MacBreak Weekly 968 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
Time for Mac Break Weekly. Andy Ihnatko here, Alex Lindsay's here filling in for Jason Snell, the wonderful Doc Rock. We will talk about the tariffs on again, off again, on again. I don't know what's going on. What does it mean for the price of the iPhone and Macintoshes and how does Apple handle this uncertainty? Also, what's wrong with Apple? The New York Times says there's a real problem with AI. They're doing something that a number of privacy advocates think may not be the right way. Uh, we'll talk about that. And, of course, there's a whole lot more. It's something to listen to while you do your taxes this week. MacBreak Weekly is next.
This is MacBreak Weekly episode 968, recorded Tuesday, April 15th 2025: Can't Call It Chocolate. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show. We get together and talk about the latest Apple news. Joining me now our Apple gang, Alex Lindsay is here, from officehours.global and 090.media. Hello, alex, hello, good to be here. Welcome back to the show. You were at NAB for the week.
0:01:21 - Alex Lindsay
I was. I was only there for a couple of days and then I had to do a production. But yeah, it was good. It was good.
0:01:26 - Leo Laporte
We'll get an NAB update in a moment, but first say hello to Andy Ihnatko. Hello, Andrew. Hey there. Heather, hey there, hey there. Hey there, hey there. What's new in Andy Ihnatko's world? Anything.
0:01:39 - Andy Ihnatko
The good news is that I'm doing an office clean-out and finding a lot of things that I was about to replace. That's usually my motivation for like it's not spring cleaning, it's like let's go down to the baseboards, let's throw the baseboards. It's like okay, now I need to replace earbuds. I have, like a 10-gigabit switch that I bought, that I was going to install, that I can't find.
0:02:02 - Doc Rock
Oh, no, and basically.
0:02:03 - Andy Ihnatko
I have a spreadsheet that says here's how much it would cost to just simply buy all that stuff all over again, versus here's how much time it will take to clean the office to the extent where you have actually gone through every corner in every box, and this time the math, the math orange, orange beats.
0:02:17 - Leo Laporte
I found orange beats when I cleaned my office. Hey, we don't have Jason Snell, he's got the week off. But, good news, doc Rock is here from Aloha, Honolulu. Hi, doc Aloha, how's it going? Good to see you. Look, the lights move when he talks.
0:02:33 - Doc Rock
It's my spectrum analyzer.
0:02:35 - Leo Laporte
It's so cool, but it's not accurate. Well, it doesn't have to be accurate, it just has to be cool, man, good to see you doctor, man, good to see you doctor. So let's see, since we previously, on mac break, weekly giant tariffs brought apple to its knees, then, apparently, Tim Cook made a call, paid a visit, something happened and when, when you're talking in this context, I really do think it's Tim Cook.
0:03:04 - Alex Lindsay
You know, like Tim Cook for sure it's like he has a little Tim Cook. Uh, uh hat on that. He puts on there and and uh goes and talks.
0:03:11 - Leo Laporte
Please mr president, please, uh, and a surprise announcement extremely late on friday night. Uh, donnie exempted smartphones, computers and chips from the so-called reciprocal tariffs with China, which is huge for Apple because at this point it was going to cost Apple 145 percent more to get the iPhones out of China. Uh, so we don't. You know, we don't know the problem. Here's the problem. Shortly thereafter, on the Sunday news shows, the president's cabinet members said don't get your hopes up, it's just a temporary exemption, which which means, tim, you're gonna have to make another trip to mar-a-lago soon, I guess.
Yeah I'm getting a little fed up with this.
0:03:58 - Andy Ihnatko
I think you can probably tell this is ridiculous yeah, I mean, and then on top of it there are so many different classes of tariffs that if they say oh, oh, don't worry, we're going to take off the tariffs on phones, like OK, but you're also announced you're going to be imposing new tariffs on semiconductors and chips, and you're also basically and there's also this weird thing called the fentanyl tariff Like I didn't realize that China was dealing fentanyl, but okay, apparently so. So, yeah, sometimes I'm really confused as to where the lack of forethought about this plan ends and where the idea that if the administration can keep all tech companies from getting too comfortable with anything that keeps the administration holding power over them like where does that start? And again the fact that the uncertainty has caused more uncertainty in myself, is both accurate and ironic and not particularly useful.
0:04:56 - Leo Laporte
when um the president was talking with the president of El Salvador, touting his ability to uh send american citizens to concentration camps in el salvador without due process, he said he was asked parenthetically about apple. Uh, he said, look, I'm a very I can't do his. I wish I could do an impression. Look, I'm a very flexible person, I don't change my mind, but I'm flexible. Flexible, okay, and you have to be. You just can't have a wall and you'll only go. No, sometimes you have to go around it. Under it or above it There'll be maybe things coming up. I speak to Tim Cook, I help Tim Cook, maybe I should do this. I speak to Tim Cook, I help Tim Cook and that whole business. I don't want to hurt anybody, but the end result is we're going to the position of greatest for our country. You can tell I'm just, I don't know what to say. This is not the way to run a country.
I will just say that there's, in the past few weeks especially, there's a lot of people who did not know what the keyboard shortcut was for the sigh and eye roll emoji were but now we know exactly what how to get that shortcut however, uh, mr cook, even though your company has regained its market cap, still a little bit below it's a quite a bit below its april 2nd peak. It's it's peak this month. Uh, it has regained its three trillion dollar market cap. Um, but uh, according to the new york times, trump signals that there will be new tariffs, new tariffs on computer chips and drugs, because I don't pay enough for my medications. Uh, monday, which was yesterday, the trump administration see, this is this is like constantly changing took steps that appear likely to result in new tariffs on semiconductors and pharmaceutical products. Federal notices put online monday afternoon, just hours ago, said the administration initiated national security investigations into the imports of chips and pharmaceuticals, and he says that could result in tariffs. What do you think? Uh, how? What's that Tim Cook's pepsi budget right about now? I mean?
0:07:17 - Alex Lindsay
if you think you're getting tired of it. It's kind of like, okay, okay, we don't have a tariff. And then mond on Monday, you're like, okay, I'm going to call him again and we'll talk to him again.
0:07:28 - Leo Laporte
I'm sure what Tim is saying, which is what he said all along, what he said in 2017, when the same thing came up. Mr President, you're going to kill Apple and that only helps other companies. Yeah, and my guess is that.
0:07:41 - Alex Lindsay
Tim, I bet you, my bet is that Tim has enough EQ to know that he's not talking just about Apple. I'm sure he's talking if you look at the things that were exempted. He probably talked to Trump and talked about all these industries that will be negatively affected and how that actually undermines America's competitiveness and these different verticals. He probably put Apple into a larger basket and said all of these baskets are are important and and um, my guess is is that's how he persuaded that that process to move forward. But he's probably the lead person that's pressing that forward. He's not the only one. Yeah, he's not the only one doing it, but I bet you he's probably one of the most effective. So he seems be the one, that he's the one. He's the one that gets quoted, like by Trump. Yeah, which?
0:08:28 - Andy Ihnatko
is he's obviously having some conversations yeah, I'm sure Tim is like happy. That means okay, I'm having an effect of that I'm, I'm inside his head and he regards me as like someone to listen to, as Tim I'm not I'm not terror, I'm not terribly. I'm I on my deathbed.
0:08:41 - Alex Lindsay
I'm not going to be happiest that he he kept using my name and mentioning his policies, but okay he uh and howard lutnick and others have a dream of making iPhones in america yeah, yeah, because we have, because the problem, the real problem, is that are that americans love doing manual, manual labor, um, and that the unemployment is so high, so there's a lot of people that are available to work in these factories and a lot of people, and when they are available, that they're, they're willing to work in this factory, absolutely $15 an hour is a massive.
0:09:16 - Doc Rock
What I think is absolutely funny because we are all gentlemen of a certain vintage. When we went to school, the hammer, the hammer, the hammer was make sure you get real good at your three R's your reading, your writing and arithmetic, so you don't end up working in the factory like Pawpaw and Meemaw. That was drilled in our heads. And then we're like oh, we have, all the manufacturing has left the United States. I'm like everybody who's Gen X. We were told to study hard so you don't have to work in the factory. And then, after I did it, after y'all had kids, you told your kids to study hard so they don't have to work in a factory. So we killed a large portion of the people that would possibly end up working in a factory. Now we're saying oh, everybody, run back to the factory.
0:10:00 - Leo Laporte
We have no factory skills.
0:10:02 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, there was, and that's that's actually absolutely on point. There's a quote from Tim Cook from a conference Q&A that he did in 2024 that's been making the rounds about him explaining that no, no, no, I mean, we don't manufacture in China because the labor is cheap, or at least the labor that Apple needs stopped being cheap a long time ago, and he outlined that. It's because, uh, not only because of the factory infrastructure, the what we've been, what we've talked about a few times before, where, if we're doing a production test and we decide and we discover that this screw needs to be like a couple of thousand shorter than we thought, you can basically have the a million of the new screws ready by the next day. But he's also going deep into saying that the thing is in China, they also have education happening, where kids are being educated in engineering. They're being educated in manufacturing. There is not just a labor force but a skilled labor force to draw on, a labor force but a skilled labor force to draw on.
And that's one of the reasons why, again, given that he is speaking in a public forum and defending manufacturing in China, but at the same time, that points out something that is kind of a fallacy about one of the many fallacies in the discussion here that if a president wants to move more manufacturing back to the United States, tariffs are not the way to do it. Every single previous presidential administration, not just Trump, has never made that sort of investment in education. They're not investing in making sure that every kid who comes through public school has a certain amount of marketable manufacturing skills. They're not doing the investment to make sure that there is post-high school training. They're not doing the investment to make sure that there is post-high school training. They're not making the investment in infrastructure, making sure that there's a labor force that can take those jobs, that can do those jobs, that can be paid for those jobs. And this lack of forethought is in stark contrast to what China did about 20 years ago.
0:12:00 - Leo Laporte
I love Brian X Chen in the New York Times His article today. On Friday, president Trump announced a tariff exemption for a moment. Widespread anxiety about a potential $2,000 iPhone dissipated because of the tariff reduced production. But two days later the Trump administration said smartphones and computers were likely to be hit with new tariffs. More expensive iPhones could come after all. So Brian X Chen in the New York Times says don't panic because we can buy last year's phone model. We could buy refurb. I think last year's phone model is still going to be tariffed right.
His article why a tariff-inflated $2,000 iPhone is nothing to fear really is just saying, oh, don't worry, you can buy a flip phone from motorola, it's gonna be fine. This is stunning.
0:12:52 - Doc Rock
Everybody hasn't really t alked about this, but, um, I've been to the building when it was first built. I don't know what's there at the moment, but there's a place in, uh, saigon sorry, my friends will not allow me to call it HMC Bencom Center built a really impressive building for a lot of tech companies to move in, and over the last couple of years, a whole bunch of tech companies so Apple Watch primarily is Vietnam, and so there's going to be a lot of taking the talent, say, from Hunan province, where the Apple factory is, and they're just going to move them to Saigon, and then you know you remember, the tariffs on on Vietnam were initially 49 percent.
They're back down to 10 percent they brought it down at any moment they could.
0:13:36 - Leo Laporte
They're going to cheat it's already an Apple where Apple flew, uh, millions of dollars of iPhones out of India and jumbo jets trying to get ahead of this. It's a very, it's an unstable, it's a developing story.
0:13:56 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and I think that the challenges with a lot of this is that tariffs can be effective at protecting existing things, but to bring something back from the dead, it's basically like finding the DNA and then re-implanted into something else. It's like making a dire wolf out of a factory. It takes decades. So the thing is, is that the problem is you say, oh, I want to build a factory that builds iPhones. Okay, well, that's a decade away.
And now I think that Trump has visions of being still president in a decade, but I think that probably is unlikely, and so, but I think that that's the challenge is all this stuff. I mean, I think that at the rate we're going, you know, four years from now, you know, unless something crazy happens, which I'm going to believe, anything in front of me at the moment is that you know, someone else will come into power and all this will get wiped away, and we'll try to forget that it ever happened, and I think that that's the and so it's just a matter of dealing with four years of chaos. Is the issue.
0:14:57 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, trump can get past the 25th Amendment. Maybe he will definitely not get past the McDonald's and Diet Coke diet. That's term limits for.
0:15:06 - Leo Laporte
Trump. I think we really reduced though these are, this is really slim pickings. We're really reduced to well.
0:15:11 - Alex Lindsay
Okay, at least he's 79, maybe well, I don't think I think I think we do have to. Uh, you know, I mean a lot, of a lot. You know we have had the luxury, as americans, to live in. Even that we don't agree what the government's doing and we think there's a lot of dumb things the government's doing. It's never moved very quickly before, like, so we're all kind of like, we've always been a little bit in the adult in the room, you know like, you know, there's a lot of countries doing a lot of crazy stuff and you're like okay, well, that's the rest of the world and it's good to be in time, right, so, so you know, and people will.
How was that? Uh, you get used to it, you just get used to paying attention to. I mean, I had, you know, in Zimbabwe, the, the lunch was twice as much every day. So so you just, you know, like, when you talk about, you know, like the it, but it creates different behaviors. Like everyone, when you finished a job, everyone will get paid that morning and they'd all go out and go shopping and buy, spend everything that day, because the next day it'll be more expensive again. So so, but no one had any debt, so so, so it was kind of a. There was all this other stuff, that that that happens and people figure things out.
0:16:18 - Leo Laporte
I'm not, I'm just trying to say that I'm thrilled that we're being we're turning into Zimbabwe. That's exciting.
0:16:25 - Alex Lindsay
We're turning into Zimbabwe.
0:16:26 - Andy Ihnatko
That's exciting. We're not there yet, but we're sure threatening this face is going to be on the $5 million bill.
0:16:30 - Leo Laporte
you think yeah, yeah, exactly All right, but it could be.
0:16:32 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I think we need to kind of steel ourselves that it could be. Four years of every day is like this, yeah.
0:16:39 - Doc Rock
Andy, we should put in a request that if they decide to do the five million dollar build that, we get like a mount twitmore.
0:16:47 - Andy Ihnatko
So it's like yourself okay, no, because as long as.
0:16:53 - Leo Laporte
Because soon other other, more prosperous nations will start buying them as novelty items, and I don't think my ego can take that somebody in our discord well papered my thing with with amy somebody's on discord says alex howard says it's gonna be like cuba, except instead of old cars, everybody will have old phones taped together and duct tape. Look at my Moto Razr. How do you like that?
0:17:13 - Andy Ihnatko
huh, want to see a phone with tail fins Go to the United States. Yeah, it was a simpler time.
0:17:20 - Leo Laporte
You know, what it does underscore is how good we had it until recently. You know, I mean uh with with a fairly low or no trade barriers. Uh, we were able to uh offshore a lot of manufacture and uh be able to get these phones. I mean they seem expensive but get them down to a price where they weren't horrific. Um, yeah, was that a golden? Is that a golden age? That's now gone?
0:17:45 - Alex Lindsay
yeah was that a golden? Is that a golden age? That's now gone? I think it's. It's. There's all kinds of possibilities that the, the chain reaction that occurs after this, will leave us in a better place four years from now. Uh, not everyone, definitely not anyone with savings, um, but uh you know, so I'm watching my 401k dissipate yeah, well, I mean you're looking at a. It's a a pretty focused attempt to deflate the dollar.
0:18:10 - Leo Laporte
And now I'm sad because I got rid of all my Nokia and 95s and I had all those great old phones and the BlackBerry Pearl. I should have kept all that.
0:18:19 - Alex Lindsay
That would have been valuable, that could have been my retirement Maybe, but I think that it will push companies like Apple and others to keep on diversifying, Like you just keep on trying to get out of China, which isn't a bad thing. Yeah, I mean, I think that people had to. There's many reasons to get out of China, and this is just amplifying the need to move it out. This is not even touching on if there was ever a war in Taiwan. It gets much more complicated again, so it's probably good for the country.
0:18:44 - Leo Laporte
That also, by the way, seems more likely, does it not?
0:18:47 - Alex Lindsay
I mean yeah it's hard to know. It's hard to tell, I mean, if China has nothing to lose if the tariffs get high enough, that there's no trade to be lost with the United States, if we really decouple Pretty much, that's where we are right. We're not there yet. But if we, if we got there uh there, then why would China not there's?
0:19:11 - Leo Laporte
nothing to lose. Yeah, that's the problem. Well, nuclear weapons might be one reason not to.
0:19:16 - Alex Lindsay
I still think he has them.
0:19:18 - Doc Rock
Anyway, we'll this week, this week in geopolitics well I know, I don't, I don't want to get political, but this directly affects macintoshes and iPhones, by the way.
0:19:29 - Leo Laporte
We we talk about iPhones, but it affects your laptops and your desktops just as much it affects everything.
0:19:35 - Doc Rock
Actually, you know, um, we're not going to take that jump just yet, but I'm telling you it was completely felt on the floor in the north and south halls last week and then you would go into at naab you're talking about the canon or a fuji or even sony, and they were like listen, don't even bring it up, because we're not even allowed to discuss the t word.
0:19:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I was like well, don't try to buy a switch too, because they're not doing it. Yep. We were supposed to be able to order that a few days ago. No.
0:20:07 - Doc Rock
And there was. There was really needed products that were introduced. And then there's products that was like, well, we were going to do this, but we heard all the rumors. You know, everybody who had rumors of what's going to drop a NAB semi looked like a fool, because a lot of that stuff was not brought up.
0:20:21 - Leo Laporte
Because it's like we got a table this discussion for a couple of weeks until we see what's going on. So you can feel it on the floor. There is a silver line in this cloud. The right to repair now is going to be everybody's going to get behind that. The right to repair. Keep your, keep your stuff working, that's all. Yeah, take care of it. Yeah, damn, I wish I were able to replace the batteries in my air. That's going to be an issue. What's wrong with Apple, asked the New York Times. So Apple has been going through some tough times.
Even before the threat of tariffs, says Trip Mikkel, there were questions about the company's inability to make good on new ideas and specifically, the new idea was ai, and we are now learning what a cluster this ai thing has been for years. I. I guess we should refer to the information story here how apple fumbled siri's makeover. This is wayne ma. Last month, apple shook up the leadership of siri. A behind the look is seeing behind the scenes effort. Look at the f at the effort behind the scenes, look at the effort shows just how dysfunctional it got. Have you guys, uh, read this yet? I mean it's, it's an indictment it's terrible one of.
0:21:48 - Andy Ihnatko
We're going to focus on the new york times article, but everybody's talking about this right now. They they're huge sources that were basically explaining exactly how dysfunctional the management behind uh, the development of siri, the development of apple intelligence, where one of the big headlines was that the team said, hey, we need, we need a big, big budget for more AI compute, like more hardware for basically to build these models. And Tim Cook said, yep, great, totally approved. And then the head of AI said, yeah, we're going to give you half as much as that. And they felt stifled by that.
Also, reports of how Gianandrea, who's the head of AI that they hired away from Google, needed to make some shakeups in how management of AI was handled, but refused to do so.
They had a lot of quotes from individual team members who were happy to say all the derogatory stuff that they were sort of sharing about it.
Robbie Walker, the head of Siri, was also kind of thrown under the bus by a lot of the stuff, essentially saying that there were very, very obvious things that they needed to be doing that they refused to do or rather, I think this was attributed to Robbie Walker a lot of stuff where they didn't realize that, look, you're building a house, you need to dig the foundations into bedrock, you need to level everything off, you need to build foundations and walls and then put services, whereas at that point, colloquially, like Robbie Walker was saying, I'm really excited about this tile that we've decided on for the master bedroom.
Like, we are not there yet. We shouldn't be working on these, we shouldn't be proud of these small, tiny, almost insignificant and ineffectual achievements. We are not yet ready to even to demonstrate basic functionality yet. And so a lot of they're saying that a lot of the resources and time were being thrown away by focusing on the tiny, tiny, tiny picture as opposed to the big picture, and I don't know if you consider that good news or bad news. If you're cheering for Apple intelligence to be out and be successful, on the one hand, you could say that it would be terrible if Apple simply does not have the technical capability to achieve a very, very highly advanced piece of software and infrastructure. But it seems as though their big drag seems to be management. On the other hand, that implies that without a notorious change in management, without a certain amount of bloodletting, the problems are not going to be solved so long as these big name people are still have the ability to make terrible, terrible decisions again, wayne ma's article.
0:24:31 - Leo Laporte
Uh does find a villain besides john jan andrea. His number two, robbie walker, oversaw day-to-day operations. According to four people familiar with the matter, for instance, uh walker. Uh apparently ended up being kind of a roadblock. He would celebrate the smallest victories. He was the one who wanted hay, for instance, to be removed from hay shlomo uh, that was his big victory. He was uh talking about how getting a few seconds faster response time or a few milliseconds faster response time or a few milliseconds faster response time was a victory. It got to the point where engineers and the rest of the company were calling Apple's AI and machine language division aimless, a-i-m-l-less. John Andrea and Robbie Walker have been replaced by Craig Federighi, but it might be a little bit too late. This is an indictment, this article.
0:25:35 - Andy Ihnatko
And it's why.
0:25:35 - Leo Laporte
Siri is still so bad, I think right.
0:25:39 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and you see that Craig Federighi also has has apparently started making some big decisions. There's a piece of news from late last week that he already basically changed some rules saying that engineers inside Apple are allowed to use language models and AI models that weren't developed in-house if it'll help them, like, get things going forward.
0:26:01 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, that has stimulated a controversy. Actually, let's take a break and we'll talk about that, because there is a controversy now about Apple's new strategy and how it's going to use your data. That is getting some people a little head up. Yeah, good point, well worth reading. Apple obviously has trouble with its AI. Wwdc is just a little more than a month away. It's going to be very interesting to see how they respond to this. Mike Rockwell and Craig Frederica are now in charge and are shaking, as you said, shaking things up, but not necessarily in a way that privacy advocates are too happy with. We'll talk about that in just a bit. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. I'm going're watching MacBreak Weekly. I'm gonna calm down. I'm gonna calm down, get some chewing gum and uh, I don't know spit. Uh, it's great to have you. Doc rock is in the house. Thank you, cam ambassador extraordinaire. And, of course, youtube celeb, youtubecom slash. Doc rock, do you bring, can you bring us some aloha spirit to my mood today?
0:27:06 - Doc Rock
absolutely, absolutely. Uh, I just remind myself that you know all this stuff just gets better every day anyway. So you know, no matter how crazy it is, just keep a smile on and keep doing what you got to do. Thank you, I still feel like crap and the celtics are winning.
0:27:22 - Leo Laporte
Also Also Alex Lindsay from Office Hours, Andy Ihnatko On the blue sky. He is Ihnatko I-H-N-A-T-K-O.
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Apple insider has uh, the article Wesley Hilliard writing on device apple intelligence training. So apple has a new plan. I'm I'm guessing this is Mike Rockwell and Craig Federighi. They shared this yesterday. It is opt-in, but it's a new way to train.
They're going to use differential privacy, which you may have heard this term.
They started doing this in 2016. The idea is they collect data about you, but then they introduce noise so that data collectors can't figure out where the data came from. It's basically a way of anonymizing it. There is some skepticism over differential privacy among privacy experts. So what Apple is planning to do and this actually comes from Mark Gurman comes from Mark Gurman is to take synthetic user data, anonymize user data from a lot of different customers, including you and me, anonymize it, then look at your. This is very complicated. Then look at your data and see if your data coincides with any part of that data set the synthetic data set and if it does, that data set the synthetic data set and if it does, then it takes a synthetic data and uses that for your ai yeah, the, the apple machine learning group, published, actually, a white paper about this to the, to the blog, basically explaining that the overall thing is that previously because the dogma inside Apple is that, look, user privacy is absolutely paramount we can't train on user data.
0:33:23 - Andy Ihnatko
What they've been doing instead is training on synthetic data, which is, you know, it's like cheese spelled with, or actually like these chips of hoy with whatever. They can't call it chocolate. So they say C-H-O-K-L-I-T, oh Lord. So I mean and that's one of the reasons because it's not real data, it only looks like data. That means that in terms of trying to figure out which email is actually important and which email is actually spam that's trying to look important very, very difficult. So they're changing and saying that, okay, we're going to have to start looking at actual user data in order to train our AI models as part of it. They're saying that they're switching to this thing, but don't worry, the AI will be able to actually look at your email and train their AI models on it. They are reassuring people and saying that we're not going to necessarily just throw your text, your private emails, into a hopper. What we're going to do is we're using differential privacy, not dissimilar from what they promised to be using when they had their on-device CSAM scanning.
Yeah, and also they say that it's going to be opt-in. I don't know, but it's a little bit vague as to whether this means that they will ask you, after a system update to 18.5, if it's okay to turn that on or if, as they did with some advertising in the Apple Store app, they'll automatically turn it on and if you're annoyed by it. Hope that you won't actually go into settings and turn it off. But it does show you how much they feel, as though they booted their initial development of AI that they said okay, we did this for the right reasons, but it's not working. And now we are willing to compromise a little bit and they're doing the technical stuff to protect people's privacy. But even if that actually works, there's still the uncomfortable notion of wow, I'm helping you to build this incredibly valuable corporate asset and you'll be giving me. How many dollars in store credits per month for no, nothing, not even like 50 cents, not even like one free item.
0:35:22 - Leo Laporte
Okay, that sounds totally fair uh, it's a little concerning that. The very first example they show, uh, in their white paper, understanding aggregate Trends for Apple intelligence using differential privacy is gen moji. Using differential privacy is Genmoji, but maybe it's best to start with something not harmful. For example, understanding how our models perform when a user requests Genmoji that contain multiple entities like dinosaur and a cowboy hat helps us improve the responses to those kinds of requests. Okay, then they talk about improving text generation with synthetic data Synthetic data created to mimic the format and important properties of user data but do not contain any actual user generated content. They want to produce synthetic sentences or emails that are similar enough in topic or style to the real thing to help improve our models. For summarization, does this sound like they're really? Uh, this sounds like a moonshot a little bit like they're really.
0:36:28 - Andy Ihnatko
They're almost desperate at this point I would call desperate, more like each of their game plans. Again, it's, I feel like they.
0:36:36 - Leo Laporte
They've.
0:36:36 - Alex Lindsay
They've realized that they had and this, we've talked about this all along that they have a problem which is privacy, and ai seem to be incompatible, at least effective ai yeah, I think this actually is more part of the original plan or what they needed to do long term, which is they got to find ways to take advantage of the fact that privacy is hard and that they have it, you know, like they have it in a way that the other organizations don't. So I think, well, there's obviously a lot of chaos that they have related to that. A lot of it was just saying too much too quickly, in the sense that Apple can start to look at data carefully and if they unwind this carefully and they maintain privacy and they do all the things that they're working on doing here, you have a massive advantage over everybody else. You know, like you know, there's a lot of things that that they can see, uh, about you in your phone that you're not going to share with Google or other. Most many people won't want to share with Google or other others. Um, so that they they can, people will. You know, there's lots of things around our, all these devices that we have attached to us, that we're carrying around, that we're putting information into that. You know, I'm not going to willingly give it to pretty much anybody outside of my phone and and and Apple if they figure out a way to to do this in a way that and most of us are going to lean more towards trusting Apple for privacy than the other organizations touching our data for better or for worse, and so Apple has this huge advantage of that, and right now they're behind on the overall calculation or overall solutions for LLM. But if they slowly grow into that, while they take advantage of that privacy first model, they'll have a level, they have the potential of a level of interaction with our data that isn't going to be common for other services, and so I think that that it does it.
This is less. This feels less desperate. A lot of the other stuff they were doing feels pretty desperate, and again it was mostly people starting to say stuff that wasn't done when no one was going anywhere, like the use the users are not leaving tomorrow because they didn't have A on their phone. I mean, I'm using ChatGP Like someone I apologize for forgetting the person's name Someone listened to the show and I was complaining about the fact that, oh, I just want to hit the thing and they sent me a shortcut on my phone. So now I just say a Siri shortcut and what do I get ChatGPT set up for chat. So now I'm, you know, so I uh. So now I just say start chat all the time and um and it's uh, it works great so.
0:39:09 - Doc Rock
So I To Alex's point. I think this is very important and, from a user perspective nevermind the noise of the media and the pundits and everybody, all the naysayers I would rather Apple take two more years like give me 2027 April to nail this correctly than to be forced into doing something because everybody keeps yapping about something that the majority of us don't care about. I don't care that siri is broken right now if I know that in two years I can get sorry. Get a situation where I do ask a question like would you like to play tennis tomorrow at 11, and it automatically knows that of the three of you, the only one that plays tennis is alex. So it's going to send a message to alex. I don't even have to say that part because it knows I've already. We played tennis on tuesday, like six weeks in a row, like those are the kind of stuff where it's going to come in really handy and I don't think it knows that.
0:40:03 - Leo Laporte
I think that's the whole point, though, is it does not look at your data.
0:40:06 - Doc Rock
It doesn't work if you could do it in the enclave of your phone and it can figure out your contacts based on your phone. It doesn't have to go to anybody's servers and it realizes what you do, and you could develop an intelligent assistant that doesn't require you sharing his private information with anybody else. This is where they're going to win, and I'd rather them just take their time and do it correct, because a lot of people are just making noise and like, oh, let me make all these cool studio ghibli stuffs. As a huge fan and as a person who loves the idea of mr miyazaki because I watched, watched all the documentaries, watched all of the film, been to the hometown, the whole nine yards I was kind of irritated watching everybody steal his style and make those things. I did one and I'm like, yeah, okay, I got to stop because this is in the scope of what he does. You know what I mean.
0:40:52 - Leo Laporte
Apple introduced the idea of deferential privacy in 2016. I mean, and they've been working on this for some time. At that time, experts said the EFF said yeah, in principle, this is a good idea. We'd like to know more about how Apple does it, and it's one of those situations where there's a slider between you know, complete privacy and no privacy, and effectiveness and ineffectiveness, and it's a really all about. There's a, there's a picture of the slider. I don't know that's a, that's a math. This is from wikipedia. The problem is it isn't. It's it's not perfect, and how it's implemented is it really is the devil's in the details, and Apple is not completely forthcoming about how they implement it. Now, I'm encouraged by the fact that they have been doing this since 2016. That's a good sign. They were one of the first to offer differential privacy, and that it's opt-in, I think, as you point out, andy, is a very good sign.
0:41:54 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and also, as Alex said, if there's anybody that we're going to be trusting with more access to our personal data, it's definitely Apple, and they've earned that kind of trust, and that's great. I'm not sure if it's. I think it will allow them to catch up and get where they need to go. I'm not sure if it's an advantage, so to speak, because, so to speak, because Google's user base is just so much bigger than Apple's, the number of people who opt in or fail to opt out, which is more Google style, is so great that those people are going to be training and improving the models. For the people who are concerned about their privacy on Google and have clicked the button and say no, you can't see any of my data for this, you can't see any of my data for that, they will still have the benefits of Gemini. 2.whatever, looking at your Gmail inbox and being able to surface no, these are absolutely the most important emails in this inbox. Or when I ask my calendar where was that place? I went to with that person that time to parse that oh, you met your Aunt at us at this restaurant in new orleans on this date. That's the sort of stuff that is going to benefit everybody. Thanks to the some, the people who actually were okay with giving more data that we talked about sliders.
Apple is always this has always been something that apple has had to confront where their institutional culture of privacy being sacrosanct, being part of every decision at the very, very beginning, is a very, very important part of what they do and why it's great. However, that doesn't come at no cost to how well their products work, and so I think eternally and certainly for the foreseeable future, there's going to always be that question of, if we compromise privacy a little bit and not so much that there is anything we can point to that's tangible that people are losing by giving up this much privacy and give the users a disproportionately high benefit compared to what we compromised in their privacy by getting that data. That's something we should be going for and that's something that they have to figure out where that slider needs to be. Because, again, I've decided that the deal with the devil is perfectly fine by me. I'm getting as much or more than I feel, so I'm giving up and I trust Google to be the only person that exploits this data, as opposed to selling it off to other people and, as a result.
Boy, they're ABI products, they're not. Just, they aren't like the silly stuff like, oh, studio Ghibli version of whatever it really is. Again, I'm looking for the photo of the place where I went that time and it actually coming through, uh, and the ability to simply say that here is, here is like 2 000 pages worth of documents on this subject. I need you to tell me what in these documents refers to how tariffs are going to help medical technology or hurt medical technology, and boom, within like 20 seconds, giving me not hallucinations but a summary, quotations, links to exactly where I can go to find these things. That's the stuff that makes me glad that Google is exploiting people, and that's the stuff and Apple needs to get some of that magic going for its products too.
0:45:14 - Leo Laporte
Or do what Alex is doing, which is keep Apple out of the ai space and use third-party ai tools when you need.
0:45:22 - Alex Lindsay
If apple catches up at some point and goes, oh that's great, I'll be like, oh that's great this feels like a hail mary, to be honest, but I, just I, I think it's a it's.
I think it'll take five, five to ten years for it to develop. You know, I think that it is, but I, but I think that again, as an, as an I, you know, a somewhat average Apple user, I don't. I just don't care as long as the phone keeps getting better. The biggest Apple intelligence thing that was useful is being able to open up my iPhone and point to something I don't want in the photo and have any disappear. I was like that's really cool.
You know like it works really, really well, and so I was kind of like okay, AI works. Now I'm going to go back to what I was doing, and I'm a person that's using AI in some form every work hour of the day. I'm using AI in some form. So it's not like I'm anti-AI or I'm not using it. No, of course, of course. So I just don't care if Apple's doing it Like it's not like.
0:46:19 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's what I'm saying is that Apple doesn't have to provide that it doesn't like it's Apple rushing around trying to figure this out.
0:46:24 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, they can keep on talking about this and I think that they should keep developing for it, but in the same way that they're developing vision. You know, if they get it done five years from now, that's great. But don't lose focus on making a better camera. What I really want is 4K spatial, you know from a phone.
0:46:45 - Leo Laporte
Apple's a $3 trillion company. It could probably do more than one thing at a time.
0:46:51 - Doc Rock
They have brought in the they got to keep their corporate DNA, and the main thing here is they do not break their corporate DNA with just keeping up with the privacy corporate DNA and the main thing here is they do not break their corporate DNA, which is keeping up with the privacy. And to that point, this is the best example I could think of. When I first started DJing and people used to get lippy at the end of the night, I'd go outside and remind them that.
I am a retired soldier and I worked in special forces and I can kind of handle this all by myself as I became more popular. I couldn't handle those things by myself and it's not because I wasn't physically capable. It just wasn't conducive to the business. It would look really, really bad and possibly ruin a career. So Apple can do the same thing we did in those days. You just gave somebody across the room to look and then they would handle it and you have plausible deniability. That is what alec and I are talking about. We're like let somebody else do all that ai stuff. We really don't care.
Apple, take your time and do your thing. Don't break what made you famous. Don't break what made you good over the idea of doing the trivialities of ai between super whisper, chat, gbt and jiminy and I'm with you on this andy, jiminy rocks right now. I just did four videos on Notebook LM and how to get the best out of it and use it to teach you anything. You can finally learn ancient Mesopotamian basket weaving and it's phenomenal Some things you just need to keep your hand out. So Apple does not have to say, oh, it'd be a shame if something happened to your pretty AI. They have other people that can handle that for you.
0:48:22 - Andy Ihnatko
I just remembered something that is a perfect example that, while Apple can't find its car keys, with Siri I'm inside the library because I stream from the library. But something I used just last week I finally got my phone, finally got Gemini Live with camera. Now I can give it access to the camera live, I can give it access to my screen live, and I've been trying to break it and I can't, and which means I'm now just using it to see. I bet this will do a good job. With this Upstairs there's a library book sale that goes on all the time, and so I'm just using it to see. I bet this will do a good job.
With this Upstairs there's a library book sale that goes on all the time, and so I'm always looking at the shelves for interesting books to read. They're only like a buck or two each. I decided, gee, I wonder if Gemini Live with camera can do this. I turned on the camera and I'm just like, as I'm looking at the shelves, I'm passing the camera along and I said no, I'm actually looking for like something light to read. Do you see anything? That kind of stands out and we're having a conversation about books. It sees that might fit that and like, as I'm talking to it, it's like it's a nice lighthearted mystery, like you said, the one that was kind of like PG Woodhouse, it kind of does that. It's like, ooh, that sounds good. Which shelf was that on?
0:49:34 - Leo Laporte
It's on the second shelf, it's, uh, it's, it's got a red spine and this is what apple's afraid of is that people are going to see this and want android phones, right and it's not.
0:49:43 - Andy Ihnatko
It's not just the feature, because I'm sure that that will come to the gemini app on ios, but the danger is when I'm not sure it will well, well, maybe, but the the remember that that google's business plan is always the more people are using our services, the more more data we get and the more valuable that data gets.
0:49:59 - Leo Laporte
But Apple has to also let it remember.
0:50:02 - Andy Ihnatko
But the point that I was trying to make with that is just that you don't want a situation where my go-to tool on the iPhone is something that is not made by Apple if Apple is capable of doing it themselves. Gemini is becoming more and more important to my daily life, so it's such that I'm no longer saying, oh wow, gemini is really good at summer, like a year ago. It would be like, oh, gemini is really good at summarizing this thousand page PDF that I downloaded. I will do it for that. Notebook. Lm is really good for that.
Now, with Gemini 2.5, I'm into hey, I need to know what the Unicode character for a down arrow pointing whatever is. I'm not even going to do a Google search by rote. I'm tabbing into Gemini and saying, hey, show me a bunch of Unicode symbols that are left-hand hours pointing down and will just give me a very nice, tidy list. My muscle memory is being developed to go to Gemini for lots and lots of stuff that I used to do, for a lot of different apps or a lot of different resources. What Apple absolutely does not want to happen is for just like they don't want it to happen that the iPhone loses another, let's say, 10 percentage points towards the disaster of it being just another device that runs Gemini, or just another device that runs Instagram, just another device that runs Microsoft Office. Microsoft Office will run on a whole bunch of different things. Mine just happens to have an Apple logo on it because I like the way it's constructed and supported.
Even if it's just a few percentage points, some year that's going to be the difference between somebody going into an Apple store, not being terribly thrilled with the new iPhone, but then going across the street to the Google store which is Boston is one of the very few cities in the world you can actually do that and saying, wow, I can actually get pretty much the same powered phone with double the storage for the same amount of money. And yeah, of course it's going to run like these five apps that I need. Why am I just wasting money? Why should I get, uh, get, uh, 256 gigabytes of storage on an iPhone, where I can get double the storage on a pixel phone and we'll do 98 of what I would want an iPhone to do?
0:52:14 - Leo Laporte
that's the danger that apple is in yeah, precisely, um, this will all come out in uh. Ios and ipad os 18.5, mac os 15.5. Those are in their second developer beta. As of yesterday, I imaginea public beta is around the corner. That's when you'll get the option to opt into this. I don't know if opting in will then give you additional features because, remember, opting in is merely saying okay, you can take my data, put it up on your cloud for training after anonymization I don't know at what point how it's then they have to train the stuff and then it has to be available to you. So I suspect there'll be a period of time between turning this on and the ability to use it. We'll see. They're going to do an image playground, image wand, as I mentioned, genmoji, memories creation, visual intelligence, as well as Genmoji and writing. This is Mark Gurman saying 18. 18, 5, although I think that's probably accurate, you'll all turn it on, or no, sure?
0:53:24 - Doc Rock
yeah, I would turn it on yeah, I'll turn it on.
0:53:27 - Leo Laporte
You trust apple, I trust them.
0:53:29 - Doc Rock
That's basically saying I trust you to do different and it's a well-earned trust, and this is why we just don't want them to break it over the idea of speed and like please, right, right, right wall street precisely.
0:53:40 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. So we're encouraged that mike rockwell and craig federighi are in charge. They brought in the old hands. I don't know where jenna treya ended up. He's in some corner of of uh cupertino working on something go away.
0:53:55 - Doc Rock
Money gives him a chance to come and hang out with me for a couple of months. Yeah, there you go.
0:54:00 - Leo Laporte
Move to Hawaii. Yeah, the company plans to announce Apple Intelligent Upgrades at WWDC, of course in June, June 9th, but won't implement long-awaited features for Siri until next year. That's the last sentence of Mark Gurman's.
0:54:14 - Alex Lindsay
And I think that Apple definitely is going to stop telling people things that they don't have working like yeah, that would be a good thing.
0:54:20 - Leo Laporte
That'd be a good start, yeah, yeah, all right time to take another break. You're watching MacBreak Weekly Alex Lindsay, Andy Ihnatko filling in for Jason Snell this week. So great to have you. Doc rock, thank you for being here. Our show day brought to you by Melissa. Love these guys. You know we just celebrated our 20th anniversary on sunday of TWiT. Melissa is celebrating 40 years, twice as long as the trusted data quality expert.
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Let's see what else is in the news. Uh, France is in the news. I think it's a love hate with apple in France. We've talked about the hate.
Now France announces they're going to do countrywide digital identity cards on the iPhone. Uh, some states in the us of course allow you to put your uh driver's license in the wallet. California is now doing that. Not that anyone I ever have met can read it or use it, but France says they're going to move to embrace digital identity cards, which have been around as an alternative to passports and driver's licenses. 25 million people use them in France as a form of government identity. That way they don't need the other documents. And now they're going to put them on the iPhone.
Uh ID card will be going digital, available on mobile devices soon. This is in French so I'm translating for you. Current plan to make it available in time for summer vacations, All through an app called France Identité. It's not clear whether they're going to use the wallet or it'll be a separate app. California did it with a separate app and then made it. I don't know Is it in the wallet yet? Some states it's in the wall. I can't remember if california we have it in the wallet. Yeah, aloha state has it in the wall. But, doc rock, have you been able to use it with police or like?
0:59:14 - Doc Rock
uh well, this is gonna sound super bad. My brother-in-law's a sergeant in honolulu police department.
0:59:19 - Leo Laporte
I don't get in trouble, nice you don't get in trouble, but ask him.
0:59:23 - Doc Rock
If they have readers, try to show it to somebody they have no idea like oh, I need to see your license, and you show them and they're like well, uh, yeah but I want to see the actual license, right, yeah, yeah, they just don't understand what it is, so it's kind of hilarious that that's the the case.
I think it's just going to require some education and we're really slow with these sort of things, so it takes a while for it to matriculate through the system so that people understand that this is an acceptable form of id I want.
0:59:52 - Leo Laporte
I'll be curious to see how France uh handles it. Indonesians can now buy it by by the iPhone 16. You may remember it was banned in Indonesia until Apple.
1:00:05 - Alex Lindsay
Spent money? I don't know.
1:00:07 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't want to say it's a bribe, but they were excited to when you talk about bribes.
1:00:12 - Alex Lindsay
and then there's, like I would like, $100 million in unmarked bills before we let your Well ban in Indonesia went in force in october of last year's uh.
1:00:23 - Leo Laporte
The government officials called it a tricky negotiation. In theory, this is from apple. Inside of the ban was because apple was failing to comply with indonesia's local content quota, which requires 35 to 40 percent of components to be sourced in indonesia. Apple's never met that quota, uh. So then Indonesia said well, you can invest in in our country in other ways. Apple proposed 109.6 million investment but only spent 94.53 million. So uh app following Indonesia enforcing the local quota. Apple tried offering more money, like developer training, but it only offered $10 million. So Indonesia rejected that, then rejected $100 million, then both agreed on a simple $1 billion. It's not exactly clear what's going on. Apple's billion-dollar offer was to make air tags in indonesia.
1:01:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Of course they're not in the phone they're going for more investment in factories and infrastructure in indonesia. Like related related to apple, not just hey, just give us. This wasn't like a donation to like the inauguration party. This was like we want you to invest more. Yeah, and they felt, and they felt like they had been a little bit slighted, or at least they were using that as an excuse to put the hammer down. But you've got to admit that was a real Kaiser Soze move. Indonesia showed other countries what real motivation is like. It's like okay, guess what? We?
are going to make it not only not ban the sale of your new iPhone here, we will ban the sale of iPhones in here to say the use. We will have our ministers basically say that tell everybody, hey, if you see somebody with an iPhone, they might be a criminal, call a cop. And apple said okay, we probably can't just simply like wait this one out. They do seem serious about wanting their money.
Let's open some good faith negotiations neither Apple nor Indonesia have revealed how the band was finally settled, so I leave it to your imagination you see these t-shirts, you usually can only get them at the Apple campus, but we're going to give them to you right net, right here.
1:02:42 - Leo Laporte
Pass, alex lindsey says they're the best. So good, so good. Um, okay, instagram may be coming to the ipad after 15 years. I don't know why people are still so worried about this, but uh there hasn't been an ipad app which is weird yeah, what? Yeah? Who cares well? I mean this is from the information, apple is now developing a native ipad app meta meta developing yeah what who'd I say is it apple no, no, it's coming from uh meta.
In fact, um, adam mosseri said that. Uh, you know at an event that maybe they're working on something. I don't know? Yeah, instagram is also working on a version of the instagram app designed for ipads, according to a current employee, which could further drive usage of instagram. Why did they not do it for so long?
1:03:40 - Doc Rock
listen, that one bugs my brain. There's two apps on the ipad right now that just absolutely chaps my coconuts and it's the ipad as the instagram app on ipad, because I mean, the surface is there. There's a lot of space forward and something that a lot of people don't realize if you live stream to Instagram from the RTMP style on a web browser, it shows up in 16 by 9. On the phone, it shows up 9 by 16. And then the other app that just crushes me hardcore is the YouTube app, and it's just a simple thing. Keyboard shortcuts, when connected to the magic pad, do not work. The space bar works, but none of the rest of. I can't mute, I can't speed up, I can't jump a couple of seconds, none. And I can't at mention at leo laporte, like it, just doesn't freaking, and that's work.
1:04:33 - Leo Laporte
That's google, though, right not?
1:04:34 - Doc Rock
not apple. No, I fully understand and there's no reason, and I've even yelled at our buddy when I was hanging out with him like I'm like, I know you don't work in that department, but walk over there and be like my friends are mad at me.
This is really silly. For it not to work, the idea of breaking it because someone's going to turn around and buy an android tablet never going to happen, bro. That mentality is just dumb and that makes no sense why those two apps, of all the apps out there, don't work. Because they have the money, they have the team, they have development, they can even just go steal any of the other apps that has been made to solve this problem. Just hire that person for like 50 bucks, because most of them apps are free and they're just like crappy adware. So, yeah, those two are just silly at this point just like crappy adware.
1:05:23 - Leo Laporte
So yeah it, those two are just silly at this point. This is a small paragraph in a larger article in the information about uh mosseri talking about how we'll be ready when tiktok is banned. Of course, uh, the tiktok uh ban has been extended for another 75 days, but with this trade war, uh, it seems unlikely that china would improve, would approve a sale of tiktok to the us. So I mean, who knows what's going to happen?
1:05:45 - Doc Rock
this is another one of those well, it's also happening because the edits app is is upon us.
1:05:49 - Leo Laporte
The edits app is supposed to come out on the 25th it's instagram's video editing app to compete with correct, and then you're going to want to be able to do the edits app on ipad.
1:05:59 - Doc Rock
So the only reason why it's coming right now is because the data shows a ton of people edit cap cut on the ipad oh, interesting.
1:06:09 - Leo Laporte
So cap cut on. The ipad is an ipad app yeah, and it's glorious.
1:06:13 - Doc Rock
That's from pencil you can get. You can get nuts with it, oh, interesting.
1:06:16 - Leo Laporte
That's from t TikTok, from ByteDance's company that owns TikTok. So it would be banned, presumably along with TikTok. Maybe, I don't know, it was temporarily banned. At this point I don't think Trump's going to ban TikTok, I think he's just going to keep extending the 75 days. At some point, Congress may step up and say hey, you know, we did pass a law banning it.
1:06:37 - Andy Ihnatko
By the way, this isn't like stopping social security payments to elderly widows. This is actually a law here this counts, this counts.
1:06:48 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, okay, maybe I should stay away from those stories. Apple maps on the web leaves beta no one notices nobody even cares well it's, it's only.
1:07:08 - Andy Ihnatko
It's only interesting in the sense that, like it was always super, super weird that it doesn't even the beta did not work on android devices. It's like what is it are you doing with open web technologies that you have to block it from working on, like Chromium-based browsers? What did you not do? What is part of your strategy? What is the tactics? It is utterly insane to think that anybody who has macOS is going to be using the web version instead of like one of the app versions of it. And if you're not helping Maps to penetrate to some percentage of the Android market, why are you even doing it so? Okay, good, it's now there.
I mean, I agree mostly with what Alex has said about Apple Maps in the past. It is so much prettier and is so much more pleasant and experienced. It doesn't have the same depth of knowledge, doesn't have the same uh level of features, but in terms of, I need to find, so I need to find out where it addresses and navigate to it, and or I'm going to be spending some time in a meeting in this building. I want to look around the neighborhood and see what else is cool that I might want to do while I'm there. It's so much better it's not not better enough that I'll probably like switch off of maps for it. But it's got it's. It's got a certain lessonality about it.
1:08:28 - Leo Laporte
I like it you can go to mapsapplecom now in your browser instead of betamapsapplecom, although it still says uh, beta, let's. Let's click on the. Uh, there you go. Look at that rockefeller center, look at that. You can zoom in. You can see all the sites in new york city I mean I, I guess, I feel like it's.
1:08:52 - Alex Lindsay
It's kind of like if I have the native app on the phone, right computer and the where do I guess the? Problem is if I'm an android user, why would I that's who it's for google maps, yeah, but like. Why would I not use google, like it's the native google maps that's on, that's on the platform, so that the native apps for these are so good? I just don't understand, like why?
1:09:14 - Leo Laporte
do you ever? Do you use apple maps on your android or do you just use google maps?
1:09:19 - Andy Ihnatko
no, I mean, I mean, now I've got a bookmark, I've got a folder with navigation stuff. Now I have a bookmark in that folder.
Again, it's more pleasant to look at. But the thing is, muscle memory is so hard to overcome. And once again, when it comes to looking around and saying, oh wow, there's actually a thrift store near where I'm having my lunch meeting, maybe I'll go there afterwards. How late are they open on that day? Are there some pictures of it inside? Do I have some idea of how good they are?
That stuff is not what Apple Maps does well In terms of looking around at a beautiful cartoon version of the neighborhood.
Really, really good to make me actually want to like look around at a cartoon version of the neighborhood. But I mean, it's like I said it just, if you're going to even at all create a web version of the, of Apple Maps again, it just seems insane not to make it work with the, the, the, the default web browser on damn near 67%, 70% of all the phones that are out there. It's darn weird, but they fixed it. But they fixed it. I mean, I think it's more interesting to ask again why do they think that a web version is really, really important? I think it has to do with shopping, it has to do with businesses and I think that's a long-range plan that we're not going to find out anything about for another like three or four or five years, but obviously they need to put, they need to plant a start line here in 2024, 2025, if they're going to be able to do what they want to do in 2028, 2029.
1:10:54 - Leo Laporte
So okay, we'll watch apple is rebranding its ad business to Apple ads. Okay, yeah, I won the pool, it was Apple search ads. They decided save some ink and just call it Apple ads. Evidently.
1:11:13 - Alex Lindsay
Bodie McAppleface was taken, yeah, bodie.
1:11:17 - Leo Laporte
But part of the reason is it's not just in search anymore, right? So before it was just a top of the reason is it's not just in search anymore, right? So before it was a just a top of the search results. Today advertisers, according to apple, can run ads in multiple places across the app store.
1:11:29 - Andy Ihnatko
So we've decided to change our name apple ads everywhere yeah, people forget they have an ad business, but they do, and so there's a reason for them to know more stuff about you and the only reason I mean honestly, I really think the reason apple doubled down on privacy is because their ad business was so crappy they thought, well, okay, we'll just embrace it you know that's always been a thing. Again, I do believe that their belief in the importance of privacy is genuine and sincere.
However, that that also means that, because they don't know how to make any money off of compromising people's privacy, means that anytime there's an argument in a meeting, they say it's easy for that person to get shouted down, whereas when there's an argument about hey, wouldn't it be great if, like you know how great our iPhone camera is? It'd be great if, when they send it to someone who is not using iMessage, that looked just as great as it did on the iPhone, that argument gets shouted down in a big hurry because it affects sales of hardware.
1:12:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, All right, I think this might be a time for the Vision Pro segment. What do you say? We have our own music. This is how long it's been, doc rock. We now have a vision pro and wait hold on doc. There, doc. There's another version.
1:13:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Vision Pro Vision, pro Vision, pro Please don't go.
1:13:26 - Leo Laporte
We have really more jingles than we have vision for news, but that's okay. Uh, actually, uh, maybe we do have some news because apparently, according to mark herman, once again apple is working on a pair of headsets, uh, one of which will be, uh, tethered to the mac. So I don't know, has he changed his tune? Like he was saying they're not going to do it, now he's saying they're going to do it.
1:13:47 - Andy Ihnatko
Um, yeah, I think he, I think he sort of glanced at that in january.
He made a report in january about how they've a couple of other vision pro projects have been canceled and anything that she mentioned that in this newsletter piece, uh.
But the idea of a vision pro that's tethered to the mac again, this is not like a long, long 800 word, like explosive piece of news, it was just oh, here's some information we picked up. There's these two models, but the idea of having a vision pro that's tethered to the mac potentially seems like a is very interesting to me because I'm getting more and more interested in the idea of acquiring a headset as an external display that will work with my MacBook, that will work with my Android phone, that will work with my iPad, stuff like that, to leave the compute on the Mac, also have the device drawing power from the Mac. That basically means that the chip count gets drastically reduced. We don't have to have a battery on a hip or anything like that. We can reduce the weight in so many different ways. If we decide that this is no longer a breakthrough spatial computing device, it is simply a very smart external display for all of our other devices. That seems kind of intriguing.
1:15:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.
1:15:07 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, they also pointed out that in our Vision Pro segments in the past we've mentioned that a lot of the use cases, a lot of medical setups are using it as like surgical display devices, because when people, when surgeons, are using, again, camera guided surgery, normally they have like these screens that they have to really work hard to position where they want them to go, and a lot of these surgeons are loving the fact that they can just simply be wearing this device, this display, and have a virtual display in their line of sight exactly where they want it to be. So the idea of having less latency, of an actual corded device like that seems like an intriguing idea. Again, whether they're going to be charging like $300 to $500, which is the cost of a lot of these devices that are just external displays, remains to be seen. But less than $1,000 for, again, external display but it has some compute power so it doesn't necessarily have to just be an external display. I think that's really, really interesting.
1:16:10 - Leo Laporte
Gurman does point out that the plan is up in the air with the tariff uncertainty. One of the new headsets will seek to address the issues of price and weight by reducing, though reducing the cost may even be more challenging with the possibility of tariffs. He writes Vision Pro, of course, is made in China. The other headset now he said in January I mentioned Glerman, said that Apple had scrapped work on AR glasses that would tether to Mac, but now he says he's envision pro, the plugs in the mac. Um, would you, would you all I'd be interested in. That depends what the price is. I'm not sure I'd want to pay more than 1500 bucks for it. Would you guys be interested? Because it's it's almost another display, right?
1:16:53 - Alex Lindsay
that's the idea I'm still pretty happy with the one I have.
1:16:57 - Doc Rock
Yeah, I'm saying I like having it where I don't need to have it tethered. Okay, um, and it's only because just the absolute freedom it gives. And you know, I don't mind being that dork on the airplane with the apple vision pro, although I get a lot of questions, but uh, it's funny.
1:17:14 - Alex Lindsay
You know what I'm amazed. That is when I'm on the, on the, on the plane with vision pro. No one asked me anything like like I. You know I get like. I got one person sat there.
1:17:24 - Leo Laporte
I move away from people wearing Vision Pros. I just say can I have another row, stuart, please?
1:17:29 - Alex Lindsay
No one even says anything, except for the. I was playing chess one time and the guy, when we were getting ready to get off the plane, the guy was like I got to know what you were doing and I was like, oh, it's playing chess. He's like, oh, it totally makes sense.
1:17:45 - Doc Rock
He goes like I just couldn't figure it out. Your hands were just going like this and I couldn't understand what you were doing. When I had it the last time I took it. On the plane. The lady asked me if I had a portable CPAP. I was like no, it's Apple Vision, bro. And she's like, oh, you mean like those glasses? And I was like yeah, just so I can watch movies like at a high clip.
1:18:05 - Leo Laporte
But the f1 Netflix, f1 Apple Vision Pro, just right in there so one of the things Gurman does say is it's all a stepping stone toward Tim Cook's grand vision, which he's been after for 10 years. He wants augmented reality glasses. He's made this idea according to a top priority for the company and is hell-bent the words from mark german's mouth hell-bent on creating an industry-leading product before meta can. As you know, meta has shown those orion glasses, but they say they're years off. Tim. Tim cares about nothing else, says someone with knowledge of the matter. Now that means that someone works at Apple, by the way. That's just somebody with knowledge of the matter Could be a reporter at the next desk, could be Wayne Ma over at the information. Tim cares about nothing else. It's the only thing he's really spending time on from a product development standpoint, if we believe this report it sounds like this.
1:19:08 - Doc Rock
Do you believe it? I believe it for one particular thing, one particular thing only. Like everybody is talking about, what is the next thing that replaces the iPhone? Just from owning the meta Ray-Bans for the last year and using them extensively like I wear them every day at NAV the new frontier of what's available, as far as you know devices and selling glasses changed the way social media works right now. Right, social media right now requires there to be a scene for you to look at and interact and things like that. But if you just have glasses, that that just takes that whole party out of the thing. But it is a little bit more humanly conductive because there's not really a barrier between you and the next person.
1:19:49 - Leo Laporte
We all know that, doc rock, that the real problem is. This is a pipe dream, it's a fantasy, it's a fairy tale. The technology to do?
1:19:56 - Doc Rock
that is not flight and and airplane flight and submarine yeah.
1:20:01 - Leo Laporte
So you're in the equivalent of 1925, talking about landing on the moon.
1:20:06 - Doc Rock
It is a distant goal it is. It is a pipe dream. I think that the tech moves faster than now than ever before, so I don't think it's super far out. It's something that we will see in our lifetime. But I think it just changes the game game and it takes away some of the the nastiness of like, oh, everyone's putting the phone in between them and another human which I'm like you just have nothing to say because no, no, we all agree it's a good idea.
1:20:31 - Leo Laporte
I just I don't know if I agree that it's going to happen anytime in our lifetime. Uh german writes. A variety of technologies need to be perfected in extraordinarily high-resolution displays, a high-performance chip and a tiny battery that could offer hours of power each day. Apple also needs to figure out applications that make such a device as compelling as the iPhone. All this at a price that won't turn off consumers. That seems difficult. I understand why Tim Cook wants it. In fact, I think part of it is just ego. But Tim's 60. What is he? He 65, he's not going to be around long enough. But he wants I think he wants a signature product.
1:21:09 - Andy Ihnatko
He doesn't have one yeah, but he's also smart enough and humble enough to know that sometimes, if you want a cathedral to be here, you have to be the person who starts it and not the person who lives long enough to see it created. So much of what would involve the smart glasses is stuff that Apple needs to start working on today, not the least of which is the AI about it. I'm sorry to bring Google back into it, but they demonstrated at a TED Talk they brought up another working sample of their Gemini Live glasses, more like kind of spectacles, like the kind that Doc Rock is wearing. Not terribly, they have a presence, but they don't look like you're wearing something weird on your face.
And the ability running the Gemini model on the device where it was doing a live demonstration of oh, where did I put my coffee? And we say, oh well, you left your coffee, like on that stand, like over there to the left. That's the sort of stuff that they're going to have to be able to get these glasses to do. My biggest fear, my biggest worry, is that Apple is going to wait until the technology is that the hardware technology has advanced to the state where they can build the device that they're imagining and not thinking about. Well, while we wait, can we build something like the meta ray band, something that is just simply siri inside your glasses, meaning it doesn't have a display vision pro models are I mean, isn't that what they're they're saying?
1:22:31 - Alex Lindsay
not for three, five hundred dollars, they are I mean, the problem I still think is really content, you know, like, and they just, you know, the cameras are now getting close. Um, you know, I don't think that I don't know what's going on at Apple when they make content. I mean, the baseball one just came out last week or the week before, and baseball is a horrible thing to shoot with with immersive, like you know, like as someone who's done immersive for the last 20 years, like if someone says, hey, let's shoot baseball, let's not like let's, let's let's not do that.
1:23:01 - Leo Laporte
Doesn't need content, though. Ar is the content is the real world. What you need, though and I know, I know it's just out of software that can interpret and display stuff, and none of that exists at this point. I mean, you want to tell you the display?
1:23:15 - Doc Rock
part is where we're getting stuck, because people have it in their head that these things have to have a display like a computer, and I'm saying for right now, at this point, they do not. They need to just do what the meta is doing.
1:23:27 - Leo Laporte
We don't have to worry about display technology, I don't think for some reason I don't think Tim wants to do uh, the meta Ray Bans or anything like that, and that's that's what that's why I worry about.
1:23:36 - Andy Ihnatko
Like they could make some really great products right now again including an Apple, an Apple display that is a wearable, that doesn't even necessarily have the same quality of display as the absolutely top of the line $3,500 Apple Vision Pro. We want a device that is commensurate with the sort of display technology that we have on our mobile devices and we don't necessarily have to compete with again these $250 spectacles that you see that are simply floating displays. But we will make sure that it's affordable. We will make sure that we don't have one of the features as we engineer. This is going to be that we are not trying to develop a $2,000 thing that is simply something that people can admire. We want to build a $500 thing that people will actually walk into the app line up at the Apple store on launch day and actually buy.
1:24:23 - Leo Laporte
Imagine if you could be wearing these glasses and do the same thing you did earlier with your phone, exactly, but instead with the glasses, without in completely unobtrusively.
1:24:35 - Andy Ihnatko
I almost always have my phone in my pocket. I don't necessarily need to have the compute on the on the wearable device. Once again, it's a wonderful ideal that I'm going to have a beautiful augmented reality, extended reality experience in thick Buddy Holly style glasses where the compute is all there, the battery is all there, the display is full color and 4K and no latency and all this other stuff. It's okay if you start off by saying it would be great if there's a camera that's mounted into the glasses my prescription glasses that I wear all the time anyway with audio of them getting feedback through the side pieces of the glasses, so that when I ask my personal assistant questions, it can include in the response. Oh well, I see that you're standing. I see that the third item on the menu is spicy but not terribly hot. Maybe you want to order that that sort of stuff is spicy but not terribly hot. Maybe you want to order that that sort of stuff that will get people to the Apple Store for a demo and realizing that, wow, I've got $549.
1:25:27 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to make another $549 within the next week or so, is Apple the most likely company to make these.
1:25:34 - Doc Rock
It's coming because the proof of concept to what Andy just said already exists. It's called PhoneView in iOS I mean macOS so all I got to do is take that and move that over to the glasses. My phone can stay in my pocket, I can get an update, I can see the notifications. I don't have to take it out, but I can get a little bit more context and a little bit more information. So if we start-.
1:25:53 - Leo Laporte
I feel like, though, there's a big difference between what Vision, what Vision Pro is, which is VR. Yes.
1:25:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Actually it's XR.
1:26:02 - Leo Laporte
They call it XR, but how much of the time that you're wearing your Vision Pros are you looking at the world around you? A lot for me.
1:26:10 - Alex Lindsay
Really yeah, oh they got to go to the bathroom. Well, no, I just use a lot of things that are interacting with my environment and I guess the thing is and and you know, I may, I may not be typical like an ar glasses, like for the vr glasses, that was a no-brainer for me to buy them. I know what I want, I know what I want to get out of them. For the ar glasses, they're gonna have to hit it over the moon, like they got the. You know, for me to buy an ar glasses for $1,500, they would have to hit that ball so hard that it went into the orbit of the moon, like you know because I could care less about ar.
That'll be my reality, for me to put the glasses on, and this is someone I mean I bought the google glass, I mean the moment you could get it, and I spent a year putting kind of wearing it, not wearing it. Everything else, uh, I didn't. Particularly. I didn't find them useful over time. You know, like, and you know, the most useful feature that I had from the Google Glass was the ability to see what I was shooting. If I wanted to shoot something, I had a heads-up display that showed me what I was able to display. But outside of that I just kind of slowly.
You know, and it was interesting when they launched Google Glass you could do hangouts back and forth with other people. And then they took that away for a bunch of security reasons and as soon as they did that, it was dead, like I just never put it on again. You know, I was like this is the coolest thing ever. I can sit there and talk to people and show people stuff. And then they took it away and then I was like, okay, I don't need to glasses that I'm going to wear all the time. And as soon as you put a camera on it, I'm going to be like well, isn't?
1:27:47 - Leo Laporte
this, telling that we haven't really improved on Google Glass in 15 years. Well, I'd like to see it.
1:27:53 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I'd just like to see what the behavior is going to be that I really am going to want to wear these all the time. I just don't know. Like Mike, the glasses I wear glasses every day, but the glasses that I'm wearing right now are as heavy as it's ever going to get Like which is funny, because I put the Apple vision pro on doesn't bother me. The weight doesn't bother me at all, but it's something I'm going to wear around all day while I'm doing other things. This, these glasses, are as heavy as I'm going to put on for any prolonged period of time. You know, and, um, I'm used to wear wire frames, you know, and so so I, you know, I just don't.
I have a hard time envisioning, uh, an ar glasses. I'm on the opposite end of. I just can't even imagine putting ar glasses on and leaving them on, because I'm super sensitive to the weight over long periods of time. You know, like I, uh, you know when and when they're just like putting them on and pulling forward. I found, with a google glass, I just felt like I was getting pulled. I felt like, literally, I was leaning to one side all the time. It was just too heavy on one side.
1:28:47 - Andy Ihnatko
The only reason why I stopped wearing. I love my Google Glass. I used it a lot. There are a lot of circumstances which I would absolutely be wearing it, like when I'm at a conference and I just need to remember things or quickly take notes when I'm going from one meeting to another. But by far the the biggest hang-up was hey, is that Google Glass? And because people would either be like wow, how does that work? I've never seen it before too. Oh, you're one of those. I don't want my picture taken. I'm not taking your picture.
1:29:16 - Alex Lindsay
Well, you're probably taking.
1:29:17 - Andy Ihnatko
no, I'm not taking your picture. You have no idea how warm the CPU on the side of my head gets if I take more than like 10 seconds with a video, Trust me.
1:29:24 - Alex Lindsay
Well, the funny thing is like I had the entire like, like, not entire, but like a big chunk of of the basically Rwanda's Secret Service for Kagame lined up to put them on. They wanted to see him on and I taught them all to have it. Ok, take a picture. And then, when they finished, I had a security look at it, goes. And I taught them all to have it. Okay, take a picture. And then, when they finished, the head of security looked at it and goes that is very cool, but do not wear the Google eye when the president is in the room. It was like we're having fun here, but, okay, stop.
1:29:52 - Leo Laporte
All right, anything else in the Vision Pro segment? Jason Snell says we are the leading Vision Pro podcast, so we better come up with something Is. Jason Snell says we are the leading vision pro podcast, so we better come up with something?
1:30:04 - Alex Lindsay
no, that was. Is there new immersive content? Well, that was, I talked about baseball. They did they did.
1:30:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we saw that. We talked about last week too yeah, yeah. I, I just don't like since then.
1:30:11 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, no you know, saturday, saturday Night Live just posted a whole bunch of like 360 videos from this SNL 50 oh, that would be cool and I'm just one. It's like weird that like there's no simple way to simply say wow, yes, absolutely my 35. I.
1:30:25 - Leo Laporte
I wonder how, if Apple's doing, it where your medic quests, it would work is there a way to?
1:30:29 - Andy Ihnatko
is there a way to get this running on viewable on the Apple Vision, bro? Because we will take that content for free if if NBC is simply posting it it'll definitely work.
1:30:38 - Leo Laporte
On metaquest yeah, can you look at. Uh, if you have a 3d video or a 360 video on youtube, can you use the vision pro to look at that and move around in it?
1:30:48 - Alex Lindsay
no, I don't think so. No, no, you're your own on the metaquest, yeah, and if you have it on your own video, you can.
1:30:56 - Leo Laporte
You know like right if you shoot it with an iPhone or theta.
1:30:59 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, okay, just curious oh, it works with the theta. Yeah, yeah.
1:31:05 - Leo Laporte
So all my theta, like really paid off to have that, but you have a theta app. Is that how you can do it?
1:31:10 - Alex Lindsay
no, it's just in my photo doc oh, it's in your photos so in anything that's that's tagged as a 360 shows up as 360.
1:31:18 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's, then, what nbc should do. They should put it in their Apple photos and make a shared album for all of us.
1:31:24 - Alex Lindsay
Yes, exactly. Well, if they just put them up somewhere we could download them. We'd be able to do that.
1:31:28 - Leo Laporte
Right, but YouTube. It won't work with YouTube.
1:31:30 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I don't know. I wonder if you ripped it down. I don't know what the format is Right thought of that.
1:31:42 - Leo Laporte
Can you work on that for us? I will. I will, okay, work on it right now. Like that's your vision pro segment number one. We're done talking the vision pro. Every time I put these meta ray bands on, it goes like it's ready to do something exciting, but it isn't doing anything exciting. I guess I could play music on it.
1:32:06 - Doc Rock
The speaker part of it is very good. It's very good One thing I used it for when I was at NAB is. I would say hey, what her face is. Send this story to Instagram, or take a picture and send it to my Instagram, Because I'm updating it and they me right, because they're not doing that um, the speaker side of it is really, really good and you know, I would just use it to make phone calls, just because I don't have to take my hand out of my pocket.
Yes, you can do it with airpods, but that requires putting them in, because I don't want to elaborate bluetooth headset that requires putting them in elaborate Bluetooth headset. Yeah, it does way more than that, that's.
1:32:46 - Leo Laporte
That's a little shorting it, but yeah, for the most part, yes, uh, and well, it's AirPods with lenses, yeah, yeah, and it can take a bit, and a camera, yeah, so it does a few things. I just actually like those Technologies. There is not even a like hint or whisper of the technologies we're going to need for these to exist out there. I mean, the battery life alone is going to be an issue. You've got to have displays that could do heads up. Nobody's got that down. The Google Glass is still the state of the art in that realm.
1:33:19 - Doc Rock
I think the heads-up display is still somewhat overrated, because the information that you need at hand on any given day doesn't necessarily have to be visual.
1:33:28 - Leo Laporte
So if you have AR glasses, it's just going to be all audio.
1:33:33 - Doc Rock
Listen, I'm going to be the person that gets in trouble with the whole chat. Ar is trash. I don't need AR.
1:33:37 - Leo Laporte
If I need AR in reality, I'll just do acid.
1:33:40 - Doc Rock
I need better things than fake things in my environment. That just doesn't work for me If I'm an interior decorator maybe I thought you were excited about it.
1:33:49 - Leo Laporte
I misinterpreted what you were talking about.
1:33:51 - Doc Rock
No, no, no, I think Alex and I are on the same point. The AR doesn't really do anything for me, right? However, give me information that I need at my fingertips, things that I can invoke by voice uh, send emails for me, reply to emails for me, but it's all by audio. I think the audio side of it is perfectly fine now well, apple is ready.
I mean, if apple puts cameras if apple puts cameras in the airpods, they're ready to do that well, yeah, I'm saying if I can get some accurate camera data, say you know, I'm over here and I got a pixis 12k out and I'm saying if I can get some accurate camera data, say you know, I'm over here and I got a pixis 12k out and I'm it's like telling me some stuff hey, you're about to be uh oversaturated, uh, you need to crank your nd up to five or something like that. Like that would be helpful, right, but other than that, ar is just dookie so you don't want uh, that's interesting.
1:34:39 - Leo Laporte
You don't want something. You see, it's all in your ear. You need a camera. Maybe you just have a little camera you glue to your forehead or something.
1:34:45 - Doc Rock
If I could, see it and it made sense. All of like Call of Duty or Halo, yes, but so far no one's even close to that, so that's not important for right now. Yeah, yeah.
1:34:57 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm 100% with you, doc. Yeah, I'm 100% with you, doc. I've been saying for years that when I'm talking about virtual reality assistants or augmented reality assistants, all I want is one Bluetooth earbud.
1:35:09 - Leo Laporte
I don't even need two you want her, you want her.
1:35:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, yeah, just allow me to tap the side of this thing and ask a question like convert this unit to this unit? Or hey, uh, whereas am I close to, if I'm close to, an atm? And then it simply asks my phone for gps. The gps says, yeah, there's one like that should be nearby on the next quarter. You don't need cameras and you don't need screens.
I think that a camera pin that communicates by minutes wirelessly so that it can give visual input to the virtual assistant would be handy. But again, give me not even two, one earbud. Give me the other ear hole that I can listen to the real world around me, but one that allows me to have an ongoing conversation with my assistant, including tap, take a note or remind me of this, or when I get near a place that has good bagels, let me know I'm close by because I need to pick up bagels, that sort of stuff. That's. All you need is one good earbud, and that is that. You'll make me so much of a. I will be using that assistant all day long. I'll be wearing that earbud until my ears are saying, yeah, could you switch up, dude?
1:36:17 - Doc Rock
And here's one that comes in handy. Here's one that comes in absolutely handy andy speaking of another andy. So we're in any being. We're walking down the back side of south.
I'm going to the creator lab because I'm about to do this thing with uh opus clips and my moderator, who I happened to take to his first nab, who was looking ahead as I was looking down, and you go, oh, just to head up. Uh, andy carlucci was approaching and I was like cool. So I was looking down and you go, oh, just to head up. Uh, andy Carlucci was approaching and I was like cool. So I lift up my head and I go hey, andy, you know, get a chance to chat with Andy real quick, if my glasses could say there's Alex Lindsay and the guy walking with Alex Lindsay is Leo Laporte from twit. You know, these are the quick information that you need to know so you can look like a responsible human being in an environment like nab off the chain. Don't say anything stupid about panasonic. That person that's right there is uh works for the lumix division. All right, cool. So then I'll keep my mouth shut on the sr. They just came, do you think?
1:37:16 - Leo Laporte
the world, though, is um. I think I feel like there's a little backlash about being always connected, and the world is kind of now saying maybe we shouldn't be always connected, maybe we shouldn't have our phones in our hands all the time.
1:37:28 - Doc Rock
I think that is said from people who aren't interesting, and I'm going to be a completely, because I don't have that problem around you. Guys, if we were in public, we're perfectly fine. Nobody has their phone out unless we're showing off a cool app. We're not hanging with my niece we're engaged but with her parents she's heading out on her app and they blame the phone.
1:37:45 - Leo Laporte
I'm like no you guys are not, you're not interested. You guys are not interesting her.
1:37:51 - Doc Rock
Like I can talk to her about K-pop because I understand it. You know what I mean. Like take an interest.
1:37:56 - Leo Laporte
I I've noticed this among a certain demographic younger demographic that sometimes they don't even talk together, they just are both on their phones and then they show each other memes and then they go back to their phone and their communication is the sharing of memes.
1:38:12 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and I wonder, you know, I'm trying to figure that out because my kids started with technology when they were, I mean, as early as they could, you know, two years old, three years old, but I didn't.
I was pretty hardcore about no social media until until recently, um and um and it's, and I find that they're just not addicted to their, to their phones.
Like there's not, there's not this level of, you know, connection to their phone that their friends have, and but even even talking to them, they talk a lot about the fact that it's starting to become more and more a cultural thing within school. This is in high schools, of disconnecting, you know, like, oh, I'm not getting, you know, I was off, I was disconnected, and it becomes. They're just starting to think, you know, I think that that backlash that you're talking about is happening at the high school level, where they just, you know, there's a certain amount, a growing amount of respect, of like, oh, I disconnected for saturday, or I disconnected for the weekend, or I disconnected, you know, like it's kind of a cool thing to do, as opposed to being hyper connected all the time. Good, so I think they're just tired of it. You know, like, I think at some point they just feel like their adrenals have been tweaked so high all the time that there's always the growing awareness.
1:39:24 - Doc Rock
Actually, jason mentioned it last week Before our connection was around these cultural events that happened. So Game of Thrones come out, we're all at the water cooler talking about that. Back in the day it was Roots or Battlestar Galactica or something of that nature. These events are few and far between right now. Only sports is the connecting one for right now, but I think there's, you know, people are working on ways to bring some of that back, and that's also a part of it too. We don't have that grand thing that we all watched and could talk about the next day Whether we wanted to see it or not. We had no choice because there was three channels.
1:40:03 - Alex Lindsay
And we got well and, to be fair on the ground, we didn't have a hundred years ago, we didn't really have that either. Like you know, there wasn't something that everyone was paying attention to at the same time a hundred years ago. You know, like this, there's this concept of mass media that pulled us all into where we have, these moments that we all feel like we have to be part of. But I think that in many ways we're not. You know, we may be kind of pushing, you know, backwards, you know, and we may find out that nothing in the last hundred years made anything particularly better.
1:40:27 - Leo Laporte
I think I'm starting to realize that for sure. Penicillin polio vaccine, pokemon Go 80 years, pokemon Go, definitely. Apple's launching a new recycling promo for the next month 20 discount on airpods and other accessories if you recycle your old ones. I think that's that's for earth day, I think, which is coming up, but, uh, they should keep that going. Earth day is april 22nd this year. Oh, it's a week from today. We'll be, yes, yeah, burning up. We should celebrate. Let's all wear green I want.
1:41:02 - Andy Ihnatko
But I wonder what they're going to do with, like, the airpods. Like do they have? Are they putting it? Do they have a system so that they can actually be recycled and refurbed and resold with new batteries, or is it just going to be? There's? There's just no way to service these. We are just going to sell this in a big bulk pack to a disassembler that's just going to crush them up and use mangas to take out the, the precious the earth metals and whatever.
1:41:26 - Leo Laporte
Well, they're more precious now, now that china's cutting us off, so maybe and finally, you can now get colored cables from beats, that's no small, thing, I guess not.
1:41:42 - Andy Ihnatko
Beats is a lifestyle brand. Beats is what you buy. I know people who have many like six different styles of headphones because they want to match color and they want to match style to like what they're going to be doing that day. So that's not for Beats. That's not a silly proposition. No, I got my orange.
1:41:59 - Leo Laporte
Beats. Actually, I meant to do a review of these. These are those new beats with the hooks over the ears, and I'm a little disappointed, to be honest, because the hook keeps it from really getting in my ear like the airpods pro do. So I don't get quite as good as seal, so actually the sound isn't all that good. I thought for working out this, these would be better. Uh, and it turns out I end up I'm using my airpods pro because they sit in my ear just fine and the sound is better. So I'm a little less excited about these.
1:42:29 - Andy Ihnatko
And, by the way, orange not a good color well for me, like if they they'll be a good color, if they help me, like not lose these damn things.
1:42:40 - Leo Laporte
That's why I got orange yep, there'll be no question about a who's these were, and if I if I scan the room quickly, I can usually spot a little orange or just good for the bottom of the backpack, except for my internal of my backpack is orange for that exact reason oh well, then you're not going to use it.
So don't get orange cables 18.99 for a single cable. Usbc to c, a to c, c to lightning what? Oh wow, bolt, black surge, stone aka gray, nitro, navy and rapid red. No orange available. Rapid red slater this summer.
1:43:19 - Andy Ihnatko
Those names are very intimidating to me. My lifestyle cannot compete with anything Rapid, red or Blaze, orange or whatever.
1:43:26 - Leo Laporte
They are braided, which is nice.
1:43:29 - Andy Ihnatko
Sedentary Sienna.
1:43:31 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they're nice.
1:43:32 - Andy Ihnatko
Lazy Lilac. That's good for me.
1:43:34 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think they're nice looking cables Is $20 high, I think that's about right. Yeah, or you can get four dollar cables, but maybe they're not.
1:43:44 - Andy Ihnatko
Or you go to amazon and get no name ones that aren't quite as nice but they'll cost six bucks. I mean they're, they don't. They can charge 20 because it's a beats product and it matches everything. It's probably not. It's probably not garbage, so good all right, yeah, apple says we've. We've put hundreds of hours of testing we have a-minute video about how we chose the chamfering on this dimension of the plug connector.
1:44:08 - Doc Rock
Have you ever seen those cable tester things? No, there's a thing, yeah, when I was at Foxconn Does it have a name.
Yeah, no. So they take a machine and they build a machine and it has just a couple of servos and all it does is this to the cable over and over again. But they put a hundred of them in the rack. So if you put a hundred cables in there from the random test and the machines are all doing this and you run that for an hour, you have hundreds of hours of testing right, that's how you get mean time between failure and hard drives.
1:44:36 - Leo Laporte
You don't test them all, you do a deviation.
1:44:39 - Doc Rock
The crazy thing is the cold rooms, though. When you walk into the cold room, it is obnoxiously cold. I saw the machine that stabs the iPad. That just goes like this, just to check how many times you can press on the screen, and it's pretty interesting, it's cool stuff.
1:44:55 - Andy Ihnatko
Have you ever seen the tumble testers?
1:44:58 - Doc Rock
Yes, the tumble testers also.
1:45:03 - Andy Ihnatko
It's amazing to see like, wow, here's a, here's a 600 like tablet and they just okay, let's toss it in here. And just it starts spinning around, just going with all these oddly covered blocks and baffles inside. You just see them crashing from baffle to baffle to baffle and like, okay, it's not my tablet, but I'm glad to watch them here's a super interesting one for you.
1:45:21 - Doc Rock
I hope I don't get in trouble for saying this and Niles headquarters. At shore they buy liquid sweat, manufactured sweat. It is seven hundred and some odd dollars a gallon, but it's our closest thing to match. Give them a proper look at my sweat for a lot less.
1:45:40 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, test the. Actually Gallus sweats a lot less.
1:45:42 - Doc Rock
They test the pH and everything, so it's perfect. But they use that to make sure that SM58 is as bulletproof as it is. I have SM58 that is 37 years old. It's flawless, it still works and they've showed ones that have been through fires, run over by cars the whole nine yards. And in that building there's a guy his job is get this mic drop. He just dropped. Oh, that's good, that's a good job. I dropped my drops, mike's, and tested to see that they still work and there's a big sign and it says mike drop. I'm like bro, what do you do for a living? I drop mike's, I drop my job yeah.
1:46:18 - Andy Ihnatko
So this kind of stress testing is just amazing. Amazing because you make me think of. The NIST has a whole catalog of standards for like. If you need to test like, can this thing get out, can this stain get out, peanut butter or whatever, there is SRM 2387 specification for peanut butter. You can contact a lab who will sell you a $900 jar of peanut butter because that is exactly the standards that have been set for. If you're testing against peanut butter, here's a nationalized standard for peanut butter, just like here's a national standard for pencil lead, and it's like I wonder if they ever just have fun. It's like you know what we're going to make a sandwich with this. I'm going to make a PBbj with, with, with standardized bread and standardized jelly, and it's gonna cost eight thousand dollars.
1:47:05 - Leo Laporte
And I'm just gonna tell people I did it uh, before we get to the rumors of the week, there are quite a few. Let's take a little pause. You're watching MacBreak Weekly andy, not go? Alex lindsey and filling in for Jason Snell, the wonderful Doc Rock. Now on with the news rumor time. Uh, there's a lot of rumors, probably all of them bogus, uh, but I will run through them real quickly. Uh, ipad OS 19, which will be out in the fall, rumored to be more like Mac OS. We knew that it was going to have Vision Pro style, or knew that it was going to have vision pro style, or we thought it was going to have vision pro style round outcomes. But bloomberg's now saying mark german's now saying more like mac os. I'm told this year's upgrade will focus on productivity, multitasking and app window management with an eye on the device operating more like a mac.
1:47:59 - Andy Ihnatko
That sounds like good news. Yes, that, that's good news. They're talking about, hey, we'll make this less. We're not saying we're going to make this look like a Mac and operate like a Mac. They're just saying that we're trying to make people who actually use this $1,500 tablet for productivity we should actually make it easier to multitask and easier to work across multiple apps and multiple docs, which is an incredibly good thing. As someone who still loves his M1 MacBook Pro and uses it like he's using it right now.
1:48:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I actually. I've been using my iPad Air and not Air Pro a lot more, partly because of that tapestry app you guys recommended, which really has become kind of my beat check, my number one app that I use all day to keep looking for stories for these shows. I think this will be interesting. We'll probably see it at WWDC, right, or at least a tease of it at WWDC. We won't have to wait too long. He says the revamp is arriving about a year after Apple brought the M4 chip to the iPad Pro. So again, the iPad has a lot more horsepower than it needs, so maybe we could put it to use.
1:49:10 - Andy Ihnatko
It's always been true.
1:49:11 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, other rumors. Let's see there's a 20th anniversary iPhone. That would be 2027. So don't get your hopes up on that. One may finally go all screen according to german. I'm gonna whiz through these. We're also looking to see perhaps a foldable uh device. In jeff poo I don't know where who he is or where he comes from, but he is a rumor guy who say he's an analyst, I guess, who says it's late. Next year there could be another, not just a foldable phone, but an iPad fold, a 19-inch foldable device. So there'll be 19-inch and 8-inch foldable devices by fourth quarter of next year.
1:49:55 - Doc Rock
The question is why? Why does everybody want a foldable device? I don't get it. Am I weird? I don't get it. Am I weird? I don't get it.
1:50:02 - Alex Lindsay
Doc and I are both in the same boat. We're like I don't care about foldable devices.
1:50:07 - Doc Rock
I'm like why it serves no purpose.
1:50:09 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, no, I'm a big fan. As someone who spends a lot of time excuse me't spend double the cost of an iPad for it. I mean, if I made a lot more money than I do, maybe I would but I love the idea of something that transforms based on how you're actually using it. At the moment, there's a lot I don't know about seeing this shipping next year or whatever, but we see so many an acceleration of rumors and information from the supply chain about Samsung is going to be is the only vendor that they're considering. Samsung has a new like floating hinge design that minimizes or eradicates the ditch in the middle of it. So again, not this year or next year, necessarily, but it kind of encourages you to think that, yes, they're definitely serious about this. They're definitely not just building like a dozen of them for the labs. See how it works that they're working out. Here's how much would this cost to manufacture? How many could we manufacture within a certain time frame? It's very exciting. I really want to see it happen.
1:51:26 - Doc Rock
The foldables 12 to 24 makes sense, I get that, but like four to eight, I'm like why 12 to 24?
1:51:34 - Andy Ihnatko
I can't see, I can't give up if I had this and I could turn it into an iPad Mini when I need to, and the idea that I can have I'm wearing cargo pants right now, but I wouldn't be carrying a portable keyboard in my cargo pants but the idea of having a very, very small bag that simply has the ability to write and research. If I just have a couple hours of flight delay to actually deal with, that's really attractive. Again, my hitch and I think that would be true if I made like five times as much money as I did I can't see spending $2,800 for what is essentially a $1,000 phone. I would much rather buy an iPad and buy an iPhone and have both of them at the same time, particularly given that you have to compromise and a lot of makers make some really good foldable phones, but none of them have foldable phones where the camera is as good as their regular flagship phone. I wouldn't want to give that up.
I also wouldn't be able to give up the idea of instead of this phone lasting me five years, maybe even seven years. It will probably last maybe three before either the screen breaks or things wear out to the degree where it becomes a pain in the butt to use it or there's scratches on the display because they can't have like the same sort of durability for this, for the screen glass, as on other devices. I can't give up that sort of stuff. But if any company were to suddenly find a way to close a lot of those gaps for most of them price they'd get my attention super, super quick.
1:53:04 - Leo Laporte
All right, let's take a final break and get your picks of the week ready. Doc Rock is here filling in for Jason Snell, who is apparently at an airport in Dallas. He joined us in chat briefly just to wave and say, is Leo making fun of the Vision Pro still? And I said, yes, where is he going? He says he's on his way to memphis. Now I don't know what he's on some sort of uh interesting tour. I don't know. We don't know. We don't know what he's up to. Uh. Also here, of course, Andy Ihnatko, uh ihnatko.com and Ihnatko I h n-K-O on the blue sky where he skeets regularly. And Mr. officehours.Global, Alex Lindsay. Good to have all three of you. You know who else is good to have A good password manager.
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All right, now it's time for the picks of the week. Alex Lindsey, why don't you kick things off?
1:58:23 - Alex Lindsay
I know I've talked about this in the past, but I was just in like three meetings in a row where I brought this up and I was like I should talk about it again. My recommendation is Mix Effect Pro for the ATEM switcher. So this is a controller, a controlling software that runs on your iPad or on your iPhone.
1:58:41 - Leo Laporte
I use it and I love it. I got the Pro, I love it, it is.
1:58:45 - Alex Lindsay
Adam Tao put this together and it's not the same as anything else that's out there, because he Wiresharked how the ATEM panel talks to the ATEM. He analyzed it. So there's stuff that's way deeper than just the API and the biggest thing is that on an ATEM, super sources especially if you have any ATEM switcher that allows you to do super sources they're really painful. They're really painful to do on an ATEM and this just makes it completely seamless to to put those together and so um. So it's something that when someone has a um, when someone has an ATEM, I kind of, if you're getting an ATEM mini, extreme, pro or better, uh, it is something you just and pretty much every switch, every time you get an ATEM switcher, you should buy this as like. Just consider it being $50 more or whatever. I think it's $50. And but they have a 30 day, you know, trial that you can try out if you have an ATEM switcher. But it is magic Like it and it also just as a little note is that it will take OSC commands and convert those OSC commands to switcher commands.
So if you have a variety any OSC tools, that's, open, sound controls, that's what a lot of switchers use. If you have any kind of OSC controllers, you can just feed OSC into it and it's kind of like the atem whisperer for osc commands. And finally, because adam's really a hard, hardcore mac user, it supports shortcuts, so you can have shortcuts that are asking mix up I could use siri to switch cameras.
2:00:31 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you can yeah, you can.
2:00:34 - Alex Lindsay
So the thing is you could have shortcuts talking to MixEffect Pro, which then talks to your ATEM, our whole show. When you look at office hours in the morning, we have a bunch of commands that are happening from Isadora, but the ATEM whisperer that literally runs the entire morning show, all the things that are happening inside the switcher are all done with MixEffect Pro. It's converting all of those commands those OSC commands from Isadora in our case, into commands for the switcher, and so all the super sources that come up automatically and fill automatically. All those things are done with MixEffect Pro. It's just an incredible product written by one guy who knows a lot.
2:01:14 - Leo Laporte
yeah, it's really cool. I didn't realize. You use wireshark to reverse engineer the signaling. That's incredible. Incredible. Yeah, that's wild. Yeah, great documentation too. A lot of times, if it's a single developer, you're not gonna. This is a. This is all online. This is an incredible document and and frankly, you need it. This thing's powerful. It does a lot of stuff.
2:01:35 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, it pretty much allows you to have a touch interface for any part of it, and sometimes I get into a situation where I want different parts of my ATEM controller to be up at different times. I'll have two iPads and they'll both be running Mix Effect Pro, but they're in different states, right Different places in the switcher, so that I can just tap on those as well.
2:01:54 - Leo Laporte
Not different states of the union, different states of being okay.
2:01:57 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, exactly, Although you can. You know, it's just over IP you could do it in different states. I know I did have a situation where we were doing rehearsal and I opened it up and I accidentally hit a button and it was talking to was like 2,000 miles away because we just happened to be on a VPN and he's like what happened? You know, my TD's like what happened.
2:02:13 - Leo Laporte
I was like, oh, nothing, sorry, didn't mean to switch your Nothing, sorry about that.
Moo, moo moo. If you have an ATEM, which I know a lot of you do, I have the 8 Mini Extreme right here. You really do need this. This is just how much is the pro? It's not much like 50 bucks or something. I think it's like 50 dollars, yeah, something like that. Very affordable, yeah, and Mark deserves it. Thank you, adam. Yeah, adam, absolutely Mark, adam Tao. Thank you, alex. Good pick. Doc Rock, I think you are recommending something we are a fan of. Well, maybe not yes, okay.
2:02:51 - Doc Rock
So, um, I am a huge fan of nowadays that the webcam companies have finally come into their capabilities, and this was what I've been using for the last year plus, and this is the osbott tail air. This thing is phenomenal. Well, osbott took a whole bunch of input from everybody, including people like mr lindsay over there, and they came out with the tail air too.
2:03:17 - Leo Laporte
Bunch kaboom so what is this is?
2:03:20 - Doc Rock
a ptz absolute beast. It is ptz r. That is where they're claiming the famous that they've added r, because if you've been into any older buildings or you live someplace like in the bay where things are crooked, the worst thing you do is mount this baby in the ceiling, and it's always off canter. This guy could actually rotate a wee bit. Oh, we have found so much joy with this, and what you are showing on the screen right now is that we've added the ability to control all your pZ from inside of Ecamm.
2:03:52 - Leo Laporte
So this is the Ecamm interface to the PTZ. Yes, wow, I love that.
2:03:58 - Doc Rock
I can give you 10 presets, whereas most of the apps that come with these guys will give you like three, and so what will happen is, if you change the scene, it's actually will change the PTZ when you change the scene.
2:04:10 - Leo Laporte
Look how smooth that is too, and it's really smooth.
2:04:12 - Doc Rock
It comes with a 12x optical zoom. Everything about this is cool. The only thing that I'm working with them about and I'm yelling at them constantly is I want to do my white balance with a gray card because I was well-trained. I don't want to do white balance by typing in a number that I guess, even if you're doing it in a semi accurate. But that's the zoom. The zoom is incredible.
Um, what's really handy about this guy is, if you're just a simple muggle, you can come out UVC and it's glorious. If you want to run this over land with POE, by the way, I can mount this in the ceiling and with a single thin cat six cable I can send that signal to basically anywhere in the world because, as you know, in a VPN I can control this camera from anywhere. I have SDI out and it's a 3G SDI. I have HDMI out. I even have RS-232 control if you have some kind of old switcher that requires that, and then microphone in and out. But it is a highly functional camera with a built-in sd card so you can record directly, so you can stream directly out of this, like, take it to the beach, set it up and rock that surf contest.
Um, I know I always slip in my home brags of where I live, but yeah, you could do so much with this camera and it is a very simple device. And in the past for us to do something like this, alex and I would go and grab the big Sony or the big Panasonic and we were looking at about $8,000. It's $1,000. It does all of what we used to do on very expensive PTZ cameras for so cheap, and it's incredible.
2:05:45 - Alex Lindsay
And one of the things that's great about it being controllable from Ecamm is that the software itself OBSBOT makes great hardware software itself that runs the OBSBOT. It's okay.
2:05:56 - Doc Rock
I wasn't going to say that, but thank you.
2:05:58 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I can say that again, it's like sometimes it's not stable on a Mac and sometimes it kind of works and it's quirky, like they don't really understand it, and I think that having it built into Ecamm means that you're using ecamm's uh interface as opposed to, yeah, uh, ob's bots, which you know. Again, they make great hardware.
2:06:16 - Doc Rock
Um then, software they could probably use some more are you in touch with their team at all, because I would love to put you in touch and cameras to talk to them all right, I'll make an email after this, because I think they would love your input, because you're a genius.
2:06:30 - Alex Lindsay
Oh, thank you wow very nice I don't know about that, wow but I think you're right anybody's making software or hardware for this kind of stuff should definitely talk to alex lindsay.
2:06:43 - Doc Rock
That's four oh, but it's just so good. Before we would laugh at webcams and even their smallest camera, which is like 69 or69 or $79, it's phenomenal. And it's like why is the ones built into our computer so dumb when you've got companies making incredible ones for less than a Hyundai? And they're all Sony sensors, so they're good cameras with great light capability. Yeah, anyway, I can go on about that, Francesc.
2:07:05 - Leo Laporte
CAMPOY FLORES and the chat room is mentioning if you're going to use the OpsBot, you should definitely use ecamm, because its software is actually better than the ups software. So thank you, chad.
2:07:14 - Doc Rock
Canvas is a much nicer interface to this so when alex venmo's me, I'll venmail you guys and when they need comics.
2:07:24 - Leo Laporte
There's only one person to go to on this show and that is mr andy inako. Your pick of the week, sir.
2:07:30 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, my pick of the week, sir. Yeah, my pick of the week are the first two websites that I hit every single morning and the reason why my laptop is on the nightstand. It's GoComics and Comics Kingdom. They are two different subscription sites that serve nothing but comic strips All the way back to original.
2:07:48 - Leo Laporte
Oh, these are like newspaper comic strips.
2:07:51 - Andy Ihnatko
Newspaper comic strips and between these two, name it and they've got it. If you want the classic calvin and hobbes classic peanuts, they've got it. If you want, uh, like the very, very latest strips that I was only aware of, uh, on instagram from individual creators, they have that too. Sarah's like sarah scribbles. Uh, an xkcd. I'm sorry, not xkcd, but that, but things of that vein. They've got that too. Uh, they's like Sarah's Scribbles and XKCD. I'm sorry, not XKCD, but things of that vein. They've got that too. They've got the comic strip about the cavemen who golf. They've also got the modern version of the strip in which the cavemen golf and occasionally TikTok each other.
And it makes it very, very easy to simply bookmark and favorite the ones that you want to follow and it will just simply, every single day there is, click on this link. I've got them in my bookmarks toolbar. Click on this link and it will just simply give you a single scrolling, one page, a scrolling list of all of these different comic strips. And if you make a discovery, like there's a, it's not just the ones that I'm already a fan of. Make a discovery, it's not just the ones that I'm already a fan of. It's like I've discovered that, yes, they have the classic Flash Gordon strips, which I don't really have any interest in, but recently they got a writer-artist to write a modern version of it.
That is amazing. Like the artwork, the storytelling, everything is incredible. Artwork, the storytelling, everything is incredible. And, of course, for the $5 a month subscription fee for each one of these, there are discounts for annual but $5 a month subscription you can go all the way back to the very beginning and start from there. Extremely good value for money. There are a lot of music services that I no longer subscribe to. There are a lot of videos. I'll probably be canceling Hulu soon because I think I will have finished like everything that I wanted to watch. It's time for me to take six months off and let them catch up. But no, this is the these. These are like the last subscription services I will ever ever get rid of, because they are just too too conducive to joy for me to like give up for five bucks a month.
2:09:51 - Leo Laporte
Nice Go. Comics and comics.
2:09:54 - Andy Ihnatko
Are they like the King features web interface Comics kingdom was, is King feature syndicates one, but it doesn't mean it doesn't necessarily mean that they reflect only the strips that this one syndicate has. They get comics from all kinds of different sources, including like web comics that that ended a long time ago, like the Ongoing Adventures of Queen Victoria. They still have that. So if you want to dip, they stopped doing that strip like what? Three, four, five years ago. But if you enjoyed it and you forgot about it, you can simply click a button, add it to your favorites and now you can read the backlog of it. Like I said, it's a lot of entertainment for not a whole lot of money, so it's a very, very high recommendation.
2:10:37 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and I don't even get a newspaper anymore, so it's nice to have somewhere I can see these Very nice King Features. Does Comics Kingdom and I guess GoComics is the other one, I don't know.
2:10:53 - Andy Ihnatko
GoComics just did a huge site redesign that launched April 1st and I held off for a couple of weeks because, yes, it was bad for about a week until they solved a whole bunch of problems. But now they fixed the problems, as anytime you do a big thing like that, Very modern, very, very nice.
2:11:06 - Leo Laporte
It's owned by Andrews McNeil Universal so it's the two big syndicates. Basically right, have their, have their web interface. Very interesting. Thank you, andrew. Andy Ihnatko Skeeton at the blue sky under IHNATKO. But you can also. Uh, that's all you can do, but someday it's no, I get there.
2:11:26 - Andy Ihnatko
There are people who are like there are people in this conversation who are on a mailing list that can access the stuff I'm posting to the private blog he's building up a corpus. I want to make sure that when I say, hey, I've opened a brand new site, come visit it. That there's like several weeks of actual stuff on it as opposed to wow. I was very pleased to hear him complain about how hard it was to like log in this morning with the new whatever.
2:12:00 - Leo Laporte
No, give me three weeks or four weeks for the content so very nice, soon, soon, soon.
2:12:05 - Doc Rock
Thank you, sir. Uh, mr dr rochter, thank you so much for being here. Youtubecom sorry, I'm laughing because I'm looking at the notes and I'm looking at what the title suggestions are and I'm sorry. You know I say weird stuff, I don't know there's some good title suggestions.
2:12:13 - Leo Laporte
I don't know what we're gonna name this show. It's when you said chaps my coconuts.
2:12:17 - Andy Ihnatko
I immediately screwed up. I really scrolled up and noticed that I think alex beat me to it to type in it. Somebody beat me to it because that was way too good.
2:12:24 - Doc Rock
That's what I, that's what I just saw and I just realized, I'm sorry, the tomfoolery and shenanigans post like half cup coffee, you know, early in the morning here over the water. So yes, there's a lot we create a space where joy can thrive.
2:12:36 - Leo Laporte
This is why you need to be in the club, because that's really who gets to choose the titles for this show.
That's one of the benefits we never talk about, but that is a benefit of being in the club. And, of course, Alex Lindsay, office hours dot global. I think he had to run because we were right up against his next call. We thank you all for joining us for Mac Break Weekly. We do this show every Tuesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm, eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us live on eight different streams. My recommendation is join Club Twit Then you can use any of the streams you want. It's only seven bucks a month. You get access to our club twit discord. You get ad-free versions of all of our shows. You get special shows. In fact, we've got a special coming up. On Friday we're going to do our coffee show with the coffee geek, mr mark prince and liz happy beans, a coffee youtuber, will be joining us. Micah's crafting corners tomorrow, 6 pm. All of these are club events, which makes it fun, and Mikah and I have decided to do WWDC in the club only. We've been getting some heat from apple about restreaming their keynotes, so we're just going to do it in the club. That way it's a private stream and nobody will be put out, and you club members will get a little extra benefit. So so lots of reasons, especially because it's only seven bucks a month, plus that we have brought back the year subscription for 84 bucks a month. We're thinking about maybe raising the costs. I don't know if that's going to happen, but I got to tell you we will grandfather anybody and who's already a member. So if you've been on the fence about joining, join now and lock in that seven bucks a month or $84 a year. That's just my recommendation.
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