hundreds of thousands of dollars all in. The only real alternative for home use would be a server CPU and gobs of RAM, but even that's slower and you have to put it together yourself.

0:37:13 - Alex Lindsay
And to put it in perspective, I mean when he's talking about slow memory the NVIDIA H200 is 4.8 terabytes per second oh okay, so 800 gigabytes.

0:37:22 - Leo Laporte
Isn't that that fast?

0:37:23 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, that's hundreds of that. That's the. Those are the hundreds of thousands of other ones you're talking about, but the a100 is two terabytes per you know. So a lot of these. That's part of what nvidia's secret sauce is.

0:37:33 - Leo Laporte
That, and cuda right, yeah, cuda is the secret sauce, but I guess, um, you know, people are able to one run these local models like llama and deep seek, uh, without cuda. Uh, he says you can make a strong case. Apple is the best consumer hardware company in ai. I think that's really really interesting, especially since apple intelligence is such a flop from a certain point of view.

0:38:02 - Jason Snell
Um, I mean, that is. It is an interesting way to look at this, and this is the funny thing, talking about Apple and AI, right is that we've got another story to talk about about Apple kind of belly flopping when it comes to its estimation of how many AI features it was going to ship.

0:38:18 - Leo Laporte
Ben's article has two subheads Apple's bad week and Apple's great week?

0:38:22 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and this is the conundrum is that Apple's killing it on the hardware side? It really is, and a lot of the investments and choices that Apple made in its platform actually fit really well with a world that's dominated by AI, the shared memory, the neural engine that they've been working on for seven or eight years now. Right, like they made some good decisions. Like they made some good decisions, but in the specific case of LLMs, they just didn't believe they were going to be a thing and are spending a huge amount of time and money trying to catch up on that side. So it's interesting, I mean. I would argue that in the long run, in the long run, if Apple can weather this, they're in a good position because their hardware is so good, but they have to get through some tough times where they are trying to bootstrap and also change their kind of software development philosophy in order to get where they need to be.

0:39:10 - Andy Ihnatko
That last point is the big one. It's kind of remarkable, I mean. I think everybody expected that for all of the whistling through the graveyard. Even Apple acknowledges that. Okay, yeah, we bet on two bad horses at times when we should have been investing in AI, but we're starting it now and we'll get there eventually, and nobody disputes that. However, the big surprise is that they said hey, here is our roadmap, here is when we're going to be delivering certain things.

They were smart enough not to say we've promised by X date we will have Siri with advanced Apple intelligence. But they had a good time frame. The thing is, they guessed so completely wrong that it's not just delayed. Now there are rumors that people in the C-suites are angry with how badly the things are performing, and there's rumors that they're going to have to stop everything and start all over again. It's it's that's not something we're used to hearing from Apple that they had some confidence that, hey, we'll get. We can't be specific about dates, but we know the timeframe in which we will start to be able to roll things out and to be that wrong and saying okay, we are pulling this building to the ground, we are throwing salt into the ground.

0:40:25 - Jason Snell
I didn't really want to get to this story yet Andy, but okay, I have another Andy, stop advancing the calendar before I'm through with the first thing Andy, it's a three-hour show.

0:40:37 - Leo Laporte
Well, I just I mean, I want to finish the Ultra first. I want to finish the Mac Studio first. We will get to this.

0:40:46 - Andy Ihnatko
So let's start with Apple's great week, and then we'll get to Apple's bad week.

0:40:48 - Leo Laporte
I'll go back to my taxes. Sorry, Go back and do your taxes, would you?

0:40:51 - Jason Snell
Alright so? So the other thing here is that part of this is Apple said to people in briefings, including me, that look, we're not necessarily going to do an Ultra Chip with every chip generation, and there's reports that the M4 doesn't have the interconnect on it, which is funny because, there were reports, the M3 didn't have the interconnect on it either, which I mean I would take all of these reports very lightly because we don't know.

We don't know, and they re-engineered this right. So it's possible. The M3 chips we saw didn't have it because they didn't put them on there, but they did put it on this 3.5 or whatever version that they were building. Also, apple, I mean I'm not going to say Apple lies, I'm going to say Apple PR does what it does, which is, they will tell you everything you need to know, that they want you to know, and nothing more. And so when Apple says, well, we won't necessarily do it, that doesn't mean they won't do it.

And also, here's my conspiracy theory, which is they could have updated the Mac Pro last week too. They could have. They could have put, like they did the last time, the same chips in the Mac Pro that were in the Mac Studio and call it a day. And they didn't. Why didn't they? And I mean, maybe it's because the Mac Pro is dumb and they don't like it and they wanted to sit in the corner and wear a dunce cap, maybe, but it's also possible that there's another chip out there you think there's maybe an m4 ultra in the mac pro?

or or or something that's not an ultra, maybe it's an m4 chip that's built for the quad for the mac pro, that has even more processors in it and is super expensive and will run in a mac pro and that they will go to like a tiktok where, where they will do the ultra every other generation and an Extreme or something every other generation. So I wouldn't. I mean, I know Mac Pro is very much in the X-Files kind of I want to believe phase of its life now, but I think it's possible that the reason that it's just as possible that the Mac Pro is being ignored by Apple as it is that it's actually being prepped for something even greater that differentiates it from the high-end Mac Studio. So I think it's interesting to see where that might lead.

0:42:53 - Alex Lindsay
Which I think would be a bummer, because I think that what's great about the Mac Studio and Mac Pro differentiation right now is that the big differentiation is hey, you can buy the same computer and if you just need more connectivity you can buy the same computer, and if you just want need more connectivity you can buy it here. You know, it's kind of like it doesn't create a whole bunch of FOMO.

0:43:10 - Leo Laporte
Don't you want, though, a real distinction between the pro and the studio? I think there is a distinction.

0:43:15 - Alex Lindsay
There is a distinction. If you need more lanes, if you need more USB-C, if you need to add cards, you buy a pro. If you want the exact same computer without all those things, you buy a studio, and I feel like that makes I don't know it could be, though, that if this thing really is like four max all put together, max chips that the thermal environment of the studio is not built for that and that's why you go to the mac pro.

I think you just need to make sure that it feels very much like there was no other way to do it other than to put it into this larger enclosure, and not that they're just well and apple has to be looking at people like ben thompson and the ai local ai world saying you know what would be really great?

0:43:54 - Leo Laporte
uh, a billion gigabytes per second it would be, or a trillion it would be. It would make sense that apple might see a market for a pro as an ai machine. Um so, jason, you're saying there's a conspiracy theory afoot.

0:44:09 - Jason Snell
Well, I mean, it's just, it's my wild theory, because I have nothing to base it on other than the fact that they they have not updated the mac pro when they could have. They've not talked about what they're doing with the m4 generation. They said this thing about not necessarily doing an ultra chip with every generation, which does not say that there might not be a different, non-ultra high-end chip that they might be working on. And I put those things together Again. I get out my red yarn, I get the board out, I start connecting the dots and I think it's not impossible, and I think there's been little, if any, reporting on this from people like Mark Gurman either. It's just, I'm suspicious that the reason the Mac Pro didn't get an update and the reason that it's an M3 Ultra and there's no M4 Ultra potentially is that they have another plan for the Mac Pro. I know that Gurman has reported that in the past they were planning on doing a quad chip and it got canned. I wonder if that might be coming back. Maybe not, maybe the answer is at WWDC they say, oh yeah, that Mac Pro has also been updated with the M3 Ultra, enjoy, and they walk away.

But I don't know. I wonder because I think Apple hates the fact that they have a Mac Pro that's undifferentiated from the Mac Studio, because the Mac Pro doesn't make any sense. It's what it offers that's different from the studio. Now is so small that, like you wouldn't make a product just to be that different. And the way the story goes is that what happened is they thought they were going to get that quad core for the M2 or whatever, that quad chip processor, and then it got canceled. Then the Mac Pro team was like but we built a Mac Pro and they're like well, we'll just ship it with the, with the studio stuff in it and that'll be it. I don't know, maybe they're in that same boat, but it would make sense to me, if they really want to explore these high end areas, that maybe that's the way they do it is, and that this M three ultra is like the tip of the iceberg.

0:46:00 - Andy Ihnatko
That's my conspiracy theory, but I'm just I'm just confabulating now the red string thing, just quickly, is that we have to keep reminding ourselves that Apple knows very well who's buying what hardware and why, and oftentimes it's just they know who's buying this stuff, they know why they're buying it and I believe that they just think that they can sell more Mac studios to those people than Mac pros. And also, given the restrictions on how you configure those things, a Mac Pro is a lot more profitable configured as an AI machine than a Mac Pro would be.

0:46:31 - Leo Laporte
So I just uh priced out a studio, not maxing out the storage, because that's really where it gets expensive. You know, if you want 16 terabytes of storage, it's five thousand dollars, just hang a raid off.

Yeah, if I'm gonna, it's got thunderbolt 5, so I just put a terabyte internal. It's under 10 grand for everything else, max the processor and the ram, that's a. That's a compelling price for people who are working in ai or need whatever. It is all that uh horsepower, it just doesn't have the connectivity. Is what you're saying, Alex, that you want the, the extra connectivity?

0:47:07 - Alex Lindsay
I think it makes sense to make more of a differentiation between the studio and the I mean, if it's just that and there are things that are going, I mean, I'm talking to folks that are processing really high resolution, let's say spherical work, you know, for a app vision pro. They want all the hard. They talk about processing times in weeks, yeah, at night, you know, at high frame rates and really high resolution. Uh, they're talking about, like you know, oh, that that 20 minute piece might take two or three weeks to render, right, you know so. So something that comes out that's 10 grand is not a big deal no, especially you can.

You you know for the handful of people that need that. You can literally just open up a service and say we'll just send us your files and we'll render them and send them back but I do like jason's theory that you need more cooling for a quad core chip.

0:47:53 - Leo Laporte
I think that's a very interesting point in the studio probably just can't dissipate that much heat. I don't know why I'm looking over here. I don't have one over there.

0:48:00 - Jason Snell
I mean, they probably, yeah, they probably built it for knowing where the where the. Ultra was going and not necessarily where, something I mean because we know.

0:48:07 - Leo Laporte
Tell me about this M4 Max that you have, because that's not a puny machine.

0:48:13 - Jason Snell
No, it's great, it is not any. I mean, the story of Apple Silicon is the chips. Are the chips right? The chips are always the chips. So this is not offering any different performance, really, than on a MacBook Pro other than or a Mac Mini, right? Well, no, Mac Mini will only go up to an M4 Pro chip.

0:48:29 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, they don't have a Max Okay.

0:48:31 - Jason Snell
And so the space between the Mac Mini and the Mac Studio is all about the chips. It's the base and second level chips in the Mini and the third and fourth level chips are in the Studio. So that's the difference. But performance-wise it's basically like a macbook pro with the same um with the same chip in it. It's very impressive. It is not it when you go from pro to max.

So the question is like do I get a mac mini or do I get a max studio? Because they're not that far apart in price? The answer is do you care about gpus? Because the mac, the m4 pro chip, has the same number of cpu cores essentially as the m4 Pro chip has the same number of CPU cores essentially as the M4 Max chip, but the M4 Max chip has twice as many GPU cores Interesting. So if you are doing a lot of jobs that contain GPU and it's not just you know, it's games, it's rendering, it's AI stuff. I use a version of Whisper, the transcription engine, the speech-to-text engine from OpenAI that you can download and run standalone, and there's a version of it that a guy named Greg Garanoff built in C++.

0:49:34 - Leo Laporte
I used that one after you recommended it. It's great.

0:49:36 - Jason Snell
I have a shortcut that runs it. I can literally just right-click on a file on my desktop and say transcribe this.

0:49:41 - Leo Laporte
It's really nice to have that kind of speedy transcription on your desktop and that now uses gpu and I.

0:49:47 - Jason Snell
I transcribed my upgrade podcast yesterday and it transcribed at 27x um.

0:49:54 - Leo Laporte
That's why you get a max 27 times real time times, real time I did a two and a half hour podcast in five minutes.

0:50:02 - Jason Snell
So that's so. So you know now, like the max is do you care about GPU? If, if you don't so much and you get I mean you got good GPUs, there's just not twice as many of them you can save money. You can get a pro. You can get that Mac mini pro, which is such a great deal. But if you really really care, that's what the studio gets you is a whole bunch of extra IO. That's what the studio gets you is a whole bunch of extra IO and a whole bunch of extra GPU cores. And like, I think it's a very rational product line. The mini and the studio now kind of just sweep you up through the entire M4 slash, m3 ultra chip lineup, so that. But that, that would be the reason and that's the big which open.

0:50:42 - Leo Laporte
AI model do you use in your whisper? I'm using V3 turbo reason and that's the big differentiator. Which OpenAI model do you use in your Whisper? I'm?

0:50:46 - Jason Snell
using V3 Turbo.

0:50:48 - Leo Laporte
Okay.

0:50:49 - Jason Snell
That's fast. It's fast and it's pretty good. It's pretty accurate and it's very fast.

0:50:53 - Leo Laporte
The highest quality is Large V2, they say right.

0:50:59 - Jason Snell
Yeah, Large V3 is actually bad, but Large V2 is pretty good. I found V3 Turbo to be excellent and also fast.

0:51:11 - Leo Laporte
And found v3 turbo to be um excellent and also fast, and that's part of the point. Is, you don't want to sit there?

0:51:13 - Jason Snell
waiting for a transcript for um an hour and tell me again which which was because there's a bunch of whisper versions using whispercpp. That's on github from a guy, ah you don't.

0:51:18 - Leo Laporte
You didn't get it in the app store, okay no, I'm using.

0:51:20 - Jason Snell
I'm using a. You download it and you build it in terminal. Sorry, nerds, aren't you brave? But it works great and all the Whisper apps are following that right, and they're compiling it and they're integrating it into their apps too, but I love having that Anyway. So that got updated to use GPU at some point last year instead of CPU. You can do it on Neural Engine.

But really, if you've got a Mac, a modern Mac with lots of GPU cores, you want to use the GPU and it's very impressive. So that's why you would for example, you would opt for a Mac's chip instead of a pro chip. Is you've got a lot of jobs like that that really hammer the GPU, but it's pretty. Like I said, it's pretty rational and, again, regular people don't even need the pro chip. But even if you're like a power user, a mac mini with a pro chip or a macbook pro with a pro chip is probably fine and you know if you're killing the gpu that you want to go up to max this is we'll put this in the show notes the github to whisper cpp yeah he's got good.

he's got step-by-step instructions on how to compile it. You've got to get the, you got to download the Xcode tools but that's free from Apple and then you just compile with a couple of command line commands and then you can run it from Terminal, or you can script it or build a shortcut, like I did.

0:52:37 - Leo Laporte
I don't know why he has an iPhone plugged into this, but okay.

0:52:40 - Jason Snell
I think he's trying to do real-time transcription as an example, because that's one of the things that it offers oh the iPhone's playing it back.

0:52:45 - Leo Laporte
Wow, that's pretty cool, okay, okay, look at that.

0:52:50 - Jason Snell
But obviously real-time transcription is 1x and it works at 26x.

0:52:55 - Leo Laporte
It's in real-time, because people don't speak faster than they speak.

0:52:58 - Jason Snell
They don't, but, boy, it does help when you're doing YouTube captions for a three hour video.

0:53:03 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that is awesome and you use it on all your podcasts.

0:53:06 - Jason Snell
Yeah, because the YouTube, uh, auto captions are terrible, not so hot, yeah. So, and and yeah, I do that for um, for some podcasts where there's a like a secret version, I, so that I can offer a transcript. Yeah, exactly.

0:53:19 - Leo Laporte
Very cool, uh, all right.

0:53:27 - Andy Ihnatko
Um, let's take a break. And then, uh, andy, you'll get to talk about Apple's. Very bad, I'm sorry, I sensed the Pivot. Sometimes I'm wrong when I sense a pivot no, I'm not blaming you at all.

0:53:34 - Leo Laporte
I'm just trying to kind of keep it in. I mean, I just trying to keep in our Lane here just because in my own mind, I have a hard time. Uh, my stack is limited, they're all connected. You have a better stack than I do. You can pop stuff and push it.

Lots of parentheses going on. Really goode.

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Okay, Andy.

0:57:49 - Leo Laporte
Actually John Gruber got the scoop on this one, I think, did apple call you Jason.

0:57:56 - Jason Snell
Uh no, I think it was gruber and like reuters and somebody else, like it was two or three people not bad.

0:58:04 - Leo Laporte
Gruber and Reuters, the, the big two. Uh, apple had a little, how would you phrase it? Caveat, apology.

0:58:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year, the coming year by the way, as Gruberg is quick to point out, is not the calendar year.

0:58:26 - Leo Laporte
It's the year that begins in June with WWDC. It's Apple's fiscal year.

0:58:31 - Andy Ihnatko
And some others also noticed that they've pulled all like the YouTube ads and stuff that mention like Apple intelligence coming in with Siri in any type of type of time frame.

0:58:40 - Leo Laporte
So they're they are clearly falling back and retrenching, yeah um, I don't, I can't in in living memory, I cannot remember.

0:58:50 - Alex Lindsay
Apple ever doing this Again. I think this is this gets into Apple getting out of their, their PR, getting ahead of their, of their development. You know, in that they I think for stock reasons, more than anything else decided they have to talk about Apple intelligence all the time, so that we started talking about it last you know fall or whatever, and they, they're pounding Apple intelligence and it just wasn't part of the pipeline, it wasn't part of like, this is not how they plan to roll this out. And so now there's this hey, we can do it. I think that there was a little bit of the marketing driving, which is very unusual for Apple. Apple is, you know, very slow to bring anything out and then, once it comes out, it's just kind of like a big tank that just keeps moving forward, um, and, and I think that. But but that's because there's a lot of discussion and a lot of kind of adulting that goes on at Apple, and I feel like this is an exception to that, you know, and Apple felt like I think that again, they felt like there was this panic moment that they have to talk about AI. I don't think they did, I don't think they needed to talk about it.

I don't think anyone really cared. My wife, as I said before, doesn't even know that it exists. The only thing that people notice is the camera. Like you know, they could have gone on. They could have. Eventually people would get it. But I sit there and talk to chat GPT while I'm driving the entire time. I don't. I'm not like waiting for Siri to catch up, like it doesn't. It doesn't. I don't have any assumptions that it's going to catch up anytime soon. So so I think that I feel like a lot of Apple users don't need it to happen as fast. It's not like we're going to go get an Android phone anytime soon, like it's not like a little bit different interpretation.

1:00:19 - Leo Laporte
I kind of agree with Mark Gurman. I don't think it's a PR getting ahead of the game. I think it was actually. It turned out harder than Apple thought. Not just PR, but everybody.

No, no, I think it's harder than Apple thought, and I think that's why they brought Kim Vorhaz in because it wasn't working, and I think this puts John G Andrea's job on the line. I think Apple's intelligence division is on the line because it was, and this is the same problem Amazon's having with Alexa. When you have a device that does timers and plays music and you're trying to make it into an intelligent AI chat bot, it's so different. To merge the two is so difficult, and Amazon has had to put off for more than a year doing that with Echo. I think that the same thing happened to Apple. I don't think they expected it. I don't think PR got ahead of the game. They just they thought they'd have it by now, and it turns out to be much harder than they thought but I think someone at pr asked someone in hardware and software like, can you do this?

and they were like, yeah oh yeah, you can do that.

1:01:20 - Alex Lindsay
I agree with that and then, and then they went and talked about it and the thing is is that you shouldn't do that until it's working, like you know, like you don't talk about things until they work, and apple's so good at that of not talking about things until they're working, except for that, mag safe, whatever the thing that they, they put out, and you know the, yeah, the like yeah that was the air power and gruber points is that was the one thing apple didn't release and never sent out a release, no, to announce it they thought it worked, though yeah, it is.

1:01:47 - Jason Snell
Uh, it is very curious. I heard from somebody who used to work at apple who said um, you know, when we used to do in-person live events, you had to give a live demo, and now that everything is canned, maybe that is a mental block that has been lifted.

Because there are some beautifully animated, like fake examples of these features that are in their video presentation. But it clearly didn't work and they didn't have it running. But I would say, you know, obviously the scales were tipping toward. Well, let's over promise, let's, let's promise for ai, because they were really worried about there's pressure to do so, being perceived as being behind, and I think that's an important point here is it's not necessarily that like apple's users were going to immediately abandon the platform.

I think some of it was perception in the industry that they were going to be behind and then maybe it would end up hurting iPhone sales because there would be a perception that you should wait and see about Apple because it may have missed the boat. Even if consumer demand isn't actually there yet, they were still like worried about it. And so I think they got to the point with this feature where people inside Apple felt like they could do it, but like maybe in another world they would have said, well, let's not promise that feature. But in this case they're like yeah, I know that you're giving me a 50% chance or a 60% chance. I think they thought it would happen right. I don't think they. I think they thought it would happen, right? I don't think they promised it not knowing whether they could do it or not, and I think something must have come up since then that that was a roadblock. But I do think that in other circumstances, where they felt less desperate, they wouldn't have tried to promise something that was that far out.

1:03:26 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I think some of it has to do with talent talent retention, in the sense that it's less about the consumer buying less of anything or more of anything. It really is about. You've got a bunch of AI researchers there. If the analysts scare them, or scare enough investors that they're now their stocks, that they're getting every quarter is worth less than it was before because analysts are making up stuff that they don't even know anything about anyway, um, but then the on the other side of that, it's like oh, I'm not working at the coolest company doing ai right now. Maybe I should be, you know, dusting off my resume and thinking about where else I can go. That's going to let me stretch my legs as an ai researcher, and I think that's the. I think those, those are the things apple has to say hey guys, we're still, we're still all doing it. You know like we all making this work, and I think that it's more about keeping everyone in the corral than it is about even a consumer play.

1:04:17 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, we're talking about a road that goes 10 years into the past, and Apple was a very different company back then. One of the stumbling blocks of being an AI researcher at Apple was not only the lack of a priority on AI outside of the photo stream, but also they really didn't let you publish. They didn't let you. Whatever you're working on was such a secret that you couldn't publish what you're doing. You couldn't really be part of the community and that wasn't a big draw. But there it's really surprising what happened, as you heard in that part, in the early part of the show that got edited out, because I shouldn't have been talking about this at that time. But remember that in 2018, as part of Google's huge push into AI, they basically had two hugely successful AI teams and DeepMind's CEO became their head of AI, which means that Google Research's head of AI had hit the bricks and Apple snapped John Giandrea right up. So it's not as though they were sort of fumbling in the dark. They had one of the top people in AI working at the company that wrote the white paper. That kind of set off all of this Tinder box for LLMs. So it's really, really surprising that, as I said before that they could be this wrong about how much trouble they were going to have doing what they wanted to do, and I think that part of it was.

You have to rewind back to June of 2024, where Apple stock has been in a slide since 2022. A lot of reasons for it, and I'm not a financial analyst so I'm not going to comment on that, but the stock has been on a bad spot. Part one Number two they've been facing a lot of pressure to demonstrate how come iPhone sales are sliding, how come they're having so much trouble selling in China, how come other manufacturers are making such inroads against the iPhone. Step three in June of 2024, they had just come off of a hugely embarrassing write-off of OK, we spent a billion dollars a year chasing after an electric car that we now are just going to cancel and write off, as though we didn't do it. Uh, meanwhile, other companies were spending a billion dollars a year and more investing in ai, which is where all the all the heat is right now.

So in june of 2024, apple needed to really sell the idea that, no, no, we missed the first bus, but we're at the bus stop with our bus pass in hand and we have a plan for AI. We are not going to be left behind. We understand how important this is and so we are very much an AI-forward company. So I think that in that environment, the argument that hey look, we can't just simply say, oh yes, we're doing stuff with AI. Hey look, here's an image generator and we'll be doing more stuff in the future the people who are arguing, no, we need to really give a roadmap make people imagine what the world is going to be like, what iPhones are going to be like in 2025, and that it's going to have all those cool AI features that other phones have started to put into actual practice and actual purpose. So I think that's why they overstated things Again.

But it is still absolutely remarkable that when you look at the Bloomberg report Gurman talking about, again, c-suite executives who have been using this on their home phones, basically saying this isn't working, this is just not even in development, this is just, this is terrible, and thoughts of we have to scrap everything and start all over again that is such a big surprise and, as we said before, the idea of Apple coming up with a statement it's that yeah, this is more difficult than we thought. It's going to take longer than we thought. That's pretty remarkable. It is short of them putting something on the website like an open letter saying, yeah, we didn't do. We're basically a more open letter from Tim Cook on the state of the situation, but it's still rather remarkable that they didn't just simply say oh, yes again. It's just simply pairing it off the way that they could with pretty much anything else.

1:08:32 - Leo Laporte
Is it possible Apple isn't looking? I mean, I agree with you, Alex, that people don't buy the iPhone for AI. They buy the iPhone for a camera and all those other things. But is it possible? Apple's mostly worried about the post iPhone world, where maybe it isn't an iPhone world where maybe it isn't an iPhone, maybe it's a pair of you know, maybe it's these meta Ray-Ban eyeglasses or maybe it's, uh, the Orion glasses from Meadow or it is, but I don't know if that means that they have to start talking about AI before they're ready to talk.

They shouldn't have talked about it. But uh, I do think that they felt pressure to say, well, we do have a play here, but but the reason that they need to do this. The reason that they have to do this is not to sell iphones is. My point is no, I agree. They have to do it because of whatever comes after the well.

1:09:19 - Jason Snell
It's also a hedge right, like I mean and andy's made this point before that it's possible that there will be consumer pickup of a feature that's enabled by ai. That becomes a must-have feature on a phone and android has it and apple doesn't, and Apple doesn't want that to happen. So you hedge a lot of Apple's behavior, including that car project, including the Vision Pro. A lot of it is defensive. It's really like if something is going to supplant the iPhone, we must be there or we are in big trouble. And I think AI became one of the potential threats for them, even if, realistically, you know that consumer demand isn't there today. And Annie was mentioning the stock threats for them, even if, realistically, you know that consumer demand isn't there today. And Annie was mentioning the stock.

The stock really hasn't been down, but it did go. It was in the doldrums, like kind of flat, and then they made that AI announcement and it went up like and that's why they did it is because there was some downward pressure on the stock, because there was a perception that Apple was behind. And that's why I feel like, even when they're getting beat up this week about this, I look Apple executives didn't want this to happen. But I think if you ask them if it was worth it to go out on a limb last June even if they knew they might there was a chance they'd get beat up in March they would do it because they benefited so massively from their rollout of Apple intelligence from a perception standpoint, which is not the same as the product. Now, yes, in hindsight, they shouldn't. They could have gotten this without promising those two features that were very clearly a heavy lift. Even last June, we all could look at that and say, wow, that's very impressive if they can pull it off. And guess what? They couldn't.

1:10:49 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and again, I think that I think, obviously, hindsight is 2020, but even when we, when it came out, some of us were saying I don't know why they're talking about this, like no one cares, like and, and they could have just put out a piece, the pieces that they know that they can do. Well, they just got over their skis, you know, or you know? Um, in the sense that they felt like they had to announce all of these things. They could have gotten away with answering, just doing a couple of them and saying, hey, this is the new AI stuff, and I think that that's what we'll see in the future. I think this is going to be a big pullback where Apple's going to still talk about Apple intelligence, but they're not going to talk about things that aren't cooked.

1:11:26 - Jason Snell
A little more care put in and we've seen that with the AI features. Now that the interfaces aren't very good because they slapped them in there, they could refine these things. And yeah, in hindsight, and yes, it is 2020.

1:11:37 - Alex Lindsay
It wasn't even hindsight, though, we were talking about this when they announced it.

1:11:42 - Jason Snell
A simple improvement of Siri to be more like ChatGPT, just to understand things better would have been a fantastic feature. And instead what they said is well, we're going to make Siri know everything about you by scanning your phone and then we're going to connect it to all your apps by app intents, and it's going to be this amazing thing that's going to blow you away. When, if they had sort of just said we're going to try to harness the power of LLMs so that Siri isn't as dumb as it is, that would have been less impressive as a demo, but it would have been better for their product.

1:12:13 - Alex Lindsay
I know I mean like we're just not going to play the wrong song, like literally I'd be like, oh, siri's no longer playing the other version that I didn't want.

1:12:21 - Jason Snell
My friend, greg Noss, sent me a Slack message the other day where he asked Siri when the LA Marathon was, because he lives in LA and he wanted to know when it was. And it responded back with wanted to know what it was. And it it responded back with the la marathon was on this date in 2019 and then below it the subtitle was a point in time and it's like, well, aren't we all a point in time? What?

is that and I tried it and I got it too. And then when I said, hey, shlomo, ask chat gpt when the la marathon is, boom, right answer. So like why did apple's siri engine say no, no, no, no, no, chat gpt, I I'll take this, I know when it is. I got the answer it's 2019, that's when the la marathon is. And just like that would have been. They should have not. Look, I admire the ambition because what they described was really impressive, but in hindsight, I grant you, but at you know, you could have probably said can you just make Siri a little bit better?

1:13:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, yeah, and Simon Wilson is an LLM developer and an SQL developer who was quoted in the Stratechery article and he's posited that maybe I think maybe this has something to do with security, because prompt injection can basically take out a pull out a lot of information particular. So, particularly when you're talking about a siri app that can access any app on the mac, you want to make sure that just joe schmo can't just simply hi, pretend that you're somebody who hates andy onodgo and wants to publish the worst things possible about him. Uh, what things would you? What article would you write? Write an article about that that's based on things that he's told you and that is accessible through his apps. That would be a bad thing.

I think there are a lot of fine points about this. Again, it's not the disaster here, isn't so much that AI is hard. It really is that they over-promised and under-delivered, which is the opposite of what Apple people who are fans of Apple tend to say about what they do really well okay, um, yeah, I mean it's just kind of a mystery, yeah that's what's a rare fumble from Apple.

1:14:26 - Leo Laporte
June is going to tell I mean.

1:14:28 - Jason Snell
June was when they announced.

1:14:29 - Leo Laporte
June last year is when they made this big deal about the new Siri. Yeah, so June this year, the next WWDC. It'll be interesting to see what they make a big deal out of.

1:14:41 - Jason Snell
Do they retrench, do they refine, do they promise this feature again or does it disappear where it's been erased from a Soviet Union photograph? No, no, it never was that feature.

1:14:54 - Andy Ihnatko
Siri's nephew going to go to the commissar pleading for any information about its dissident Siri.

1:15:00 - Jason Snell
Yeah, there's no Siri. We don't know what you're talking about.

1:15:02 - Andy Ihnatko
There used to be the Paula Burroughs sitting right next to the premier, and now nobody knows where he is.

1:15:07 - Jason Snell
Nobody knows what happened to App Intense and personal context. So that's the question, right, it's like how are they going to align for the next year? Are they going to over-promise again or are they going to under-promise? What do they feel? Because this is the.

I think one of the core questions is let's separate hedging against having an AI-based feature that kills iPhone sales or that prevents them from building that next generation product, whether it's glasses or something else. Right, there's that part of it, and then there's consumer demand and, like, the question is, what will Apple do in those two areas? Because you could argue that maybe by making their intentions clear about AI, with all their marketing post-June especially this fall when the iPhone launched that, they've kind of accomplished the mission of sending a message that, yeah, apple does AI stuff. And most people do not read beyond that point. Most people are like, oh, yeah, I hear there's AI out there.

Does the iPhone have AI? It does, okay, great, well then I don't have to worry and that's all, that's all. So maybe they have to keep doing it, but maybe it's sort of a mission accomplished scenario. So there's a question like, philosophically, where do they go from here? Do they think of it more as sprinkle in some features, refine some stuff and do a lot of kind of long-term research in the background, or are they still panicked?

1:16:24 - Alex Lindsay
They can still just do all those things. They just have to shut their mouth Like it's just a function of people are working on all those things.

1:16:29 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but what if Alex had never said anything about AI a year ago?

1:16:34 - Alex Lindsay
They could have said. Here's one feature that we're releasing on AI. We're really excited about AI. You're going to see a lot more over the next two or three years.

1:16:41 - Leo Laporte
Here's the Genmoji there would have been this drumbeat of people saying but Apple, what are you doing? Are you going to do something?

1:17:00 - Jason Snell
no-transcript. And I, honestly, that's where, if you look back, you say that's where they panicked, that's where they were like let's stuff everything in here because we really need to make the case and and yeah, they probably didn't need to go as far and this thing is them reaping what?

1:17:17 - Alex Lindsay
they sow, and I have no idea whether this is the case or not, but it can be one or two people in the company that are all revved up. I mean, when Google saw Facebook turning into a black hole for their search, you know they, they started Google plus and and it became like this mantra of well, we have to give it all the power to Google plus and Google plus, google plus, google plus. And at some point they decided, four years into it, and they're like, okay, it's not working.

Yeah, but this is Google right and Google has a terrible reputation now, but it was but it was literally one or two people who were just really like oh yeah, it turned out.

1:17:50 - Leo Laporte
The one person was like a VP person at the Google.

1:17:56 - Alex Lindsay
Well, yeah and so, but, but, and it all ended real quickly, you know and he left.

Yeah, yeah, and and and so the, so the. But the point is is that it can be a person that just has the, you know, has the ear of the right people and says the things and keeps it moving forward. And I just feel like somebody spun them up and I just don't think, you know, has the ear of the right people and says the things and keeps it moving forward, and I just feel like somebody spun them up and I just don't think you know that they needed to be quite so spun up, like I just don't think that people are making those decisions Again because they're making the hardware that all this AI is already sitting on. And I don't I mean, I expect Siri to know how to tell me when the sunrise is going to be, but that's the extent of my expectations from. Can it do that? That's pretty good, can it? Can? I asked oftentimes. I'm like when is the sunrise? When is it going to?

1:18:41 - Leo Laporte
because you're up at that hour.

1:18:42 - Alex Lindsay
I'm usually trying to figure out whether I what? When do I? When do I get to sit out and have tea and look at the sun?

1:18:48 - Leo Laporte
It is a big deal, though, because we changed the clocks on Sunday and that changed everything. It's really thrown me off.

1:18:52 - Jason Snell
How did Siri do with that?

1:18:53 - Leo Laporte
Was she able to? Understand the weirdness that is called daylight saving time.

1:18:58 - Alex Lindsay
Oh, my gosh Talk about dumb ideas.

1:19:03 - Leo Laporte
Changing the clock you know what. We talked about this on Sunday on Twitter, and the real problem is nobody can agree. Should we stay with daylight saving time or should we stay with standard time? It's 50-50. And until people agree on one or the other, I agree that, and with you, I'm sure. Just stop changing it.

1:19:21 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, it's just the craziest thing to think you can cut a piece of cloth off of one end and sew it onto the other and make it longer. Everything's better. And again, as someone who gets up before the sun gets up every day, it doesn't matter to me. Like it just, you know, like it's just like.

1:19:35 - Leo Laporte
And I go into a studio with no, no windows so that's why the farmers don't care, because you got to milk the cow, you just doesn't matter what the clock says the chickens know what time it is chickens know what time it is exactly.

Yep, uh, all right, we're gonna take another break and Andy's teeing up the next story. I can feel it. German, you know, normally we do the Power on Newsletter summary every Tuesday. After all the things German dumped on Sunday, well, he just dumped something yesterday. That is a big one. Plus, there are OS updates for all of the Apple devices all of a sudden, so there's still so much to talk about. Uh, stay tuned. Andy Ihnatko will introduce the next subject, plus Jason Snell and Alex Lindsay, and I'm just along for the ride. I'm Leo Laporte.

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Andy, which? Do you want to talk about the new OS? No, no, the updates. They're out and I don't know what they do. But we'll talk. I guess there's some security. But I think the story from mark yesterday he tweeted is really interesting. Apple ready's dramatic software overhaul for iphone, ipad and iPhone, ipad and Mac. This is not Mark's guess. I think this is from his sources. One of the most dramatic overhauls in company history it will do later this year will fundamentally change the look of the operating systems and make Apple's various software platforms more consistent. Here it is. According to people familiar with the effort, that includes updating the style of icons, menus, apps, windows and system buttons. As part of the push, the company is working to simplify the way users navigate and control the devices. The design and this is what really scared me is loosely based on the Vision Pro's software me is loosely based on the vision pros software.

1:22:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, this, this, this really does smell like it's going to be something big, like renee richie late of mac, break now of youtube. Uh, pointed out so so importantly that there are times when mark puts something in the newsletter which can be very speculative, and there are times when he publishes something as a standalone article. The standalone article have a have a lot more weight. This is a standalone article. They're they're citing people who are familiar with the matter that this is a real, like a visual overhaul. Uh, that affects absolutely everything. Um, and it's not it. It actually clicks in with some things that we've seen before.

Uh, people who are looking at the camera app, for instance, and some other small changes in iOS 18.3, 18.4 have noticed that hey, wow, this box seems like it's been rebuilt to look a lot more like the sort of floating translucency of VisionOS, even though this is an iPhone app. And that's sort of what this article is kind of talking about to make everything feel as though it works together. But now we're not just talking about making sure that the iPhone experience is similar to the Mac experience and the iPad experience, but also roping in Vision Pro there. He was also very careful to say that this is not about the iPad and the Mac OS and iOS like forging and becoming the same thing. It really it's like iOS seven, where we had the same sort of consistent look and feel for many, many, many generations of the OS. And this is the time where they said look, we're not going to just do one or two things here, we're going to basically update this, update its looks for 2025 and beyond.

As you might recall, ios 7 was controversial because the whole aesthetic was whatever it is on the screen, get rid of it and make it as minimalist as possible. And for me, I still remember how confused I was with the iPhone, for the first few weeks at least, because, looking for a feature, I wouldn't find it. I'm supposed to infer it based on placement or based on gestures, so I don't know. The article doesn't go into a lot of detail about it, except for that it's going to be unveiled at WWDC. At WWDC, if it works like previous overhauls, I'm sure that most developers will get this new UI for free. But if they decide to overhaul their apps, they're going to get better placement in the app store. It's going to look better and work better, but a lot of people are going to be upset about it. Apple just made some changes to the Photos app and people are still trying to find unbroken windows, I mean Alex.

Lindsay, I'm not going to say anything, so essentially make sure you have canned goods, make sure you have toilet paper, make sure you have bottled water, go into full prepper mode, like in September and October when, uh, I was 16, excuse me, 19. Uh, and the new Mac OS come out. Because it's, it's going to be, it's going to be a whip to do, I think so, um, jason, have you heard anything this?

1:25:59 - Leo Laporte
this came out of the blue, I think. Have you heard anything like this?

1:26:02 - Jason Snell
no, there. There have been some other reports, right like, uh, front page tech did a video where they said, like they, they did a mock-up of a camera app that they said was being redesigned and that that suggested there was a whole redesign in the mix. I think we've seen a couple other suggestions that there was going to be sort of a Vision OS inspired, inspired whatever UI overhaul I you know. So it sounds like there's something going on here now. Whether they again they just got burned on this this thing, like do they think it's ready and do they think it's worth the cycles, given everything else that's going on, wouldn't shock me if they did it. Wouldn't shock me if they put it off because they said, oh you know, you know, it depends. Philosophically, it might be we have too much to do. This is the last time we want to overhaul this. Yeah, let's put it out there. You could also say you know what we're struggling in all these functional areas, so let's dazzle them with design instead, and they can go that direction too. I don't know. It'll be interesting to see where where their head is at.

But, like, on one hand, I understand the motivation to make your platform feel unified because so many people use the iPhone, and then a lot of those people do end up buying a Mac and that you want it to feel somewhat familiar. That's why this, you know, system preferences became settings. I get it. On the other hand, as a Mac user, I'm not sure that making my Mac look more like my iPhone makes my Mac better, right, and so that's the push and pull there is like I get it. There are so many people who, you know, apple wants there to be a resemblance between their products, right, they, they, because those people might buy a Mac and then be like, well, wait a second, this isn't like my iPhone at all. I get that, but I also am hesitant that are they going to do some stupid stuff that makes the mac worse because they need it to look like the iphone for some reason.

1:27:57 - Alex Lindsay
I think it'll be a bit of both. Like it'll be, there'll be some things that are improvements and a bunch of things that you're like, oh, like, really why? And I do think that there, I think that there's an attempt to you've got a bunch of different platforms, you've got vision pro and ios and all these things, and at some point you're they're trying to pull them, I think, all into one thing that feels like it's the same all the way through, and at some point you kind of have to just stop, and from the ground up and they probably decided this a year or two ago, it's probably not something they decided today that maybe we're going to just put it all together in a way that has it all feel like it's one operating system, and I think that you can only cobble your way there to some degree until you have to kind of break everything down and put it back together.

1:28:39 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and I'm more optimistic now. Whether this was true or not, I had the perception a while ago that Apple had become very dogmatic when it comes to design both hardware and software. That, oh well, if we put more things, if we put fewer things on the screen, that will make things better. Whether that actually turns out to be the case or not, I think that they're a lot more mature now, or their design philosophy seems to have pivoted a little bit towards my liking, where, hey, yeah, it has to look good, it has to look good, it has to look fresh and modern, but it also has to be very, very practical. And so this is not, despite what we might have said earlier. This is not like, hey, we have to make everything look like Vision Pro.

It's the case of the people who are designing Vision Pro basically had nearly free reign to say well, we're not just simply copying and pasting iOS or iPadOS, we can basically do what makes sense for this, and a lot of this is not going to be things that are required for a VR OS.

A lot of this is gee. I wonder why we're still rendering a window this way when we have so much GPU power on every single device that we make, that we can easily make the transition from A to B a lot more clear to the user if we simply add this effect. A lot more clear to the user if we simply add this effect. So I'm keen to see it, I'm sure that it will. We've seen this sort of thing before, where they will show something off at WWDC and then five months later we infer what made the cut, what did not make the cut, both in internal arguments and people throwing a nutty on Reddit and in various discords all across this great world of ours yeah, german doesn't have his usual disclaimer that this is, you know, internal and it could change.

1:30:20 - Leo Laporte
Everything could change, it could all be different, uh, but I think that that's of course, true. He says the uh code name for ios 19 and ipad. Os 19 is luck and Mac OS 16 is cheer. The most significant upgrade to Mac since Big Sur, for the phone, biggest revamp since iOS 7. And we'll get to see it. This makes WWDC even more interesting. We'll get to see it at WWDC, the developers conference in June. And he adds one last little shot to the elbow could help distract from the company's tumultuous push into artificial intelligence. Just a little shot there. Um, you guys, Alex and jason, use vision pro like vision pro. Is that a good metaphor for os's going forward round icons?

1:31:15 - Alex Lindsay
sure I mean like I don't, I don't know, I mean it's, it's, I think it's fine. It's hard to tell what it's going to look like on the screen. I just don't want them to change. I think the problem that I really have is that so far, I just feel like apple just has a a hard time saying no to things like they. Just there's so much complexity being added so quickly to a lot of these things and I just I don't feel like it's improving the quality of the of the experience. I think that's. That's the issue.

1:31:39 - Leo Laporte
Sir cake in our YouTube says I hope they revamp system preferences anyway. Yeah, Good luck with that. I think we're done with that.

1:31:46 - Jason Snell
I think this isn't about vision pro. I think the design team said we're going to need to do a new design language and we have to build a design language for Vision OS because it's a brand new OS. So let's build some of the concepts and then build them for Vision OS and once we've refined them there we can see how do those concepts also work on iOS, ipados, macos, et cetera. So, just having been through a bunch of like magazine and website redesigns in my career, that's what it feels like to me is that they have a design group that's thinking about Apple platform level design and they needed a design for VisionOS. So they were like okay, what do we want to change globally about our OS design? What are the tenets? What are the tenets? What are the philosophies? They start to put that together. They build a book, they build a rule system. They do all of that.

The first iteration of it is VisionOS, but it's not like hey, we made VisionOS, isn't it awesome? Let's put it everywhere because VisionOS is important. I don't think that's it. It's more like it was first. It was a good place for them to experiment and then they're going to try to apply some of the same style guide, but obviously different because it's different stuff. It's 2D, you know a phone in your hand is different than a Mac with a big screen and then kind of roll it out across their whole design system. So that's my read on it is that there probably has been a project to do a global design refresh, and vision pro was first because it was new and not mission critical, but that eventually it'll go everywhere. Good point also it always makes me nervous when they talk

1:33:28 - Leo Laporte
about redesigning mac os, because I feel like the pressure it comes from below, or it's above, I guess, uh, from the iphone make everything more like the iphone. I'm not, that's not what I want, but that's just me.

1:33:42 - Jason Snell
So right, like I understand the idea of it being a product line and you want similarity.

1:33:46 - Leo Laporte
But yeah, as a mac user, you're also like let's not get too similar, but I have a mac for a reason.

1:33:51 - Jason Snell
Everything is. It is a different product and, like good design, good design makes them similar when they need to be, but also fit the object. Right? That's the idea and so that's the challenge. Right, because it's hard, that's a hard job to say how do I make a Mac work like a Mac but also feel of a kind with the iPhonehone, like the cousin of the iphone? Can you do that? Can you pull that off? That's what they have to do it. Just one thing that's changed for apple is that?

1:34:21 - Leo Laporte
uh. In in the old days, the uh. You know the designers susan kerr and andy herzfeld and bill atkinson made the mac look like what they wanted it to look like. Now you have a centralized design team, the Allen Dye and company 300 people who are responsible for the look and feel of not just hardware but software too, and that's a big shift. I also worry because designers sometimes I feel like designers change things just because it's the new season, it's the fall season, and so fall it's the fall season and so everybody, the hemlines are going down down well, and I feel like that that's not, in the computing world.

1:35:01 - Jason Snell
A good reason to change that's why steve jobs and johnny I've worked well together. And I think this is why there's a huge misread about apple post steve jobs, where, like steve had good taste, steve was the person who could say no to johnny ive and they worked well together. But that about Apple post Steve Jobs, where, like Steve had good taste, steve was the person who could say no to Johnny Ive and they work well together. But that was a push and a pull. And I think when Steve died and Johnny was given more responsibility because Apple was afraid that they were going to be seen as rudderless after Steve Jobs for a while there they invested all this power in Johnny and there was nobody there to really tell him no. And that's when I mean, like I love, I've worked with many designers and they are great.

1:35:40 - Leo Laporte
Designers are awesome, oh designers respect for designers.

1:35:41 - Jason Snell
Designers need pushback. Designers are going to do the design thing and take it as far as they want, and there needs to be somebody there to say, not that we don't want to go in that direction, and that's how you end up with great products is that you've got that push and pull, and so for something like this, it's the same thing. It's like yeah, the designers are going to say, yeah, let's refresh, let's give it a new clean look, because clean is a great word to use. It doesn't mean anything, it just means different. Let's give it a new clean look'll be. And then. And then what you need is somebody who's a product person who says, actually, no, let's, this is too much, this breaks this, this doesn't do that. And if you get that dynamic right, you can make some great stuff, and that is what steve and johnny did.

So I I hope I mean what I see in a lot of stories, including that german piece, is grousing from designers. I mean they don't respect designers anymore. There's all these people in charge who are like product people and engineers and they just don't let us do what we want anymore. And I look at that and I shake my head because it's like it's very clear that Mark Gurman's sources are designers and like that's fine, but like you do not. Designers do not make the product. Designers are part of a process. Right, that makes a product, and some of apple's biggest missteps in the 2010s were because there was a runaway design process and nobody to tell them. No, I like the butterfly butterfly keyboard.

Let's do fewer ports keyboard.

1:37:09 - Leo Laporte
Ever made what?

1:37:09 - Jason Snell
people want from a keyboard is thinness, not type ability, right, not travel, not any of those. And, by the way, I'm.

1:37:16 - Leo Laporte
I'm a guy I use this is my user, my favorite user interface. I'm a kind of a can there. There we go. I'm a kind of a basic guy when it comes to using computers. That's fair, that's fair and uh, I don't. I don't need design, I need a nice font on my terminal program.

1:37:36 - Jason Snell
You do need good design. Right, good design is for everyone. But but design like just dressing it up and putting colors on it and putting animations on it, is not design. Design is how it works right, design is the whole package and that a complex like making a product is not just design, it is engineering, it is marketing, it is understanding who your user is. There are so many parts to making a good product, and so when I see stories that seem to be sourced from design people, I got to admit I roll my eyes a little bit, because they're great but they don't decide. They need opposition.

1:38:13 - Leo Laporte
Not every idea they have is going to make a good product and somebody needs to be able to absolutely true, and I will, and I and I will say that an iphone and an ipad are things that should look pretty and nice, you know. But just don't screw with and work. But don't screw with my mac, I'm just saying leave the macintosh alone, but they, they're going to mess with it and you know I'll just have to live with it.

1:38:36 - Andy Ihnatko
I guess, but just the one. Other quick thing, though, is that almost everybody who has been like a long, long time part of Johnny Ives design team has since moved on and retired, so we really are looking at a fresh set of eyes and a fresh set of imperatives, so hopefully this won't be as bad as iOS 7. That sounds like damning with faint words, but it's interesting. It's scary. There are people who are going to be tough for everybody just because it's different. We just have to hope that it'll do things like it will make the interface more customizable, like in the ways that are kind of important that help you to make your iPhone make more sense to you and look better to you, and that some things had been cluttering the interface for the past 10 years no longer make sense and have been updated Again. No matter what happens, it's going to be upsetting for a couple of weeks. Hopefully it's the sort of thing where, after a couple of weeks, we forget that we were upset about anything.

1:39:36 - Jason Snell
Also remember.

So iOS 7 changed a lot of people's minds who are iPhone users and made them fear software updates, and I think that it's still out there in the water that people's iPhones completely changed underneath them and they got very upset. One of the things that Apple has changed since then is their software update mechanism, where, for the first few months that iOS is out, if you don't ask for the software update, you don't get it right, like they let it lie for a while, and it'll be interesting to see how they approach a major change like this, how they communicate it, how they give people the option of not updating yet, how all of that works, because that was one of the worst things about iOS 7 is it was such a huge update that it made people say I don't want to do an update anymore, and I have members of my family that it's like that. It's like no, there's security updates, you need to run them. They're like no, but it might change something and break something and I don't want to do it anymore. So need to run them. They're like no, but it might change something and break something and I don't want to do it anymore. So I hope that if Apple is going to do this. They also are really careful about how they push it out, how they communicate it, and they don't sort of make people feel like Apple has forced them into a phone that they didn't want.

1:40:44 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah Well, and I think, in overall, there's a lot of us that would like Apple to just get the stuff that they've done working. I mean, I still haven't upgraded to the latest operations on my main computers because I have people who've just upgrade, upgraded a month ago and all their audio broke, like you know, like it's still and it's it's it's a core audio problem. Um, and it's just a you know, the that Apple needs to tie all that stuff back together. And I just, you know, when they say they're going to redo the entire look and feel, you know, they're just going to break a lot of things really quickly, and you're just like, oh man, I just need them to fix the things that they have, you know, and like I just, if they do this big update, I'm just hoping they spend two or three years then like pushing everything back in together and making all the subsystems work, because that's what it really feels like is that a lot of these subsystems aren't working as well well as they should.

1:41:29 - Andy Ihnatko
That's such a timely and common complaint, like just a few weeks ago there was a very, very simple blog post that someone posted about how someone's saying oh God, like the Apple software quality has gone down like for the past three years and I used to be able to trust that Apple stuff would actually work. And now I kind of cringe at just thinking about making a change or doing anything like that, with a very simple example of oh my God, why is this working? Why is this not working the way that it should be working? And, as often happens, it was getting hundreds and hundreds of Me Too comments saying oh my God, let's talk about this. I do think that Apple has an increasing perception problem that they put most of their passion into the hardware and the people inside Apple who are fighting for the greatest quality software are not necessarily invited to all the right meetings because they're they don't get the chance to write software that's as bulletproof as they would like it to be.

1:42:24 - Leo Laporte
But all of this goes to the fact that whenever wwdc is it'll be in June we're going to be paying close attention. There's going to be a lot for Apple to talk about, for sure. Yeah, and they've cleared the decks for hardware releases, right? I don't think we'll see anything in.

1:42:40 - Jason Snell
June. Something we didn't mention is there's that rumor of that little home screen thing that you were going to be able to do Also put off right.

And apparently because, according to Mark Gurman, app intense is a big part of its whole thing and that's one of the things that got pushed off and that means that product has probably gotten pushed off, which I would say proves the point that Apple really did think these features were going to be ready. Not that they were lying, fabricating and that they were going to push them off, because you don't build hardware around a software feature If you think it's a fake. They really thought it was going to be ready and it's not.

1:43:13 - Leo Laporte
So we'll see what happens with that? It's harder than they thought, just as it's harder than Amazon thought it is. This is hard stuff.

1:43:18 - Jason Snell
There's probably not a lot in terms of hardware announcements for Apple until the fall when they've got a new chip generation other than like, again put on your tinfoil hat some Mac Pro announcement at some point, but otherwise, yeah, I think uh, it's going to be quiet and it's all going to be about that.

1:43:33 - Leo Laporte
June software update and and we should say the m4 is uh kind of the upgrade we were hoping the m3 would be. It really is a big uh leap in performance. It looks like, according to geekbench's, single core performance is notably improved the single core is better and there are more cores.

1:43:50 - Jason Snell
So I mean in the end, yeah, it's a, it's a nice update all around, yeah um, all right timed update.

1:43:58 - Leo Laporte
Speaking of which? Safari to 1831, ios to 1832, ipad os to 1832, sequoia to 1532 and vision os to 232. Why? Because there's a nasty zero day in webkit. Oh man, again, again, again. Cve 2025, 424201.

Fix it Because it's out there, right, and you need to fix it. So this isn't one of those. Oh, I don't really need the latest version of Genmoji. This is. You probably want to update this sucker. Maliciously crafted web content may be able to break out of web content sandbox. This is, by the way, the same thing they fixed in ios 17.2. Apple is aware of a report. This issue may have been exploited in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific, targeted individuals on versions of ios before 17.2. So it is a fix to the fix. An out of bounds right issue was addressed with improved checks to prevent unauthorized action. It's not clear whether the zero day remains. It sounds like they'd fixed it in 17.2, but now they want to just tighten the bolts a little bit, just a little bit. So get that update.

Anything else to say about that apple tv? Do you have to update that? No, they're still at 1831. But everything else? I guess there's no safari in, uh, apple tv or something right? Uh, I really liked this article speaking of os updates.

Um, it's a little geeky, but I think you guys are pretty geeky, uh, and you might want to read this from random augustine, his medium post a couple of weeks ago on apple exclaves. So he talks about the fact we've always said, I've always thought that apple was using the monolithic oh sorry, the modular kernels system, the microkernel called mock, but I didn't realize that apple had kind of made it more like a monolithic kernel in a lot of ways and this raises the same security issues that a monolithic kernel raises. So a microkernel very little can run in the system space. Almost everything above the microkernel is user space. But user space is dangerous. That's when you get things like WebKit for overflows and so forth. So Apple, but it's also less performant if you do a microkernel because everything's running out of user, it's not as fast as a monolithic kernel. Windows is a monolithic kernel.

So apple created something uh called exclaves. That is kind of splitting the baby. It is. It gives you the performance of a monolithic kernel but still lets you run kind of as a micro kernel. And I thought this was a really interesting article. And apple introduced a new kernel called the secure kernel or sk, which is what we're using today, and that's all I have to say about it. But it is kind of what samsung does with nox. What, uh, these enclaves are kind of like. These exclaves are kind of like the enclaves in other operating systems. Uh, intel's trying to do it with their um, uh, cpus. So, uh, it is all an attempt to make things performant and secure. Anything else to say You'd have anything to add to that? Or is that just me bloviating?

1:48:00 - Andy Ihnatko
I read that article and I understood about 38% of it.

1:48:04 - Leo Laporte
So I think it's what I see. I like this kind of stuff because it really reminds me how much stuff that we don't even see behind the scenes is going on, with Apple trying to make a secure OS that is also performant and solving problems that other OSs have not solved. So I think that's very, very interesting yeah absolutely that must.

1:48:23 - Andy Ihnatko
that must be an interesting community inside Apple or almost any company, but especially at Apple, where, like, people have good security people they have to have.

No, absolutely you know you say what you will about nearly every large tech company. The people who work in security are the most focused, intense and humanist persons, as excuse me, humanistic people like on the staff, because they understand the importance of what they're doing. They are absolutely committed to it, like it's a religion, no matter what you say about Google, for instance, about oh well, they don't care about privacy, oh well, they're in the business of collecting information. But the people who are at Google, whose responsibility to keep that information secure and private, are the people who are like again, they will have beers with their counterparts at Apple any day of the week, because they're cut from the same cloth and they are the same quality human.

1:49:18 - Leo Laporte
And I should also. I'll read the final paragraph, the conclusive paragraph from Random Augustine. I don't know if that's his real name, I doubt it. In the face of continued exploitation by advanced threat actors, apple's implementation of exclaves represents a large Augustine. I don't know if that's his real name, I doubt it. In the face of continued exploitation by advanced threat actors, apple's implementation of exclaves represents a large investment to add extra defense in depth to their operating systems. By isolating sensitive resources, apple is shrinking their potential attack surface and reducing the impact of any single kernel compromise. Defending monolithic kernels is a Sisyphean task. Ex-claves represent one method of dealing with a challenge. He says it's a defensive effort on a larger scale than any other end-user device manufacturer is currently attempting.

1:50:04 - Alex Lindsay
I think that one of the things that, as Apple does that and then continues to kind of knock the keys off of what it's doing so that it doesn't have access to it, without the hardware, it makes everything it does make everything much more secure. It makes it, as they continue to do this and then continue to reduce their ability to actually get to it, when government organizations as well as hackers try to get get to it, there's nothing they can do. They're like I don't have a key, like I don't have a key to that. It's like putting a whole bunch of compartments out there with all their individual uh, compartments. You can get into one, but you can't get into the rest of them. So it's interesting um.

1:50:45 - Leo Laporte
Are you excited that you will finally be able to play Rollercoaster Tycoon in Apple Arcade?

1:50:50 - Alex Lindsay
Yay.

1:50:53 - Leo Laporte
Am.

1:50:53 - Alex Lindsay
I, I don't know. I mean occasionally I found an Apple Arcade game that I thought was fun. There was like Cricket Through the Ages or whatever. It was kind of a fun thing for a little while that we played. But overall I just haven't found any of the games to be something that I would like I fiddle with them a little bit. I show I got a couple new ones. I'll go play with them a little bit, but they last not pretty long, like it's. That's the problem yeah, but that's.

1:51:19 - Leo Laporte
But that's fine, that's like they're yeah, you're not paying for them, so why not?

1:51:23 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, well, I mean they're oh god, I'm sorry, go ahead no, no, I, I and I just feel like maybe I'm not a game per. I mean I I maybe I'm not the right game person for it, because I just don't like to play lots and lots of different games. I think. I think that's yeah, yeah you know, stuck with the same tower defense game for 20 years.

I'm stuck with the same. No, not 20. You know, the desktop tower defense was the first one. That was 20 years ago, and then that went to field runners, but they went out of business. Yeah, now in kingdom rush is where, yeah, and, but not the new kingdom rush.

1:51:54 - Leo Laporte
I'm still on the original oh wow, they're at least new ones it's too complicated.

1:51:57 - Alex Lindsay
The new ones are too complicated, like I just, and not only. Here's the worst part is not only do I play only one game, I only play one level on one game, like literally I play the same level. What why? Why, because it's just it. It it because it does, it's not pattern oriented it's soothing, it's well.

No, it's constantly changing, so it it. It isn't like it's never the same level, like it's a level, but it's the. The challenges are different every to this, so I've already, because you have to you found this one level.

That really it's the master level, I mean, you can see it. It's like separated from everything else, um, and it's, and it doesn't have. It never stops Like so you, just, you just go until you die, right, and so it just keeps on getting harder until you, until you. Shooters I love like that type of thing and I so. It's not like I don't like other kinds of games than desktop tower defense, but I don't find I find myself a little bit, um, uh, I have a hard time like I look at some of these ones and they just, and I talk to people about, I'm like is anyone I don't know anybody that's playing these games? Like that's the thing, it's not just me, it's just like when I talk to people like my kids, my kids have access to them and they're like no, no, that's a stupid game man it's a stupid game.

1:53:14 - Leo Laporte
Well, it's not available yet. I was just checking the uh arcade and I don't see it yet, but it's coming, coming soon. You can buy it, but don't buy it because it's coming. Okay, I have this new game I've been playing. It's really wild. There's black and white keys. It's a little expensive to get into and they're yeah, they're in-app purchases of sheet music. But I'm learning to play the piano and I figure in about 10 years I'll be really good at this. It'll be like you, Alex, I'll just play the same bach piece over and over and over again. Yes, that's my exactly. I often thought you know, I'm playing guitar here. I was thinking, you know, if I put this many hours into actually learning a real guitar, maybe someone should show some videos that someone.

1:53:55 - Alex Lindsay
Oh, there's, this new guy who broke the record Right. They were showing that they're like some guitar. You know, in some cases some of the game players are. You know, they've built up to a dexterity that they can actually learn how to play something.

1:54:06 - Leo Laporte
No, they can't play anything. Yeah, I don't know how to play something. No, they can't play anything. Yeah, I don't know. There's a guy who just finished the impossible level.

1:54:14 - Andy Ihnatko
I was it on guitar hero guitar here from fury I I'll I, if you're thinking of the same thing. The guy who played the played the fury and the flames at double speed, 100. Yeah, and I'm like, and I'm like I had a mixture of being really, really impressed at a physical feat that is legitimately amazing and also, taken back at, how much time did you have to spend?

1:54:33 - Jason Snell
on this thing where you're not learning anything.

1:54:34 - Andy Ihnatko
That will be applicable to anything other than playing this one song in this one game. I'm glad he's doing it, I'm glad he's having fun, he's entertaining a lot of people with it, I'm sure he's making a lot of money on his channel, but it's like oh wow, I mean that's the reason why I stopped playing like these long, long, immersive games, because it's like I like these short games where you get a quick blast. This is why I like apple arcade. This is why I like my, my panic play date, because I like to dip in and have some fun and distractions and dip out again.

The last time I played a long game I felt, oh wow, hey, it's been five weeks like my life, my life. What could I have been doing in five weeks? And I know you're having? I'm not judging anybody who does. It's entertainment, it's pleasure, and that's always going to be subjective. But for me it's like I don't want to spend. I want to spend five weeks either applying myself and being focused and learning a skill, or having an experience that will pay off, that will enhance my life in the future, or five weeks doing something that is absolutely not taxing me in any way, that I can just allow my brain to sort of purge itself of all the crud that it builds up 12 hours a day of working. I don't want to have to work for my entertainment Again, that's, but his reaction at the very end is amazing, yeah he does it.

It's the joy of.

1:55:54 - Leo Laporte
Nobody's ever done this before at 200%, I guess, but look how fast I feel like maybe he could play a real guitar. But Maybe not, maybe not.

1:56:06 - Andy Ihnatko
But I will say he has the finger dexterity. If he, if he learns keyboard or that's true, because a lot of it is like the the reason why, one of the reasons why, like they have, you play scales interminably when you start learning keyboard is that's right.

1:56:19 - Leo Laporte
You have to build strength and dexterity doing that and my hand exercises and and my teacher has me doing this all day and just because, yeah, because you don't, your fingers don't know how to do that. Yet my biggest problem is this finger, this fourth finger, the ring finger. That's tough anyway. Uh, yes, all right, ready for the vision pro segment. It's there's only one item, but let's do it. What do?

1:56:44 - Jason Snell
you see, what do you know? It's time to talk to vision pro.

1:56:54 - Leo Laporte
First look from south by southwest at the black magic ursa sine immersive. I'm sure you've watched this already, Alex.

1:57:04 - Alex Lindsay
I mean yes, right, I mean we all have yeah, anybody, anybody like shooting, that's getting ready to shoot with this camera. We're all like, okay, when do I get one?

1:57:12 - Leo Laporte
how does she get one? How did she get this? I don't know well, this is the black magic booth. Oh, this is them.

1:57:17 - Alex Lindsay
Oh yeah, this is their at their booth, yeah, so you see, so they go to south by. That's kind of cool yeah, no, with all the cool kids yeah, all the cool kids go to south by.

1:57:27 - Leo Laporte
uh, I don't know where it was this year because they lost the convention center. It's torn down in Austin, so they must have found somewhere. You'll see this, though, at NAB.

1:57:37 - Alex Lindsay
When's that NAB is in a couple of weeks. It's April 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th, and you said that.

1:57:43 - Leo Laporte
Black Magic has almost a whole hall devoted to them.

1:57:47 - Alex Lindsay
They take over. It's like the front quarter of the south hall, like remember where your, where your uh booth used to be? Yeah, yeah, studio, right, right, right above the butt thumper. Yeah, you look over and it's like black magic but it's just, you know, it's just.

1:58:02 - Leo Laporte
They used to be a small little area there, now it's metastasized it's massive.

1:58:06 - Alex Lindsay
It just keeps getting bigger every single time and so, um, yeah, so, anyway, yeah, there, uh, hugh, how is he's? Um, the guy like ever like on youtube, he does all the videos about how different. He covers all kinds of different cameras. It's his channel, okay, but this is his, this is his groove, uh, and it's we all, we all watch his videos, nice, nice. So he's covering it. I mean, I think, again, a lot of us are excited to see.

1:58:34 - Leo Laporte
Did you see anything that you didn't?

1:58:35 - Alex Lindsay
know, did you learn anything? In this no I thought that there were more. So one of the things I thought is that some earlier designs showed more Ethernet going out of the back. It only has one. So also, you know, we weren't sure whether the 8 terabyte memory module was going to be able to pull out, but they pulled it out and we weren't seeing what it looks like.

So those are some of the newer things that we looked at there, you know. So I think that it's being able to completely control the camera through the Ethernet connection is useful, because we're going to want to put it in places that we don't want to necessarily go out and deal with. I had 180 degrees. It's hard to sneak up with the camera. I mean you can go from back, but it limits what you do Like. For instance, they showed this tripod and you have to. With a 180 lens you have to kind of tuck the camera out in front of the tripod so you don't see any of the legs.

1:59:21 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, you'll see the tripod, won't you? Yeah, I don't know what he shot this with, but this is a 3D video, or?

1:59:28 - Alex Lindsay
100. Yeah, I think he shot it with an Insta360. I think he does a lot of stuff with Insta360s. So I think that's probably what he's doing, and that's your video.

1:59:38 - Leo Laporte
Wait a minute. Didn't a new immersive video come out? I think a couple.

1:59:43 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I mean, they came out with the water. Did you watch the water climbing thing, jason? Water, the water, did you?

1:59:49 - Jason Snell
watch the water climbing thing, Jason.

1:59:51 - Alex Lindsay
Water climbing thing. The wall Climb the wall above the ocean, over the ocean.

1:59:54 - Jason Snell
No, no, I mean, I was on vacation, so I just All right, they keep pushing new beta updates so.

2:00:00 - Leo Laporte
Did you?

2:00:01 - Jason Snell
bring your Vision Pro on vacation. I did not bring my Vision Pro on vacation.

2:00:04 - Leo Laporte
That's because you were in Kauai.

2:00:06 - Jason Snell
I was reading books.

2:00:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you, you were in kawaii, I was reading books.

2:00:08 - Jason Snell
yeah, you didn't need a vision pro everything was there already around you I was using the vision pro this morning and I went into the bora bora environment and I was like, oh yeah, I was here basically right like uh just a beach and palm, yeah vision pro is not for bringing to kawaii, it's for when you can't get to kawaii, exactly what you do is you turn up the heat a lot, put in humidifier, get the fan going at a gentle breeze level and then you dial in Bora Bora and imagine and that's the Vision Pro segment Now you see, now you know we're done talking the Vision Pro.

2:00:43 - Leo Laporte
A couple more things. Let's see Dropbox now supports live photos.

2:00:51 - Andy Ihnatko
Good for Dropbox now supports live photos good for Dropbox.

2:00:55 - Leo Laporte
Okay, I think that's it. Andy, you put in a lot of stories. Did I get to everything that you wanted to talk about?

2:01:05 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm just going through here a lot of little stuff there's, oh, spacex, if you want to talk a little bit about. I'm just going through here A lot of little stuff there's, oh, spacex. Okay, if you want to talk a little bit about I think it's kind of interesting. So remember how Apple made a billion-dollar investment in Global.

Star for satellite services for iPhones. So guess what? For absolutely no reason that has to do with conflict of interest. Perish the thought. Elon musk has said that asked the fcc. Hey, maybe you should basically stop global star from launching more satellites and context installation, not, not until we get a little bit of a little bit of a can we find out what's going on? But what that spectrum should be like.

2:01:49 - Leo Laporte
This would be the SpaceX rights, the fairest and most expeditious route to determine the appropriate regulatory regime to govern operations in a band that has not been examined for nearly 20 years. You know, I think Elon probably made a call. I don't think this SpaceX letter is the most important thing. I think Doge said it would be a shame if the fcc were to ban you entirely from the space. Uh yeah, that's ridiculous, anti-competitive bs.

2:02:20 - Andy Ihnatko
Uh yeah the only other. The only other thing that I thought was really cool is uh mingxi quo uh published on his medium blog basically a summary of everything he thinks he knows about the folding iPhone, which some of the stuff was kind of new. He thinks that Apple's targeting a super premium price point like $2,000 to $2,500, which would be in line with what Samsung and others are charging for their big phones big phones Also that he thinks that it's going to be like a book full, like it's going to unfold into a 7.8 inch screen with a 5 point something inch screen for the outer screen. So it's going to be an iPhone that unfolds into sort of like a tablet, not an iPhone that folds into a smaller package. And he thinks that mass production in fourth quarter of 2026, projecting three to five million units.

So a lot of specifics here. Some of the stuff that we'd heard rumored before, partly from Ming-Chi Kuo himself, but it definitely seems like, with this and other rumors that we're getting about folding iPads and folding notebooks, foldables does seem to be. There's the correct velocity of rumors and supply chain information that would make you think that, no, this is not something they're simply dabbling with and making prototypes to just sort of test out concepts that they do have this on as part of their, like three year roadmap uh, I do wish I'd gone to south by just to see ben stiller and eddie q talking in conversation about severance.

2:03:48 - Jason Snell
You can just watch it on youtube. Oh well, there you go.

2:03:51 - Leo Laporte
Saves me a trip to austin, doesn't it um?

2:03:56 - Andy Ihnatko
do? They can do dueling cold steel blue steel yes, blue steel yes blue steel yes, uh, eddie, eddie q.

2:04:05 - Leo Laporte
Uh, his hair is a little. Uh, he said it looks a little different for some reason to me. I don't know. Maybe he's just aging, I don't know. So does Ben Stiller. It's all teeth. It's all teeth nowadays.

All right, let's take one more break and then, gentlemen, prepare your picks of the week as we wrap up this week's Fine Mac Wake Week. Fine MacBreak Weekly.

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Matt Levine, the founder and the guy who called me way back when it was 2008, when we were struggling with our bandwidth, uh interviewed me for his podcast, which should be out very soon now, so I'll let you know when that comes out. We had a great conversation. Matt's a great guy. Do you ever go to one of matt levine's famous steak dinners at uh, ces, Alex, or anybody that's? Oh yeah, really fun really.

2:08:48 - Jason Snell
Yeah, he's a great. Really it was. It was the best dinners I've ever been to CES, Alex or anybody.

2:08:50 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, really fun, really fun. Yeah, he's a great guy.

2:08:51 - Alex Lindsay
Really it was. It was the best dinners I've ever been to. Yeah, I mean the food was really good, but the who he invited, I know Was always just the right people and it was always it's. It's always been fun. Yeah, a hundred percent. Let's get our picks of the week. You start, Alex. Give me one second because I want to make sure.

2:09:09 - Leo Laporte
Okay, you don't start, Alex. Let's start with Jason.

2:09:12 - Jason Snell
All right, I'm going to recommend a weather app. I know there are so many weather apps, but I have a reason for this. This is Mercury Weather. It's available on the.

App Store.

And here's why I like Mercury Weather is it has a feature that lets you put in travel so you can say, for the week I'm in Kauai, I'm going to be in Kauai, and if I'm going to Portland for the weekend, I'm going to put that in.

And then in the app and, most importantly for me, on the widget that you can put on your home screen, it will show you the temps in the places you're going to be.

So if you've got a multi-city trip that you're taking, or you're going across the ocean somewhere to a far-off land and you're taking, or you're going to across the ocean somewhere to a far off land and you're going to be in this city on these dates, and then you're going to this city on these dates, you put all that in Mercury Weather and then your widget will show you the next seven days or whatever, of highs, lows and weather forecast in the places you're going to be, which I can't believe that there aren't more apps that do this, but there aren't more apps that do this. So Mercury Weather is the one I found that does this. You can name them, you can apply little icons to the different locations, so it's very clear to see when you're in this location and then when you're in that location. I wish I'd had this app when I went to New Zealand, because we were going all over the place and I built a shortcut that showed me the weather for the various cities but Mercury.

Weather will just do it. So it's a subscription and you got to make sure it's worth it for you. You can play it monthly or annually or whatever. It's a nice weather app. There are lots of nice weather apps out there but the feature that I love about Mercury that I have not found anywhere else in a full featured weather app is travel forecasts, so that you know again, because, again, I don't care what the weather is going to be here if I'm going to be there. So I want to see that. And, yes, that does mean that my last couple of days in Hawaii I was seeing how much colder it was going to be at home, but that's part of it too.

2:11:01 - Leo Laporte
No, that's you know what I do, that every time I have to cruise up the Mississippi and we're hitting a lot of locations and the weather will definitely be different in New Orleans than it is in. St Paul.

2:11:21 - Jason Snell
So you pre-program that in there and then your weather widget will know. It'll be so cool. I can't wait.

2:11:25 - Leo Laporte
It's great. It's really good mercury weather and how much is it?

2:11:29 - Jason Snell
it's a sub, I think it's like four dollars a month, or it's fourteen dollars a year or something. I mean, it's just, it's just a subscription. They all are, aren't?

2:11:35 - Leo Laporte
they, they all you have to.

2:11:36 - Jason Snell
Yeah, they probably get their because they're paying for their weather data.

2:11:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, exactly, yeah, won't be from noah for much longer but okay, use it while it lasts you'll have to get it from the weather channel, I guess.

2:11:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Uh, all, right, andy, and I co your turn, my friend well, it's very, very uh relevant that jason picked a weather app, because I'm looking at weather underground and noticing that, to my disappointment, that there's going to be a 66 cloud cover at midnight on thursday night, uh, going all the way up to 92% by 2 am, which means I will probably not be able to see the blood worm total lunar eclipse that's happening in the United States overnight on Thursday night. If you're on the West Coast, it'll start going around 11. If you're on the East Coast, it will wrap up around 2 am.

2:12:27 - Leo Laporte
It's time for the syzygy. Oh my God.

2:12:32 - Andy Ihnatko
Don't you love a word with no vowels? That's just like makes you happy as a Scrabble player. But yeah, it's going to look really super cool and it's going to be the first, the only one in the, the only total lunar eclipse there, I think, even maybe even longer.

2:12:48 - Leo Laporte
So if you look at the totality. I mean we are everywhere in the us except, I mean, newfoundland's gonna miss it. But that's it. It's amazing, and a little bit of alaska yeah, exactly, and these things are they.

2:13:00 - Andy Ihnatko
They photograph really, really nicely, so it's a good reason to just go out now.

2:13:04 - Leo Laporte
That's a little bit warmer now that you can get to stay up a little bit later, that's pretty cool and now people are going to say that newfoundland is not in the us, but it is in our 51st state. Uh, and so I'm going to say in the us, thank you, thank you. Newfoundland and the entire gulf of america will also be in the total. That's well, mount mckinley, all right? Yeah, okay, very cool, very cool. That's not your only pick, though.

2:13:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah I have another, I have another pick. Uh, so if you go to the apple tv plus channel on youtube, they have posted an eight hour like asmr video entitled an exclusive odessa set. A design for eight hours of focus, perfect for your innie's work day. Severance music to refine to so it is eight hours of just in the workplace and background music and I should just play this.

I should have been playing it the whole podcast yeah, and I will say, if you, if it actually is very pleasant, because it's nice music that like is like, especially if you're in a work environment where, like, there's noise from the outside that's kind of like affecting your focus, it's better than noise canceling headphones because it replaces it to some nice music that doesn't distract your focus. And I will also say that, as someone who is self-employed and, like, works at a home office, there's something about having eight hours of video of like workers and a cubicle office complex that makes you think, oh, I should probably at least look busy it's the next best thing to be working at lumen, at lumen industries.

2:14:35 - Leo Laporte
Um, somebody I saw did a breakdown of the music and it's actually quite interesting. There's any and there's audi parts and stuff. It's really interesting. Uh, very nice. Uh, this is severance Music to Refine by featuring Odesza. Who is Odesza? Is it SZA with an Ode? What is Odesza? I could be wrong. Odesza, odesiverance, odesiverance.

I hope I don't get taken down for playing that 30 seconds of it because it really is great, but you have to hear it to remember it. Like is it oh yeah, that yeah, oh, what a great show. I have not been watching it because I want to wait until it's completed so I can binge the hell out of it.

2:15:21 - Andy Ihnatko
Yep, I'm renewing my Apple TV Plus subscription like this, at a time when I have time to just sit and that's going to be my life for watching the entire series I can't wait.

2:15:30 - Leo Laporte
And stephen drawbell says the 51st state comment is not funny to comedians.

2:15:35 - Andy Ihnatko
Please stop it and not funny to us either. It's not funny to us either I guess it's the answer.

2:15:43 - Leo Laporte
I only mention it in passing because it's so unfunny. Alex Lindsay, what do you got for us? Have you had time to?

2:15:51 - Alex Lindsay
set it all up. I just want to make sure I hadn't recommended it before. I've had it for a couple of weeks and I was just so I've been testing. A friend of mine sent me this to test and I'm taking you along my surround sound journey. So we've talked about the Ambio mic. We've talked about the H3 mic. This is the Voyage mic, the H3 mic.

2:16:09 - Jason Snell
This is the Voyage mic. Ooh, look at that, it's cute.

2:16:11 - Alex Lindsay
This is eight mics actually, this is a second order, ambisonic.

So, and what's kind of cool about it is? It just connects to your iPhone. So there's an iPhone app and so basically, you can see me walk, you know, you can see as I kind of go around it. It's so all these are all eight mics, and you just plug this mic into this phone and hit record and uh, and it's going to record all of those, all of those channels, um, in uh in this case ambisonic a uh format, and then I can go and take them into a variety of different pieces of software to turn them into some some version of surround Uh, basically it's building, it's using these mics to build a sphere of audio around, um, that that uh that you can then work with.

And so, as I do more and more spatial, um uh video and and and immersive, getting ready to do some more immersive video, you know, capturing the space, I found watching other people's work is really important. So, um, this, by the way, is the smaller version of what Apple shows on there. They have a Dante version of this that they show on some of the behind the scenes of what they're doing, but this is the USB version. It's a lot less expensive and it just connects to the phone. So this is. You can see that that's the one with the cap on it. I took the cap off so you could see what the mics actually look like.

2:17:28 - Andy Ihnatko
It looks like an everlasting gobstopper without the cap on. Yeah, I can get it to go focus here yeah it's it's uh, you know, like this is.

2:17:36 - Alex Lindsay
This is the the typical youtuber thing, really cover your eyes but you can see the kind of the um. It's really cool. So my uh, uh. Well, my son and I are taking this out near Nicosio, out in the redwoods, this weekend to record some scenery, so it should be a lot of fun. But we've already done some testing and it's turned out really well $999.

Yeah it's going to keep getting more expensive. I started off on the small ones. I have another one that I'm already testing. We'll see how it goes. I haven't tested it yet, so I'm not going to talk ones. I have another one that I'm already testing. That's even. We'll see how it goes. I haven't tested it yet so I'm not going to talk about it, but this one I've tested.

It's too bad we don't shoot this in 360, because I would be fun to have everybody in different positions in the sphere. What's interesting is that what I'm playing with really is how do I take instrumentation that's in front of me and mix that in, then be able to capture what it sounds like in the space? That's, what I've noticed is that when I watch someone record, do a recording and it was only the recording I feel like it's there's something about it. Now I'm in spatial or immersive and I and I feel like I'm missing something, and usually it's the how it interacts with the environment. So I'm trying to figure out ways to capture that environment and then bring it back into the experience, and I find that when we do a little bit of that, it makes a pretty big difference Very cool.

2:18:59 - Leo Laporte
This is an ambisonic mic with eight different capsules from Voyage Audio. A mere $1,000. But if you need it know, there you go. I mean, obviously, if you're shooting with the ursa, it's not another thousand bucks for audio big deal.

2:19:17 - Alex Lindsay
Well, you know, again for some people and again, the h3 is a great little uh 250 version of this and that's probably the least that. That's the entry level uh and what we're.

One of the things I'm working on right now is I took out, um, I took this out with the h3 from zoom and I'm recording them side by side and I'm taking another interesting and what I'm working towards now is having the ambio, this mic, the h3, and this other mic that I'm testing right now um take them all out in the same place this weekend and record all markets. You know, we'll just record all of them and see what they all like, right, different noise the noise would you like if I put this in the middle of a symphony orchestra?

2:19:58 - Leo Laporte
I might not need to mix it at all, right, because it would just give me it would give you an experience.

2:20:02 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, some people will tell you that it's not like. One of the problems with it is that it's a point of reference. It's not your ears, it's not. Yeah.

2:20:09 - Leo Laporte
So they just say binaural it's.

2:20:12 - Alex Lindsay
You can fold it down to binaural yeah. So what you do is you take all these and you say, okay, well, I've got the sphere that I recorded.

2:20:18 - Leo Laporte
I only have to make it into it make it into a make it sound like it.

2:20:21 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I could send you a stereo feed and it would still sound like it was around you. The next step is that you start moving the mics away from each other. So when they're doing orchestras, they start doing what's called decatrees, where they're moving the mics apart from each other so that you get a greater spatial feel. So those are all that.

2:20:46 - Leo Laporte
So it's not merely directional, it's also spatial. You want both. Yeah, yeah.

2:20:50 - Alex Lindsay
And the problem is that one that one requires a lot more setup this one. What's nice about this is that I can pull it out it's got a little quarter 20 on the back throw it up and record something that is kind of kind of cool so anyway, just playing with it. Thank you, Alex Yep.

2:21:05 - Leo Laporte
I'm sorry we've run out of time. We won't have time to go over his majesty king charles iii's musical uh playlist prop.

2:21:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Props for putting grace jones on the list. I. I would wish for slave to the rhythm instead of la vie en rose, but still okay okay.

2:21:23 - Leo Laporte
Well, you know you get when you're in the palace you don't want to play anything with too much of a beat. You know you.

2:21:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Just because that just the whole thing is crumbly, andy and I, co gbh is calling, but when a week, from thursday at 12 30 eastern time, go to wgbhnewsorg to listen to it live or later, or listen to what I did like 10 days ago okay, thank you, sir.

2:21:47 - Leo Laporte
Did you get your?

2:21:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Unfortunately. Yes, this might be my last show. I might be broadcasting from a series of places.

2:21:56 - Leo Laporte
I hold in my hands the paperwork, my taxes are done, but I'm very sad about it. Let's put it that way there's going to be a large check involved to both the state and federal government, but I'm hoping, if they just fire the entire IRS, that no one will ever look at this. So maybe I could just forget to sign the check.

2:22:21 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know, In America taxes pay you.

2:22:26 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, andy. Jason Snell is at sixcolcom jason.

2:22:32 - Jason Snell
indeed great pieces, uh, even though written poolside about the new max uh, yeah, check out my macbook air review, which posted this morning, which I wrote here in the cold of california instead of, uh, poolside. But uh, yeah, it's, uh, it's, there's. There's lots to talk about right now. I'm glad we did and, yeah, if you want to read more, come on. Also plug John Gruber filling in for. Mike.

2:22:57 - Alex Lindsay
Hurley yesterday.

2:22:58 - Leo Laporte
Short show, two and a half hours, you know, I saw a short show and I thought really Now I see what you mean, I think what I said is not much happened this week so it's a short show.

2:23:10 - Jason Snell
That was a good merging of a big week and a really great guest.

2:23:14 - Leo Laporte
That's a must listen. We had a good time.

2:23:16 - Jason Snell
People should check it out.

2:23:17 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you talked about other things too, I see.

2:23:21 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I mean yeah, but those New Max AI, and we talked a little bit about it all I don't know if you covered it last week or not, but there was a story about how a judge in Brazil basically pointed at the DMA and said we want that here, sideloading, make it happen in the next three months and like it's going to happen, Like once you break out of nobody having outside the app store, it's very easy to just have everybody else say you already did it for them, so do it for us now. So we talked about that a little bit too.

2:23:50 - Leo Laporte
Looks like another trip to.

2:23:51 - Jason Snell
Mar-a-Lago for Mr Cook. Really interesting chat. So yeah, if you want another two and a half hour long podcast in your life about Apple after this one is over, fear not, upgrade will fulfill your very long podcast needs.

2:24:05 - Leo Laporte
You'll find it at Jason's website sixcolorscom. Jason yes or on relayfm upgrade will do that'll work as well. I just want to get ready to go to six colors. Check it out then they can see all my many podcasts, all your many podcasts. Alex lindsay, office hours, dot global every single day. Q a anything coming up you want to talk about. You're going to cover nab with your omnisonic mic? I'm sure we are. We're going to take a live talk about.

2:24:30 - Alex Lindsay
You're going to cover NAB with your Omnisonic mic. I'm sure we are. We're going to take a live view. We're going to attempt a 4K 60 HDR 5.1 walkthrough of the expo floor on Sunday. Wow. So we've got all the pieces, should be here by Thursday and we may go to GDC next week. So stay tuned. We may go for like an afternoon. It's really there for test testing for NABs.

2:24:52 - Leo Laporte
That's a good idea.

2:24:54 - Alex Lindsay
And take the cause. The kit is complicated, so we're.

2:24:57 - Leo Laporte
It sounds awesome it works. Yeah, I'm pretty excited about it. Sounds awesome. Can't wait. Can you believe it was 20 years ago that HD video practically killed you?

2:25:08 - Alex Lindsay
Oh my gosh, I'm like leo sending me emails. When are we putting out the first show? You know we recorded this a long time ago. I'm like I'm going to pass it here, you don't want to.

2:25:16 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm switching floppies as fast as I can.

2:25:17 - Leo Laporte
It's just a lot of data sir yeah, exactly we are we actually going to do our 20th anniversary twit on april 13th. Uh, our 20th anniversary is coming up and I want to invite anybody who watches our shows to send us a video or put it on your socials. Just add at twit to the socials A video of how you watch, how you first found us Maybe the first time you watched an HD video from MacBreak Weekly stuttering along at one frame per second Any of those memories. It's going to be fun. We're going to play as many of those as we can on April 13th on our 20th anniversary show. Uh, we've been together for a long time, Alex. Yeah, absolutely yeah, long enough so that you've started to look like my favorite chia pet. It said Alex Lindsay, Alex Lindsay, chia. Just water him and he grows. Thank you, Alex, thank you Andy, thank you Jason Snell, thanks to all of you for joining us and, of course, thanks especially to our club twit members. They get ad-free versions of all of our shows for seven dollars a month. They also get access to the club twit discord and they make possible the eight different live feeds we do every Tuesday at 11 am, pacific 2 pm, eastern 1800 utc. Live to discord for our club members YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, x.com, Facebook, Linkedin and Kick Everywhere.

If you want to watch us live, you can, but of course most people watch after the fact. You can download versions of the show audio or video at twit.tv/mbw. There's also a YouTube channel you can use to share clips, and, of course, we encourage you to subscribe to the podcast. That way, you'll get it automatically Again, audio or video, and you can listen to it whenever it works in your busy life. We're just glad to have you. Thanks for joining us, everybody, and I'll see you next week. I hope we'll see you next week. Meanwhile, though, it is my sad and solemn duty to tell you get back to work. Break time is over. Bye.