MacBreak Weekly 1037 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy, Christina, and Jason are here. We're going to talk about the fight between Apple and OpenAI. It continues and it's getting brutal. Why Pavel Durov is upset about Telegram's takedown and what it really means. Plus, the Chinese RAM company Apple was counting on says, yeah, no. All of that and more coming up on MacBreak Weekly.

Leo Laporte [00:00:29]:
This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 1037, recorded Tuesday, August 11th, 2026: Mechanical Donut. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show that covers the latest Apple news with Christina Warren from GitHub. Hello, Christina.

Leo Laporte [00:00:54]:
Where she's in developer relations.

Christina Warren [00:00:55]:
Hello, hello.

Leo Laporte [00:00:56]:
And a frontier AI pioneer. Ms. Copilot 2026.

Jason Snell [00:01:05]:
Leo's coffee there. Leo's drinking his coffee. He's caffeinated. Watch out.

Leo Laporte [00:01:11]:
Uh, also, that would be Jason Snell, who's narrating golf style.

Jason Snell [00:01:15]:
Yeah, that's right. We're at the 13th hole now. Leo's brought his coffee up with him.

Leo Laporte [00:01:19]:
He's sipping his coffee.

Jason Snell [00:01:20]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:01:20]:
Hello, Jason Snell. sixcolors.com. You've been busy. A busy, busy guy.

Jason Snell [00:01:24]:
Busy times. Lots of busy— it's a busy summer, as it so often is. It's true.

Leo Laporte [00:01:29]:
It's true.

Jason Snell [00:01:29]:
I filed the GitHub issue just moments ago. So Christine, I'm, I'm, I'm flying the flag, the GitHub flag.

Leo Laporte [00:01:36]:
Love the GitHub.

Jason Snell [00:01:36]:
I found a bug. I had to file an issue. It happens.

Leo Laporte [00:01:39]:
Love the Git.

Christina Warren [00:01:39]:
Amazing.

Leo Laporte [00:01:41]:
I want to tell you, my agents are always saying, hey, you want to file a bug report? And I always say, no, no, no, no. They probably know. Also here, uh, there's something about you, Andrew, that is odd. And I'm just, I'm trying to figure it out. Andrew Inako, he's never looked so good.

Andy Ihnatko [00:01:59]:
I did change to a different brand of body wash. It used to be Herbal Organics. Now it's sort of like a cherry wood and fresh cedar.

Leo Laporte [00:02:08]:
I can smell it over here. Where are you, Mr. Inako? Where are you?

Andy Ihnatko [00:02:14]:
I am just not— is it a vacation when you just decide I'm gonna take a week and just like visit friends in various places? So I am, I am in Maryland, not Not far away from a government science facility.

Leo Laporte [00:02:27]:
Okay, I'm not sure what I'm to take from that.

Jason Snell [00:02:33]:
It's where they keep the alien bodies.

Andy Ihnatko [00:02:34]:
I will say that it is lovely to be podcasting— to be broadcasting from a sofa for the first time.

Leo Laporte [00:02:40]:
I know, you look comfortable. Have you— is there something else? You shaved or something? Is this— did you have another style of facial hair at another point, some point?

Andy Ihnatko [00:02:51]:
Uh, not since 1992. When is it?

Jason Snell [00:02:55]:
When is the baseball cut?

Andy Ihnatko [00:02:56]:
I did.

Leo Laporte [00:02:56]:
Okay.

Andy Ihnatko [00:02:56]:
I did. Well, I, I did like just about, uh, before I left on this trip, I did get a haircut and I did like trim, give, give myself the full—

Leo Laporte [00:03:04]:
They're not so bushy as they were. Maybe that's it.

Andy Ihnatko [00:03:06]:
Exactly. But once every few weeks, I, I try to get it from, uh, there at the, at the, at the narrow end, there's John Lennon, 1965. I try, I want them to be fuller than that without being as full as like the, the go for the full Asimov. So. Somewhere in the middle is the usual target.

Leo Laporte [00:03:24]:
And as usual, I'm exactly the same as I ever was. Let us talk about— no, I'm not going to do this.

Andy Ihnatko [00:03:31]:
Same as it ever was.

Leo Laporte [00:03:32]:
Same as it ever was. Uh, let me start. Let's start with OpenAI because this is going to be, I think, a, uh, an ongoing, uh, scenario here. Apple has asked, uh, for an injunction, a court injunction to prevent more harm I don't think I— last I checked, the judge hadn't ruled on that. I don't know if the judge is going to give Apple an injunction. I don't even know what the injunction would be. Like, knock it off, OpenAI. OpenAI also went to the judge and said, Your Honor, dismiss this lawsuit.

Leo Laporte [00:04:12]:
It was filed without adequate investigation. In fact, I really enjoyed the little brief that OpenAI wrote, which was, which, you know, depending on your point of view, this was whiny or it stuck it to the fruit company. Apple's getting this wrong. Apple, wrote OpenAI, is one of the greatest companies of all time and built a reputation for obsessing over the smallest details. This careless, aggressive, and oddly personal lawsuit sadly does not live up to that reputation. And they go over some of the points we've already gone over, like that Apple's outside attorneys emailed the wrong person after, quote, confusing 2 Asian last names, and only after we brought this to their attention. Apple claimed they had a discussion with our general counsel, which they now admit never happened. Is that true? Or is that— this is the problem is I don't know, you know, these are, this is an adversarial—

Jason Snell [00:05:16]:
I don't know. We talked about this a little last week and it feels to me very much like somebody at OpenAI was really mad and was like, we gotta write a blog post. And I don't think it's a very good blog post and I don't think it serves them very well. And the irony is that then they filed a legal filing from their law firm, Quinn Emanuel, that is much more forceful and detailed and shows that they actually do have deep disputes about some of what Apple did. But the blog, The blog post is like, I don't know, it's, it's kind of like PR. It's kind of like just trying to cloud the waters and make people not—

Leo Laporte [00:05:47]:
It's not a legal filing, as you point out. No, it is, it is more for us.

Jason Snell [00:05:52]:
Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, I think The Verge called it, you know, the court of public opinion is what the blog post is for. I thought it was funny because the court, the actual court filing is much better. It's much, much better, much clearer about where Apple— and again, I mean, the court filing also contains a lot of things that are like that, that I could lift an eyebrow about, like the idea that the reason that they took the Apple offboarding document and used it with the people they were recruiting was just to remind them of what they should not, you know, should do and not do. It was just a helpful thing to help Apple, really. And it's like the, you know, the, the, the, all the questions about what I do with my stolen Apple documents are answered by the stolen Apple documents on my t-shirt kind of thing going on there. But it's a much stronger case that they make that essentially, if I am not a lawyer, okay, but I'll say it this way.

Jason Snell [00:06:45]:
I think that the legal case that they're making is very interesting because what they're basically saying is, what is a trade secret? I don't see any. Which is funny because what I don't think it does is deny anything about that. There may be a whole plan inside OpenAI to get people out of Apple with everything they know and with documents, which is the difference between, you know, like people People taking documents out of their employer is not the same as people taking their knowledge out of their employer. And I'm a big fan of the idea that if you're a worker and you want to go somewhere else, you should be able to. But that's sort of what Apple is alleging is it's more than that. It's actually this kind of conspiracy to get all sorts of documents, technical documents outside. And what OpenAI's lawyer's response is, which I think is actually really smart, is show us The trade secret that was violated here. Show it to us.

Jason Snell [00:07:37]:
Which is not saying that they didn't have this whole strategy. It's just saying, where, where is the illegality here? And it's a— I don't think it's necessarily going to win a lot of hearts if they say, look, the stuff we stole, we were allowed to steal. But legally, if that's the case, there's no case here.

Leo Laporte [00:07:57]:
They also said we did it to help the Apple employees who contacted Tang Tan saying, hey, I need some stuff. Tang Tan just happened to have access, uh, Apple said it is not an iCloud failing.

Jason Snell [00:08:13]:
Just, well, yeah, there, there, there is an also argument. It's not, it's not so much with Tang Tan. It's with that other guy who left.

Leo Laporte [00:08:20]:
Oh yeah. Yeah.

Christina Warren [00:08:21]:
Yeah.

Jason Snell [00:08:21]:
But, but, um, but yeah, that one of the arguments is like, look, Apple's cloud document practices were bad. And, and like, I think we're all going to agree that that's true, but it is a weird argument. Again, a weird argument to make that might be successful. That is, look, they left that stuff out and so we took it.

Christina Warren [00:08:44]:
Yeah.

Jason Snell [00:08:44]:
Finders keepers. And like, finders keepers may not be a legal argument.

Leo Laporte [00:08:48]:
It doesn't work that way.

Jason Snell [00:08:50]:
Sorry. Well, I don't know. I don't know. And I want to try, like, I see a lot of people are very polarized on this. Just like, oh, Apple's so right here, or OpenAI is so right. And I'm like, I don't know. I kind of feel like maybe where this is going is that Apple's got some real kind of like moral points here, but does it have legal points? And I think that was the big thing I got out of the filing from the legal filing was, again, I think it comes down to show us the trade secrets being violated here. And I think Apple's response will probably be that's why we need discovery, because we, we've only seen the tip of the iceberg here.

Jason Snell [00:09:24]:
And what, what have you stolen from us underneath the surface? And that's what they're going to fight about.

Leo Laporte [00:09:29]:
Apple actually— well, the information says, and I don't know if this is confirmed, although the information's usually pretty good, that when employees join Apple, they do get their own, you know, company iCloud account, but they're encouraged to connect it to their personal account.

Jason Snell [00:09:45]:
Right.

Christina Warren [00:09:46]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:09:46]:
And that when you leave the company, well, of course your personal account continues and there may in fact be, you know, confidential documents on the personal devices.

Andy Ihnatko [00:09:55]:
Yeah.

Jason Snell [00:09:55]:
If you, if you, there's like, it like mounts an extra folder in iCloud that is your Apple stuff. And if you copy stuff Elsewhere, it doesn't disappear when your Apple stuff disappears. That seems to be the deal, which is true, by the way, which is true of anything. If you copy something off of a cloud service to somewhere—

Leo Laporte [00:10:14]:
You can put it anywhere.

Jason Snell [00:10:15]:
Not controlled by your employer. Like, I mean, I'm not— I've been gone a long time, but I'll just say that, did all my email from IDG get deleted when I left IDG? It didn't, you know, because I copied it to another computer and when I turned off my email accounts, those emails are still there, right? Like that kind of, that kind of stuff happens all the time. It's just that Apple seems to have done this in a weird way.

Christina Warren [00:10:39]:
Well, yeah, exactly. I was going to say that the problem is, is I think, and frankly, this doesn't mean that anybody should be allowed to take things they shouldn't take without permission or anything like that. But Apple's ID system and the fact that, you know, you can only be, except for very specific circumstances, logged into really one iCloud account at a time. Because of the primitive nature of how Apple accounts exist, because they're, they're brittle, as all of us who've used them know, do that. The fact that you can't easily switch between accounts, I think that makes it more likely for people to have overlap than you might have at other institutions that had, you know, multiple accounts through, through Google, for instance. Right. Microsoft accounts are also a little bit complicated, but they do make it easier, at least like default, not on a phone device, but on, on a computer. To be able to switch between the 2 universes relatively easily.

Christina Warren [00:11:35]:
And you can see different drives appearing, you know, in your sidebar or whatever the case may be. You'll see OneDrive Personal, OneDrive Business. And with Google, you know, they— there are ways, obviously, you can copy things from one drive to another or move things from one account to another, even from an internal Google employee drive. But they— it's not one of those things where they're telling you in onboarding, We need you to log in on your work devices with your personal accounts because that's the only way you can access certain things. And this is going to now become a more difficult, you know, data residency practice because if I accidentally saved it to the wrong thing or clicked the wrong link from the wrong place, stuff can get intermingled. And I don't think that's a legal defense, to be honest with you, for at least in terms of OpenAI. I don't think the fact that it's a pain you know, to be able to switch between things is a legal defense. But I do think that if it comes down to— if the argument is, was this intentional or was this not, which it might come down to, I think that there will be at least something to be said for, okay, well, you've made it very difficult for me to keep my, my two worlds separate.

Christina Warren [00:12:45]:
And as part of your own official processes, you literally tell me to essentially link these two accounts together.

Jason Snell [00:12:52]:
Yeah. What's weird about it is that, I mean, Apple's allegations are that there is a plan here, right? That it's not like, whoops, I ended up with documents. It's like telling people to copy documents. And like, to me, that's, that's what it ends up coming down to. OpenAI's story here is basically like, no, we were just— we don't want it. We don't have a plan. Some stuff got commingled. It was never in any direction.

Jason Snell [00:13:15]:
In fact, we were passing information back to Apple, which is one of the stories that I think is really interesting, which is like people people's manager left to go to OpenAI and they're like— and we've all dealt with this, right? Where somebody leaves your company and you're like, oh, what is the answer to this question? And you try to contact the person who's left your company. And some of those people are like, I don't care, goodbye. And other people are like, I will help you. And OpenAI is like, we did some of that. Like, they're helping out their friends back at Apple. It's not a big deal. And Apple's allegations are, no, you had a whole system to exfiltrate documents. And like, That's what it's going to come down to.

Jason Snell [00:13:50]:
Not— it's so— it's a little bit silly to have it be like, oh, was there a secret Apple document that happened to be on that person's hard drive at home? It's like, well, if it happened to be there, it's— what are we even doing here? But if it was copied as a part of a plan, then it's different. But how do you prove that?

Christina Warren [00:14:09]:
How do you prove that? And I would also— but I would just also ask that case, like, I understand directly suing the individuals that you think are involved in that. But I think it takes a much bigger leap to then say, oh, the company itself, OpenAI, was responsible for this. That's— and obviously Apple's point is that's what we need the discovery for. But I also understand OpenAI pushing back and going, no, no, no, no, no, we're not going to let you have access to all of our files and everything else in a wild goose chase just because you have some evidence that some of our employees might have handled data in an unideal way. Because to me, like, 1 1 does not necessarily equal 2 there. Like, you have to actually, to me, like, very much prove like that there was a conspiracy and that this was a, you know, directed like OpenAI practice where employees are being told at an employee level, this is what you need to do so that we can gain access to these documents versus, you know, the way— because the text that they released could be read a number of ways. One, it could be people are sharing things they shouldn't be sharing, or it could be to your point, because I've certainly had this happen. where I've created a document, I've left a company, somebody doesn't know where something is, or they say, hey, this was on your personal drive, can you share this with me because I need to use this? And I'm like, yes, of course.

Christina Warren [00:15:23]:
Some people might say, no, I'm not going to do that. But in my mind, I'm like, no, if I had this on my personal drive, it in almost all cases wasn't because I was trying to hoard. For my personal case, it was never because I was trying to hoard anything that I didn't have access to. It was usually a permissions issue. where I had to have it on my personal drive because that was the only way that I could present something. And so I'm like, yes, I will delegate and even change ownership to you directly. It's not clear to me what the circumstance is here, but it feels like it's a bit of a stretch to just immediately go to some documents existed and we have some text messages from employees that talk about these documents to there was a high-level conspiracy in the company to direct people towards you know, not only saving data when they left in, in a way that would not be, you know, understood or infiltrated, but then to continue to pass information back and forth after they've left the company.

Leo Laporte [00:16:21]:
By the way, I apologize to everybody for relitigating this, if you will, but we were getting more information. Actually, Jon Gruber, while we were doing the show last week, kind of published some interesting stuff, which sounds like he has somebody inside Apple talking to him. For instance, he says that whole thing about emailing the wrong person. Yeah, no, uh, Gabriel Gross, the outside attorney, sent one email to the wrong address, quickly emailed an apology, and it was a, it was a short email. It wasn't the full, you know, cease and desist. That was sent to the appropriate person, OpenAI's general counsel, Che Chang, and Chang never did respond to Apple's lawyers. Now this is Gruber talking. I don't know where he's getting this information from.

Jason Snell [00:17:07]:
Somebody at Apple, probably.

Leo Laporte [00:17:08]:
Somebody at Apple. He also says it wasn't— Apple kind of implies this— it wasn't iCloud Drive, it was a third-party drive. He says it was Box.

Jason Snell [00:17:16]:
Box. Apple does use Box. That is a standard.

Leo Laporte [00:17:19]:
That was interesting. Yeah, it sounds like Jon has inside information, which he's not, of course, revealing. But there's a lot of information in this post John put up from last week. So I apologize for bringing it back up. But you know what? We're going to be talking about this for months.

Jason Snell [00:17:36]:
And the story advanced because they did— because they did their legal filing and that pushes this whole thing forward even further.

Christina Warren [00:17:41]:
Yeah, the legal filing. I agree with Jason. I think it's much more interesting than the blog post, which I think is, you know, partially PR exercise. But honestly, that's what Apple did too, right? Like, I mean, I would argue that Apple's entire original legal filing was a PR move. And then we'll go beyond that. I will say, and I'm not a lawyer and I don't know how to read this, I don't think it's really damning one way or another in terms of the emailing the wrong person. It certainly looks bad. But if I received incorrect communications as a lawyer and you had it addressed to the wrong person and other things, and then I told you, I don't know what this is.

Christina Warren [00:18:12]:
And they said, oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean that for you. I, I think that it's reasonable for someone to say, I'm not going to respond to any of your communications now. You need to, you need to actually resend me, you know, almost a new email and start over from scratch. Because I don't, I don't know, you know, at this point, I don't know whatever was intended from the beginning. So I could see that in either direction. But I think that getting, you know, caught up on those details of, oh, the wrong person was emailed, or we didn't respond to the email, I think kind of misses the point? Because I can see both perspectives there.

Andy Ihnatko [00:18:48]:
Yeah, I mean, the entire blog post, like, it's hard to take it seriously because it was just so poorly thought out. As Jason said, it really does smack of somebody high up saying that we have to hit back. I want something on the blog quickly. And most of— for all the details, quote unquote, they put into it, it was a lot like, you know, a friend takes your car and wrecks it. And then when you say, look, you've wrecked my car, What are you going to do about it? And he says, I didn't wreck it. I was able to drive it from the scene of the crash. So it's not wrecked. Like, you are missing the point.

Andy Ihnatko [00:19:23]:
You're arguing semantics. You're not arguing the actual point, the point of discussion here. So yeah, that's, that's why the legal filings are really the meat of the issue. Apple's filings, however, were, uh, you know, you, you, in the past 5 years, I think all of us have gotten 5 or 10 years with all the, all the meaningful lawsuits that have been slung back and forth between different companies. We've all gotten into the habit of reading, like, the downloading and reading these PDFs. They are rarely as literary as what Apple filed about. Here is, let me set the scene of what actually they've been doing. And let me see, here's how they would prepare new interviewers for their meeting to bring hardware, bring this, bring that, bring that other.

Andy Ihnatko [00:20:08]:
No legalese. They really are, it seemed as though this was a document that was meant to be read and then basically turned into news items about malfeasance, as opposed to, we are trying— we are seeking legal recourse to get a company to knock some stuff off. That— so they were playing the— they were playing the PR game from the very start. Not to say that they shouldn't have. I'm saying that, that there is a lot of very, very careful usage of, of the media here.

Leo Laporte [00:20:34]:
Uh, and all of this over a donut-shaped smart speaker, because, uh, and I, I don't— you know, this is the A rumor that this is what OpenAI's vision of the future, as Fast Company puts it, is. It's a leaked device, a piece of hardware. This is something very Jony Ive. It has moving parts inside it to indicate it's thinking, which is hysterical. It comes from the Love From Studio. A smart speaker for $300 to $400? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Everything's going to cost more, uh, of course, including all of Apple's stuff.

Leo Laporte [00:21:15]:
But I think we've seen these smart speakers from Amazon and Apple at this size. I don't know. But it's connected to ChatGPT. Is that the selling point?

Jason Snell [00:21:24]:
Uh, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's using their live version, you know, future version of their live.

Leo Laporte [00:21:29]:
They actually have a very cool, and you can do it on your iPhone now, streaming speech capability. So you can have this conversation.

Jason Snell [00:21:36]:
I hate it. Because it's trying too hard and it's inserting a lot of ums and ahs while you— while I'm talking. And then every single time you say something to it, it does the filler sentence because it doesn't have an answer yet. And like, and I've heard people say, oh, well, you know, people do that. It's like they don't do it every single time, which is what it does, but they'll make it better. They'll make it more natural. And that, yeah, that's their killer app is that they think ChatGPT is so great and conversational that you will want a device that you can, you know, park or carry around your house that lets you interact with it. And, you know, is it a smart speaker? Is it just kind of like a, you know, an outgrowth of OpenAI into your house? I don't know.

Jason Snell [00:22:20]:
I think having ambient computing devices that you can talk to is not a bad idea. And if they were really smart, that would really help because the current ones are not that smart. So I don't know about the, like, it's your droid companion that makes little wiggles a little or whatever. Uh, well, we'll see. We'll, we'll see about that.

Leo Laporte [00:22:40]:
But like, no, I'm going to buy one cause I'm stupid, but, uh, I don't see it as a mass appeal. I mean, I'm wearing a shirt made out of corn, so, you know, I'm the target audience for this.

Andy Ihnatko [00:22:52]:
It's, I mean, it's, it could, it could be interesting. Remember that like a year ago, we're wondering if there was going to be some kind of a wearable, even something along the lines of a pen.

Leo Laporte [00:23:00]:
Let's move on.

Andy Ihnatko [00:23:01]:
But the thing is, like, if it's— if we're— it's easy to underestimate a product like that if we're comparing them to the same sort of Google smart speakers they used to basically give away like, like M&Ms. If we talk about— if we stop talking about a smart speaker and we start talking about an agentic speaker, meaning that again, it's still just a speaker that has a reasonably good speaker in it and a good 360 360-degree microphone that can basically disappear in any, uh, any decor. So it doesn't look like there's this big gadget there. But nonetheless, you can just basically, while you're tying your shoes, say, I want you to email everybody that I'm supposed to be meeting today. Make sure you send the— collect the latest reports on this project and make sure everybody's up to date. Uh, and then create a new Google Doc in which they can basically assemble all their Basically, if you give it the abilities of an actual human being to not just simply say, what is the weather? Turn the thermostat up to 38 degrees. If it can actually be, no, it's actually doing things and making decisions based on your instructions, that would be something that maybe someone would be spending $200 or $300 for. And if OpenAI does have an agentic approach that is that effective, then yeah, it's one of those things where just like we sold, each one of us, I think, sold a lot of smart speakers to friends and family 10 years ago when, without even thinking about it, when we had a guest over, we just picked them up from the airport, got them in this— got inside the house and say, hey Sammy, turn on the lights in the, in the office, and, and what's the weather tomorrow? And suddenly a voice gives these answers like, wait, what, what did you do that? Oh yeah, it's a smart speaker.

Andy Ihnatko [00:24:42]:
It's this thing that Google now has, or Amazon now has. So basically, agentic speakers could do the same thing.

Leo Laporte [00:24:46]:
I should give them a call because This is an ESP32, which cost me $60.

Andy Ihnatko [00:24:52]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:24:52]:
It has a motion sensor, has a moisture sensor, it has a screen, it has a speaker. I can talk to it, hey Quicksilver, it'll respond. It actually talks to me through my Sonos speakers. It also will do things like open the window shades, it'll play music on my Sonos speakers. It's connected to my local agent too, so it knows who I am. Uh, and knows more about me. And if I wanted to connect it to ChatGPT as the model, I could.

Christina Warren [00:25:20]:
Um, I, I, I think that that is probably— those are easy to do. And I think that honestly, kind of what Andy was talking about, the way that I would look at this, if this is in fact the direction they're going in, would be that it's much less about the hardware and the speaker itself, which to your point, Leo, and even what we've already seen is relatively rudimentary, right? It's a, it's a 360 microphone. It's, it's a, it's a good sounding speaker. Speaker is something that is, you know, built 10 years ago. But, but if you power that with— now you have a cloud-based always-on agent, right? Because your system, Leo, you have a local agent that lives somewhere with you. And we have people who have like their own, you know, Hermes or OpenCLAW setups and whatnot. I could envision a world where if OpenAI is saying we are going to give you your own cloud version, maybe it doesn't have all the—

Leo Laporte [00:26:04]:
well, that's what they want. That's what they want. They want you to send all your data to them and they want to store all your memories.

Christina Warren [00:26:11]:
Well, yeah, but, but, but I'm going one step beyond that. Obviously, they want all that information. But I'm saying to Andy's point, if they can then do the powerful computing stuff and I can then pick up and get that information from any number of devices, whether it's a web browser or, you know, an iPhone app or an iPad or something else, and I'm starting things off in my car, by talking to it, or I'm in my living room and I'm talking to it. And then, you know, a few minutes later, I'm getting an alert someplace else that this has now been delivered to me in a way that I can interact with it. I think that's powerful. And so in that sense, I think that the speaker aspect itself is rudimentary. Who cares? It's more about if this is what they're actually doing, if this is going to be the way that they get kind of cloud-based agents, so to speak, in people's homes where people are going to be willing perhaps for a subscription fee, you know, I'm going to pay, you know, $20 or $30 a month on top of, you know, whatever my ChatGPT Plus subscription would be to have the ability to do all this additional processing where it's connected to my email, it's connected to my documents, it's connected to other things. And it's just going to kick off those tasks for me.

Christina Warren [00:27:20]:
And I don't have to worry about how to set up, you know, the hardware, or anything on my end. It's just happening and I can interact with it, with it on a number of services, including voice.

Leo Laporte [00:27:34]:
Well, we'll find out. It's not even coming out this year. Yeah, but I— the timing of this leak kind of tells me that either OpenAI wants you to think Apple was trying to block it or Apple was trying to block it.

Jason Snell [00:27:48]:
Also, this is a Mark Gurman leak. And, you know, I would say I think his track record suggests that there are a lot of hardware designers and designers in general at Apple who leaked to him, and some of them went to OpenAI, and they're now leaking to him there. Whether— and OpenAI may want it. Gurman has also picked up things that were, um, that OpenAI gave to him as sort of like statements but not officially. So I mean, this is clearly meant to be the narrative. The other thing I would say is, you know, you, you said, Leo, you know, is this what Apple's trying to stop? I wonder if this is Not. I wonder if what Apple's trying to stop is whatever comes next, because this strikes me as being a real low-hanging fruit kind of product. It is the easiest product for OpenAI to make as a first product, which is their take on the smart speaker, except backed entirely by ChatGPT and whatever powers that they can give to it.

Jason Snell [00:28:39]:
And I think that's a great first move for them. This is not the kind of product it strikes me that you steal trade secrets But I don't know. But I— and we've heard that like they have a lot of other ambitions of things that are more phone-like or more wearable. This is not that. This is just a place to start. And I think to Christina's point, it points the way for what table stakes are going to be. And I, you know, even putting this in an Apple perspective, I think that this is really interesting. Apple is just getting on the board with Siri AI.

Jason Snell [00:29:12]:
It's good enough to be functional. Great start. But you look when you describe something that's more agentic and you start to think, how do you compete in that space? And the answer probably involves Apple, you know, especially since Apple can lean on the personal and they're trying to do that with Siri AI, that it's on your devices. That means Apple is going to need to keep working on ways that your— whether it's your watch or your phone or your smart speaker, that it's able to talk to a device that has your personal information on it. And in terms of agentic actions, it probably means they need to keep pushing down the road that they've only barely started now, which is things like App Intents. It's the idea that in the end, they probably need to create the ability for developers to have their functionality be, you know, in the ecosystem so that if I'm using my voice to talk to my Apple version of this, that it's able to go to my device with my personal information and run my apps that I paid for. And they have their knowledge bases and that I can use that to do a personal version, a in-my-own-home version of what OpenAI might be doing in its cloud. And like, it does feel to me, as Christina was talking about it, like That feels plausible for what the table stakes in this are gonna be in the next 3, 4 years is you're really, you know, gonna have to comp— Apple will have to compete in its own way with these more kind of like, how do you take things that are more agentic but also make them more friendly?

Andy Ihnatko [00:30:48]:
Well, again, there's a, there's a lot to play for, uh, amongst many, many players, chiefly because as, uh, as Christina, uh, said that If you have, if you have an AI that is not connected to the super, super, this super, super stylish phone or this super, super stylish laptop, if people aren't, if people are just connecting it with, this is the, the ghostly spirit that can live anywhere. Okay. It becomes irrelevant whether you have, and you've, and this becomes one of your most important tools to get you throughout the day personally and professionally. It's make, it has the power to make the iPhone irrelevant as a specific brand choice.

Leo Laporte [00:31:25]:
Yeah. That's a good reason to be scared, huh?

Andy Ihnatko [00:31:27]:
And so, and, and so like, this is, This is the Coke or Pepsi moment. Like, if, if you get people to be loyal to a certain product at this outset, where I'm— again, I use Gemini for nearly everything, not necessarily because I'm in the process every single month of doing a comparison between what's the latest model and what, how well does it all these things. At, after a year and a half starting, 2 and a, 2 years starting with Bard, for God's sake, I've—

Leo Laporte [00:31:52]:
Bard.

Andy Ihnatko [00:31:53]:
I'm comfortable with it.

Leo Laporte [00:31:54]:
I know exactly how it works. Bard. We forgot all about Bard.

Andy Ihnatko [00:31:56]:
I mean, the thing is, like, I know how it works. I'm comfortable with it.

Leo Laporte [00:31:59]:
Credit says it's Gemini. We should mention that.

Andy Ihnatko [00:32:01]:
So, so, so basically OpenAI, OpenAI is not likely to win me as a customer, chiefly because I would have to test out a new product. I'd have to get used to its own rhythms. It would have to, I would have to train it on my own data so it knows when I'm talking about, hey, can I get my phone to do this? It knows that I'm referring to a Pixel 7 Pro running Android 17, all this other stuff. If Apple get, Apple probably does not want to get itself in a situation where, uh, as good as the iPhone is, it's just another device that runs Instagram or runs WhatsApp or runs whatever. Uh, and this use of agentic AI, once it arrives and people are able to do things like, hey, uh, know that report I wrote yesterday? Uh, check to see if I need to update it, and if nothing's changed, then send it to the usual group, and that it simply happens. That is something that it doesn't matter if it happens on an iPhone or not. So anything that, I don't think that that's exactly why they're doing this against OpenAI, but they definitely have, like I said, everything to play for to make sure that people get the— they want people to fall in love with Apple Intelligence and they don't want them to form an emotional or professional commitment to any other AI at a point where everybody is still kind of shopping around and playing the game. It's the 1970s.

Andy Ihnatko [00:33:15]:
Everybody's bed hopping. No one's ready to put a ring on it yet, but the '80s are coming, man.

Christina Warren [00:33:19]:
Well, yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [00:33:20]:
And at some point they're gonna have to sell Microsoft.

Leo Laporte [00:33:21]:
Don't forget what happened then, right? Okay. Let's take a break. There is other news, but I have a feeling we're gonna have to create a theme song for the OpenAI versus Apple battle because this will return like a bad penny every single week. You're watching MacBreak Weekly, Christina Warren, Andy Ihnatko, and Jason Snell. I'll tell you who's not taking a victory lap right now. It's Pavel Durov, the creator and founder of Telegram, who is mighty peeved. Uh, it scared the hell out of me, I have to admit. This was last week also.

Leo Laporte [00:34:01]:
Did you— I don't think you talked about it. It happened— maybe you did. It happened later on Tuesday. Uh, if you talk about— see, I wasn't here last week, so I don't know exactly what was talked about. So I woke up on Tuesday in Las Vegas at Black Hat to the news that Telegram had been— actually, it was, uh, it was before— it was the night before I, I left— that Telegram had been pulled from the App Store. Now Telegram is important to me not only because I love it as a messaging platform— I know, I know, it's not secure— but I love it as a messaging platform. It's fun, it's cool, but most importantly, I use it to talk to my, my AI. It's how it communicates with me.

Christina Warren [00:34:39]:
Oh, really?

Leo Laporte [00:34:40]:
on the phone and on the road. And I thought, man, this is a single point of failure. It turned out, by the way, it came back within a few hours, not before I had completely removed my agent's interactions from Telegram to a Matrix server I was running myself, but that's another story. It came back and it turned out that— and this is Pavel Durov— was pretty miffed. He posted on X, saying it was an extortionist. A bad guy had posted CSAM to a Telegram group and then contacted Apple and said, there's CSAM on here, to which Apple responded by immediately pulling Telegram down. The attacker was a takedown extortionist, someone who demands ransom from group owners in exchange for not targeting their communities. They use automated accounts to plant illegal content in public groups and then report it directly to Apple, attempting to trigger the removal of legitimate communities whose owners refuse to pay them.

Leo Laporte [00:35:47]:
Now, everybody knows Telegram is a hive of scum and villainy, among other things, but what messaging system isn't? Maybe Apple Messages, but You know, um, Apple at least— I mean, I'm sure Pavel has a phone number of somebody, and Apple at least put it back. But he's very concerned about this single point of failure. Others have raised the point that Telegram might not be getting fair treatment considering that X never was taken off the App Store despite for months hosting nudified content and other Very questionable content. Your thoughts?

Andy Ihnatko [00:36:28]:
Well, but there's a, but there's a big, big difference. CSAM is the nuclear bomb that you have to negate immediately. Whereas as unpalatable as X is in general and Nudify apps are, it's not quite the same thing. I, I believe that if Apple has so many responsibilities to make sure that they lock that crap down at the first twitch of a, of, of a report that, that does absolutely start a four-alarm fire immediately. It's not, no debate, no discussion, no, let's investigate this. It's like, no, we gotta shut this stuff down.

Leo Laporte [00:37:02]:
But don't you think that empowers takedown extortionists?

Andy Ihnatko [00:37:05]:
It certainly does. And it's, and it's part, and it's part of what is, is, is on a lesser scale, excuse me, lesser dramatic scale. It's what's empowering YouTube to become the problem that it is, where it's very, very easy to target a very, very popular channel and simply get it taken down with multiple spurious copyright notices.

Christina Warren [00:37:24]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [00:37:25]:
Andy, don't mention that.

Christina Warren [00:37:27]:
But, but, but I think that's an interesting point though, Andy, because obviously I agree with you, like, like CSAM is going to be a nuclear option. And if you get reports, you need to take action. I think what is an interesting thought experiment is if someone had reported that CSAM content existed on Twitter, on X, whatever, or on YouTube, if Apple would have made the same decision. And I'm going to be honest with you. You, I don't think they would have. Now, part of that you could argue is that at least in the case of Google, they have their own teams that scan things and are incredibly proactive to dealing with that type of content in a way that maybe you can't be on a messaging platform, especially if there's any sort of kind of encryption involved. But I do still think that it's interesting. It's worth noting because, you know, I I, I, I'm not going to say that Apple would not have removed X from the App Store, but I don't know if it would have.

Christina Warren [00:38:19]:
At the very least, I mean, I think that in a circumstance like this, I, I think Pavel has a right to be frustrated because if you're going to take an action like this, I think at the very least you should give, you know, the CEO of a company which is a very popular and, you know, a very used app in your App Store. a heads up, even if you're not going to change the decision. Just, just at the very least, you know, reaching out and going, this is what's up. We can talk about it, you know, when, when you've dealt with things. But, but we have to act in this manner.

Andy Ihnatko [00:38:50]:
I wonder if it speaks to how— what kind of lines of communication Apple has with different companies. Like, for instance, there was problems like this and problems in terms of deepfakes and other kind of content on X before. Where, I mean, us and other people were clamoring like, why are you allowing this to continue? This is— they are in direct violation of App Store policies, and you have shut down other apps for doing the same or worse.

Christina Warren [00:39:16]:
Because they have a different tier.

Andy Ihnatko [00:39:17]:
Right.

Christina Warren [00:39:17]:
There are different rules.

Andy Ihnatko [00:39:19]:
But also, in addition to that, it came out soon afterward that, yeah, Apple was basically having deep, threatening conversations with them saying, We need you to fix this and take this very, very seriously because we are contemplating the nuclear option, but we do not want to do that right now. So I'm just, I'm just not even suggesting anything might or might not have been the case, but it does make me think about all the different times where a nuclear option was averted because as it happens, these 2 very, very key people have had a really good professional reputation, uh, at their respective companies and even at different companies before they came to Apple and whatever. And so they were able to pick up the phone and say, what, Josh, what the hell is going on and what are you doing about it? So I wonder if there was just less communication between Telegram that might have affected things. But if nothing else though, my first reaction to this is that it does show you how quickly Apple can move if it is properly motivated. That if we were ever wondering about, well, the thing is there's so much bureaucracy and so many layers that they have to go through. It's like, no, under certain correct— under certain situations of, of high motivation, Apple can just grab for the wall switch and just yank that plug out immediately if they so desire to. Which might provoke us to think back in the past 5 or 6 or 7 years about times when, again, it seems like they weren't doing anything very, very fast. Is that— That doesn't mean that they can't do something very, very quickly, but that This category of problem is not something that they resort, that they devote those kinds of resources to.

Jason Snell [00:40:58]:
I also wanted to mention, and this is somewhat tangential, but like, to be clear, so like, there's a quote from the Telegram guy saying, if an app used by more than a billion people can be removed from the App Store without prior warning, any app can be. There's been a lot of like, Freakouts about this. And I just want to be clear, if you use Telegram, nothing happened. They removed it briefly.

Leo Laporte [00:41:27]:
Yeah, I could still use it, but it would—

Jason Snell [00:41:28]:
From the App Store for new users who had to download it from the App Store. That's it. This was— and to Andy's point, feels to me like this was somebody at Apple saying, why isn't Telegram talking to us? Well, we'll get their attention. This is serious enough that we're going to get their attention by doing something like this.

Leo Laporte [00:41:48]:
Oh, you think so?

Jason Snell [00:41:48]:
But well, I mean, what if they had a line of communication? Why would they do it this way unless Telegram was like, no, we're not going to do it, which I really doubt. But I just want to be clear here that like, this is one of those areas where this stuff, like there are lots of detailed issues about Apple's control and stewardship of the App Store and their choice to make it the only platform For iOS and iPadOS. Lots of issues there. But to see people cover this story like Telegram stopped working on people's iPhones, it's like it didn't happen. None of that happened. All it did was disappear if you went and tried to get it new in the App Store, which affected probably approximately nobody.

Leo Laporte [00:42:33]:
Okay, I understand your point, but I completely disagree with you. It's just, as far as I'm concerned, another nail in the coffin of Apple's complete control of this.

Jason Snell [00:42:46]:
I don't dispute that at all.

Leo Laporte [00:42:47]:
It made me immediately say, all right, I need to own this channel. I need to put up Matrix, have my own server. And I am absolutely— every time this happens, it's a little nick in Apple's reputation. The minute there's something other than the iPhone that I can use, I will. And I think that that's really important. Apple, yeah, it's a nick, it's not a big chunk, but these add up. And it is, it is problematic that they so control this device that I spent lots and lots of money on that they can take an app away. They didn't take it away from me, you're right.

Jason Snell [00:43:25]:
But they didn't take that.

Leo Laporte [00:43:27]:
Well, wait, but they could. They have that control, and it shows you it's a single point of failure. And that's a big problem. And I just, I mean, maybe it's just me, maybe nobody else got that message, but I got that message loud and clear, and it is a chink in their armor.

Jason Snell [00:43:44]:
I, I, there, like I said, I think there are lots and lots of issues with Apple's choices here, and we've talked about it, we'll continue to talk about it. But I think there is a conflation of 2 issues, and I think there is a tendency Among some of the people who talk about this stuff to use what happened as a lever to make people scared about the bigger issue. Now, the bigger issue— look, it's true. If you want to have an iPhone, Apple determines whether— what software you get to run on it.

Leo Laporte [00:44:18]:
And by the way, to a certain degree, so does Google.

Jason Snell [00:44:21]:
To a certain degree, right? They're different but similar in some ways. And people should know about that, but in my opinion, it's irresponsible to say, and I saw headlines that said this, Apple pulls Telegram from iPhones.

Leo Laporte [00:44:40]:
And I understand that's not what happened, and I still was using Telegram. I completely understand.

Jason Snell [00:44:45]:
So why does the CEO of Telegram then say, oh, this is outrageous? It's because the CEO of Telegram feels like you feel. feel, which is this individual item is not outrageous, but isn't it a reminder of the power Apple wields over its platform?

Leo Laporte [00:44:58]:
Yes, it wields over its business because— Yes, if, if Apple pulls Telegram, if Apple were to pull at some point— and by the way, let's face it, Telegram is under a lot of assault, quite rightly, by Ukrainians saying Russians use it to plan their warfare, by Russians who say Ukrainians use it to plan their warfare to American governments who say terrorists use it and CSAM is on it. All of that is, is all true, I should point out, at least as far as I can tell. There's a lot of junk on there. And I think Durov is quite rightly concerned that at some point Apple may say, yeah, you know, Elon has an in in the White House, but you, my friend, do not. In fact, he's, he's under indictment in Moscow. He can't go back to Russia because he'll be thrown into jail. Uh, I understand his concern. That's his business right there.

Leo Laporte [00:45:51]:
Yeah, he'd still have Android.

Andy Ihnatko [00:45:53]:
Yeah, I mean, I, I, I do understand. I do, Jason, I do understand your point that oftentimes these get—

Leo Laporte [00:45:59]:
It was overstated for link bait. I completely agree.

Andy Ihnatko [00:46:01]:
Yeah, and also, and also for what might even be as bad a problem, which is someone being lazy and not understanding— someone who's in the, in the job and career of communicating news and communicating information not understanding that words matter and the sequence in which you put the words into a sentence also really, really matters. I do, I do, however, think that this is yet another really, really important opportunity to talk about the problem of the choke point for every single phone now being, if you can intimidate, if you can strong-arm Apple into pulling an app, and if you can strong-arm Google into pulling an app, you can censor an entire channel of communication worldwide. And how much do we trust Apple or Google to say, If they said, by the way, in our country of 1.8 billion people, we've decided that we don't want any kind of security of any kind, or we decide that this platform's becoming too popular for people that we don't like, or here is an art platform that is allowing types of art that we think communicate bad ideas, we decide that we can't— rather than pass a law to censor that, that our people will be very, very unhappy with, We've decided to simply basically strong-arm you into pulling it with just 2 of those choke points. That's a big, big problem. And Android, which used to be like the, the, a good case study of saying, look, if you don't want— if what it's, it's your app, it's your phone, you're free to do whatever you want with it. If you want to sideload an app with all the risks that that entails, by the way, here's fine. Here's an APK file. Go ahead and sideload it.

Andy Ihnatko [00:47:37]:
Now they've app— now Google has gone back on that. with essentially making sure that every app at least has to be signed by an understood, known, identified developer. Now, we're just basically down to AOSP, the Android Open Source Project version of Android. And that comes with so many downsides that even a big, big nerd like myself who loves the cachet of saying, oh no, no, no, I run pure open source on my phone and I'm de-Googled Yeah, but now you can't get any of the cool apps or services that you actually rely on. You can't call an Uber on this phone. Yeah, maybe I don't mind some control and surveillance. That is just a big, big problem that can't be shoveled under the rug.

Leo Laporte [00:48:22]:
Well, I also think that this, and this goes back to the previous conversation, there is a threat to Apple that right now, I don't have a whole lot of choice. As you point out, I can run an AOSP phone. I mean, I have phones that are like this E Ink phone that runs, I don't know, some sort of very stripped-down AOSP version of Android.

Andy Ihnatko [00:48:43]:
And I noticed that you use it so much that you've got a dead battery indicator on the screen.

Leo Laporte [00:48:48]:
It's got a long battery life 'cause it's E Ink, but yeah, I haven't used it. In fact, it's really useless. But we're gonna see, I think, in the next few years, AI-based devices that don't have apps, that don't have app stores, that are, capable. And I think that all you're doing—

Jason Snell [00:49:05]:
most of them are going to be run by giant companies.

Christina Warren [00:49:07]:
I was going to— I was going to say, I was going to say, I— you're not wrong, Leo, that we— they are definitely facing competition. But there is zero reason to believe that whatever the next big operating system is— and I do believe that at least one of the AI companies is going to take a very big swing and potentially be very successful. by doing like their own operating system, I have zero reason to believe that their policies will be demonstrably different from the policies that Google and Apple have. Honestly.

Leo Laporte [00:49:37]:
It's— but it's true. But there are competitive pressures there. You know who might actually end up doing it? Believe it or not, the last people you'd expect— Meta. Because they've lost the AI race and they spent so much money hiring Wang and building this ASI group that's— nothing's happened. So a couple of things have happened for Meta in the last couple of weeks that make me think maybe they're saying, well, maybe there's other ways to make money than sucking people's data. Oh, come on. Meta, Meta, Meta.

Jason Snell [00:50:08]:
Wait a minute.

Leo Laporte [00:50:09]:
Just let me just give the 2 data points, then you can rebut. Meta released an open source repo. It's on your platform, GitHub.

Christina Warren [00:50:17]:
I know.

Leo Laporte [00:50:18]:
That lets you take these Meta glasses and point them at your agent, not Meta, even the cameras. And they've released Glimmer and are about to release, uh, what is it, Muse, another model, an open weights model, their first in years. They, they released the first open weights model, LLaMA, and started a whole thing, by the way. Thank you, with LLaMA CPP. Uh, but they've been back to releasing— they're not the best, fairly capable models. Uh, maybe they're seeing that maybe the— maybe there's other ways to make money than pointing everything towards, you know, Meta properties. And look who else is doing it. And we know they have ways to make money.

Leo Laporte [00:50:54]:
NVIDIA, who are making very capable open weight models, knowing that, well, maybe we won't collect your data, but we'll get your money for the hardware. Anyway, those are my data points. What do you think?

Christina Warren [00:51:07]:
Okay. So I think on the Meta end, you're— it is interesting. And I do like that they have finally returned to doing open weight models again after, you know, basically the— especially after the LLaMA for benchmark scandal and whatnot. And I'm glad to see that. But let's make no mistake, the whole enticing thing of that model, the whole thing that they are betting on is that if you are willing to let Meta train on your data, you get it insanely, insanely cheaply. Their normal pricing is fine, but you can do better from other models. So the whole reason that anybody would bother with it is that they are letting you train on their data. And I think that it's great that they can have, you know, an open source repo to let you use it.

Leo Laporte [00:51:50]:
I can run Glimmer on my own server.

Christina Warren [00:51:52]:
Yes, you can. But most people are not going to, Leo. That's the thing. And, and the thing is, is that yes, you can release these things open weight, but at a certain point, open weight becomes a little bit meaningless in the sense that yes, it's open weight, but I need $2 million minimum to be able to, you know, get enough, you know, H100s to be able to run them.

Leo Laporte [00:52:09]:
I can run Glimmer on a 64 gig M4. Many.

Christina Warren [00:52:14]:
Yeah, but it's not going to be the best thing in the world. It's not going to be competitive. The models that people are actually excited about, you know, are the ones that are being run in data centers, period. And so it's great that it can be open weight. It's great that we can—

Leo Laporte [00:52:26]:
That's today, though.

Christina Warren [00:52:28]:
Yes, that's today. But given the hardware, you know, crunch and whatnot, I don't know when it will be, you know, actually feasible for us to, on a mainstream level, self-host these things. I'm all for it.

Leo Laporte [00:52:40]:
As you know, I've been, you know, I would tell a 20-year-old who's thinking about what they want to do with their life that the best thing to do is to aim at that future day when there'll be hardware and software that people can run in their house that will give them privacy.

Christina Warren [00:52:53]:
And I think that's, that's a great ideal. But I also think that there are financial incentives from all the companies involved, including Nvidia, which will make it difficult for people to actually have access to those things. So I wonder at a certain point how much it just becomes almost marketing copy where you're saying, oh, well, it's open weight and anyone can do it, but it's not actually conceivable. Right.

Leo Laporte [00:53:11]:
You're on the front lines and I trust your opinion.

Christina Warren [00:53:13]:
Well, and, and, well, but you might be right. And I hope that you are right. Like, right. Like, I hope that that is where we can get to.

Leo Laporte [00:53:19]:
I mean, more people do that.

Christina Warren [00:53:21]:
I really hope we get to that place. But when I look at what Meta is doing right now, I'm going, okay, well, no one is taking you seriously. You've spent all this money. The only way that you can get anybody to pay any attention to you because the Chinese model so have caught up so quickly is basically by all but giving it away in a hosted variance. And the way that you're doing that is by training on the data. I mean, Facebook's entire thing, Meta's entire company ethos has been the fact that it, it knows everything about you and that it tracks your data like even more than Google. That has been from the very beginning kind of their MO. So I would love to see them like turn another leaf, but I actually see this open weight strategy, that this return to open weight in some ways is them trying to be like, okay, no one is using our stuff and we need a way to be able to get additional training information and something else.

Christina Warren [00:54:10]:
And if we make it cheap enough, that's great. And maybe in an ideal world, people will be able to fork that and use some of that information to, you know, have models that you can host without having to give them any, any data, which would be wonderful. But it kind of becomes to Andy's point, kind of like an AOSP sort of thing where, yeah, it's great that I can run GrapheneOS and that I can do all these things with it, but I can't call an Uber and I can't, you know, use Google Wallet. And there are other things that are just not going to work. And for some people, for the idealists, the people are going to be willing to jump through enough hoops, that will be fine. But I think more people will just kind of be like, I'm going to go with whatever is easier. And if it's training on my data, Soviet.

Jason Snell [00:54:50]:
Can I be utopian for a moment, please?

Leo Laporte [00:54:53]:
I don't want to be the only one.

Jason Snell [00:54:55]:
Well, and boy, this is going to make some people angry, but, um, there's a real good solution here, which is that a bunch of influential regions make it illegal for companies that make computing devices to prevent the sideloading of third-party software. Done. Solved. And honestly, It should be illegal.

Christina Warren [00:55:17]:
Yeah, it should.

Jason Snell [00:55:18]:
If I— well, if I, if I buy an iPhone and I write a piece of software for it and I want to just stick it on there, if I want to download a piece of software and just stick it on there, I should be allowed to. And it doesn't have to be for the general public. It wouldn't be for the general public necessarily, but it would allow a little latitude. And, and I wrote a piece about this like 5 years ago, but like The Mac does it. Apple's got all sorts of security levels on the Mac, but in the end, if you say yes, yes, yes, do this, you can get any arbitrary code to run on a Mac. And it's fine and good. And it provides a degree of latitude that allows things. In fact, I would say it allows things that Apple doesn't anticipate, like the flowering of AI models and agents on Apple's Mac platform.

Leo Laporte [00:56:07]:
Yeah.

Jason Snell [00:56:08]:
to happen. It allows all that to happen without Apple needing to be involved at all because Apple didn't have to be. It didn't have to approve anything or disapprove of anything. And like, and is it likely that the governments of the world are going to do some sort of digital freedom like that to allow our devices to have that level of freedom if we want them to? I don't know. Probably not. You know, that's the pessimistic part. But my optimism is There's a simple answer here, which is make it so that if you make a computing device, people can put software on it if they want. And that the idea of a monopoly control of the platform and all the software on it is just not allowed.

Jason Snell [00:56:51]:
That is basically what we have to do.

Andy Ihnatko [00:56:53]:
I would, I would do, I would suggest something that's either more serious or simpler. And it actually mirrors something that iFixit wrote in an editorial. editorial the other week, something that I've been basically hoping for for a number of years. If all they did was simply say that— if I were to, uh, given the— if I were to be able to create the mass delusion in lawmakers to make it— to make this one kind of law happen, I would say, no, you know what, instead of making it illegal to have a device that can't sideload apps, I'm going to basically say that you must have an unlockable bootloader on every single device that you ship.

Jason Snell [00:57:28]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:57:28]:
Mm-hmm.

Andy Ihnatko [00:57:29]:
So that yes, you can still restrict your iPads, your iPhones, whatever, to your specific app store. But if, because someone likes your hardware but doesn't like that policy, or simply because, okay, you know, my 5-year-old iPad is still working great, but you're about to drop support for it and no more OS updates. I'm, I, it, if it, with an unlockable bootloader, now suddenly if there is an open source project that says that wants to bring Linux to the iPad or Linux to the iPhone or something like that, they can actually do that very, very— not, not, excuse me, not easily, but basically the thing that makes it impossible will have been done away with. On other devices with— God, I have got, I've got Chromebooks 'cause I'm, I've been such a fan of Chromebooks. The idea of, well, that they don't make it, they don't make it so easy that you would get yourself— anybody who doesn't understand the, the, the importance, the severity of what they're doing would do it accidentally or just because they're board, you literally have to take, take the, the case apart and physically like break a seal, like on the motherboard, often case to do that. But once you do, once you've made that choice to do that, essentially you can rewrite everything on it, which is why I've got a beautiful like 6 or 7-year-old Chromebook Pixel that is now running a very, very good version of Arch Linux on it. Because again, it could simply do away with everything. I feel as though it breaks my heart a little bit that I still have like a early generation, uh, iPad Mini that I love in no smart— small part because I've got the most beautiful hard case for it that just makes into the most Ford Prefect, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy looking and feeling device ever.

Andy Ihnatko [00:59:05]:
If I could, and of course it's been obsoleted a long time ago, breaks my heart that it still works great. The battery still charges great. If I could install Linux on this, I would do that in a heartbeat, but it is now essentially e-waste. Uh, you, I grew The, the idea of just being able to use the apps that are still installed on it that don't connect to a server and say, I refuse to run anymore because you're not running on an OS that I approve of, it breaks my heart. And like I said, power to— if I spend that kind of money on a device, I should have the, the ability to influence the disposition of the device. I can understand how a company like Apple would be— is fighting sideloading for a number of good reasons in addition to the majority of bad reasons why they're advocating against it, because it does make things a lot more difficult for them. It's something that they have to do. But if they just simply say, look, once you basically say, if you, if you tap the, if you go to the about box and tap the about box, uh, 11 times to the tune of Yankee Doodle.

Jason Snell [01:00:06]:
Hmm.

Leo Laporte [01:00:06]:
Okay.

Andy Ihnatko [01:00:07]:
You'll, when you get to stuck a feather in its cap, you'll get a dialogue saying, If you tap and call it macaroni, the bootloader will be unlocked. It will decertify iOS. It won't function as an iOS device anymore, but the bootloader— so think really carefully if you want to, if you continue to tap and call it macaroni. But I assume that if you're going to tap it at this point, you know what you're doing. Do that and then let the open source community figure out how to take advantage of it. And now it's no longer your problem, Apple.

Leo Laporte [01:00:35]:
Well, we are all now just proven dewy-eyed utopianists.

Jason Snell [01:00:38]:
Yeah, we're saving the world here. We'll throw it. Well, we'll do, we'll do Andy's bootloader thing. Christina mentioned in our members Discord the idea of like, at the very least, say that if you're going to end of life a product, that the bootloader needs to get unlocked. We'll put that in there along with my app thing. And then I think there's a lot of sort of right to repair, Cory Doctorow-ish stuff that should go in this same reform package. This is your tractors that can't be serviced by third parties or, you know, parts to repair a product that can't be blocked out if they're not from the approved vendors via some sort of serial check. Like, yeah.

Jason Snell [01:01:13]:
And look, I think what we're really saying here is at some point companies realized that the real way to make money was to control all the horizontal and the vertical. Right. And part of that— look, I will admit part of that is they decided that they— that consumers wanted things to be cheaper. And so they're like, all right, okay, we'll be— we'll make them a little cheaper, but we're gonna, you know, we're gonna sell you the printer real cheap, but we're gonna sell you the toner. And that, that, that blade, razor blade model has been applied to technology to the point where like every single freaking thing is a part of the gestalt of the company. And it's like a company like Apple that's the size of Apple can point at something like putting ads in Maps. And it's like, it's a key part of their strategy to add a little bit of map ad revenue. It's like, this is, this is what gets us to this point is we can't give up control of the App Store.

Jason Snell [01:02:10]:
Do you see how much money we make on it? We can't allow people to repurpose older devices 'cause we need to sell them new devices. And, you know, the only way to stop that, this is even bigger picture, is, you know, the point is that capitalist profit-driven organizations want to make as much money as possible. And the only thing that prevents them from doing the worst things to their customers other than the open market, that the open market is limited when there are fewer and fewer players, is regulation. And, and so this, my, my fellow Americans, that is today why I am introducing the Notco-Snell-Warren Plan.

Andy Ihnatko [01:02:50]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [01:02:51]:
We are now going over the top from utopianist to communist, and I want to stop it, nip it in the bud.

Christina Warren [01:02:57]:
No, you know, no, this is capitalist.

Jason Snell [01:03:00]:
Who are you? This is capitalism. It's the classic, genuinely regulated capitalism, because you can't unregulate capitalism.

Leo Laporte [01:03:06]:
Even Adam Smith, I think, said that while the, you know, the hand of the market is great, you still need some sort of interest.

Jason Snell [01:03:13]:
You still need rules, and saying that your computer should run whatever software you want is probably a good rule.

Christina Warren [01:03:18]:
That's all I'm saying. I would also argue that frankly, the anti-capitalist argument is kind of where we are now, where you have an uneven playing field, where it is not a market, it's being controlled by monopolists, it's being controlled by major parties, and there's no way for you to even have an open market. Right.

Leo Laporte [01:03:35]:
One last bit before we take a break, which is thanks to the courts and Epic, Google has started hosting its first third-party store, uh, including, uh, well, there's only one so far, but in the App Store you can get Aptoide, which is okay. Not the— it sounds like hemorrhoid, but it's not. It's a game-focused store, uh, that you can— you could sideload it in the old days, but is now officially in the Google Play Store. This is part of what they agreed to in their settlement with Epic. So I don't— I'm not gonna rush to get Aptoide after looking at it. Yeah, but nevertheless, this is a chink in the armor. Um, I, I, I don't know if Apple's been fighting this. They're still going to the Supreme Court to try to stop this.

Leo Laporte [01:04:26]:
Um, but I think that that is a step in the right direction. Not, not much of a step, but a little bit of a step.

Christina Warren [01:04:32]:
But no, I think it's a big step in the right direction, at least in the sense that you would have you know, potentially other ways of getting things. Now, I don't know. I haven't looked into this enough. I think Andy would know if the, the new app stores can have different policies over what can and can't be installed that can override whatever the core Android policies are. If this is similar to the, the way the alternative app stores can work in the EU where you can access things that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do, I doubt we will see anything like this happen. to Apple because even the judgment that they are fighting did not require this. They lost in a— or they won, I guess, to be more clear, in a way where Google lost in a much larger way. And so this is one of the concessions Google is having to make.

Leo Laporte [01:05:22]:
I still find it ironic because honestly, Apple is more of a monopolist than Google is.

Christina Warren [01:05:26]:
Right. Look, it was different courts, different judges, different lawyers, even though very similar facts and whatnot. And so I don't know if this means that, okay, if I install the— God, the name is so terrible— Aptoide. Aptoide.

Leo Laporte [01:05:44]:
Aptoide.

Christina Warren [01:05:45]:
It's awful. Awful. I don't know if you would be able to install apps that otherwise would not get through Google App Review. That's what I'm not clear on.

Leo Laporte [01:05:54]:
Yeah, that's the question.

Christina Warren [01:05:55]:
But, you know, I think it's good that there are alternatives there, at the very least, for people not having to rely on, you know, Google's payment policies and, and that sort of thing. Now, will people actually use this? Almost certainly not, which is kind of the sad thing with this, which is like, you know, if you would allow these sorts of things to exist, I promise you 80%, 90% of the people are still going to use the default as long as you make the default experience better and as long as you can show the use cases for why it's better, people are going to do that because they're going to look at the alternative stores and they're going to go, it's a lot of junk. It doesn't have the big players. Maybe I can do something weird with it. But it's kind of like the F-Droid store, which to be clear, I'm a big fan of. I'm glad that that exists. But in most cases, the number of people who are going to be bothering installing F-Droid versions of things on their phone is so small, it's not impacting Google Play. It really isn't.

Leo Laporte [01:06:53]:
Yeah, they might as well. Yeah, absolutely. And you said 80 or 90, I think it's 99.9. I mean, I—

Christina Warren [01:06:58]:
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I was exaggerating.

Leo Laporte [01:07:01]:
Everything we've been talking about in terms of freedom is for the tiniest slice of people who have the technical expertise and the interest. And so Apple and Google don't have to fear for their profits. But I just think people ought to have the right to do what they want. You can't root an iPhone, can you? There's no way to do that.

Christina Warren [01:07:22]:
Yeah, but, well, you can, but it was interesting. One of the stories was in the document was actually that there was a new jailbreak version that was released. The thing is, is that it has to be a certain version. You better not be updated past anything else. It's very limited in what you can do. Some of the older hardware is easier to get than others, but I mean, Apple Apple is really good at even going way, way back and doing stuff. And then the hard thing with Apple devices is that they only sign the, the, you know, older versions of the operating systems for a certain period of time. I think it's 2 weeks.

Christina Warren [01:07:53]:
And so if you didn't have that exploitable version of the OS already running on your device, even if it is capable of running that version, good luck getting it because it's not signed, so it's not going to run.

Leo Laporte [01:08:03]:
And Apple has a strong case saying, well, that's a bad idea because of course, that makes you highly insecure. This is the story, thanks to Andy. Uh, iOS 26 has a jailbreak. The Dopamine folks have created Dopamine 3.0, but you have to have very specific—

Christina Warren [01:08:22]:
Very old hardware. Very old hardware.

Jason Snell [01:08:25]:
Which is okay.

Christina Warren [01:08:25]:
Which is okay, absolutely. But, but again, to my point, the interesting thing here is that again, like, you'd need to have a version that you were running iOS 26 or I guess like 26.01, if you were running, and what are we on right now? 26.6— 26.6.1 or something. So we're, you know, many, many, many releases past that. So it'd be one of those things where if you happen to have hardware that could do it, and it is running that specific version, you're good. But where you would run into trouble is like, let's say I'm running iOS 18. If I want to update that, I can't just go into this version that's You know, rootable or exploitable because the only signed version that I can get is the latest version.

Leo Laporte [01:09:08]:
Right.

Christina Warren [01:09:08]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:09:09]:
And that illustrates another problem with the freedom that you should have on your phone. Like, if you have like a 5 or 6-year-old iPhone and it's not— let's say it's not been obsoleted yet. Okay. You're still going to— it looks like you're still going to get iOS 27. You're still going to get at least a year worth of updates. But you're aware that, man, I don't think this phone has been ever as fast as it, as it was when it was running iOS 16. I, I would love to roll it back to iOS 16 just to get that performance back. And but no, because that OS is no longer signed for this device.

Leo Laporte [01:09:45]:
Mm-hmm.

Andy Ihnatko [01:09:45]:
Uh, that's another— see, again, it, it goes for— I just believe that unless you're giving them away for free or whether— or you're selling them at well under cost, if you're You really do have to— I, I do feel as though these companies should give you the ability to have control over the device, uh, because you can't just treat people like children.

Leo Laporte [01:10:03]:
That this is—

Andy Ihnatko [01:10:04]:
that's one of the things that has made me so annoyed about Apple's control versus Google's control, even though oftentimes Google and Apple are— have the same level of control. Apple's attitude has always been, the thing is, we can't— these people are idiots, okay? We are so much smarter than they are.

Leo Laporte [01:10:21]:
There is this kind of Patronizing.

Andy Ihnatko [01:10:24]:
I mean, yeah, I mean, on a more positive— to put it in a more positive way, there's a line that I heard some Disney executive who worked with— actually was long with the organization long enough to have worked personally with Walt Disney. He told the story about the character of— the characterization of the Disney theme parks, which is that Walt wanted to make sure that if you came to Disneyland, you would have a really, really good time. He felt so strongly about that that he wanted to to make it impossible for you to not to have a bad time. Meaning that there's so much that is tightly, tightly, tightly controlled to make sure that whatever kind of mischief you want to get in that has not been controlled by Disney, it is not possible to even do that. And that's, I've always thought about that as a really good analog for Apple. Like maybe their intentions, or at least originally were correct that, look, if we lock down this operating system, we are gonna prevent our users from having a bad time with this phone. And yeah, I mean, having, having access to an alternative app store that doesn't have any of the content that's on the original regular app store is a bad time. Installing it, unlocking a bootloader and installing like a kind of flaky mobile Linux can possibly be a bad time.

Andy Ihnatko [01:11:30]:
But sometimes the most fun you can have is not to go to Disney Disneyland, but just to rent a car and drive around Anaheim and say, you know what?

Leo Laporte [01:11:38]:
Go to Crusty Town. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:11:40]:
That, that, that food truck Looks like it's serving something really, really cool, and I might get violently ill from it, but it smells great, and I'm going to order from that truck.

Leo Laporte [01:11:52]:
Well, let's not forget that after the sale of Pixar to Disney, Steve Jobs was the number one individual stockholder in Disney. Disney definitely influenced Apple to a great degree. Let's take a little break. Come back with more. By the way, happy birthday to Steve Wozniak. It's his birthday today.

Christina Warren [01:12:12]:
Yay! Happy birthday, Woz.

Leo Laporte [01:12:14]:
Yeah, happy birthday, Woz. Uh, we'll have more with him.

Andy Ihnatko [01:12:18]:
He is the anti-tech bro.

Leo Laporte [01:12:19]:
He is, isn't he?

Andy Ihnatko [01:12:20]:
He's like, if he—

Leo Laporte [01:12:21]:
you know, Woz would agree with everything we've just said.

Christina Warren [01:12:25]:
I was gonna say, Woz would have insisted that the bootloader be easy to unlock and offered his own, you know, alternative operating systems himself.

Leo Laporte [01:12:33]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:12:34]:
Why wouldn't we print the, the, the, the, a hex dump of our ROMs in with the instruction manual? Why wouldn't we?

Leo Laporte [01:12:40]:
Yeah.

Christina Warren [01:12:41]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:12:41]:
Woz is 76 today. Happy birthday to Woz. And I'm sure Janet, his wife, who we all know, is throwing him a heck of a party and we are not invited. At least as far as I know. Maybe you are. RAM, RAM, RAM, RAM, RAM. It's, uh, it's in short supply. Apple thought very wisely, oh, they thought, oh, you know what we're gonna do? We're gonna go to, uh, a Chinese RAM supplier, uh, CMXT or CXMT, and get the RAM from them.

Leo Laporte [01:13:13]:
Now don't worry, U.S. RAM suppliers who won't sell us your RAM, uh, don't worry because, uh, we're only going to use it in the Chinese iPhones. Well, guess what? After going back and forth and Apple went to Congress and went to Trump saying, can we please now see XMT has rejected Apple. Well, to be specific, according to a Korean technology site Digital Daily, they've rejected Apple's demands for discount pricing.

Andy Ihnatko [01:13:41]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:13:43]:
And you know what? They're in this— they're in the driver's seat on this. Apple, you know, just Doesn't have the, uh, they're not the only buyers, let's put it that way. Uh, CXMT provides Huawei and Xiaomi with, of course, RAM chips, so much so they don't really need Apple. Um, in fact, CXMT had the gall, the nerve to tell Apple, you're going to pay the same price you're paying now to Samsung and SK Hynix, who apparently are sold out through 2030.

Andy Ihnatko [01:14:18]:
Yeah, I imagine Apple thought that the idea of securing Apple as a customer would, in the long run, they would be so excited about it that they would give them better pricing. But that is remarkable. Even so, I think it was The Wall Street Journal had a long article about the larger situation, said that even if they managed to get through all of the political headwinds against Doing business with this entity. Half of the people that Apple is lobbying in D.C. are actively trying to get them added to the exclusion list. Right now, they're not. It'll just cost them politically if they go ahead with the deal. But no, they're actually pursuing the nuclear option against this company.

Andy Ihnatko [01:15:03]:
That's how bad this situation is. But Wall Street Journal was saying that even if they could do a deal with this company, They, I, all their RAM is already allocated and it won't solve their immediate problems at all. So it's like, wow. It's like the first reel of any Charlie Chaplin movie where it's just depression after depression after depression, slam door after slam door after slam door. And the fact that they got the, they carried the clipping in their wallet, but we're a, look, look, we're a $5 trillion company. This shouldn't happen to us. Yeah, it's happening to all of you.

Christina Warren [01:15:36]:
I'm sorry.

Leo Laporte [01:15:36]:
The 3 big RAM manufacturers in the world have announced they are sold out through the end of next year.

Andy Ihnatko [01:15:43]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:15:44]:
Through the end of next year, according to DigiTimes. This crisis isn't gonna end. Now, there was a rumor which Ming-Chi Kuo has debunked. I don't know what the truth is, that TSMC was sitting on as many as a billion processors because Apple does integrated RAM. They can't finish the die until they get the RAM for the processor. And the story was where they're sitting on a billion processors and they can't get the RAM to finish them. Now, Ming-Chi Kuo says that's not true. I don't know what the case is, but whoo, it is tight out there.

Leo Laporte [01:16:18]:
That's another one of the reasons I went out and spent a lot of money to buy machines that had enough RAM for me to run local AI models. I feel like this is gonna— I may not be able to buy those next month. I may not be, you know.

Andy Ihnatko [01:16:34]:
I'm totally, I'm totally with you. It's like, so, uh, I'm, as I've said before, like, I'm also, I'm also like kind of really— this is like the last year I can possibly run this phone that I have, this, uh, this, uh, this Pixel phone that I have. Like, it will almost certainly lose support like at the end of next year. And I'm really like, um, right, this is a good— and I almost pulled— I almost bought, uh, a Pixel 10 Even though the Pixel 11 is going to be released actually tomorrow, uh, because, uh, Google was offering such a good discount on it like a few weeks ago.

Leo Laporte [01:17:07]:
It has 100— what, they went to 256 gigs of storage, which is good, right?

Andy Ihnatko [01:17:12]:
And also, yeah, and, and, but that—

Leo Laporte [01:17:14]:
what's the RAM? We don't know what the RAM is.

Andy Ihnatko [01:17:16]:
But no, on the— I'm sorry, I don't know. I know about tomorrow.

Leo Laporte [01:17:18]:
16. Okay.

Christina Warren [01:17:19]:
Okay.

Andy Ihnatko [01:17:19]:
But for, um, for the Pixel 10, that was again, it was on sales 16 gigs RAM, 256 gigs of storage for that model. And my concern was that not knowing for a fact what the capabilities of the 11 would be, it's like we are all looking at a future— we're all looking at a future where a year ago we would just simply assume that if we have— if we're buying a premium smartphone, it will have 16 gigs of, of, of application RAM. Now we're thinking the premium level might be 12 gigs.

Leo Laporte [01:17:48]:
Right.

Andy Ihnatko [01:17:49]:
even— maybe we can't even count on 12 gigs. And that's—

Leo Laporte [01:17:52]:
Christina says the 10 is 12.

Christina Warren [01:17:54]:
Yeah, the 10 is 12. I think the 10 Pro is 16.

Leo Laporte [01:17:57]:
Um, and so I'll be honest, I'm sitting on my Pixel 9 with no urgency because they haven't really made much of a difference in the 10, and I don't think the 11 will either. But Andy, you have something much older.

Andy Ihnatko [01:18:09]:
Well, yeah, I have a Pixel 7, uh, and that, and that's actually my backup phone because my Pixel 6 like went the ways of Jesus called it home, uh, October of last year. Um, and the, and the thing is like, this has, and, uh, I'm again, I'm, I feel the same way as you do. The thing is like with the, when I upgraded my MacBook, I could, before I, before I even bought it, like I, here are the, here was like a half dozen things I will be able to do immediately with this M5 MacBook Pro that I cannot currently do with my M1. With the phone, it's like whether I, even if I switch to iPhone, My thinking is like, I just, the camera is the ca— I'm fine. I am satisfied with the camera on my 5-year-old phone. I'm satisfied with the storage and the speed on my 5-year-old phone. It is a little bit laggy when I test out, like when I have got other phones to test out, but it's not bad. The only thing that I would be looking forward to is on-device AI models that might, and AI features that might require Uh, more, more capability, more, uh, TPUs or more, uh, a lot more, uh, neural processors, uh, or more RAM.

Andy Ihnatko [01:19:16]:
And it's, that's why I didn't wind up buying the, that, uh, that 10 Pro because it's like, I just, this, I don't like the idea of upgrading a phone just because I feel as though I need to because I'm being imperiled by maybe I won't be able to get the phone that I want sometime anytime next year. Uh, and it's just very, very difficult. Again, I don't know. I would love to be able to hang onto this phone for another year just to see, or just, or at least give, give, allow my bank account to like heal over the scabs that it acquired after spending $2,200, $2,300 on a new MacBook. Uh, but the thing is like, I, this is the first time that I'm, I think we should all be concerned or at least be aware that it might not be, if the difference between whatever you might've bought in 2025 and the new phones that are available in 2026, Might actually in some ways be an active downgrade because they just don't have enough RAM to fill all of these things. And it might be that, yeah, there will be a 16GB model of whatever, but that will have to be the 512GB option or the 1TB option because they have to save that for the highest price points and the highest profitability. Uh, and the ones that most people would buy are just not going to have as much RAM as you would otherwise like it to have. It's a, unprecedented situation, I think.

Leo Laporte [01:20:34]:
Yeah. Well, you know, of course these RAM companies think this is a great opportunity and they are breaking ground. Micron's about $100 billion on a New York State plant. SK Hynix says they're about to break ground on a $38 billion plant. TSMC is building $100 billion worth of fabs in Arizona. None of that will come online for years.

Christina Warren [01:21:03]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:21:03]:
And that's the problem. I can promise you a RAM glut in 2030.

Christina Warren [01:21:10]:
Well, this is the frustrating thing, right? Is that they had years and years to be able to invest and to stock up.

Leo Laporte [01:21:17]:
They didn't want to because RAM was so cheap, right?

Christina Warren [01:21:18]:
I know. Well, because there are rises and falls, but I mean—

Leo Laporte [01:21:22]:
We've seen this before.

Christina Warren [01:21:24]:
We have seen this before, but this is the level. And I don't know, to me, When you start seeing your projections go up, when you start seeing other companies other than your main suppliers starting to buy a lot from you, when you start seeing the crunch, which you know that they had to be seeing 2 years ago, you know that they did. The fact that they are only now announcing these, you know, these new fabs, which are going to take years to get online, even if they'd invested 2 years ago, we still would be in this problem. But the fact that they didn't, that's what kills me, is that, you know, Like they're, they're pretending like, oh, we had no way of knowing. But yeah, we're completely sold out through the end of the year, through the end of next year. And, and too bad there's nothing you can do about it. Like, come on. I think Andy's point is great.

Christina Warren [01:22:06]:
I think that there are going to be a lot of devices, not just phones, but laptops too. We're already seeing this with some laptops where not on the Mac side, but on, on other sides where, you know, the RAM amount is going down and And that's very unfortunate. I would hope— I'm not hopeful, but I would hope that maybe this would be an opportunity where, especially with some of the advances that we're getting with, you know, with latest coding models, that maybe people would build more efficient software that would be able to run better in these constraints. Again, I hope, but I'm not actually hopeful of that happening. But I think this is going to be an interesting kind of journey for a lot of people because, yeah, but I do think Andy's right. I think what's going to happen is that there are going to be a lot of people who, yeah, I bought a phone 3 years ago, I'm buying a new phone and it's not going to feel demonstrably better than what I used to have. And that's because, yeah, the chip's going to be faster, but there are going to be a lot of other aspects of it that are not going to be a big improvement. Whereas, you know, I think people kind of used to like these, these big kind of improvements and, and that's just not going to be the case because the supply is what it is unless you are fortunate enough to have the money to buy the highest-end component you can get.

Christina Warren [01:23:20]:
And even then, I would be surprised if, you know, as companies are starting to plan out their future products, if they have to keep in mind, okay, well, are we actually going to be able to get as many RAM chips as we think we need or do we have to spec this differently? You know, however many years in the future. But it also, I think, is increasingly clear that none of these major companies care a whole lot about consumers. Their primary—

Leo Laporte [01:23:46]:
Micron even said we're not going to sell to consumers, right?

Christina Warren [01:23:49]:
They shut down Crucial, right? But I think, you know, Nvidia has made that clear for years, too. And I think it's just kind of one of those things where you're like, okay, well, we will own nothing and we will like it. Hey, we'll be able to lease lease an iPhone. We, we, we, we can lease that $3,000 iPhone or, or whatever. I'm being hyperbolic. I, I hope that we don't ever reach a point where an iPhone is $3,000, but—

Leo Laporte [01:24:11]:
I've been kind of buying, buying as much stuff as I can.

Jason Snell [01:24:16]:
Yeah, my wallet's hurting, but, uh, a lot of people asking about like, should I buy an iPhone now when they're the normal price instead of next time?

Leo Laporte [01:24:24]:
Well, maybe they won't be the normal price for a lot longer. We also heard a rumor that the 17 is going to go up price before the 18 comes out.

Jason Snell [01:24:31]:
Keep in mind that 18's not coming out until next spring, probably, right? The 17 base is, is staying around, so they're going to have to raise its price. But the Pro might, because they're finishing up the 17 Pro line and then they could reintroduce at a higher price. But I think there is a strong argument if you have an aging iPhone, the iPhone 17 has been a hit because it's really good. The base model is really great because it's got a lot of Pro features. The Pro models are really nice. I look, I mean, I am going to have phones because I have to test them and all of that. But I'm telling you, looking at the prices, looking at the future, looking at what's going on, and I got my, I got my little cosmic orange iPhone 17 Pro here. It's like, I wouldn't mind using this for the next 2 or 3 years.

Jason Snell [01:25:12]:
It's great. I love it.

Christina Warren [01:25:14]:
It's a great device. It's a great device.

Jason Snell [01:25:16]:
Maybe think about getting an iPhone now and not waiting until next month because, you know, I'm sure they'll be better, of course, but like, What are they going to cost and what are the specs going to be and how much better?

Christina Warren [01:25:30]:
Exactly. Well, that's the whole thing, right? Is that how much better? I mean, the one thing I guess you could say is a ding against the iPhone 17, and I don't think that's that big of a deal, is that it doesn't have all of the new Siri AI features stuff. But that's only the kind of the local stuff because it only has 8 gigs of RAM and really limited to it.

Jason Snell [01:25:49]:
It's just, it's right now it's just like the better Siri voices. It's like it's not enough.

Christina Warren [01:25:53]:
I was worried about— that's what I was going to say is, you know, having used it on my iPad now, like, it's, it's nice. But I think that most features— and honestly, I think this makes sense.

Jason Snell [01:26:02]:
This is—

Christina Warren [01:26:02]:
Google is doing this too. It's like, yeah, you could run this locally, but especially if we're in supply constraints, if you can show that you're doing it in a private way, which Apple has been taking great strides to do, why wouldn't you use it, you know, hosted if possible? So, yeah, you have some better voices and some other local things, but it's not going to be a massive difference, especially if you're looking at, is this going to be, you know, $200 more or whatever? Because we don't know what the prices will be. But it used to always be— but it's so funny because it used to always tell people, you know, the worst time you could ever buy an iPhone would be August of, you know—

Leo Laporte [01:26:36]:
That's changed, hasn't it?

Christina Warren [01:26:37]:
That's changed because we don't, we don't know in, in a month what the prices are going to be. And I certainly think that if you are somebody, let's say you're on like an iPhone 11 or an iPhone 12, and you can get a good deal through a carrier or through Apple or whatever on a 17 or 17 Pro, I would not buy an Air. But like the other 2, I would, I would definitely consider, do you need the latest and greatest, factoring in that there's probably going to be a 20% price bump?

Andy Ihnatko [01:27:06]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:27:06]:
And also, it's hard to believe time is going so fast. Maybe it's because I'm an old man. We're 3 months— 3 weeks away from the next iPhone. Yeah, yeah, we are that close. Yeah, at least its announcement.

Jason Snell [01:27:18]:
I don't know, probably 4.

Leo Laporte [01:27:20]:
4, you think?

Andy Ihnatko [01:27:21]:
When—

Leo Laporte [01:27:21]:
what do you think the day will be? Do we know?

Christina Warren [01:27:23]:
7th, maybe?

Jason Snell [01:27:24]:
9th? 7th is Labor Day.

Christina Warren [01:27:25]:
Oh, is that something? Labor Day? Okay, sorry about that.

Leo Laporte [01:27:27]:
Yeah, 8th or 9th. Sooner than the 9th.

Jason Snell [01:27:29]:
8th or 9th. Yeah, they could do it on the 8th. They've done it the day after Labor Day, especially since it's all pre-recorded now.

Leo Laporte [01:27:34]:
That's not a big deal.

Jason Snell [01:27:34]:
They prefer to— yeah, that's— oh yeah, but they do have People that they will invite to come and do their thing.

Christina Warren [01:27:39]:
I was gonna say, and they have executives who might not want to have to immediately travel, you know, right after Labor Day.

Jason Snell [01:27:46]:
Yeah, so, you know, 8th or 9th feels like—

Leo Laporte [01:27:47]:
I'm still wearing my white shoes, man. I can't come down to Cupertino.

Jason Snell [01:27:51]:
Yeah, yeah. So if I— I mean, Gurman said it, and I agree with him. I think 9/9 is the most likely. Yeah, but, you know, they could surprise us.

Leo Laporte [01:28:00]:
Well, that's less than a month away.

Jason Snell [01:28:02]:
John Ternus will be in charge. He's gonna have to John Ternus's debut.

Leo Laporte [01:28:06]:
Uh, we've seen these RAM ups and downs. Nightscape in our Club Twit Discord says, it's gonna be like the '90s. I bought 16 megabytes of RAM for $600. A month later, something shifted, it was $300. It hurt so bad, I never forgot. Actually, he said counseling helped.

Jason Snell [01:28:24]:
I love a story like that.

Leo Laporte [01:28:25]:
Now we're going the opposite direction. In February of last year, 16 gigs of RAM DDR5 cost $100. Today, $600.

Jason Snell [01:28:37]:
Yeah, I looked up, uh, almost exactly a year ago I bought a replacement for one of my drives in my RAID. So it's just spinning hard drive, but those are needed in data centers too.

Christina Warren [01:28:45]:
Yep.

Jason Snell [01:28:46]:
And I looked at that same model, it's like a Western Digital Red, I think, or maybe it was an IronWolf, you know, but, you know, a NAS drive. And it's twice the price it was one year ago. Twice, just straight up twice the price.

Andy Ihnatko [01:29:01]:
Honest to God. Like, I, so I needed, so I needed some extra storage, uh, and I wasn't even looking for like to build an additional NAS for my network. But the thing is, by the time it came to the point where, you know, I do think that it would be nice to have another 16 terabyte drive or like a 20 terabyte drive, by the time I got around to basically saying, yeah, maybe we should put some, uh, devote some money to that. Prices had gone up so high that it actually cost less for me to buy like a NAS enclosure and recycle 4, like 8 terabyte drives that I'd pulled from a previous, uh, previous thing than to simply buy like a brand new zero hours, uh, hours, hours old, uh, operation old, uh, device with the, with the correct capacity. It's like, it is like just so nuts.

Leo Laporte [01:29:44]:
It's getting so bad. It's making that OpenAI $300 mechanical donut sound pretty appealing.

Andy Ihnatko [01:29:50]:
I can afford $300. That's fine.

Leo Laporte [01:29:51]:
I can afford a Mechanical Donut.

Andy Ihnatko [01:29:54]:
Yeah, I mean, it really is weird. Like, I mean, and, and I'm sorry, just to, uh, not to retread what we were talking about like a couple minutes ago, but the thing is, like, part of— because I've been— I have been thinking about this a hell of a lot. And one of the things, one of the things that I'm thinking about is, well, what if you were to buy like an A series or an E series phone just to last the next 2 or 3 years Partly because of like, it's been a long, long time since I've decided to try to, to daily drive like an A-series phone as my own device. Because part of it, part of the thinking is that by the time, if I wait, if I let this go for 2 or 3 years, the chip prices, chip crisis will be over. The, the flagship phones will be 2 or 3 years better. But also, if the thing that, like, like I mentioned earlier, the thing, only thing that I'm kind of don't wanna miss out on is the idea of like really, really good on-device AI.

Christina Warren [01:30:45]:
Mm-hmm.

Andy Ihnatko [01:30:46]:
Making this into a much more useful device. The thing is, like, as of everything we've seen in iOS 27, that is not going to be seen anytime in 2026, unlikely to be seen in force until we're well into 2027. If we're talking about wanting to use Gemini for that or want to use OpenAI for that, it's not as though next year is likely to be the revolutionary year in which everybody stops using apps and tries and starts using AI agents to get all the work done for them. So again, if I decide that I'm going to try to see what a Nothing, a $500 Nothing phone will be like to rock for a couple years, or, uh, or an 18E or a Pixel, uh, Pixel 18A, uh, would be like for, uh, for 2 years, by the time it's over with, that will be the transformative upgrade when I spend $1,300 on a brand new flagship phone in 2030 or 2029. And my God, I can't believe I'm talking about 2029 and 2030 as though there's things I can plan for. Oh my God, we're living in the future.

Leo Laporte [01:31:46]:
I feel very fortunate. I bought 2 Western Digital Red Pros for my NAS last December. They were about $300 for 16 terabytes. Now they're $700.

Andy Ihnatko [01:31:57]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [01:31:57]:
So I'm glad I put them in. I hope I don't lose my drive. I can't afford to replace it. It's a 5-drive box and I only replaced 2.

Christina Warren [01:32:05]:
Oh no. Paul pointed out in the members chat that, you know, he had a drive go bad and that Amazon, rather than warrantying it, just, you know, gave him his purchase price back. But that's only going to cover half of replacing it. Right.

Jason Snell [01:32:21]:
Yeah.

Christina Warren [01:32:21]:
And there have been other companies who are doing that sort of thing, too, where they don't want to deal with the warranty issues. I trust that Apple will not be that way here. But I have had this thought in my head where I'm going, oh, man, you know, I've got a, you know, almost 3-year-old MacBook Pro. It has 128 gigs of RAM in it. Um, I sure hope nothing happens to it. A, I'd hoped that I'd be able to upgrade this year. Looking at pricing and everything else, I just, I just don't think that I'm gonna be able to necessarily do that because it's going to be so much more than what I already spent. And I already spent a lot of money on it 3 years ago.

Christina Warren [01:32:55]:
But now I'm like, okay, well, I sure hope nothing happens to this thing because—

Jason Snell [01:32:58]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:32:59]:
Me too.

Christina Warren [01:32:59]:
Who knows how long, you know, if it was the screen or something else, I'm sure they would deal with it. But I'm like, I don't know how many of these things they have, you know, held back to do warranty replacements. I trust that Apple would figure something out. But this is going to become a problem, I think, with other companies who are— it's not so easy to be able to like, okay, well, you know, your device broke and you're under warranty. Now we're going to replace, you know, your drive for you, whatever. It's like, okay, with what?

Leo Laporte [01:33:26]:
It's time to invest in buy now, pay later companies, that's for sure. You're watching MacBreak Weekly, home of the Mechanical Donut, uh, with Andy Inaco, freshly shorn with the mini, mini chops, uh, and visiting friends.

Andy Ihnatko [01:33:48]:
I've got this— it's the speed chops, lightweight chops, more aerodynamic. For winter, for, for hot weather.

Leo Laporte [01:33:54]:
His new site, innotco.com, is up and running, and your membership is much appreciated. Great content there. In fact, at this point, Andy, I'm just going to let you do all the show rundowns. You do a much better job than I do. Thank you for all your contributions. Christina Warren, of course, film girl everywhere. She is in developer relations at GitHub and my personal AI guru. So I appreciate all you Do, Christina.

Leo Laporte [01:34:19]:
We are so glad to have you here, a very, very valued newest member of the MacBreak Weekly panel. And Jason Snell, I didn't get to talk about all the colored ink last week. I hope Mike helped get all that out of your system.

Jason Snell [01:34:33]:
Spilled a lot of colors last week.

Leo Laporte [01:34:35]:
Yeah, it's true. 6colors.com.

Jason Snell [01:34:37]:
Apple made a lot of money, that's all you need to know.

Leo Laporte [01:34:39]:
Yeah, Apple made a ton of money. Yeah, still great coverage. Everybody should join 6colors.com.

Jason Snell [01:34:45]:
Thank you.

Leo Laporte [01:34:45]:
Glad to have you on MacBreak Weekly. Time for our weekly Mark Gurman report. Actually, Mark kind of found something interesting to talk about. Here we are, 3 weeks or 4 weeks away from Apple's big iPhone event, and his story on Sunday: Apple explores shaking up its smartwatch for a new era. This is a response to AI, isn't it? What are they, what are they gonna Not— it won't happen this year.

Jason Snell [01:35:12]:
I think it's also, I mean, this feels like it's, it's, it's like Apple has been resting on the one Apple Watch for more than a decade where they thought we'll make an iPhone that's a watch. And there is this rise of all of these, like, screenless bands and smart rings and all of that. And, and I, it feels to me like as they're making changes at Apple, people are looking at wearables, home and accessories and going, what's going on over there? Like, is anything happening at all? Because I like my Apple Watch. I think the Apple Watch is a very nice product. But why is that the only one they make? It doesn't— and I hear from people who are like, I don't want a computer watch, but I like the idea of the health sensors. And some people will end up getting bullied into wearing an Apple Watch that they don't want to wear. But like, I also have friends who love those health bands that have no screen or a tiny screen that has almost nothing. It's super Simple, like why would? And we're all talking about syncing with your iPhone and syncing with Apple Health.

Jason Snell [01:36:12]:
Like why wouldn't you make other products? So German says maybe they will, although this is early days. They're like they're talking about it now, which you know the best best time to talk about doing something other than the Apple Watch was five years ago. Second best time is now. Great, let's talk about it now. But like they should absolutely. I mean because the health platform they've got is great, but like one size does not fit all. So the idea that they could have not just different Apple Watches, but other health wearables that might fit into people's lives. I was thinking I would, I don't like wearing my Apple Watch to sleep, so I don't use any of the sleep tracking.

Jason Snell [01:36:47]:
And like, I might buy a band for sleep and then put on my watch during the day. But if I do, it won't be from Apple because Apple just doesn't make that product.

Leo Laporte [01:36:56]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:36:56]:
I mean, this is this, so this is the Fitbit Air that I got one for review and I had to actually buy one for myself because I just like it so much. This, that's, uh, Jason, that's exactly like what we're talking about. It's like, I like the— I like the Apple Watch, I respect the Apple Watch, but I just don't have room for an Apple Watch like in my lifestyle. I want this, a very, very simple light weight band.

Leo Laporte [01:37:18]:
I bought that Casio watch you talked about 2 weeks ago. I might add, $17. How could I not buy it?

Andy Ihnatko [01:37:23]:
I like this. Yeah, it's like, what was it like? There's, there's a meme from Top Gear where, uh, where Jeremy Clarkson is like, the difference between like the super, super high-tech like supercar, but there's like little simple little cars. Like, this is brilliant, but I like this.

Leo Laporte [01:37:39]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:37:39]:
And, and the— I think there's so much opportunity because not only, not only that, but see, the part of the brilliance of this design is that it's not built into the band. It pops— all the electronics just pop straight out, which is like a Fitbit. Exactly. Well, exactly.

Christina Warren [01:37:56]:
Well, it was a Fitbit.

Andy Ihnatko [01:37:56]:
It's not—

Leo Laporte [01:37:57]:
it is a Fitbit.

Andy Ihnatko [01:37:58]:
It's not just to attach—

Leo Laporte [01:37:59]:
Thank you, Google, for not killing it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:38:01]:
I'm very grateful. Google did something really, really interesting where they basically say they published like this.

Leo Laporte [01:38:06]:
That looks exactly like the original Fitbit that I lost in the wash 4 times.

Andy Ihnatko [01:38:10]:
It looked— no, it looks like the, the original Nike Apple.

Christina Warren [01:38:13]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [01:38:14]:
Oh, the thing that went in your shoes.

Christina Warren [01:38:15]:
I loved that. I loved that.

Leo Laporte [01:38:17]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:38:17]:
But the, but the thing that makes this brilliant is that so Google decided early on, say, guess what, here are the complete CAD plans for the whole holder for the, the receptacle for this. So if anybody, including any commercial entity, wants to build, make something that this snaps into, go for it. And so that's why the people who like want to wear it on an armband, great. It's what you can make, you can wear this like, uh, on your, on your bicep, like, uh, uh, like the, like some competitors do. Uh, I bought, uh, a, some, uh, a group started 3D printing an adapter that just simply like attaches to like any watch band. So if I wanted to just basically be not even, not even be wearing like this thing on my other wrist, but basically integrate this into any watch band that I want so I can wear whatever watch I want, I could wear my $5,000 Rolex. I don't own a $5,000 Rolex, but I don't even know how much a Rolex costs. And I'm thinking it's probably a $22,000 Rolex.

Andy Ihnatko [01:39:11]:
But anyway, basically the idea of the idea that if I want to integrate this into whatever device, whatever thing I want to wear, wherever I want to wear it, I can do that. And it's like Jason said, it's like, it's brilliant. It's lovely. Your Apple Watch, but it's not for everybody. It doesn't matter. It doesn't— no one's going to get the— that customer is not going to get the benefits of this because they don't want to wear it when they sleep. This is lightweight enough that I do wear it when I sleep. It's light because there's no big strap or buckle on the bottom of it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:39:42]:
I don't have to take it off when I'm like at my keyboard for like 8 hours a day and I'm 'Cause it has this big lump underneath me. So that's not saying that the Apple Watch is a bad design. It's just that it's been, it was introduced a long, long time ago and a lot new ideas have come across. The Apple Health software and ecosystem is still top-notch.

Leo Laporte [01:40:01]:
It's great.

Andy Ihnatko [01:40:02]:
But the Apple Watch itself has been equaled by so many other companies and so many other products and exceeded from certain points of view and others. So it is long past time for Apple to give access to— basically to give access to people who again have looked at your Apple Watch, respects the Apple Watch, but I do not have room for an Apple Watch in my life.

Leo Laporte [01:40:24]:
So they're thinking about ceramic white coming back, which would be great. They haven't done that since 2016. They're thinking about a round face according to Gurman.

Jason Snell [01:40:32]:
Yeah, he says that they're like, not that hard, not that hard, not that hard. They came a little—

Leo Laporte [01:40:36]:
kind of had a dream.

Jason Snell [01:40:37]:
They thought about it. They don't, they don't like it so much. But yeah, I think other Go ahead. Other wearables are probably a better move for them than the Apple Watch. And we, as, as computer people, we tend to, tend to frame this as, are they going to replace the Apple Watch with the new product? It's like the Apple Watch has been around more than a decade. It's iconic. You look at watches out there like Andy's Casio watch that Leo also has. Like, these are things that last for— they're around for decades as a design.

Jason Snell [01:41:02]:
I don't think the Apple Watch as we know it, the series, is going anywhere. But make other ones, right? You could make More than one product. Yes. Hello.

Christina Warren [01:41:11]:
Well, I was going to say, like, having a sleep one alone would be, to me, one of the easiest things to do because I have an Hermès edition Apple Watch. So which— okay, whatever. It's great. And I love the band and what I can put on, like an elastic band. But that means because it was, you know, $1,600 or whatever, and then the band was more than that, we're not going to talk about it. I'm not going to wear that to sleep, period.

Leo Laporte [01:41:37]:
But you could bridle a horse with it. So that's the good side.

Christina Warren [01:41:39]:
Well, maybe, but like, you know, but it's stainless steel and I'm not going— I'm not going to wear that to sleep. So I don't get any of the advantages of, you know, the sleep tracking stuff. Now I have an older Apple Watch that I could pair and I could wear that to sleep and then, you know, switch between the two, you know, one up, but they make that clunky. But like, there are plenty of situations where even if you were comfortable wearing your watch to sleep in, okay, well, now when I wake up in the morning, I have to charge it because it's going to be dead. And, you know, there are a lot of other things. So, yeah, having a ring, having another sort of wristband, having other form factors so that can tie into this ecosystem, I think that would be great. And it wouldn't take anything away from the Apple Watch. To Jason's points, it's iconic.

Christina Warren [01:42:17]:
It's been around for 11 years. It's— or yeah, 11, right? And it's been very, very successful. I think when they tried it as fashion, it failed. As soon as they pivoted it to, you know, fitness and health, it became a huge success. And I feel like that's an opportunity for them to go even harder in that direction. I especially— if you were like in a perfect world, you open it up in some way to have trusted partners create, you know, you know, wearable type of activities the same way that you have certain other devices that can talk to Apple Health. Like, Apple wouldn't even have to be the ones to do all of it. But yeah, I think that it'd be, it'd be great for them to expand into this area because I think at this point I'm not, I'm not claiming that like the Apple Watch market is dead or anything, but I do feel it's saturated to a certain point where I don't know how many new people are going to buy an Apple Watch, if that makes sense.

Christina Warren [01:43:13]:
Right. Like, I feel like you got the people that you're going to get and I get more people, which is a ton of people. The be clear. But I don't feel like there's like this huge hockey stick of growth, you know, beyond that. I feel like at this point, you know, most people who thought they wanted a smartwatch and are in the Apple ecosystem have, you know, looked at an Apple Watch or have bought one, even if they ultimately kept their Rolex or something else.

Leo Laporte [01:43:37]:
Excuse the knocking. There is a person on the other side of the wall behind me who's trying to tear our house down. And just, you know, it's normal. Yes. Hello. Hello.

Jason Snell [01:43:50]:
Here's Johnny!

Andy Ihnatko [01:43:52]:
You got there before I did. Johnny!

Leo Laporte [01:43:54]:
A little axe in his hand. Yeah.

Jason Snell [01:43:57]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:43:57]:
Something important. I don't want to let this slide. There is a very important update to your macOS if you're using 26 or even an older one.

Christina Warren [01:44:06]:
Or even 25.

Leo Laporte [01:44:07]:
Yeah. There was a bug in screen sharing which would allow an attacker They'd have to be on your network, so that's, you know, probably not likely. But if they were, they could authenticate to screen sharing without valid credentials. In other words, see what you're doing. Uh, this has been fixed, kind of an out-of-band update that Apple pushed out, so everybody should apply that. Uh, if it's offered, um, you know, if they're on your network, I guess the real risk would be if you were at a hotel or an airport or somewhere on a shared network, that, that could be risky. At a coffee shop, somebody could be looking over your shoulder without looking over your shoulder. Also a new report, you had it at your blog, Jason, sixcolors.com, Dan Moran writing it up, that Apple's Private Relay may not be as private as thought.

Leo Laporte [01:44:58]:
This comes from 404's Joseph Cox. He's been really looking at all this. He was the guy who—

Christina Warren [01:45:03]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:45:04]:
told us last month about the Hide My Email flaw. Um, it's apparently due to the implementation of passkeys.

Jason Snell [01:45:14]:
So, uh, yeah, it's wild. It's like, it's basically like passkeys take a different path that reveals who you are. I mean, it is a classic bug, right? Where there's like, they're handled differently and one of them is not going through the pathway that privatizes information. And, um, Oops. But, you know, you also get the vibe that these features were built and then sort of like left by the side of the road and that there's nobody like actively working to make them better, as so often happens with new Apple features. And yeah, that's, that's kind of disappointing, but hopefully they'll, they'll address it. This is not a huge deal, but it does make you feel like, you know, is anybody paying attention to this?

Leo Laporte [01:45:51]:
Well, you know, there's every— software is going to have bugs. And I think some of this is because We now have very good AI tools to find these bugs that we're starting to—

Jason Snell [01:45:59]:
That's probably part of it.

Christina Warren [01:46:00]:
I'm sure that's how we found it.

Jason Snell [01:46:01]:
And Apple, of course, Apple is also using good AI tools to try and find their bugs. And you end up in this very weird kind of state. But I, I wonder if these iCloud privacy features are being looked at in that way, or if they're just, we're not quite sure who's in charge of those.

Andy Ihnatko [01:46:18]:
But it's also, but it's also like, it's, it's established it. It establishes a need to take a look at Apple's track record. We're not so far away from the Hide My Email privacy problem, which Apple knew about for an entire year without really doing much about it. Regarding the proxy browser leak in WebKit, the makers of Silo, which is a privacy-focused browser, basically, A, did a really good job documenting also the proxy problem. But also, I think they put this on their socials, basically saying that, you know what, we are not— they basically issued a vote of no confidence in Apple's ability or interest in fixing this really big problem really quickly. So that's why they're informing all their users that we have basically disabled certain features in WebKit that might affect your compatibility of our browser with the entirety of the web. But we feel as though, given that our— what we are selling you with this browser is privacy and security, we cannot allow this unpatched bug to be in our software anymore. But again, it seems like the responsible thing to do given the nature of their browser.

Andy Ihnatko [01:47:27]:
But it really was a vote of no confidence. They did cite not only the Hide My Email problem, but also they cited personal experience that they have had with the— excuse me, that they claim to have had with the App Store about, look, We're telling you about this problem. When are you going to fix it? Well, maybe we will, maybe we won't. And again, it's Apple starting to have— it's not a crisis by any definition, but they are starting to— I think that we're getting towards a point where Apple kind of needs to start talking about this sort of stuff. And even if they're not directly addressing this, they're basically saying, we're going to be a little bit more open We're gonna—

Leo Laporte [01:48:06]:
let's—

Andy Ihnatko [01:48:07]:
we're gonna be a little bit more open about how we process these security vulnerabilities when we get these reports, basically to restore faith and confidence that if a bug is reported, we immediately jump on it. And if we have not updated it, if we've not fixed it in 6 months' time, it's not because we don't care or that we don't have a process. It's because there is a correct time for us to release that into the main OS. And that time was not now. It was 4 months from now.

Christina Warren [01:48:33]:
The part that bothers me about a lot of this, honestly, is just the fact that— and this came up when I was on Clockwise last week— is the fact that this is part of a paid service, ostensibly. That's because otherwise, bugs happen. And I'm glad that they are acting, it seems like, more quickly than they were before. I will also, similarly with the way I felt about the private email, I never personally looked at the Private Relay as actually being all that secure. A, it breaks sometimes. If you use it for certain things, you'd have to turn it off. But B, like, I just— my personal threat model was such that I was like, if I— I'm not, you know, using this as my way to try to feel like this is the end-all be-all of security. Having said that, I do think that it is— it's a little bit— I understand how hard it is to try to maintain software and keep up with all your different features.

Christina Warren [01:49:24]:
and your bugs and different teams and whatnot. And I understand that better than most people. Right. And I can give a lot of leeway to that. Where it is a little bit frustrating is when this is bundled as part of a paid service and, and then when these types of things happen. And I am glad that they acted, you know, at least in this instance, it seems like, or hopefully they're going to act as quickly as they can. But when you're talking about the other instances where they've just let things go for a long time and it hasn't been prioritized, that's really disappointing, especially when you're in the iOS ecosystem. You don't have alternatives, for instance, with the, you know, with the web browser and things that you can use.

Christina Warren [01:50:00]:
And that's frustrating.

Leo Laporte [01:50:03]:
It's time for, thanks to Andy Inouko, the Vision Pro segment. What do you see?

Christina Warren [01:50:09]:
What do you know?

Jason Snell [01:50:10]:
It's time to talk Vision Pro.

Leo Laporte [01:50:12]:
Who would have thought Andy Inouko would be the chief advocate Vision Pro content on this show.

Jason Snell [01:50:18]:
Now this week we actually have something to talk about finally.

Leo Laporte [01:50:21]:
So that's a big story. Friday Night Football— no, football, baseball. Yep, on Clear Hearts and Clear High. Anyway, no, no, no, that's football.

Christina Warren [01:50:33]:
That's football.

Leo Laporte [01:50:34]:
Yeah, yeah, the lights are brighter there.

Jason Snell [01:50:36]:
They're doing— no, they're doing the thing we assumed that they would do when they announced day one.

Leo Laporte [01:50:41]:
Yeah, pull it out. Go ahead, Jason, you want to pull it out? I can tell you want to pull it out. Just pull it out. Go ahead.

Jason Snell [01:50:47]:
I mean, it's right here, but it's like— Yeah, I know.

Leo Laporte [01:50:50]:
He's handling this super well.

Jason Snell [01:50:50]:
I gotta get ready to watch some baseball at the end of the month. So they're gonna do 4 immersive baseball games.

Leo Laporte [01:50:58]:
Wow.

Jason Snell [01:50:58]:
And the question is—

Leo Laporte [01:50:59]:
Why didn't they do this a few years ago?

Jason Snell [01:51:02]:
Well, you know, if you could think back to when Alex was on the show, the Blackmagic camera and the live version of it took a long time to come to fruition. And that's what enabled them to do those Lakers games that they did. The big difference here is, well, there's 2 big differences. One is this is on Apple TV+ or Apple TV now. So you won't have to have like a charter cable subscription in L.A. to watch the Lakers, right? Like everybody basically who has Apple TV will get to watch this if they've got a Vision Pro. And if you've got a Vision Pro and you're not paying for Apple TV, I don't even know what to tell you. Like, that seems weird anyway.

Jason Snell [01:51:35]:
It is. So they're gonna use the, presumably the bunch of those Blackmagic Live cameras and they figured out how to do it. The other big difference though is a basketball court is tiny and baseball stadiums are enormous.

Leo Laporte [01:51:46]:
Yeah, how are they gonna cover it?

Jason Snell [01:51:47]:
Where do they put the cameras? That is what I can't wait to see. Again, this is all basically like so new. It really, the reason this is interesting is it's like early days of TV and it's like, what is a TV show like? Is it just a play that we record or do we do other things? Well, like, What is an immersive baseball game like? What makes that good? And are you sitting behind home plate? Are you in the outfield?

Christina Warren [01:52:10]:
Are you— Can you switch?

Jason Snell [01:52:12]:
Yeah. Can you switch? Are they switching for me? Do they switch too much? Do they switch too little? They're going to have like the— like their NBA broadcast, they're going to have a bespoke immersive broadcast. They will have different announcers for the immersive broadcast. And they also said something fun, which is like the regular broadcast has ads. And they said, no, no, we're not doing ads for the immersive broadcast. The immersive broadcast You're going to stay in the stadium and there's going to be like stadium vibe in the stadium. Do you have hot dogs? I don't know. Like, I just—

Leo Laporte [01:52:38]:
Will there be a t-shirt cannon?

Jason Snell [01:52:40]:
Again, again, leaving aside all of the baggage of the Vision Pro, I would just say I love to see stuff like this because I don't know what they're going to do. And I love baseball and I love going to baseball games. But like, there are so many different choices they could make. And I'm sure we will— I'm sure we will all debate after they start.

Leo Laporte [01:52:59]:
Will they cover it like the FIFA World Cup where they just sit with a wide-angle shot on the whole stadium?

Jason Snell [01:53:05]:
We don't know.

Christina Warren [01:53:06]:
That's the thing.

Leo Laporte [01:53:06]:
We don't know.

Jason Snell [01:53:07]:
And you can't be close because there's no such thing as close. The stadium is enormous. Do they switch? Like, all of that. So anyway, there's 4 of them. Starts with the Yankees-Red Sox. They got a Giants-Dodgers. They got a Giants-Braves.

Leo Laporte [01:53:19]:
They've picked good games. These are massive rivalries. The Red Sox and the Yankees, the Dodgers and the Giants. The Phillies and the Mets, the Reds at the Brewers. I mean—

Jason Snell [01:53:30]:
No, that's too many.

Leo Laporte [01:53:32]:
Well, I'm looking at the newsroom. It says, here's the schedule.

Christina Warren [01:53:36]:
There are 4 dates, Jason, but there are actually 7 games.

Leo Laporte [01:53:39]:
Yeah, these are all the games. So you're gonna be able to watch— I don't— you probably— it depends on your market because I noticed this Angels and Pirates is at 6:30.

Christina Warren [01:53:48]:
No, no, no, wait a minute. I'm wrong.

Jason Snell [01:53:51]:
I'm wrong. No, no, they're only doing the—

Leo Laporte [01:53:53]:
Oh, I see. They put a little logo on it. There you go. Yeah, this is the schedule.

Jason Snell [01:53:57]:
On the 28th, they're doing Red Sox at Yankees. On the 4th, it's Angels at Pirates, uh, great stadium. Uh, 11th, Padres at Giants, great stadium. And then, um, September 18th, the Giants at the Dodgers at Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine, where cows go to die. Um, so yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:54:15]:
I want— you know what, that's where I'm gonna buy a Dodger dog and have it shipped up to me just so I can get the full immersion. I have been in the bleachers at Dodger Stadium with a Dodger dog, and it's a great experience.

Jason Snell [01:54:28]:
And by the way, also, I was saying about the NBA stuff being so limited, and then they were supposed to have playbacks. I could never get the playbacks to work right. This one, it's available live and of course as a replay, and it's in the US and Australia, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the UK. So like—

Leo Laporte [01:54:46]:
Baseball loves this. That's great.

Jason Snell [01:54:48]:
All these places, if you've got a Vision Pro, you will be able to see what would immersive baseball be like. And that's the question that, you know, we get to have at least a first answer to starting on March 28th.

Leo Laporte [01:54:59]:
They also let you listen to the radio if you're in the US and Canada, the local radio, the home station.

Jason Snell [01:55:05]:
It's a nice touch for Friday Night Baseball.

Leo Laporte [01:55:07]:
They got a lot of feedback. People were angry. I hated the network announcers. I wanted to hear Ron Fairley. I want to hear our local announcers. And so I used to do that and it's hard to sync it up. So I'm really glad that they're doing that. It's a nice feature too.

Leo Laporte [01:55:22]:
I wonder how much do you think, how much this has to do with Alex Lindsay?

Jason Snell [01:55:31]:
I'm sure he's involved to some degree. I mean, they've been experimenting with this stuff before, but he's one of the people down there who cares about this stuff. So I'm sure if he were here, he would tell us all about it.

Leo Laporte [01:55:42]:
He was pushing for it from day one, right?

Jason Snell [01:55:43]:
Yeah. Yeah, well, live sports, right, is a whole other level. And I think when we talk about the Vision Pro or a product like it and it being relevant to consumers, something like this is the way that that would first happen is like if you could do live sports really, really, really well. Live theater is another one that I keep thinking of. Like these are things that could sell a headset, maybe not a $3,500 headset, but maybe a $1,500 headset in a way that, that could drive some use of these kinds of products. So right now it's just an experiment, but I'm looking forward to it as a baseball fan, especially.

Leo Laporte [01:56:19]:
Now I want to start a conspiracy.

Jason Snell [01:56:21]:
Oh, let's do it.

Leo Laporte [01:56:22]:
Because these games, some of them at least, probably 2 of them will be after the big announcements. And I noticed they're brought to you by Essilor. Okay. Am I just— maybe I'm pulling at straws, but those are the eyeglass manufacturers. Oh, yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:56:45]:
Yeah, I, uh, I was going to say I've only seen the Lord of the Rings movies. I haven't seen— read all the books, so I don't know all the characters.

Leo Laporte [01:56:54]:
No, not Erebor. Essilor, the, uh, I think that's Luxottica, uh, that's their, their new name. That's the people who make the Ray-Bans for Meta.

Christina Warren [01:57:05]:
I was gonna say they make Meta's things.

Leo Laporte [01:57:07]:
I mean, I'm just saying maybe that's really pushing it, but Apple certainly isn't ready with glasses.

Christina Warren [01:57:14]:
No.

Leo Laporte [01:57:15]:
Does Essilor make the lenses in your Vision Pros? No.

Jason Snell [01:57:17]:
I don't know. They don't.

Leo Laporte [01:57:19]:
They don't. So why would Essilor sponsor this?

Jason Snell [01:57:21]:
They're sponsoring Friday Night Baseball.

Christina Warren [01:57:23]:
Oh.

Jason Snell [01:57:24]:
Not this particular thing, just the Friday Night Baseball run.

Leo Laporte [01:57:27]:
In general.

Andy Ihnatko [01:57:28]:
Getting, getting the name out there even though they're not—

Leo Laporte [01:57:30]:
With the first game of each weekly doubleheader presented by Essilor. And actually the first games are only August 28th and September 4th. So that's right, we'll take it all back. That— boy, you debunked that rumor fast. Sorry, I was gonna call Mark Gurman and everything.

Jason Snell [01:57:44]:
You've just been Vision Pro'd.

Leo Laporte [01:57:45]:
I've been Vision Pro'd.

Andy Ihnatko [01:57:47]:
By the way, Jason Snell, Joy Popper.

Leo Laporte [01:57:49]:
Boom, boom. There is another one down. There is another Vision Pro story, not quite as exciting as that. Andy, I'm gonna let you do the honor since you found it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:58:02]:
Okay, well, this is a project on GitHub to allow Android APKs for Android VR apps to be run on Vision Pro hardware.

Christina Warren [01:58:15]:
That's cool.

Andy Ihnatko [01:58:15]:
And still— excuse me?

Christina Warren [01:58:17]:
I said that's cool.

Andy Ihnatko [01:58:18]:
Yeah, I'm sorry. It's still early days, but they say they've already got Beat Saber pretty much working. And they have also said Uh, that Steam— like, they can get the SteamVR Link library running in Toto. They say that they're, they're, uh, they're working on SteamVR Link, uh, and proving generalizability. Build tooling still work in progress. But the idea of just— if all that happens is people can play Beat Saber on this device, that will rescue so many of these devices from so many drawers.

Leo Laporte [01:58:49]:
Yes.

Andy Ihnatko [01:58:50]:
And lead so many people to break so many wrists and fingers. Because it's such a great game.

Christina Warren [01:58:55]:
It is a great game.

Andy Ihnatko [01:58:56]:
Most of the injuries you get from VR are like swinging, swinging of beats.

Leo Laporte [01:58:59]:
I have to admit, that's the only game I played on the Meta Quest more than once, and it was really fun.

Christina Warren [01:59:05]:
It's a really fun game. Yeah, I mean, I love seeing a project like this. I do think that this is, to me, the saddest part of the failure of the Vision Pro is that the developer ecosystem never happened for so many reasons that we've discussed. You know, on the show, I won't relitigate that. But it's nice that we're finally seeing, you know, 2.5 years later, some stuff like this. Because yeah, being able to run the APKs and the Quest and the Android XR stuff on VisionOS, even if it's not perfect, like that's pretty compelling. That's pretty cool. Certainly would never say you should go buy a Vision Pro for this or for base But if you have it, to Andy's point, you can pull it out of the drawer now.

Christina Warren [01:59:51]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:59:51]:
And it's good to see like people just have developers saying, gee, wouldn't it be great if we could do this on Vision Pro? And then because they are clever and because they're determined and they think it's a good idea. And to be clear, this isn't running Android on Vision Pro.

Christina Warren [02:00:03]:
Right.

Andy Ihnatko [02:00:04]:
Basically, there's compiled like .so libraries that are responsible for these VR apps. And this team have figured out Uh, figured out a way to basically translate that into, uh, uh, retrospective, uh, Apple-like libraries. And that runs underneath a runtime that they've, they've also created.

Leo Laporte [02:00:25]:
So I love it that the project is called Klepton, same root as kleptomaniac. Uh, we're stealing apps for the Vision Pro. Nice job. Nice job. Actually, one of our, um, one of our club members, Nightscape, uh, has apparently built— he's watching the show right now on his Vision Pro. So that's so cool.

Andy Ihnatko [02:00:46]:
Nice.

Leo Laporte [02:00:47]:
People are doing stuff with the Vibe Code. I guess you're Vibe Coding it, right, Nightscape? That's pretty cool. All right, one last break and then it is your picks of the week. I'm giving you fair warning, ladies and gentlemen, you're watching MacBreak Weekly. Andy Iwako. Hey.

Christina Warren [02:01:02]:
Leo, what? Now you see, now you know, we're done talking the Vision Pro.

Leo Laporte [02:01:08]:
Again, I almost forgot. That is vital.

Jason Snell [02:01:10]:
4 times.

Leo Laporte [02:01:12]:
The vital period at the end of each sentence.

Jason Snell [02:01:14]:
I'm keeping a tally now. I mean, if we're going to do it, we got to do it right or we're going to get trapped in a long line of parentheses and that's very bad.

Leo Laporte [02:01:21]:
As a Lisp programmer, I'm completely comfortable with that. Uh, actually, I haven't, I haven't coded in Lisp since AI came to town.

Andy Ihnatko [02:01:30]:
Bang forever, man.

Leo Laporte [02:01:32]:
Yeah, man, I tell you.

Andy Ihnatko [02:01:34]:
This was the AI language of the future, remember?

Leo Laporte [02:01:36]:
It was. Now it's Go and Rust. You know, it's funny, my agents were programming furiously all last night. And I said, what was— you know, there was review back and forth. They were going back. So what's going on? They said, it's 148 lines of Bash. I said, what are you doing working in Bash? They said, well, the The original software we ported was in Bash. I said, dude, cut the pain, man.

Leo Laporte [02:02:03]:
End the insanity. And then I said, I bet you can rewrite it in Go in about 5 minutes. And they did. So no more Bash. I said, no more Bash. Okay. Don't do that to yourselves. Also here, Christina Warren and Jason Snell.

Leo Laporte [02:02:19]:
So pleased to have all of you. Jason, how's the history podcast going?

Jason Snell [02:02:22]:
Oh man. Uh, we're going to launch with our episodes that we previewed later this month. And then the first week in September, the whole thing kicks off. Our first full series is about Apple's OS crisis, the System 7, System 8, Copeland, Gershwin, Be, NeXT, the whole thing that ends up culminating in Steve Jobs standing on stage at Macworld Expo.

Leo Laporte [02:02:48]:
Um, if you can get to the bottom of that, I, I have to hear that.

Jason Snell [02:02:51]:
There's just fun, fun stories to tell. And we have, uh, John Siracusa who wrote all the definitive like Mac OS X reviews in the early days. He's our guest for that. Still has blisters on his fingers from those days. So that's, that's what we're kicking it off. And then we're going to roll into the, you know, this October, November is the 25th anniversary of the iPod. So after that series, we're going to do a, um, history of the iPod, uh, origins. story of the iPod, really.

Jason Snell [02:03:16]:
So I've been writing a lot and we've got a lot of episodes kind of in flight right now in order to do the launch so people can check it out. Designed.fm.

Leo Laporte [02:03:26]:
Nice. Very exciting. Congratulations.

Jason Snell [02:03:29]:
Thank you.

Leo Laporte [02:03:30]:
And Christina Warren, what's— you came back from Berlin all refreshed talking to developers and all excited. What's, what's going on in your life there at GitHub?

Christina Warren [02:03:40]:
Yeah, I mean, we've got— we're releasing updates to GitHub Copilot all the time. We launched the Kimmy case 3 model on GitHub Copilot at the end of last week.

Leo Laporte [02:03:48]:
Oh, I bet that was popular.

Christina Warren [02:03:49]:
Yeah, definitely. And it's a very, very good model, I have to say.

Leo Laporte [02:03:52]:
Have you played with it?

Christina Warren [02:03:53]:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. In fact, it's funny because one of the things that I did because I was making the demo video to go out on social and I said, OK, I gave it a screenshot and I said, OK, create a Flappy Bird style game based on the screenshot and make it GitHub themed and retro. And it was like a terminal screenshot from the GitHub CLI. And it actually, its first pass was quite good. I then wanted to refine it and make the little robot look a little bit better. But yeah, I was able to, you know, in just a couple of minutes and very inexpensively create like a fully HTML5— It's so cute. Exactly.

Leo Laporte [02:04:26]:
It's so cute.

Christina Warren [02:04:27]:
That you can play. This is live on GitHub. I'll put a link in the chat.

Leo Laporte [02:04:34]:
So Kimmy wrote this in one shot?

Christina Warren [02:04:36]:
I had to go back and forth maybe twice. But the crux of it was basically one shot, which was excellent. Wow. Wow.

Leo Laporte [02:04:45]:
So it's a good coding— what did it write it in?

Christina Warren [02:04:48]:
Just HTML and JavaScript.

Leo Laporte [02:04:49]:
Oh, that's what you said.

Christina Warren [02:04:50]:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And it was— which is nice because it even, like, you know, put in sounds, which is actually pretty fun too. So I— a big— I was basically just kind of looking for something that I do a lot of test projects. Um, where I can— exactly.

Leo Laporte [02:05:09]:
That's very funny.

Christina Warren [02:05:12]:
No, it's very good. It's very good. And I, you know, usually when I'm making these videos, I just, I, you know, build a bunch of tests and toy projects. And this was one where I was so impressed with even its first shot. It wasn't completely perfect, but I said, okay, we'll make the pipes Git lines instead. And then, you know, make, make the, make the robot—

Leo Laporte [02:05:28]:
Oh, they're Git lines. Oh, I didn't even get that.

Jason Snell [02:05:31]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:05:31]:
This is pretty cool.

Christina Warren [02:05:34]:
Yeah. I mean, it's dumb. And there are things that I could go back and modify with, but the fact that it took me a few minutes and then I could just immediately deploy it to get up pages.

Leo Laporte [02:05:44]:
Kimmy, this is amazing. It's not cheap.

Christina Warren [02:05:46]:
No, but it's a lot cheaper than other models of its class. Fable.

Jason Snell [02:05:51]:
Right.

Christina Warren [02:05:52]:
Or even Opus, right? Obviously, 5.6 Sol is a really good model. And I'm not taking anything away from that. But, you know, I was very impressed. It was one of those things where I went into it with fairly low expectations and I gave it a screenshot, went back and forth and what I was able to get out of it. And then I've used it on some other tasks too. And I've been very, very impressed with what it can output. So—

Leo Laporte [02:06:15]:
Have you published Flappy Copilot somewhere?

Jason Snell [02:06:17]:
I have.

Christina Warren [02:06:17]:
Yeah, it's on GitHub actually. I'll put it in the Discord.

Leo Laporte [02:06:20]:
Nice.

Christina Warren [02:06:20]:
I'm trying to find my window here.

Leo Laporte [02:06:21]:
Yeah. flappy-copilot.

Christina Warren [02:06:25]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [02:06:26]:
You can play the game.

Christina Warren [02:06:27]:
You can play the game. And, and, and maybe I will— this would take more work, but, you know, if I deployed it to a different place and had a database layer, I could have like a high score, you know, type of thing or whatnot. But just the fact that this was—

Leo Laporte [02:06:38]:
It's kind of mind-blowing that you can just do this.

Christina Warren [02:06:41]:
Well, the fact that, like I said, because usually I try to work on like real projects and I wanted to show something visually, um, you know, for, for purpose of the video. And, um, I was just— I was shocked. I was like, oh, okay, this actually is quite fun. This is, this is really cute. So—

Leo Laporte [02:06:56]:
Wow, we live in amazing times. KIMI K3 and Copilot. And of course now you have that desktop app, makes it even easier.

Christina Warren [02:07:04]:
Absolutely.

Leo Laporte [02:07:05]:
Or harness, I guess I should say. Not a desktop app, but the Copilot harness. What do you call it?

Christina Warren [02:07:10]:
Well, well, I mean, we call it the Get It Copilot. I mean, it is the harness, but it's the desktop app. It's basically the same thing as the GitHub Copilot CLI, which is the harness.

Andy Ihnatko [02:07:18]:
Right.

Christina Warren [02:07:18]:
But we've created a—

Leo Laporte [02:07:19]:
A desktop app.

Christina Warren [02:07:20]:
A desktop application that you can use on Mac, Windows, and Linux to maintain your sessions and preview things and whatnot. That was actually part of the fun as I was building it. It loads up the web server automatically so I can test it out as it's going back and forth. That's when I was able to basically be like, okay, this is great, but let's refine this a little bit. You know, let's make the pipes get lines. Let's, let's make the robot look a little bit like that.

Leo Laporte [02:07:45]:
And hey, one of the things I love about these harnesses is the ability to retain the session and go back to it. So all the context is there and you can just pick it up. I think that's really a nice convenience quality of life feature.

Christina Warren [02:07:58]:
It's nice too, because, and this is, this is the case not just on, on our harness, but on a lot of them, but like the sessions will, you know, maintain themselves and you can pick them up from other devices too and from other services. So, for instance, if I start something, you know, in my, you know, on my computer, I can also use VS Code or I can pick up those sessions as long as I have, you know, um, the, the remote kind of thing enabled, then I'm able to resume those sessions even from another device, which is really nice.

Leo Laporte [02:08:24]:
That's really nice. Yeah, my Quicksilver told me the other day I have 22 gigabytes of sessions and that maybe I would like to prune that tree at some point. I said, well, it's a 4 terabyte drive. I guess we can leave it for a while. You're watching MacBreak Weekly. Time for our picks of the week, and I think Jason Snell should kick this off. Hi, Jason.

Jason Snell [02:08:49]:
Sure. Um, I get a lot of newsletters. A lot of people do that now. There's newsletters. Substack sort of started something, but everybody's got a newsletter. Everybody's got a little newsletter, Substack, a button-down, a ghost, whatever. They're all over the place. And I was thinking to myself, and I think I made a joke on a podcast where I said, you know, probably shouldn't do this, but it's an interesting idea.

Jason Snell [02:09:12]:
Like, what if you made a reader app? Like, well, or put it as an email client for newsletters. What if you did that?

Leo Laporte [02:09:20]:
I like that.

Jason Snell [02:09:21]:
That's a good idea. And somebody did. It's called Letterboxd with 2 Xs at letterboxd.app. It's It's in the App Store. It's a Mac app right now. I think he's working on an iPad and iOS or iPad and iPhone app. But this is what it is. If you look, I don't think mail clients are good for reading.

Jason Snell [02:09:43]:
I think they're kind of unpleasant. They're for email. They're certainly not for newsletters. And so you can do a few things. I pipe them into RSS for the most part now. I do it that way and then use an RSS reader. But This is an actually really good idea, which is maybe instead of just having an email client for email, you also have a newsletter reader client and it looks at your email and it'll follow rules and it'll find the newsletters that you want where you want them. And then you can just scan around and read those newsletters in the app.

Jason Snell [02:10:13]:
And like, if email is going to be your content delivery medium, maybe try an email client that's designed to help your reading be better, your reading experience. It's just a really good idea. I like this idea a lot because I read a lot of stuff in newsletters now. And again, email client is not the place to do it. It just isn't. It's just not very good in an email client. So Letterboxd is a really interesting idea. I hope the developer, developer keeps going with it because I find a lot of my best content these days comes from newsletters I subscribe to.

Jason Snell [02:10:50]:
And in fact, as RSS feeds from a lot of big commercial news organizations fade away.

Leo Laporte [02:10:55]:
Mm-hmm.

Jason Snell [02:10:55]:
One of the things you can do is subscribe to their newsletter, which is a daily list of links or whatever, however often about the subject you're interested in. And I do that for the newspapers I subscribe to now is I just get their newsletter because then I can tap on all those links to read those articles. So the newsletter ends up being the front end instead of the RSS. Not ideal. I like RSS, but It's not a bad fallback. And, uh, you know, again, don't read your newsletters in an email client. That's not a good reading experience. So Letterboxd, it's a nice idea.

Leo Laporte [02:11:28]:
This is very cool. And you know who else likes this? All those newsletter people who are sending me newsletters that are just ending up in a pile, right, in my email client.

Jason Snell [02:11:37]:
And so you don't have to manage them like you manage email now. You manage them like you manage a reader app because your reader app looks at it, right?

Christina Warren [02:11:43]:
I, I love this. I've had same idea before, Jason. Like, I've literally thought this to myself. I really wish that I had an app just for my newsletters.

Jason Snell [02:11:50]:
Right.

Christina Warren [02:11:50]:
The closest I've come is using, uh, Feedbin, where I basically kind of try to assign things to an email address and forward it and use it that way. And that's, that's okay. But, um, I like this. You can either use a dedicated email or you can connect it to your own thing. I think this is great.

Jason Snell [02:12:04]:
This is a good idea. Yeah, right. Like, as absurd as it is to say an email client for newsletters, actually think think of it more like Instapaper or some other RSS reader using your— using email as the transmission method.

Christina Warren [02:12:17]:
Yeah, no, I love it. I mean, it's funny because I had— when I was thinking about this idea, I'm glad that someone else did it. I was like, well, what do I call this? A newsreader? And then I was like, that's actually kind of funny that we're almost going back in time, you know, to like the, you know, Usenet of old, which I don't actually even have any real experience with other than downloading things illegally off the internet. But, you know, I never actually used a newsreader for mailing lists. But like, it feels like, well, that made sense, right? There was like a dedicated application for that type of communication. And instead—

Leo Laporte [02:12:51]:
How does it know that it's a newsletter? I mean, it's presumably getting your email, right?

Jason Snell [02:12:56]:
It's looking for some signals. And also, I think you can set it up to like look in particular labels or mailboxes or follow rules or set it to senders and say, this is a newsletter, and then build your newsletter kind of subscription list that way.

Christina Warren [02:13:09]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Snell [02:13:10]:
It's a good idea.

Leo Laporte [02:13:11]:
Very cool. I like that idea. Andy Inaco, your pick of the week.

Andy Ihnatko [02:13:15]:
Um, my pick is a kind of a treat that I bought for myself. I've got a, uh, uh, I do have subscriptions to streaming services. However, like the truth, as the, as the saying goes for CloudStream, is always like the, my physical media collection of like music that I've ripped or downloaded and put on my media server. And because I feel as though I don't want to have to— I'm happy to pay Spotify X dollars a month for access to every single piece of music that's ever available if I want to just sample stuff. But the thing is, like, I want to make sure that, uh, my Dave— my David Bowie albums, I never have to— I'm never required to pay money to get access to all the music that I've deemed, like, worthy of actually owning. Uh, and so I decided to Vibe upgrade my Sony Walkman. So I've thanks to the MBW Picks site, I found out that the previous for my previous Sony Walkman, the NWA55, was a pick in episode 700. I've upgraded now to the NWA306 Sony Walkman.

Andy Ihnatko [02:14:19]:
This is actually made by Sony. It is a Sony Walkman product, and it is like in Mac terms or Apple terms. This is like the iPod. Like the, uh, uh, it is like the, like the iPod that used to run iOS. This actually runs Android.

Jason Snell [02:14:35]:
iPod Touch.

Andy Ihnatko [02:14:37]:
Thank you very much. The iPod Touch, uh, which I don't know why— I wish they would bring that back because every— this device reminds me of exactly how useful that sort of thing is. The old player that I had was, again, it was not, uh, was not Android, but didn't have an app store with it. It just had a built-in music player, which is great. Uh, but the thing is, like, this runs Android, so it means that not only can it run— doesn't it? Yes, it comes with the Sony Walkman app, but also if I want to replace it with a better music app like Musicolette, uh, then I can replace it with whatever music app I want. And because it has a microSD slot that accepts cards of up to 1 terabyte, I literally have every album I have every track of music I have ever collected accessible on shuffle play on this device. And unlike the previous one, this is actually quite sprightly. But not only that, but I also have Spotify on this, and I also— and my downloaded playlists.

Andy Ihnatko [02:15:34]:
I have Apple Music on this. I have the Audible music player on this. I even have YouTube on it because it can actually play video. Not really well, but it can And play video. Like if I wanna download like an, an audiobook that's been posted on YouTube, I can do that just fine. It runs the Google Play Store. So I also have Google Drive installed on it or, and Dropbox so that if I have music that's basically in the cloud, because again, I can install any music player app I want, I can point it at that cloud storage folder and now it can basically stream from any cloud file folder that I want.

Christina Warren [02:16:11]:
Basically.

Andy Ihnatko [02:16:11]:
So basically it means that no matter how you enjoy music, this will play it for you. Now you might ask, well, that's great, but—

Leo Laporte [02:16:16]:
Not cheap, is it?

Christina Warren [02:16:17]:
No, but although it's cheaper than it used to be. Oh.

Andy Ihnatko [02:16:20]:
It's cheaper. It's, well, again, it depends on your version of cheap, but just to wind things up, I mean, the question is always going to be, well, you have a phone that can also run iOS or run Android. Why bother like getting a separate device? A, particularly in this day and age, to get enough storage like several hundred gigabytes of music on it. The idea of, I don't want to just sync certain albums or certain playlists, I want everything available on this. Uh, ask yourself how much it's gonna cost for 512 gigabytes of storage, uh, or more, like on a phone. But the other, the other thing is that this is my phone and this is the Walkman. It is more portable, it's more tiny, but also on top of all of that, It is a music player. It has a headphone jack.

Andy Ihnatko [02:17:08]:
It also has dedicated like push buttons on the side for volume up, volume down, skip tracks, things like that. And the number of times when even when I'm just streaming to like my home stereo or my home speakers to just like pick this up like it's a remote control and just click a next track button, there's just something that's a lot more satisfying about it. I also really like the fact that this is a separate device. with a separate battery so that I'm not basically wasting battery on this. I'm also not getting notifications on this cuz I don't have any social media apps or messaging apps, messaging apps on it. Downsides, you do, you didn't say the, the, the, the bad part, which is that this lists at $399.

Christina Warren [02:17:48]:
Whew.

Andy Ihnatko [02:17:49]:
That the, the, the, I will use that opportunity to say that you can buy even higher fidelity versions of this kind of thing. For $1,000. Even Sony makes some that are close, but those are the audiophile, like balanced gold, solid gold, whatever. But you can also buy, if you don't want something quite as ambitious as this, there are Android-based music players from names, manufacturers you might not actually recognize, like FiiO or Hiby, that can actually cost $100 or less. And they're not nearly as feature-rific as this, and they're a lot slower than this, but it will still allow you to play local music. It will still allow you to install Spotify or Apple Music. It'll work just fine. Other disadvantages is that battery management is that of a phone-style device, meaning that there are always, even if I put it into, I would love to be able to turn this with the old machine because it was just a music player.

Andy Ihnatko [02:18:42]:
If I actually powered it off in 2 weeks' time, I could power it back on again and I would still have my 72 2% battery left. On this one, it is like any other device that you've got that runs an operating system where I power it off and then if, then if I come back to it 4 or 5 days later, the battery's dead because there was some sort of a process in the background waiting to light the screen up in case I touched a button or something. So that's a, that's a bummer. It's not, it's not, it's not a debilitating bummer, but it's the sort of thing where I have to kind remember to put it on the charger like before I board like a train, Amtrak, for 3 or 4 hours, or at least bring my battery pack with me. Also, if you're expecting this to be as lively as a phone, they did— it is older hardware to older, lower power hardware, so it's not as responsive as you would find on another, on a modern device, but it's responsive enough. It's perfectly fine. Again, if you're, if you were looking for the ability to play Lots and lots and lots of music files that you own all the way up to the most highest definition files that you can get. Even streaming to high definition earphones with spatial audio.

Andy Ihnatko [02:19:50]:
This will handle all of that, which is something that the cheaper ones won't do. It runs Android 13 even though we're on Android 17, but that's not a big deal because most of the stuff that Android updates is actually now done through the Google Play Store. So, and in addition to that, even though this is not like 2026 hardware, I think this hardware came out like about 3 or 4 years ago, uh, Sony's actively updating this. I got that my last firmware update just about a month ago. So again, for those— and also it is a nicely dev— it feels like a Sony product. It's aluminum, it's really nice fit and finish, the USB-C, so you don't have to worry about crazy connectors. Uh, the $100 ones are a lot more affordable, but they're very, very You know, cheap plasticky feeling sort of stuff. It's not going to be for everybody, but for someone like me, I'm very—I get a lot of pleasure out of this because there's something.

Andy Ihnatko [02:20:38]:
Maybe it's because of my age, but there's something about I've got a dedicated player that has music on it. When I listen to music, I pick this up and scroll through playlists or scroll through my albums and play things, as opposed to picking up my phone, getting past my Notes app, getting past my Instagram, getting past all this sort of stuff. So like I said, not for everybody, but if you're looking. So if you're looking for something, I think this is a nice happy medium between the cheap ones that aren't very performant and don't really have many features and the $1,000 ones where it's like, what if you can afford a $1,000 pocket music player? Why are you not like just hiring Jack White to just follow you around and play guitar as you walk down the street? That's where I fit.

Leo Laporte [02:21:16]:
That's where I am. Christina, I I have my pick of the week just arrived in the mail, but I want to give Christina Warren her due. It's your chance for the pick of the week.

Christina Warren [02:21:29]:
OK, well, I have 2. One is actually inspired by, by Andy's because I appreciate the extensive review on that, Andy, because I bought previous versions of that Walkman before. And for single-purpose devices, yeah, they're downsized, but I think they're pretty fun. So the first My first pick was— this is a skill that I don't think should have to exist, and this is niche, but Leo, you might appreciate this. If you haven't added this to your coding stuff already, it's an AI skill and it's called I Have ADHD. It is basically a way to stop your coding agent from being super verbose and burying the answer.

Leo Laporte [02:22:06]:
I don't know this. I need it.

Christina Warren [02:22:08]:
It's great. Basically what it does is that it follows 10 rules, and these 10 rules have been basically kind of, I guess, adapted from one of the known ADHD kind of guidebooks. The full skill is basically lead with the next action, number multi-step tasks, end with one concrete next step, suppress tangents.

Jason Snell [02:22:31]:
I love it.

Christina Warren [02:22:31]:
Restate every turn, specific time estimates, make wins visible, matter-of-fact errors, cap the list at 5 items. No preamble, no recap, no closers. And you can tune it, you know, if you want to, you know, do that too. If you want to make your own kind of modifications, you can do that as well. But this is something— this should not have to exist.

Leo Laporte [02:22:53]:
But it does.

Christina Warren [02:22:54]:
But it does. And honestly, since I've installed it, and I'm not a huge— like, there are too many skills at certain points, and you can get kind of bloated with them. But this is one that I have actually found that I really like because—

Leo Laporte [02:23:06]:
We should mention that a skill is simply text.

Christina Warren [02:23:09]:
It's just text. It's basically just kind of giving an instruction. In some cases, it means you're gonna be running, you know, a certain shell script or something else. And in other cases, it's just text and kind of instructions. But the fact that you could have this, so if you're running, you know, Claude Code or GitHub Copilot or Codex or anything else. I'm getting it right now, my agent. Yeah, I really like it. It has definitely improved my output and I spend a lot of time in an editor.

Christina Warren [02:23:30]:
But my second pick, uh, I'll just say this.

Leo Laporte [02:23:32]:
You know, it's hysterical. It's based on a kit for humans called the Adult ADHD Toolkit.

Christina Warren [02:23:38]:
Exactly.

Leo Laporte [02:23:39]:
That's hysterical.

Christina Warren [02:23:40]:
Which I think is excellent. I was like, you know what, love it. I, I love it. And I am ADHD, so I do appreciate, you know, yes, I'm gonna put this in my brain.

Leo Laporte [02:23:49]:
Yeah.

Christina Warren [02:23:50]:
But, but even like if you're completely like, you know, neurotypical, I think that this leads to better output. Uh, But my second pick, if Andy's $400 MP3 player is too rich for your blood, but you still want to listen to music in a really dumb way. And I'm not saying Andy's way is dumb because Andy's way is actually the opposite of dumb.

Andy Ihnatko [02:24:11]:
I have this same product. I endorse it.

Christina Warren [02:24:13]:
Yeah, I have this product too. I have this product too. So this is a Maxell wireless Bluetooth cassette player that has USB-C. fast charging and like a built-in battery. It also has a headphone jack. It has actually pretty good battery life, 11 hours or so is what they claim. And I was— my experience, I don't listen to a lot of cassette tapes because who listens to cassette tapes? But you know what? I have a lot of cassette tapes because Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo and other artists—

Leo Laporte [02:24:39]:
You never threw them out? Oh, they're—

Christina Warren [02:24:41]:
No, no, they're new. Oh yeah, it's a whole thing. It's a whole— they'll release multiple editions and, and the, the recent— I know, but And then the thing is, I don't even open them, Leo, because I have problems. And but honestly, the secondary market is really high on some of these things that I won't sell my vinyl, but I think I will sell my cassettes at a certain point. But I have listened to a few and I have to say, being able to like have your AirPods in and listen to a cassette tape, it's kind of a vibe. So if, if you don't want to spend $400 on listening to, you know, 20-year-old technology, you know, MP3s You can spend $80 to listen to 40-year-old technology, um, in much lower fidelity. But, uh, but hey, it has USB-C. So—

Leo Laporte [02:25:21]:
And this does something that Andy's fancy dang player won't do. When you're running down, you know, doing your little jog, this thing warbles as you run. It's crazy.

Christina Warren [02:25:30]:
Exactly. It's great. It's exactly— it absolutely— it's gonna— well, no, well, it won't warble. The tape won't warble, but, but it might get caught. Like, your CD player would warble. horrible. But yeah, I know this thing, you're gonna have to switch sides.

Leo Laporte [02:25:42]:
You know, let me tell you, when the Walkman came out 40 years ago or whatever, it was that expensive. It was as much as Andy's. It was $400, $500.

Christina Warren [02:25:50]:
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. No, I mean, they were incredible. And like, you know, CDs were expensive and, and, you know, there was—

Leo Laporte [02:25:57]:
No, I had a cassette Walkman.

Christina Warren [02:25:58]:
That's what I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah, okay. But that's saying 40 years ago CDs existed, but they were expensive. And so tapes tapes were like the way to kind of do it. And so yeah, if you want to go back in time and be like, oh, I have to switch sides now, hey, $80, it's great.

Leo Laporte [02:26:12]:
I know that it has a USB-C port. Is that just for charging, or can you use it to convert your tapes to MP3s?

Christina Warren [02:26:17]:
Because, um, it's, it's, it's just for charging. If you could convert it, I think that— I think it unfortunately would cost more than $80 to have, to have that.

Leo Laporte [02:26:25]:
So I've been waiting all morning. I, I kept getting the, the, uh, messages that I was going to be getting a special, special package, and I disappeared for a bit because I ran downstairs because it came, and I'm so excited. It is my new Mac for $30. This is a Mac clock, the— what is it? Coco Goal.

Jason Snell [02:26:47]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:26:47]:
Now it looks like the one I got looks like the box is kind of beat up, but maybe that's just— I don't know, maybe it's— I don't know if it's used or not. I haven't turned it on yet. It's nice and big, unlike that little baby Mac I have back there, which actually boots macOS. This is just a clock.

Christina Warren [02:27:01]:
Oh, this is so cute.

Leo Laporte [02:27:02]:
But it's cute. I'm gonna put this right on my desk. I can't wait. So I haven't yet, uh, turned it on. It has a USB-C port and it, and it has a disk. I don't, I don't know what's in the disk, but it has a little floppy disk. This is adorable. 1.44 megabyte floppy disk right there, just coming out.

Andy Ihnatko [02:27:22]:
And, and Leo, you'll be pleased to know that ever since like this became really, really widely available. There are many projects that will allow you to convert that into a working Mac.

Leo Laporte [02:27:30]:
Oh my God, you're kidding! And an ESP32. It's an ESP32. See, everything's amazing. Everything's ESP32.

Christina Warren [02:27:36]:
I love the ESP32.

Jason Snell [02:27:37]:
It's awesome.

Leo Laporte [02:27:38]:
I do too. I have so many of them.

Christina Warren [02:27:40]:
I do too. I have them all over the place and various badges and stuff.

Leo Laporte [02:27:44]:
3 more of these so I could put them all over the house, which Lisa's not gonna like, but it doesn't have a camera. Yeah. Oh, and then I can't stop buying The ESP32 e-readers. Look at you.

Christina Warren [02:27:53]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:27:53]:
I just got the new Pro.

Jason Snell [02:27:57]:
Yeah, it's got a backlight on it. I love those ESP32. What can it do?

Leo Laporte [02:28:01]:
You told me not to do the, the stuff, the XTE Ink firmware, and use Crosspoint. Are you still using Crosspoint? Is there anything better?

Jason Snell [02:28:09]:
It's so good. Crosspoint's the one. Is the one. Yeah. And they're building a plugin architecture for it, and like, it's so good. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:28:14]:
Oh, that's great. I— okay, I'm gonna put that on there because I just got it. And then there's something else came in the mail, and I don't know what this is, but I got, uh, I got this thing. And I actually— what's weird is I got it— 2 of them came. So I don't know what I'm gonna do with this, Christina, but I, I'll find, I'll find something to do with these little boxes. We'll probably talk about this tomorrow.

Christina Warren [02:28:35]:
You're so lucky, man. That's, that's, that's fantastic.

Leo Laporte [02:28:38]:
Not lucky. Well, it cost me more than the car, but other than that.

Christina Warren [02:28:43]:
Yes, but But they're hard to get, man. Like, even costing more than a car. Like, they're—

Leo Laporte [02:28:48]:
I bit the bullet because I didn't— I couldn't— I really want to be local. Anyway, it's their DGX Sparks, and I have 2 of them now. And I hope I do, because, you know, when you buy these things, you hope that there's one in the box, that it's not just a brick. And I didn't get it on eBay, so maybe I'll—

Andy Ihnatko [02:29:04]:
Got it from India!

Leo Laporte [02:29:07]:
So anyway, that's our picks of the week. That's our show, everybody. Thank you for being here. We appreciate your kind support and your, uh, kind attendance to this show. We do MacBreak Weekly every Tuesday, 11 AM Pacific, if Leo shows up on time. Uh, I, I, I'm okay. I'm gonna admit it, I kept running downstairs to see if my clock came. Uh, that would be 2 PM Eastern time.

Leo Laporte [02:29:31]:
That would be 1800 UTC. You can watch it live if you're in Club Twit, of course, in the Club Twit Discord. But if you can't get there Uh, you can always, uh, watch us on YouTube, Twitch, x.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick. We stream on 7 different platforms. After the fact, you don't have to stream it. You can watch anytime at your convenience. We have copies of the show, audio and video, at our website, twit.tv/mbw. There is a YouTube channel with the video also dedicated to MacBreak Weekly.

Leo Laporte [02:30:02]:
Actually, you'll find all of our shows' YouTube channels at the main headquarters, which is youtube.com/twit. And then of course you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That'll do it. That's the way to get it. And then you don't have to even think about it. You just have it the minute it's done. Christina Warren is FilmGirl at GitHub and everywhere else in the world. So great to have you, Christina.

Leo Laporte [02:30:24]:
If you ever want to come over and touch my sparks, you can.

Christina Warren [02:30:26]:
Thank you. Thank you.

Leo Laporte [02:30:30]:
Andy Inako, I I hope you have a wonderful time couch surfing. So great to see you. Of course, follow Andy at his website, inatko.com, I-H-N-A-T-K-O dot com, and become a member and support this ink-stained wretch in his daily trials.

Christina Warren [02:30:49]:
Exactly.

Leo Laporte [02:30:49]:
Jason Snell, he's now a media mogul at sixcolors.com with many podcasts at sixcolors.com/jason. And he's got lots of ink and lots of colors. And you, of all of us, will likely get an invitation in the next few weeks.

Jason Snell [02:31:05]:
I don't know. iPhone's a hard event. I didn't get an invitation last year.

Leo Laporte [02:31:09]:
You didn't?

Jason Snell [02:31:09]:
So we'll see.

Leo Laporte [02:31:10]:
But you got in, didn't you? Or no?

Jason Snell [02:31:11]:
No, no. Last year I've been working it. It is the toughest ticket. It's all those influencers, damn them.

Christina Warren [02:31:16]:
It is. It is. They've shifted. Gosh dang it.

Jason Snell [02:31:20]:
They're very influential.

Andy Ihnatko [02:31:21]:
Should we start like every time we— 'cause we are our true identity.

Leo Laporte [02:31:24]:
We're influencers, ladies and gentlemen.

Andy Ihnatko [02:31:27]:
We should. Well, our problem is that we don't like start the show by saying, hey guys, hey guys, like and subscribe.

Leo Laporte [02:31:34]:
You know, uh, every month more than a quarter of a million people listen to this damn show, and I feel like that's an important number.

Andy Ihnatko [02:31:40]:
That's pretty good.

Christina Warren [02:31:42]:
Very good.

Leo Laporte [02:31:43]:
It's all right, I'll never get to go to another Apple event, but that's okay. I have my little baby Mac here.

Andy Ihnatko [02:31:48]:
Well, I mean, is it time to do like, you know, because people after, after the Sundance Film Festival got like really, really popular and like a lot of different like creators were getting shut out. They just started to host Slam Dance Festival at the same time in the same city. Should we like do our own like actual event like at the same day for people who do not get access together?

Leo Laporte [02:32:09]:
Competing event across the street in Cupertino at the Wagon Wheel Restaurant. Yeah. By the way, I just feel like separate checks, everybody, separate checks. This is the funniest thing. There is— whoops— instructions on the top on how to insert the diskette in case you don't know. Maybe it does something, maybe it's functional, I don't know, but don't put it in backwards.

Andy Ihnatko [02:32:28]:
I think, I think it activates a switch or something. Oh, my, my fun part was that I see it advertised all the time, and in the ads it has— doesn't have the Apple logo, does not have like the Macintosh branding, but like the sticker set contains like, as an alternative to the not Apple There's an Apple logo that goes into the Apple logo slot. Oh, well, there's an Apple logo here if you want to put the Apple logo in that.

Leo Laporte [02:32:47]:
Oh, that's— I— oh, let me see if I have this.

Andy Ihnatko [02:32:50]:
I don't know which version of it is.

Leo Laporte [02:32:50]:
There should also be a disc label that's a reproduction. Oh, they're sort of Apple logos, sort of Six Color logos. Ah, very clear. And it looks like it has a disc hub, a disc shutter, a disc label, Front logo. Yeah, they're not an Apple, but they are sixcolors.com.

Andy Ihnatko [02:33:12]:
Okay, some makers will sell it— will include among on the sheet, like, yeah, don't—

Leo Laporte [02:33:16]:
we couldn't put that in the ad, but don't tell anybody, but we've got sixcolors.com. Uh, Emmerich says, with all the Apple negativity on this show, Leo will never be invited to another Apple event. Are we negative?

Christina Warren [02:33:29]:
We're honest. We're, we're, we're, we're not like that. I think— well, I mean, I think that people like Jason who have earned a lot of respect, understandably, like, are able to toe that line, and Apple is willing to overlook certain things. But I—

Leo Laporte [02:33:42]:
yeah, I think, uh, unfortunately, um, John Ternus will never grace our microphones, I'm afraid.

Christina Warren [02:33:49]:
Hey, he's my link— he is my LinkedIn friend.

Leo Laporte [02:33:52]:
He is your LinkedIn friend?

Christina Warren [02:33:53]:
He is my LinkedIn friend.

Leo Laporte [02:33:54]:
Wow, pretty fancy.

Andy Ihnatko [02:33:57]:
We ride at the gates of dawn, Leo, and we take no prisoners. We're very famous for that, and that's what the titans of industry fear most.

Leo Laporte [02:34:04]:
Thank you everybody for joining us. We'll see you next week on MacBreak Weekly. And now, as I have said for lo these many years, it is my sad and solemn duty to tell you, get back to work because break time is over. Bye bye!