Linda Mulcahy on Semi-Structured Interviews

It's time for Mac Break Weekly, Jason Snells here, Andy and Ico-Christina Warren. We're gonna talk about iPhones in space, AirPods, two. We also will be talking a little bit about rumors about what's coming. Don't worry, the iPhone Fold is still on schedule. We'll explain all of that. And then local AI running on your Mac and iPhone, I'll explain how. All of that coming up next on Mac Break Weekly. (crickets chirping) Podcasts you love. - From people you trust. - This is Twit. - This is Mac Break Weekly, episode 2019, recorded Tuesday, April 7th, 2026. Furious, eloquent, and unrestrained. It's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show we cover, the latest Apple News with our great Apple panelists, like Jason Snell from sixcolors.com, only his 50th podcast of the week. - Present. - He's fresh. - Present. - Hello. - Hello. - Hello. - I'm here as principal, look for it. I made it. I'm in my jail. - A class time, it's happy. Yeah, a lot of podcasts, it's true, it's true, but this one is not like any of the others. It's special. - No, this is my podcast. It's not like any of that. - Is it wild? You never know what might happen. Stay tuned, everybody. - We're new. - You never know. The gags and laughs come fast and furious. This fun filled battle of the sexes. And now Andy and not co. Hello Andrew from the library. - The fun part about this for Jason is that this is not a podcast that Jason owns or has founded. So basically, if he could burn anyone, if he has to burn one podcast to the crowd. - This is the one. - This would be the one he'd probably use. I would not blame him for it because again, it just simply makes sense. - So that's why it's such exciting. - Leo has cleverly hedged by placing on the panel to somebody I've known my entire career, who I consider a friend. And it's like, I mean, I could burn it all down, but Andy would go down with it now. I can't do that to Andy. I know Andy's so long now. - No. - And then Christina and I go way back to it. - And then there were four, Christina Warren. - Hello. - For Caleb is here. Hello Christina. Let us, there is really so little to talk about. - Right. - We'll keep it to two hours then I think. - I'm good feeling about this. - Andy did put in a lot of stuff from the 50th anniversary, but I feel like we did that. I don't know if we. - Yeah. And also like, I don't know why. I just, I'm not as excited about it as, I'm, as 10 years ago, I would have guessed that I would have been. It's just that there's been so much talk about. Even I was surprised that there's, I April 1st, it was like, there were two things that I came to do it, and then annually you dread all the April fools posts. But then it's like, if all these posts, and all these articles and all these videos were absolutely sincere and I'm not, and not singling anybody out, it's just that it just felt like a lot for celebrating a fork. I, again, I'm, I'm trying, - You live in them. - People out, I realize that I'm bumming myself out and I do have a hype. - We live in the hype man. - I'm amazed. - I'm amazed that I'm just surprised that I wasn't as excited as I might have been. - It was a lot. It is the 50th anniversary, although again, I'm just gonna point out that they actually incorporated January 3rd of 1977, so we can do this all again in a few months. - What was April 1st then? I thought that was the first. - They filed the partnership. So Apple Computer Company was filed legally as a partnership on April 1st, but then they incorporated the following year. So there's a bunch of things. But I'm right there with you. I mean, I basically, between that and Jeopardy, it basically took over the first three months of the year for me. Like I wrote two pieces for the verge. I wrote a bunch of stuff for six sellers in Macworld and like, oh yeah, I was absolutely tired of it all. But it also, like 50 is a, that's a big number. Like I don't expect that every April 1st we're gonna get more Apple remembrances, although I will point out that next year is the anniversary of the iPhones, 20th anniversary of the iPhones. So here, I remember that one, everybody. But no, it was a lot, but I do think it was a special occasion. I was happy to be part of the verge's package. I think the verge did a really good job of trying to cover the whole era. And they asked me to talk about the Apple too and about how weird it was when jobs wasn't there. And that was fun writing those stories, but I don't disagree. I mean, like by the end, I was so done. (laughing) - Well, that's kind of the problem. - It's like a destination wedding. Let's put it that way. It's like when, actually, I-- - Like a Christina talk. - No, I just wanted to add to that, and we're good. - Crush you too. - Oh yeah, no, no, no, no. You're not wrong. It is kind of like a destination wedding thing. But I think that this is kind of a more kind of general problem that we kind of run into with fandoms as it were, which I think weirdly, like Apple, even though it was a company kind of falls into that thing too, is that because there is the whole content ecosystem around it and all of us are part of that ecosystem, there then becomes kind of a machine to kind of celebrate these things. And so it's like, okay, we have to do these packages. We want to do these remembrances and like that. And I think kind of become overwhelming even if you're part of it and even if you like it, just because so many people are wanting to get their comments off. And the final thing I'd just say is, I love Jason's contributions to the Verges special. But I also thought the art direction that the Verge did was actually really incredible. And it was clear they put a lot of work into that. - Oh, yeah. Yeah, like each piece has original art that was designed to fit together and stuff. Like that's magazine level work. You don't see that in a lot. - Absolutely. - Yeah. - Another magazine's are dead. - Well, I mean, yeah, basically like, and web publishing, look, I've been publishing on the web forever, but like it's mostly just templated, right? So you just stick things into fields and press post. And so for the Verge to go and do art direction and get like special headers that are designed around, you know, animations of and collages of Apple history and stuff like, yeah, it's above and beyond. But they do, they do some really good work over there. - Good on them. - Good job, Neely. - Good job. This is somebody's getting ready for the 2027 anniversary of the iPhone with this. - There's always something. - Yeah, this is a picture of every iPhone ever. - I will say, so like people are interested in this, like the, I have been writing a column from Macworld's website since I left, right? So since 2015, early 2015, it's been a long time now. And the feedback I've gotten is that the stories where they picked like, here's a anniversary that happened and you use it to tell a story that maybe ties Apple up today into the past, it does work for them. So there, I mean, it doesn't, it happens. - It drives things. - This is what you say. - But I think kind of emptiness, nostalgia is not as much fun as it is to kind of like connect the dots to the past, but that's, I mean, that's me. 'Cause I am not an Apple historian, I am somebody who writes about Apple. Like I always say when Neely Patel at the verge emails me and says, here's a story about an anniversary Jason, would you like to write about it? I'm like, you know, I also write about the present, Neely. But he's got people to do that part of it. - I absolutely like that. - I like to press that. - This is actually kind of an interesting site called the Data Drop with a weird URL. They do, I guess one of these every month is the 40th one. They did a, I have a feeling it's AI generated, but it's really nice. - It's beautiful. - The history of the iPhone, where it's got a lot of, not only details about each model, but kind of stats, you know, like the camera's got better and so forth. So I think it's kind of, there's a price graph, which is kind of interesting when you look at it. - And that really is the magazine sort of effect these days, that even, especially New York Times and other publications that have the money for it, it's like, you know what, the days of laying out, left page, right page, spread page, even the days of laying out, okay, let's have a nice scroll that has, now it's like, no, this needs to be an, even though it really is just about a long, like 2000 word piece of text, it needs to have some, it wouldn't be wonderful this way, we could put across all the information with some interactivity and making it not necessarily an app or a video, but making it just do things as you navigate through it. This is such a lovely visualization of a design story. - Yeah. - Sheets.works/data-viz/every-iPhone. I suspect Sheets works is maybe a place where you can do data visualizations, would be my guess, yes it is. So maybe that's their little ad for themselves. - I mean, they did a great job with that. I mean, even in this detail, like I'm sure that AI was probably used as it is for most things these days, but the fact that even the wallpaper that's included on each phone is updated to what the wallpaper was. - That's cool. - For each of those models, they have the different colors and prices, it's pretty cool. And then I look through this and I'm just like, oh my god, I don't have them all obviously. I've usually trade them in every year, but I'm like, I've owned almost every single phone on this list, which is absurd. - Oh, I have to. Well, not, no, not every single, but one per year. - What rate? I was gonna say, not every single variant, but at least one per year. I'm like, okay, my god, I had like, you know, I didn't have the 5C for instance, because I had to buy this, but you know, like yeah, every year I had one of these basically. - It's been my daily driver since it came out. The last phone I had before that was the Blackberry Pearl, and it's been a daily driver ever since. iPhone in space, thanks to Annie, collating a bunch of things. of good bits, including this one from Macworld. I thought, now Macworld says this was shot on the iPhone. I thought that they weren't able to get pictures off the iPhone yet that we'd have to wait to go back. So they know. So there's been a lot of questions to this because there's also shots of the astronauts using AirPods to do their workout. And the answer is there are PCs on board, famously running multiple copies about, look at once, which they had to reboot and they had all sorts of troubleshooting issues with that. And there are, there is Bluetooth connectivity. So there's no, there's no like Wi-Fi or anything like that. But the Bluetooth radios are allowed. The PCs use them, the AirPods obviously use them. And I would imagine that there is some sort of, if not airdrop, then a cable connect because you can also just connect your iPhone and it shows up and you can import photos. And so I'm sure that they've got an iPhone data dump system where they get connected back to that PC, probably, and then imported. And I don't think they're sending everything down. I think they're like literally picking the ones they want to send on a relic because they're using the deep space network, which is very low bandwidth. But so they can get iPhone photos back too. Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how the, how Apple, excuse me, how NASA segregation to this stuff. There is, they do have an official flicker account where you see, oh my god, there's the new version of Earthrise and they're all being shot on Nikon D5s. But of course, everybody who's watching the live feed is one of the most exciting screen grabs that someone posted was, oh my god, there's one of the astronauts, one of the crew, like took a picture of the lunar surface with their iPhone. You can see the screen and even though it's like a little tiny, like little poster stamp in the middle of this like streamed video, it looks like it's going to be awesome. I can't wait for them to actually post this direct stuff. I think it really is going to be like if the newer times had a very, very long piece about how iPhones got certified and how they got on the, on the craft. And they haven't really said how, they haven't really said if this is going to, these are official NASA photos or if these are personal photos that are just going to, we're only going to see if and when, if and when. These, the crew like actually post a social media. But I feel as though like in the days after, after splash down, we're going to see some amazing post to see that Apple is going to really, really want to take advantage of because we just really can't wait to see how well this stuff works. It's, it's pretty cool. I'm just shows how consumer tech is advanced so much. That's the really amazing thing. Also the, you know, the Nikon camera that they're using, like it's not a, it's not the hassle blad with film that they use in Apollo 8, right? But it's like modern digital camera technology is so amazing. And then the fact that they've got, I was always chuckling because they're like, they have so limited time that they've got to, they choreographed it out. The astronauts are in the windows. They're shooting the moon as they go past it. Shooting the moon literally. And but it's like that I had to laugh because they're like, all right, now we're going to rotate, be sure to bring your SD cards with you. And like there's a lot of talk about where the SD cards go. Yes. Yes. Yes. Because instead, because with Apollo 8, it was all like, hey, can you get me some more of that color film? And now it's like, don't forget your SD cards. And they do all of that. And then presumably when all that is done, then somebody is triaging those photos, those SD cards on the PC that they've got to pick which ones they're going to put in the uplink queue. It's just amazing to see that whole like digital photography work flow happening in the open on the radio as the spaceship plus the moon. Here's a guy. I don't know if he is doing a selfie wallie shaving or actually using the iPhone as a mirror. That's an interesting use. You know what? On Macworld, Michael Weisman says it's the best shot with iPhone ad ever these pictures, right? Oh, I mean, it's funny, right? Because what's it? What was Samsung who did like the AI-shed rated moon shots? Remember, right? So I mean, so it's kind of funny to think about it. You're like, okay, the actual man. You can't run guys. Actually, though, that would be hilarious. If you had that, you're like, okay, is it going to try to AI the moon on top of the moon? It's just green cheese. But no, I mean, yeah, this is, it's a perfect shot on iPhone ad. I mean, you couldn't have asked for better free publicity. Yeah. And if you go to Flickr, NASA has preserved the exif information from the shots so you can actually see. Yeah. You can also go to images.nasa.gov and they've got exif on that. That's nice. And the photos they shoot will come back. That's part of the deal is ultimately they will all be posted for the public. Yes, I can actually show these on YouTube without getting taken down. You can. It's true. It's true. They belong to Samsung. You can say that about. Yeah, but it's just, it's, it's, this is one of those moments where you see how, because it's been, it's talking about 50 years. It's been 50 years. How technology is advanced along so many different axes, including ones you don't necessarily think of in the context of a, for example, of digital photography and space flights. But this is, you know, a lot of the advanced tech that's in space stuff now is also, I mean, it works both ways. There's a lot of space stuff that is powered by the fact that smartphones got so good because you need for space. You also need power-sipping technology. You need small, not necessarily light, but you need low mass and fits in a small space. And it turns out when the last shuttle launch, I went to and there was, there were iPhones on board. That one, a company called NanoRacks had a, had a couple iPhones on that mission. And I was talking to them and they said, everybody in space loves the, the fact that the iPhone and smartphones are doing this because their priorities turns out just sort of, by happenstance, their priorities are our priorities. And so now 20 years almost later, so much space stuff benefits from the miniaturization and the low power. All of those things, all the tech that gets used in space now is much more advanced, I think than it would be if you didn't have a huge consumer product need that drives the tech forward. Yeah. And I love the idea of, just as a sociological thing, I love the idea of astronauts taking, having their own personal cameras and being able to take pictures that are not on the schedule, that are just, I wanted to capture this just the same way that if I'm at six flags, I want to, I want to capture some pictures of my friends because something cool is really happening at the moment. And when you see the livestream occasionally, you do see like someone whip out a phone and just shoot video of like the other crew members of what's going on. And of course, we have pictures like that from basically every NASA mission that's ever existed. But there's something, I don't know, it's something about something that we're all familiar with things that we do on the ground every single day. It's happening 245,000 miles away from home that is part of the great storytelling of a mission like this. I think it's great Jessica. It looks like she did this with her iPhone. She's the one where she's wearing the AirPods. She says, "Pologize for the noise." It's really noisy in the space station, which is why you might want to have AirPods with the noise cancellation. I love it that she did this. This is really kind of amazing. They have rather elaborate exercise paraphernalia because first of all, you could see they're weightless. So it's hard to get exercise. And then they don't have a lot of space, but they managed to get quite a bit in this small area. And I love it that she put her iPhone up and says you might at the gym. Yeah. And she shot her workout. Can we just take a second to just comment on how cool it is that we are at this point where it had been so long since we've had any sort of mission like this. And to finally have another one and to finally, like, we're to coalesce at a time when we have the technology to actually document what's happening in real time so that we can all follow along from the internet. We can see the photos that they're uploading through a satellite that is going to flick our right, that they're going to eventually have the full thing that people that we have technology in our pockets that we can take up to space and record things. We have, you know, like wireless headphones. Like, I don't know. It's easy to get cynical about things sometimes, but it's freaking cool. Yeah. It's you're reminding me of like the lines from Apollo 8 where there was an HBO series from the Earth through the Moon. I'm sure you've seen that. And they did a whole episode about Apollo 8 and about all the turmoil that was happening in 1968, like all the unrest, Vietnam and everything like that. And then there comes this moment where Apollo 8 goes around the moon and does this Christmas broadcast in which they read from Genesis and Earth rise comes out and they just, they found an actual historical thing where someone amongst the telegrams was, thank you. Thank you Apollo 8. You've saved 1968. And maybe this is kind of a similar moment in which we are, we are, nobody is intended. Nobody is, I don't know how to put it. That things are happening that make us all very, very worried and we still need to focus on that. But it's good to have a break from that to be reminded of the arc of history and the arc of humanity is long. Yeah. And the arc of history is better and more important than any one moment. And moments like this with Artemis are part of that positivity that pulls us through into the future. Humans are capable of amazing things. It's good. Sometimes we need to be reminded of that. From the Earth to the Moon is great. Tom Hanks was the producer of it. It's on HBO Max. You can go watch it now. It's still great. You will see it's star studded. There are lots of people you were recognizing there. I watched that Apollo 8 episode. Apollo 8, seriously underrated by the way. That's a great mission, great space mission. And with Jim Lovele and company. And that's a great show. It's worth revisiting if you got, if you got Moon fever. Yeah. And I just, I want to mention we take things for granted. Christina mentioned we have this amazing technology. the one thing that we don't have is deep space bandwidth because they're using the deep space network, which literally, you know, usually it's for like Mars Rovers and, you know, orbiters at Saturn and Jupiter and stuff like that, but they're using it for this. However, there was a good story. I wish I had a link to it. I don't right now about how there is actually a set of relay satellites that are being designed that will be put in lunar orbit or Earth orbit, but basically what you need, if you're going to be at the South Pole, if you're going to be behind the Moon on the far side from Earth, and if you want the bandwidth that we kind of expect if we want because all of this, we were seeing like they have to send their telemetry back plus the videos, the videos all blocky and not very good quality, even though they're shooting this incredible quality stuff. They are working on building a set of satellites that are relay satellites that will allow Moon missions and, you know, future Artemis missions to have bandwidth to which we on Earth are now accustomed. And I think that will be very exciting because we are going to get probably in the next few years the ability to see a Moon mission where we will actually see live HD-Full Frame Rate video. We're not, this mission didn't have that, so we had to wait, but it's still very impressive, but like that's coming too, and that's also really exciting because that you could see the part of the chain that was not upgraded, which was the speed of the deep space network, yeah. But isn't it amazing not to hear that? Yeah, it's really great over here. Eep, almost as orienting because that's the user interface for understanding Moon communications. Yeah, this NASA satellite is also great, images.nasa.gov. Be great wallpaper source too because you can get download the large file sizes, which is great. So highly recommended. And thank you, NASA, for a little inspiration and a difficult time. You're watching Macbreak Weekly, Andy and Ico, Jason Snell, Christina Warren will be back with more and just a bit are appropriately enough. Our sponsor for this segment is Spaceship. Not that spaceship. The spaceship I'm talking about is the domain registrar spaceship. You've heard us talking about a spaceship quite a bit. I'm a big fan. That's usually, you know, and we spend a lot of time talking about it because it's very successful. A platform that is on the move already seven million domains under management. I mean, it's practically brand new driven by a steady flow new tools designed to simplify how you build on line. I'll give you an example. The latest is they're calling it Alf Web Studio. We talked about Alf. They're AI assistant before, but now Alf can do a lot more. It can build your website through a chat interface. You describe your business. Alf will create a complete site for you and beautiful to layout branding, copy images. So instead of building your coding, you just chat your way to a website. You just ask Alf. That is a major upgrade. Big brains, but put in Alf. One of the things that makes Alf Web Studio especially useful, the balance. You can let the AI handle any extra personalization you want or at any moment you can step in and do things yourself with a hands-on editor, you know, old school. I think it's a great combine. Your domain, your hosting, SSL, all built in. I loved it that I could just switch on SSL when we set up a site for Paris. It was so cool. Everything is handled within the spaceship platform. So you can go from idea to a live site without dealing with a whole set of different tools. You can still, by the way, it's you can use your own tools if you want, but I think you might really like these tools on spaceship. And Alf, the new Alf Web Studio, like other spaceship products comes with a 30-day trial, free trial. So you can build and test before you make any commitment at all. I really want you to check this out. It is amazing. We love spaceship. Check it out. Spaceship.com/twit. That's spaceship.com/twit and do check out their extra low domain prices and not just for first-time scientists, but for newls as well. It's a great place to bring your site. Spaceship.com/twit. Thank you, spaceship, for supporting Mac break. Weekly. I don't know if we even care, but here's a review of the new AirPods Max 2 from Engaget. I think as far as we could tell, it's exactly the same except for the H2 chip, right? Literally nothing's different. Nothing's different in terms of the, I mean, except that the sound is going to be better, right? It's going to have better noise canceling. They said that they improved the drivers. But all the reasons that I think some of us were critical of the AirPods before are still there, right? And so it's kind of a mix back. I feel like unlike the ones that came out a year and a half ago that I bought the USB-C upgrade, which was literally just a USB-C port, although they did eventually add the ability to listen losslessly. If you had a USB-C, I guess, a three and a half millimeter cable or USB-C to USB-C cable, that was one nice thing. If you bought those, that was not a great buy because they were basically the same as the ones that came out in 2020. Seems like these are a decent upgrade. I think it just comes down. And so if you liked your 2020 AirPods Max's and you're looking to get a better experience, and you can get these on sale, I feel like maybe the takeaway is this is decent. I feel like the problem that we've talked about before is just that there's a lot of other options in this space for these types of headphones that are, in many cases, better suited towards things like a travel or for other types of listening experiences and that aren't as heavy and have a better case and have better battery life. But this is a good upgrade. I just wish that they had done this a year and a half ago rather than kind of doing this staggered thing where you have three identical looking sets of headphones. And it feels like the only reason these got an update at all was that they just ran out of H1 ships and wanted to use what they've got and continue selling a SKU. It didn't seem like it was driven from any sort of product development if let's make a enhanced better version of this. It was just like, well, we ran out of the thing we used to put in here. So here you go. Here's an upgrade. Yeah, I think I fix it. Did they're usual tear down video and they basically seem to their takeaway was that it seems to be the exact same stuff inside or at least the construction is still the same. They're still complaining about glues. I've talked before about a guy named George Hots. Very interesting fella. He was the guy who created Comma.ai which was a self-driving vehicle add-on. You could put on your iPhone and have it drive your car. He's also the teenager who first jail broke the iPhone. He first jail broke. He's a really cool guy and he has a little company called Tiny Corp which among other things makes a $10 million ex-a-flop server you can buy which is very cool as well as some regular computers. But they've done something for the Mac crowd that I think is pretty exciting. They have a driver that lets you use an EGPU with your Mac and an Nvidia card and Apple has signed the driver. That's what's so cool is that I mean now you can't use it for a Mac. You can't use it for graphical workloads. You can only use it for AI like inference type of stuff but that's still massive. If you're buying an Nvidia card these days chances are you doing it for AI. For sure. For expensive. Absolutely. And and that's I think probably why they were able to get the driver signed right at this point. Like Apple didn't want to sign it if it was for gaming. I don't think so. It's so strange. I know. Apple has you know resisted Nvidia GPUs ever since Apple Silicon came out. Even before that I mean they their thing Jason would probably Andy you guys might remember more than I do but they used to have like the Nvidia GPUs and the laptops and then there was something I think with one of the versions of the Mac books it might have been in like a 2009 or 2010 I don't remember when it was it might have been the Nvidia models are not the Nvidia the first right now models actually. There was some sort of problem with those graphics cards and and the rumor is that you know Apple got very angry with Nvidia and basically cut them off and so they haven't had any you know official driver support for any Nvidia products even in in Mac pros that you know back you could actually put a graphics card in a Mac pro and so there's just but like a 15 year cold war. It's amazing. It was posted on X on April full so I would forgive you for thinking it was a joke. Here's from George the tiny corp. If you have a Thunderbolt or USB for E GPU in a Mac today's a day you've been waiting for Apple finally approved our driver for both AMD and Nvidia and there is a beautiful Nvidia video card running bear bear naked to the world next to a Mac mini and of course as you point it out at Christina it doesn't work going to your monitor so you can't accelerate games that's why you can't accelerate games doesn't can't drive your monitor with it but you can certainly drive your AI with that. It's Apple Silicon doesn't support that concept at all but outboard GPU it'll do. Okay if you insist yeah it's Thunderbolt 4 or USB 4 you don't even need Thunderbolt 5 to do it although I met I wonder if it's faster I guess it would be with Thunderbolt 5 I don't know. It's the this is this is 2026 versus 2016 this is if The world has given Apple a reason to believe that, oh, if we support GPUs, that will help us sell more Macs because we want to sell more AI platforms. When it was back before, we want really super fast gaming or we want a tiny, tiny niche of researchers to be able to have access to GPUs. It just wasn't worth the trouble of signing this stuff. Now it's a totally different world. And by the way, it's free. I mean, the GPU's not free. Unless you got one lying around somewhere, but thanks to Tiny, they're making that available. It's just a little curl to bash, which is something we all do these days. We're all curling to bash as dangerous as that sounds. And you get a little tiny GPU app and then it will install the driver extension, which is Apple Signs. So you're not going to get any complaints from Apple. Pretty impressive. It's very cool. Yes. So that's our new product lineup. Here are your butts, Max2 and a driver. All right. Let's talk about what's coming. The foldable iPhone, which I think I'm going to buy. I really want to, if I can, because according to Nikkei, there are some engineering snags. Shipment delays possible, say, sources. I don't subscribe to Nikkei Asia, so I don't have the deeds. Maybe you guys too. Yeah. The roaders picked it up. Everyone else picked it up. They're saying it's true that more issues than expected have emerged during the early test production phase. An initial time will be needed to resolve them, quoting a force source familiar with the matter. So we don't even know what that means. A month, a week, a year. Yeah. It's about this is, but this is a time where we're probably going to get more news about that as we often speak about, if Apple really is in, in trying to ship something in the fall, this is the time where they actually stop thinking about conceptually, how would we do this? And engineering wise, how do we solve? Now they probably have like samples of what the final product is going to be. And they're finding out that, ooh, we've hit and we found a manufacturing snag that was not going to be discovered until we started a trial manufacturing run things, things like this. So it's not, doesn't mean that the project's doom. It's not that it's the StarCross iPhone fold project or anything like that. But if anything, it's a good indication that yeah, this is a real thing. And maybe Apple really is going to ship this in September or October. German said today that it's still going to ship and it's a plan's time frame. So whatever the delay, I mean, that's what German says. I'm sure that that's probably what they're, what their target is, right? And who knows? I think the report, one of the aggregations of the report that I read said that, you know, the next few weeks are critical for them, I guess, figuring out how long of a delay if there is one will happen. And look, I mean, I think worst case unless there's something truly catastrophic in the supply chain, which I doubt the worst case would be that this would be like many other iPhone launches where Apple announced something and then it ships a month and a half later, right? Like that, that, you know, they did that during the pandemic. They've done that at other instances. They could do that, huh? Yeah. So I feel like that's a case where you, you know, you have your big announcement, you show it off, you even have samples that you can get out to selected press. And then you just say, and this will be available for pre-order in November, like they've done that a couple of times. So I guess I could live with my iPhone 17 pro for a few extra months. Yeah. And that's, and that's, and that's Christine, that's a good observation because when you think about it, I think that when Apple releases the, the folding phone, which is going to be a moment, not just for iPhone, but also for the category of folding phones in general, that's going to suck the air out of any iPhone release that they, they even would consider doing next to it. So maybe they will want to give it a separate event just to make sure that they get, they get attention for the next iPhone, nothing before it. They can kick it to spring. They've got the plan is to do a spring event. So they could kick it to spring potentially. I mean, I'm not sure they want to do it, but they could do it if they, if they have to, and remember, it's not a, it, this is the classic like, what's late mean? It's not late by their standards because they have an announcement. But it's, it's late by their reported expectations. And, you know, it's a, a, a, Andy's right, we're going to hear. I mean, this is, this is not, oh, I think I'm months yet. It's like, we're going to hear like this is going to either work or it's not going to work and they're going to have to recalibrate. And, but, you know, it's not the end of the world for them because it is not a product that exists. It's not a product that, while we're all anticipating it, they could get away with doing it a little later. I actually think that there's probably a drop dead here because if you're going to announce this in September as they usually do, like if you can't ship it by November, certainly like by early December, you can think back to like the iPhone 10 ship plate, right? But like, there is a moment where you're like, forget it. Just it, we're not going to make the holidays. Yeah. Let's re, re-wrap and it won't be like January. They'll push it back into the spring and do a spring event. I think. Well, that's what they did for Apple Watch, right? Because because Apple Watch was, did they even announce it in the fall? They might not have announced in September. They would have announced it in September. Without a date. Then they showed the preview in January. Yeah, Apple came out and then they had the preview, I guess, like in March, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I mean, they could worst case they could do something like that. It really came down to it. I feel like if they are going to ship this, if for whatever reason there was a delay, it would probably be better to preemptively let people know that the fold is coming. Not so much to like, just to not have people, you know, maybe who aren't as in touch with things be like, okay, well, I'm not going to buy the max. I'm going to buy something else who might have otherwise been in line for the fold, but even then, you know, they could just hold the whole thing for the spring. That's what it came down to. The good news is that the Nika report, I'm sorry, just I just refreshed myself on it. The Nika report says that it's not due to like supply constraints. So it's not as though we can't find the RAM. We can't get the panels. We can't get the CPUs. It really is about manufacturing. Yeah. It seems like something you wouldn't have said a couple years ago, but I feel as though they can solve a manufacturing problem or readily that could have solved the DRAM problem. Oh, yeah. And another factor is that although foldables isn't like an international phenomenon of monster sales across all categories, there is enough sales data to get analysts to have some theories about how people buy these things. And most of them agree that I would have, I would have been surprised to learn this. But this is not a second device for people. If people are trading in their own, their old phones to pay down the expense of the phone. So so it's not even necessarily if they worked if they were to decide to simply show it off in September and October, maybe even somewhat alongside a new iPhone event. Maybe it's possible that that really wouldn't have a bad impact upon the iPhone pro. Maybe people would buy them. And that's right. Right. And if I like what I see and in and may, I'll just trade it in against this one and I'll probably get a really good price against it. Yeah, I think so because I feel like there will be some people who will have both. But I think like what I'm personally anticipating doing is keeping my 17 pro max. Usually I trade it and keeping that around and then getting the fold. But but not trading it in for just because I don't know how powerful it's going to be. I don't know how much I'm going to like the whole thing. But I feel like most people would not be in that position where they're just going to be like, okay, if I'm going to spend the money on this, I'm going to either do some sort of trade in or have some sort of, I've just already determined that I'm getting this, this device. You know, because yeah, because I think the most people do use it as a primary device as you should. I mean, if you're going to spend that much money on something that shouldn't be something that you don't feel like you can, you can have. And to me, I mean, like if what it comes down to being is basically like an iPad mini that you can fold up, which when they redesigned the iPad mini, that was the first thing I thought I was like, oh man, if this could fold in half, this would be the perfect device. And that's what they can give us some approximation of. I mean, I think it'll be expensive, but there'll be a lot of people who will be excited by it. I think more people will be excited still though by the regular phone and the pro models. The stock market thinks the fold's pretty important when that knee case report came out. Apple's stock price dropped 5%, which is huge. German today says Apple's foldable phone remains on track for a September debut, despite that Nikke reporting. Rebutting concerns, he says, about major manufacturing snags. So somebody from Apple immediately called Mark. I was going to say, somebody was immediately there. Like actually, this is fine. Don't worry about it. We promise we're going to have it. Yeah. It does say the complexity of the news play materials may limit initial supply for several weeks. See. Sure. And I'm excited about it. I've had folding phones all of them. I still have the Galaxy latest Galaxy Fold and been less ensues to bat him. But I think Apple might have something with the OS with a rumored square aspect ratio. I think they might end up there. And on top of everything else, it might be the least clumsy transition from stock phone to unfolded tablet that we've seen in the industry yet. I don't know. Well, they're not particularly clumsy right now. They work clumsy as hell at first. But in terms of I'm starting an experience with this thing, I just simply took out my pocket. Then I realized, oh, actually, I'm going to need to reply to this in a little bit more detail. You unfold it. And without even having a mental blip of you feel as though you just simply ended one sentence, open the phone and then continue with the next sentence. And also the ability to use split view, leveraging off of stuff that we've been they've been building for the iPad for a mighty long time. - Yeah, the iPad is the, I wrote about this like six months ago. It's that moment when you saw that it was gonna be a little squatter and a little wider and more iPad like when it's open. It's like, their secret weapon here is, they've been making iPads for 16 years now. And like iPadOS is good apps on iOS and iPadOS that get larger. They get larger in an intelligent way. They do that better than Android. It's an advantage they have over Android and they're gonna press that advantage. - Yeah, I think even you degree, I know you're an Android phone user, but the drawback really the Android folding phone is that the software just doesn't adapt. - Not there. - Sam's song had to basically build their own solution to what happens to a phone app when it suddenly appears on a tablet. I mean, it was only like three, four or five years ago that Google even sort of explicitly acknowledged that yeah, we should really get on that about making Android into something that doesn't look like an expanded phone app when you put it on a thousand dollar tablet. - Right, well, I mean, even this going back even further than this when Microsoft made the Surface Duo, right, which was a different type of thing. - I loved that. I thought one. - I would tell you. - Yeah, it was interesting to buy something. It was a little bit underpowered when it came out, but there were a lot of interesting design things. - Nice, you were software. - Yeah, and the interesting thing there though was that the Microsoft team actually Google at the time, told them we will let you own kind of this foldable experience about again to your point Andy, about how these things expand and what these things look like because Google at that point was so not committed to any sort of tablet experience. Now obviously, Samsung went beyond that and now Google has their own, the Pixel folds and things like that too, but that was like seven years ago or whenever the Surface Duo came out and they just didn't have that ecosystem. I think Jason's exactly right. What will make this work is that if it's folded in one realm, it operates just like the iPhone you've already known, and if you open it up, then it can work just like an iPad that you've always known. If that's what they want to do and I think that that would be - I hope they do. - That's what I hope they do too because I think that would be like the perfect interaction method, especially now that iPadOS has the windowing abilities and things like that. You could really have the side view, the different views, different apps as widget types of things and could really make it nice. And then again, when you fold it up and it's just kind of like when you plug your Mac into a bigger screen and everything just kind of comes in one place back again, back to you and kind of resized, it'd be kind of like, okay, now it's just going to go back to the single view, the way that it was before. - I'm really keen to see if Apple goes so far as to say, now there have been no rumors to the effect that this is going to be a 360 degree display. I mean, that basically doesn't exist for folding display, but if they would, I would love to see if they decided to say, what if we decide to do sort of a tentative mode where you've got it open kind of like a laptop, so we're going to have the vertical screen be one experience and the horizontal screen be a separate experience, whether it's here's where a persistent on-screen keyboard is going to be or we're going to allow app developers to basically put their own UI there to say that like, - That's what the duo did actually. - That's what the duo did. - It was. - Exactly, I love the duo, you're right. - Yeah. - I've been such a fan of not even just folding screens, but just screen the left screen, the right, a hinge in between, and the number of experiences that that can enhance, whether it's I'm reading a book versus I am reading my email and taking notes on another screen, I am so surprised that that never took off, maybe not so surprised after I use that macro for a couple weeks, but still I thought there was so much potential in there and it kind of breaks my heart that it never really found its footing. - Yeah. Now what do we think? Do we think that we'll have any way to have any, I think it would have to be a different a silas, but would you think we'll have any sort of Apple pencil support on this thing? I tend to think the screen might be too sensitive at first. - Yeah. - It's just kind of my fear, yeah, exactly. - I think they want to do it. I think they do want to have an Apple pencil experience when it's open someday, but I don't think they'll be able to do it for the first one. - I think it'll get scratched up like hell. Even with the Apple pencil, I think that it'll get scratched up like no one wants to put that up for future opportunity. - Yeah, these plastic screens. - Exactly, I mean, they'll make the pencil. I mean, I think if there is ultimately a way, maybe not with the first one, for them to design even a special-- - Exactly, that's not a thinking, yeah. - That works with it in any way. I think they will be motivated to do it, because again, that is one of those iPad features that they've gotten really, really good at, and the software is good, and it turns this into like, open it up and it's a sketchbook. I can see the commercials now, right? But I don't, this feels like minimum viable Apple folding on folded phone, and I think that Apple pencil-- - And the Galaxy Note came out, which wasn't folding, but had a much larger screen and had that stylist. At CES that year, they stationed artists with easels all over Las Vegas, drawing on their Galaxy Note. I remember that, and that was the pitch. So maybe Apple will bring that back. German is less than, in fact, surprisingly, throws a little shade at Apple in his Sunday newsletter, talking about the AirPods Pro Max 2, saying it's really a triumph of marketing, not of products. In fact, he says, imagine if the recent product updates themselves were as impressive as the advertising. (German laughs) Mark, I'm talking about biting the hand that feeds you, but he's right, you can't say he's wrong. - You wouldn't want him to burn that relationship that he has with Apple corporate. - Oh, yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, that's right. AirPods 2 Max blurs the line. This is the headline between marketing and innovation. Not out much else in the Sunday. We usually have a Mark German Sunday report on Tuesdays, but then not a whole lot else. Most of the pros was about that. - Can't break. Even Mark German can't break 52 weeks of stories. - Yeah, it's tough. - Some weeks are quieter than others. - It's tough, yeah. - Sometimes it's the same story in a minor key instead of a major key, because there's, there was like, oh, I've got, I've heard the same story from someone else now. So yeah, it's a terrible thing when your reputation is, every week there's going to be something dramatic and surprising that everybody's going to be talking about. That's like, oh, but actually truly nothing has happened. Everybody was, I've got pictures. The only insider stuff I got from Apple is pictures from people's like, trip to the falls. It's like, that can't really write a piece about that. (laughing) - You're watching Mac Break Weekly with Andy and Jason and of course, Christina Wormers, so glad you're here, especially thanks to our club members who make this show possible. We really appreciate your support. Twitter.tv/clubtwitter. If you're not yet a member, get Add Free versions of all the shows and special programming. Friday our AI users group, which is always a lot of fun and there's a lot to talk about. This week, even some Apple news in the AI sphere, we also have Stacy's book club with Stacy Higgandbatham. We have the photo time with Chris Marker. We talk about photography every month. Johnny Jet does travel. Mike does his great calm, soothing crafting corner. Every month, lots of great reasons to join the club. Mostly though, do it because you want to support Twitter and all the shows we do here. We appreciate it. Let's see also in rumors, AirPods Pro, new ones coming this year. Wait a minute, they just released new ones. More new ones? We just got the three last fall. It could be the four. The rumor says that it won't be the four, but it might have IR cameras or some other sorts of changes. Oh, this is the camera one. Maybe it would have some sort of, you know, like it would be kind of like the twos, which had multiple variants. I don't know. Let me ask the panel because I have my opinions, but those of you who have, who went from AirPods Pro's twos to threes, what is your kind of opinion, Ben, now that we're kind of like six months in? Well, the day one opinion was that they felt weird in my ears, but the six months in opinion is that they sound fantastic and I love them. So it took some getting used to because they do, they're more aggressive in filling your ear holes. But the increase in noise cancellation, and I tend to use the smart noise cancellation mode, which allows me to hear cars that might run me over and stuff, but get rid of a lot of background noise. And that, that sounds when I'm walking the dog, like, my threes too, a concert Saturday night. I wear them instead of ear protection. They make excellent ear protection. They do actually. And they sound good. Yeah, they do. They do. I mean, my take I think is largely similar. I think at first they felt a little bit weirder. I will say I still don't think the sound signature is as good on them as it was on the twos, or maybe I was just used to the twos for so long. I don't know. That said, the noise canceling is so much better, especially in kind of the automatic kind of mode. And the battery life is such an improvement that I feel like I finally come around like at the six month mark, where I'm like, okay, these, because I was still kind of going back and forth between the two. And I'm at this point, I think I'm primarily on the threes. Let's talk about the app store. There's a little controversy, Royaling. First of all, Apple says, yes, we're going to the Supreme Court again. [LAUGHS] The never ending story. You may remember that a district court finally last week we talked about it said, no, Epic one, you go away. [LAUGHS] Apple had appealed to the Supreme Court, which sent it back down to the district court, or the lower court. And now that the lower court is re-gurled against Apple, Apple's going back to the Supreme Court. I guess you could. I mean, at this point, that was kind of the message from the Supreme Court is, well, let the lower court rule, and then we can talk. about. Yeah, I think that specifically they're asking the court to revisit some of the data that was presented, that formulated the judgment of what Apple has to do to conform with the court order. I think it has more to do with their def-- when they decide, yeah, we're okay, guess what we're complying, but we're going to-- our way of complying-- - Plansis-- - Plansis-- - Exactly. We're going to let you do-- and let developers use an outside payment process or outside of the Apple system, but we're going to load you down with so much bureaucracy and so much paperwork, and we're also going to be charging you 27% to 30%. I think that they're asking to think what to please revisit, and the judge said, yeah, we are not amused. And this is specifically what Apple wants to be-- - Yeah, yeah, appropriately enough. - Apple-- - Yeah, Apple-- - That's you. - Maybe in court, as well, according to San Francisco Business Times, San Francisco AI startup called XHuman, whose racy chatbots of attracted controversy is taking on Apple. Two of their apps remove the App Store, and XHuman says Apple's withholding half a million dollars in revenue generated through those apps. So one of them is BOTIFY, which is an AI companion platform that lets users have chats with the AI. And apparently, you know, has some sexually charged conversations, including in character as celebrities. Other user created BOTS impersonated Millie Bobby Brown at a teenage years, Emma Watson, not appropriate. And then there was the FOTIFY. So that was BOTIFY. FOTIFY, which also, as one might imagine, generates images of real people wearing revealing outfits without their consent. I can see why Apple might have pulled them down. Apple said it was dishonest or fraudulent activity that caused the take down. XHuman said, that's all they told us. We wanted specific examples. We'll see. They're going to work. - Yeah, this comes down to, there's nothing in the rulebook that says that a mule can't be on the football field as a place picker. And Basel said, no, there's common sense rules. Why? It doesn't say specifically explicitly that. However, we hold that. We have rules that cover that. And they're, I mean, Crimea river. These are the sort of apps that kind of define the reasons why Apple tries to have control over the app store content. And that's it. You know what, we really don't want to be whatever, whatever giant controversy you are destined to become part of in three and a half months, we would rather not be part of that. - Jack Dorsey had a interesting chat app, Bluetooth-based chat app that was used widely in protests because it didn't use the public internet. It actually was a mesh system. China asked them to take it down and Apple has complied. Bitchat launched in July last year has been used in protests in Madagascar, Uganda, Nepal, Indonesia, and Iran. All places where the internet is being restricted. And of course, China is the first and foremost among those. Dorsey not happy. But I don't know if there's much he can do about it. And he's going to say about that. - No, it's just that this is the classic. Apple is forced to comply with whatever laws are in the man they operate. Sometimes though, it really is, this was designed specifically and directly to allow people to have private communications that could not be surveilled upon by a, let's call it heavy-handed surveillance state. And so of course, in many jurisdictions, the government has decided this app has to go. So I don't think Apple is crossed the line here, but it does show the amazing amount of tension that they are under every time they simply have to say, we have declared this as a rule. We are going to have to follow that rule. But it does show, I don't know. Again, I wonder if there's going to be a breaking point in which which Apple is going to get tired of simply saying that there is no commute. It goes from their specific apps that get banned by these governments. There's also a report from a Russian newspaper that's not controlled by the state about how Russian take down orders for different VPN apps and privacy apps have accelerated amazingly in the past year. There's a new crackdown on VPN. I wonder at one point Apple is starting to worry that the app store will stop going from, that's gizm, the relationship between these governments and the app store stops being, here is a specific app or a specific class of apps that has to be taken down versus as part of the app approval process. We require you to hand over to our organization. We get to examine this app before you even get to approve it. And I wonder how far away we are, Apple is from having that kind of a thing where they have to invite governments into the fundamental app approval process. Because I'm sure that Apple has limits, but I don't know what the limits are for certain governments that are in this world today. We talked last week about some vibe coding apps being removed from the app store. I don't think Apple is going to be anxious to remove too many because, according to the information, Apple's app store saw an 84% jump in new apps. Well, that's the difference between apps you use to vibe code and the apps that you do have code. Oh, there you go. Okay, yeah, it's been a boon for Apple. Remember, they make money on these apps. Well, it's been a boon, but it's also, I'm kind of curious from the perspective of the panel here. It's been great to see kind of an influx of new applications come out because it's always exciting. I think to see people get excited by what they can do. But the quality is pretty, it's pretty sus. If you go to our slash Mac apps, almost all of the apps that used to be a good place to discover hidden gems, and now it's just vibe code after vibe code. That can be fine to be clear, especially if you have somebody who is using these tools the right way and understands the code base that's being generated and whatnot. I think the fear that I have is that a lot of people, just because the coding models are so good, I think it code that compiles fine, but they don't exactly understand what it's doing. They haven't necessarily taken some of the basic precautions for things like user data privacy and stuff like that, which are things that Apple can't really check for beyond kind of doing their cursory checks. Are you using any libraries that you're not supposed to use? You can imagine the, I mean, an 84% jump in apps means Apple swammed with their view process. I mean, it was already bad. There have been some devs that have been complaining on Reddit and elsewhere about, oh my god, it's taking so long for Apple approvals to come through. It's made, they've made enough noise that Apple has response. I know we feel as though volumes are still okay. The people, and of course the developers who are not, do not feel as though they're experiencing indolays are not complaining on Reddit about it. So we have to find this out on the long term, but it is, it is what an interesting problem for Apple to have is because yeah, the thing is not only do they benefit from, hey, more commercial apps, more apps on the app store, more dive, not only more money, but also more diversity. Like there's on one level, like if you do a search for, you're looking for joblin or obsidian or Ulysses, you want a really good like markdown notes editor. And suddenly there are like a hundred. There's Andy super awesome notes at notes aplenty. How many of these do you have to wait through before you get to the ones that are from an actual, an actual developer who knows how to build code knows also how to do customer support knows how to deal with security as Christina says all the sort of stuff. So the Apple needs to defend the app store against a lot of slot, but on the other hand, there's also the question of it should Apple be in the position of saying that this particular take on a notes app is crap and we don't need it. Right. If only 10 people say, my god, it is exactly the reason why I've never used a notes app before. It's now I've been looking for something exactly like this. So this another indication of Apple being in between a rock and a hard place. Well, I mean, and fairness, I think that this is a rock and a hard place that is completely of their own making because they are the ones who in who basically came out like when they started doing the store guidelines in in 2008 that set the tone over like even when they started disallowing certain types of apps because they said there are too many of these things and they've used that for their own reasons over the years, even when it might not necessarily be a valid critique. So I think that Apple set the standards and the rules and I agree with you, I don't know if it's their place to be able to be in the position to say, you know, who are we to decide if this app is super fluid or not and to make judgment calls. I would agree with that. I would also agree that because they took on a stance at the beginning to say we're going to curate the app store and that was their argument and the Epic lawsuit that they should probably curate it. What I would say though is that what seems to me would be like a solution of sorts. I mean, this probably never work on the iPhone, but certainly, you know, would make things easier. I think on the Mac and this is what a lot of Mac developers do is that, you know, separating the notion between something being notarized and versus something being approved for the app store. And I think that this is where, especially if we were to see these types of things increasing and we'll see it in iOS apps too if we haven't, you know, I haven't seen a lot of Mac apps, but I'm sure that's been happening on iOS apps as well. Be to say, okay, well then maybe there's one standard for letting somebody be in the official app store and maybe if they would in other regions other than the EU allow alternate apps to say, okay, you can have those standards and you can, you know, let all of the apps that anybody want to go out there and will just provide that this is our notarization requirements. I don't know. What do you think about the idea? I'm not suggesting this is just something that occurred to me, of there being sort of a varsity version of the App Store and a junior varsity, where the varsity means that through whatever criterion that seems to make sense, these apps are established, either through, no, actually it got 80,000 downloads in the past, but it's new, but everybody wants to talk about this right now versus, yeah, this is something, someone as a tabletop developer made this released it, hasn't really touched it in a couple of weeks or a couple of months. It should exist, people should be able to find it, but we want to make sure that there's a difference between the marked path that has all the restroom facilities in the park versus if you want to bushwack, you can bushwack, but here is at least if you want to see the stuff that we feel is though through AI metrics, not through an editorial policy, we see some signals from this app that says that this belongs in the varsity group as opposed to the JV, have added. I think realistically, that'll just get Apple accused of putting it on the scale in a different way, and as long as the App Store is the only store that's out there, anything you do to pick winners and losers or even to sequester different apps in different locations, somebody's going to say, "How dare you do that?" You are favoring the winners and favoring the success and not allowing anyone else to rise to that level. I think that's the core problem with any editorial judgment or content judgment or the current, Elon Musk completely lost it about the sales charts that are just down like downloading sales charts for the App Store, and he was like, "No, it's a conspiracy against me." This is the side effect of Apple being the only game in town in many regions for this sort of thing, is that even if they were to do something that we would all interpret as helpful, the truth is that would also be attacked as Apple completely distorting the market because anything it does distort the market because there's only one App Store. That's the downside of that. I don't think you're wrong. I think that there are ways that, I mean, they've done things like the privacy labels and the accessibility labels where you could maybe have some better labeling and some better filtering and let people kind of understand. But the problem also is the App Store is still kind of primitive. It's not a super, it's basically the iTunes music store hacked over the course of 15 years or whatever, but it's not super sophisticated in a lot of ways. How about if Apple just made those signals available through Search? What if there were a new Shlimo-powered App Store search that allowed me to use coded language that essentially translates to, I'm looking for a Notes app, but only show me ones that have been around for more than six months and have more than have a substantial number of downloaded installs and a substantial number of comments back to it and feedback from the developer and a regular number of updates. So that even if you were interested in creating that kind of a filter you could. I mean, that would be nice. I mean, I think the problem to Jason's point with any of this is that if you start to even have those signals in there and I feel like that would be a nice search parameter to be like how long has this developer been around, right? More or less than a certain period of time. But I honestly fear that what will happen then is that people will just start to sell their developer accounts. Oh God, that's a good point. Yeah. I'm just disappointed that it's so hard to maybe, maybe it's bad. Maybe because I've been around since the App Store began. So we remember a time where you could just say the thing is like none of my Notes apps are doing for me doing it for me. I know I'll scroll through the App Store and just look through the listings of apps and now they're just maybe a because as Jason said, the App Store is not terribly sophisticated, but also because of so much volume, you can't just simply find those hidden gems anymore. Well, it's really, really hard. Well, I mean, that's the thing I think that Apple could probably do to improve things the most would just be to improve discoverability, right? Regardless of where the apps come from, regardless of whether it's a new developer or an established one, because the primitive way that they've done discoverability so far, which has either been through some editorial judgment of lists and things like that, which don't seem to be updated very often and or kind of sometimes feel like they're stuck in a certain era or charts, which kind of have their own signals for things. If there was a way to beyond just the stuff search terms to be able to find out, like, okay, these are apps that do these types of things, right? I feel that would be great, but I don't know. There's so many things to solve with that, but I feel like discoverability has remained for the last hour or long a real problem with the App Store. Our club member, Darren Oki, who's a regular in our AI user group and is a coder himself said, when the App Store first came out, he put out a whole bunch of apps and made $50,000 and they were crappy apps, but that was brand new, right? And there weren't very many apps there. He says, now I put out a bunch of apps that are actually good and have been updated. I have like two downloads. He says, there's just too much stuff on the App Store for anyone to find it. Although I like these apps. These are, he calls them orientation lock apps that they put. He says your iPhone when it locks stays in a portrait mode, but maybe you want landscape mode because you're lying down. So he has a bunch of landscape mode. That's awesome. Apps. So you don't have to worry about it. They're just going to stay there. It's very clever. Good job, Darren. And I presume you've I've coded these. There's Contract Bridge, which is OL, which means it's landscape mode. So you can lie down in the couch. He has a variety of common situations lying in bed on the couch, walking stuck in landscape. He says, watch one video now, everything sideways. That's not good. Yeah. So anyway, Darren's very clever, but he does make a good point that having a lot of apps is not necessarily a blessing. Is it? Yeah. It makes it hard to find even good apps. I guess you pointed that out to Andy. There's a lot of stuff in there. Apple has not approved OL videos. He keeps trying to get it through, but they don't like that. For some reason. It depends what the videos are. I guess, Darren. You're watching Mac Break Weekly, Christina Warren's here from GitHub. Are you still on leave or are you going back soon? I'll go back on Monday. Oh boy. Are you excited? Are you excited? No, no, no, no, I'm excited. I'm excited. I had some, you know, it took a while to kind of deal through all the post-surgery stuff, but no, I'm very excited to be back 100%. I'm sure your co-workers miss you. So that's great. And you do developer relations. What does that mean? So I mean, basically that like I am kind of try to be the voice of the developer, try to, you know, listen to their feedback about what we're doing right, what we're doing wrong, and promote that internally. It gives talks about the new things that we're doing, create content, creating a lot of content. Oh, God. You did that with Microsoft to plan nine. You did a lot of stuff. And I didn't when you were at GitHub, you did a lot of stuff. Yeah. In the back of the day. So good. I'm looking forward to seeing your videos once again. Jason Steils a podcast or for Mill Valley, California. That's true. Thank you, Johnny Gilbert. What's your anecdote for today's show? Oh, let's go to the list. You had prepared many. He is. I will tell you, so in writing about this Apple 50, I had my friend Phil Michaels who I have worked with for years and I went to college with, and he used to be a Tom's guide. And he wrote a piece for me about his 10 like weird anecdotes about covering Apple. And the last one was that, you know, everybody always emails me and says, is that you in the I pod launch video? Because that was a town hall and it was weirdly shot. There are a lot of reaction shots because Steve Jobs is like playing music. And then they're like, let's show the audience and send I'm in there along with my boss at the time, Rick LaPage and and John Seth, another editor for Macworld. And Phil pointed out I also went to that event and nobody sees me in the video because he said, I feel like this is the perfect encapsulation of my career is that I'm just off camera off to the right next to Jason off the left. So I was like, I want to fact check this. So I scrolled through the whole video and I actually found Phil. He was a row back and off to my left. And I actually put up a, I ended up posting an image where I was like this, I found you and he had to revise his story to say, okay, it's more, it's not that I wasn't, wasn't visible. It's that I was barely visible behind and off to the left. Okay, that's fair. But I was, I was kind of fun because I, I've always laughed about the fact that people always spot me. And that Phil was, I know Phil was there. He rode down in, in the car with me to that event. But you never see him. But if you know, I was a prudering of that video has led me to declare that yeah, he he was there. And he's sitting right next to Christina, did I? Who was our, our, our lab director at the time and and Julio knows because she was one of our regulars on. Of Christine. When we, when we did the McRoll tip of the week or tip of the day on call for help on on tech TV. And I mentioned this to my editor, Roman, who used to work at the screen savers of tech TV. It moved married to Christina. It was very to Christina. He says, yeah, Christina will never let me forget that she got invited to the iPod event and I didn't. So that's my story. I'm, I'm looking through the video right now trying to find somebody I know I was not there because I was working at tech at and Johnny Ives is kind of in up fairly close as that Tim Cook. That's Tim Cook. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. In the front row. It's all in Mike Mansfield. Yeah. It's all the greats. Yeah. Up up the front. The exact It's in the front. Yeah, Johnny's a little further back. Um, but yeah, so I'll I'll drop in in our I think Jim ladder back that's who went from TV in our just there's Rick LePage and John Seperate there and I'm right to the left to Rick's left off a little bit in that and if you look in our members discord, I posted in a link the live listeners at least can see the picture I found I dug up a fill in Christina back in 2001. Um, we all looked we all look a lot younger than none of us had kids. That's great. That's a lot to mystic. Yeah, Jim came back with a I think Jim came back with a bunch of iPods from that. They gave everybody an iPod in a bag. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That's true. Anyway, so that was it was kind of fun to revisit it because I always that literally one of my jeopardy anecdotes was I owe I get an email every few months saying is that you in the iPod launch video and yes, it's still me. Even though my hair didn't have nearly as much gray as it does now. Love it. But I got to kind of like take it all apart and identify some other people in there and and and yes, there is photographic evidence that Phil Michaels was at that event now right next to Christina. So now we know what a relief he can't paint himself out of Apple history. And and Andy when jeopardy finally calls you, what will be your jeopardy anecdote? Oh, gee, I don't if it's day three got for and like the end of the week, I'm filling is though I'm not people now in person. I get too far ahead of you stuff. I mean, they still haven't even called you once. Okay. I'm saying that I'm probably sure the story about the time I met Steve Jobs or for the actually know probably the chief that the quickest one was, oh, I got to you. I got to use an iPhone like five months before was actually. Oh, that's a good one. They've not heard that one before. Yeah. And by the way, your your jeopardy anecdote 100% should be something about your relationship with Roger Ebert. I would say. Oh, yeah. It's a really special wonderful story about a person that everybody has fond feelings for. Yeah. That's what I would choose for you. It's a very, very good idea. Yeah. Thank you. That's again, I'm sorry. I was I was thinking actually I was thinking about him last month. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I yeah. It he's in my mind a lot too. And I didn't have a personal relationship with him, but I still think there's a lot of stuff that happens in the world that I'm like, oh Roger Ebert has said about this crazy movie or media thing that happened. No, he even he might have even retired from movie criticism to speak full on as an editorial page columnist with the way the things are today. Yeah. He would have been unrestrable. I bet. He would have been furious, eloquent in our serenity. We could have used his voice. Yeah. Yeah. And this that got on. We go with the show. Let's see what else without we all done our jeopardy anecdotes. What a relief. I wish I had those cards. Ken had I could ask you in a more pointed way. I hear you a new Roger Ebert. Yeah. I mean, literally I'm like, I could get out the card and see what's there. Oh, you got it. Yeah. Yeah. These aren't that interesting. It's probably good that I lost to. By the way, I have a jeopardy update for you, which is my last tenuous connection to jeopardy. The guy who beat me. He's on the top 10 lists now as an all-time where he's still playing. Oh boy. Still playing. So we didn't want to be by the best. I was going to say you got beat by you. He is now in the top 10 money list for regular season play and in the top 10 most consecutive games one. So. Oh my gosh. So there's no doubt about it now and trust me, I'm rooting for him because like the bigger, more legendary he gets and I can be like, oh, yeah, beaten by the best. And honestly, do I have a spreadsheet where I've analyzed our games performance versus other games that he's played. Yes. I do. I have to say I think I think my game and the game right after mine were the two best games that people have played against him so far. So I'm feeling pretty good about losing to Jamie Ding who is a lovely guy and now has like half a million bucks. So good job. Good job. Wow. Good job. Isn't that why? That's amazing. Paul McCartney went, but the Beatles, Steve Jobs loved the Beatles. He did. I know that. And I'm sure Paul knew that. And this was part of the 50th anniversary celebration while McCartney performed at Apple HQ. I mean, that's the most that's the most ultimate flex you can possibly get is having having a beetle. Having a beetle perform, you know, your company like, you know, like anniversary celebration for all your employees. Like that's incredibly cool. It was in Apple Park. Um, employees had an area lottery, according to New York Post to gain admission. There wasn't enough room for anybody. And it was a 25 song set. It was a full show concert. It's a huge, I mean, also that place is huge. So the fact that they were, they were gating it. I mean, the truth is, not all of Apple works at Apple Park. So there's like it and they had a lot of alumni came back. I heard about like John was John Rubenstein was there. I in a Scott forest all was there. People saw like they had a lot of alumni back as well. So I understand why they did the crowd control. Although even then you could just you could watch it from inside the glass at the loop. If you wanted to like, I would, I would assume. I mean, it's a enormous space. But yeah, he right down, he did, uh, he did Beatles. He did wings. He did solo. He did live and let die with the pyro techniques, which is always fun. And, um, and in the in the show, in our show, notes, some, uh, there's a, there's a, I guess he did a Facebook post where he said, it's hard to believe that it's been 50 years since Steve Jobs gave me an iPhone, but it's true. He got the first, he was one of the people got to for the first 50 years ago. No, it's not true. It wasn't. It was a year ago, but it made me laugh because I got Paul. That Paul is a rascal. Oh, yeah, he knew better. You're right. That wasn't a slip. He did get, he did get like during the encore, when the video says like, I won't do the Paul voice. But it says, oh, I got the good friends with Steve. And, you know, I still haven't, I still haven't removed his, his name for my address book. Literally, like, ever like, I'm sorry. It's all like, it's just, it's just what broke, broken my heart. But the problem is that like, he's great, but he is so experienced at being the public Paul McCartney. Yeah. Sometimes you wonder if it's like, you know what? This would be a good time to say this. Well, I mean, imagine going to that and they open the concert with help. He was, you know, in the early days, he didn't want to play any Beatles songs. Right. Now, he first started playing Beatles songs in his shows. People were like, it was yesterday, I think, and people were blown away. He's, yeah, he's over it all. Come around. It's an amazing playlist. As soon as it got published, like I couldn't wait. And I just basically built myself a playlist for it. It is, like, it is the same play. It is an expanded version of the playlist he did, like in LA a couple of weeks ago, when he did that 200 seat thing. But, and I'm sure that's basically, it's basically his arena playlist that he modifies night to night. But my goodness, what an A to Z and psychically walk through walk through his history as a guy. Got to get you into my life. Yeah. Let me roll it, which is a wings song, getting better. Beatles, let him in. Yeah. So nice. Not can. Yeah. My Valentine, 1985, maybe I'm amazed. Would have loved to have seen that. I've just seen a face every night. Love me. Do then Blackbird. That was one of the shows. The songs he used to play his shows. Solo shows now. And then Lady Madonna, something banned on the run. Yeah. Oh, blood. Dioblodac get back. Let it be live and let die. And hey, Jude, there's mostly Beatles music. That's okay. We're not bad. And then the encore is the back side of Abbey Road. Golden slumber's carrying that weight. Yeah. Which is like one of the best trilogy's of music ever. Yeah. He's been doing that. It's amazing. Like it was, I'm telling you, it was like 2am when I put together this playlist. And I was up until 3.30 for in the morning because I just started playing it just to see and that I could not turn it off until the very very end. It is a fact. And I was just remembering and it feels like it was, it feels like it was yesterday, no pun intended. But I do remember when, I guess it was 2009 when the Beatles finally came to iTunes. And like that was like a huge moment when Apple finally got the rights to have the Beatles music digitally because they weren't on any digital service at the time. And this was obviously before streaming or anything else. But I remember that being like a really big PR moment. Like they had like, you know, stuff in the Apple stores. Remember like they had like, you know, signage everywhere and that sort of thing. And here's the selfie that Tim Cook took with Possible. Although I have to say, I'm surprised somebody hasn't taken some AI to this and had Paul fade into the bushes like almost something. It's kind of begging for that. Not really a selfie, right? It's just a picture. Yeah, you're right. It's not a selfie. The thing is when you're constantly surrounded by assistance. Yeah, he doesn't need to do it. Your job title as an intern is you are Tim Cook's I think we can yeah, we can we can give Tim dispensation and say it's a selfie. He just doesn't have to do them himself. Anybody who has a picture of himself next to Paul McCartney is by defined by definition pretty cool. He's got a selfie person. Yeah. And like I said, I mean, just what a flex just to be like, yes, we will we will pay whatever his fees and have him here for our 50th anniversary celebration for employees for a private event like because I don't even want to think about what the fee was, but I'm sure it was it's sure it was very expensive. And and they just oh, you know, I think he did it just out of the goodness of his heart. He just oh, but a few weeks ago, we were talking about like, I think Jason, you've like speculated that maybe when when David Pogue started basically knocking on doors at Apple saying, Hey, the 50th anniversary is coming up. I'm gonna start I'm starting writing a book on 50 history. Was that the moment that Apple decided, "Oh, we really need to do something good about this?" It made me it suddenly make me think, how far ahead do you have to book Paul McCartney to see if there's going to be space in his tourist schedule? And maybe the and is part of the reason why he happened to be on the West Coast and able to do a 1200 seat for any of his guys. He knew he was going to be there. Anyway, Mayas will make another $2,000, you know, they get part get part of the gate as a savvy businessman. I think it's me, yeah, a little from Colomboe, a little from Colomboe. I know when we tried to do criminal analogy on like, when they did the big in person WWDCs, they would always have like a Thursday night concert as well. And you're looking to see who's touring. And I think it's a little of both, right? They probably had a list of like 10 artists that are top shelf artists that they would have loved to have. And McCartney was undoubtedly high on that list. But then there's the who's touring, you know. - Who's touring, who has a set list ready to go? - Who's who's who's who's who's who's who's still in a place where they can, you know, tour. - Exactly. - For that matter, which band or bands collected at quarter million dollar payday to be on standby in case the Paul McCartney gig fell through. But also like, so you mentioned this, the the concerts of WWDC. What I was thinking about is like how rare it is despite again playing a 2000 seat or an LA a couple weeks ago to see an arena artist of that scale at something that's kind of more like essentially a lawn party. So a little bit more intimate. And the number of times that like I got to see food fighters in a 1200 seat auditorium, the full band. I got to see you two in 150 seat auditorium at in town hall. And the number of times that we got to see Elvis Costello same place like 150 people. Like the number, probably the biggest advantage that the biggest benefit of being like specifically like an Apple journalist is occasionally saying, well, guess what? I was close enough to actually like, it was there was nobody holding up a phone. There was a pause, a dramatic pause during a lyric and nobody shouted, woo, because, okay, mentally because of the 150 people, 80 were probably typing because they had to file like in 20 minutes. But still there's an intimacy and a unity of the audience that you miss when you're at like, when you're at a football stadium. Yeah, well, it was a fun too because there would be like kind of the generational, I guess like difference between like the crowd and like who, what artists they would have sometimes like, like I remember having to explain to Lance Ulanov who the weekend was. And, and I was like, he's singing, it was like, you know, he's singing about cocaine right now, right? It's kind of a much better, yeah. And, but you know, but it was, but they, yeah, but that was the thing is they bring in people who sometimes different crowds, like some people who knew were artists and people who were like more classic stuff and like, no other company has ever had that kind of pull. I mean, obviously Spotify would be the one exception, I would say. Spotify's holiday party in New York in 2011 or 2012 is still to this day one of the greatest musical experience experiences I've ever had. They had a Frank Ocean, they had a Janelle Monet and they had a vampire weekend all doing like sets like just like set up just things at the holiday party. Amazing. Yeah, I feel like it's a great, if you're in, in a tech journalism, it's a great like two truths in a lie, kind of, to have this, you know, that I can be like, yeah, I've seen, I've seen the weekend live and Kanye. And they're like, there's no way those are both true and they are both true because they both performed in Apple events. Yup. And so, yeah, that's, that's, that's I've seen can, can't feel my face and gold digger performed live, like feet away from me. Right. And so, I'm like, I'm just like, that Jason Stelts did not. See that if not true, I can't be, but it is. And I also did I impress my daughter with both of those facts? Yeah. Are you kidding? I like to refer to this as the, the best stuff on your, in your list of personal stories that are number one, absolutely true. Number two, you hope they don't dig too deeply into it. Like, that was once the number one bestselling book in all of Amazon. Please don't ask follow up questions. Yes, absolutely true. You have story. I wrote material that was performed on the Dave Relearnment Show. Please don't ask a follow up question. Yeah, they, they, you do end up with the, the, you cover Apple long enough, you go from it, seeming like the musical guests are being, are, are, are a little bit old to being right down your, you know, your taste to being a little too young for you. Yes. That happens to, that's kind of amazing. Like, as a you too, I was like, oh, it's my boys. It's you too. It's great. And then with, with, with, with the weekend, for example, I didn't know who he was. Well, I thought the song was awesome. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I became a fan of the weekend, right? Because it's like, oh, my God, this is so good. I went home and I told my daughter and she's like, yeah. Can't you, can't you imagine yourself like at, because again, we've been to these events, like how like chaotic it can be before like the open the room. And key, I can totally imagine myself like asking a marketing person, hey, is the demo room going to be open like immediately after and be heard? Actually, I'm the musical headliner. I've sold 10 million copies of my last thing like, oh, love the hair. Love the energy. Can't wait to hear that great. It's all good. Yeah, see, I didn't even mention see it. Oh, yeah, yeah, see it was there. And then a bit of it had like the disguise thing, which is, which was really cool. And I think I had a, the, the dance mom's girl like danced while she like sang behind her. Yeah. Yeah, that was cool. The dance mom girl. Matty Zeagler. She was, she was, she was, she was a dancer on the television show Dance Moms. I became famous from that as a child and then became like Cia's muse that Cia used for many years in her music videos. Oh, I saw her in the video. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, exactly. Sorry, that's how my brain works. I'm like, oh no, I know, I know from Avie Lee Miller's dance academy. My favorite Apple musical moment. I mean, at least comedically, because I, again, I've never seen you two live outside of an Apple venue, but I've seen them twice live in an Apple venue. It was pretty awesome. That's insane. But, um, and, well, the sphere tickets were really expensive. But no, there was an event where Chris Martin from Coldplay came out and they played a song on the piano. And I was sitting next to Chris Breen, our longtime writer and then he went and worked with Apple. He's retired now. And musician. And an amazing musician, especially piano play. Yeah. And sitting next to Chris Breen, while famous Chris Martin of famous Coldplay at their height, playing and Chris Breen turns to me and he goes, I hope he's a good rock star because he's a terrible piano. Oh, that's hysterical. And I was like, this is the most amazing thing that is ever happened. I think, oh, go get him, get him, Chris. Get him. That was funny. It's so, just amazing. That is very, good stuff. Good stuff. Yeah. Uh, let us play the Vision Pro theme because it's time for the Vision Pro segment on America's number one Vision Pro podcast. What do you see? What do you find? It's the best graphics ever. Oh, my God. Yep. Do you want to always be branding? Always be. Always be. Always be. Always be. Always to explain the ethical problems of AI generated art. I know it's better than possibly have done your side. I know. Is that a word? Maybe a little crazy. I'm like, a little crazy. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Here's the crazy ones. Uh, yeah. There's not really the Vision Pro segment is really barely a Vision Pro, but we're going to do it. We're going to do it. Epic Earth has released. You might have seen their famous IMAX 3D adventure films. And now you can watch them in your vision pro. Cool. This is all. This is one of the things I love about the Vision Pro is everybody who's made content for like IMAX 3D or Planetariums is like, finally, somebody could see this. Right. Well, no, that's kind of the thing. Yeah, it's like these things used to go to museums and whatnot. And a lot of early VR filmmaking was the same way where they're kind of like, okay, how are we going to distribute this stuff? How will people see this outside of a certain realm? And now it's like, well, we can put this on the Vision Pro for the 600 people who still pick it up every day. Honey, we need, we need it. I need to go to the storage locker. There's something way in the back that's suddenly valuable again. 50% off right now for the months of April and May. So this would be a good time if you want to stock up on those of very famous IMAX films. I don't know if they look IMAX-y on the, have you watched them yet, Jason? I haven't. This is from McElver A. McElver A. But Sandwich did a bunch of partnership with Planetarium video. And that was all really actually a lot of fun, too, even though it's not quite apple immersive. It is not stuff that you can watch on your TV set and have it make any sense. So I'm looking forward to trying this out too. Yeah, these are 70 millimeter IMAX films. I mean, it's clearly the best thing about Vision Pro as we've gone all this way in is like, the media is, media consumption is amazing. It's just now, now we have to put that asterisk up there that's like in 240 foot type, which is, yeah, but you're not going to pay $3,500 to just watch some movies. So, you know, TBD, as with everything in the Vision Pro world, TBD. But more content, the better. And I think it's cool that this stuff that basically was not viewable outside of very specific venues is viewable. Right. Yeah. No, we've talked about it before, Jason. But like, I feel like just from an archival perspective, along like it's cool just to at at least have it someplace else. And we, you know, eventually leaves the-- App Store, but yeah, just having it available, preserving it in these ways is really great. Yeah, we don't have 3D TVs anymore. So you know, how are you going to watch a 3D movie at home? This is kind of it. Exactly. Thanks to the pinko Andy for this excerpt. Crowd supporter of labor. I don't care how many pinker and goons you send to the library to plug me out. My voice got to be still. I got a signal message from somebody the other day saying, I used to listen to you, but you're such a pinko. I'm going to quit. I want to see bunker. One of our, one of our, one of our, one of our, one of our, one of our, one of our friends. Pinko. I've heard that in a while. That's a good one. Yeah. Red diaper baby. Don't get too excited with that person because they might fall on break a hip. I know. You're pinko. No, I just blocked him. Excerpted from mutiny, the rise and revolt of the college educated working class. No, I'm shiver. There is a vision pro connection. Okay. Because the college working class, some of them worked at Apple stores. And this excerpt in wired magazine from that book, how the vision pro roll out inflamed tensions at Apple. Yeah. This is a, this was written, this is a book upcoming book that's written by a New York Times labor reporter. So it's not about Apple. It's not about technology. It's about like a generation and a style of workforce. And the, it's vision pro relevant because it talks about how poorly a lot of the Apple store workers felt as though they were trained that they felt as though they basically had to get through this, this training module, this training slide deck super, super quick and be able to recite this boom, boom, boom, boom, to, to do customers coming in that the setup process to do one of these demos was incredibly fussy and created an acute, an acute amount of anxiety amongst Apple store workers who felt as though they were totally unprepared to do what Apple was basically insisting on them doing. And the entire chapter is, it's, that's interesting enough. But the reporter decides to, I get to have him read the book so I can't reflect on this. But basically talks about the history of the Apple store about how Steve Jobs, when, when was to first form decided, we're going to invest a lot in our workforce. We're going to basically give, pay them really well. We're going to give them great benefits. We're going to create an environment in which they are, they feel as though they're nurtured and as though they're part of a culture so that we will have a sense, I mean, career retail is not going to be a thing for everybody. But we want basically people who've been there for years because that will reflect, they will be able to represent our products very, very well. And so he tells the story about Tim Cook's tenure about how there was a lot of back and forth about cost cutting, cost cutting, cost cutting. As often happens, let's cut, let's cut costs in terms of the workforce, which led to, let's try to go away from expensive hires that go through a lot of training and get a lot of benefits. Let's try to do seasonal temporary hires as much as we possibly can, which was going to reflect on the quality of service that the Apple stores were able to deliver. So it's a, the wired has a very, it has an extended excerpt. It's very, very interesting. The history seems to be on point. I'm not in a position to say whether or not his observations about Apple are accurate. However, it, it tracks with memories of what the Apple store used to be at the very, very beginning because you got a lot, you got a lot of people who felt as though economically, they were never going to be able to be lifers, but they were going to be happy to work there for several years during a period of their lives where it made sense for them to be working retail, albeit a very, very upscale and a very, very nice retail environment in which management felt as though you are a critical part of this puzzle. We are not just simply pieces that we can swap out every three months. We don't know how it is now, right? Exactly. They're more transient. Yeah. And again, maybe the reality, I do not have knowledge of American retail in 2026, thank God. But I have to say knowing some young people, it's kind of a nightmare because you don't get a schedule anymore. You know, when we were young, it's a, you're going to work nine to five money through Friday or whatever your schedule is, but now it's all over the place and they do that on purpose. They move people around like crazy and it is very stressful by itself, let alone, you're having to set up a vision, pro thing on, you know, basically a couple of hours training. And that's part of the great sins of, of a American management right now. The idea, the implication there is like we're asked in the olden days of 10 years ago, 15 years ago. Okay, we're hiring you for mostly Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays from two o'clock, two o'clock until close, whatever. Okay, that means you can schedule your life around that. Where else now it's like, we are assuming that yes, we're paying you a little bit more than minimum wage. However, we own your entire week. You cannot make any commitments until the week before when we tell you what your next week schedule is going to be. And that is basically in effect, you're saying we are hiring you as a 40 hour week employee, but we are paying you as an employee at Will Park Time. And we have, this is something that Roger would have absolutely railed against because he was, labor was another one of those really important issues to him. And it's, it's something that needs to be always front most center in the conversation. I've always believed that the way that a company, any company treats its labor is a reflection of how what the character of that company is. If you treat your, your labor, particularly your, your, your quote, most dispensable, unquote, labor like crap, that reflects upwards. And that makes, that does make me think great. So is this, is this phone as good as I think it is or is the attitude filtering upward? Anyway, it's, I do think that's an important metric to judge on a company in the example. And I was like, think go talk to me. Think go talk. Absolutely. Get out of everybody. I'm also one of them women's libres. It's going to be a day soon, you know, and we'll raise the red flag and march. Absolutely. Everybody fists held high. Actually, I feel bad for anybody in this generation. I mean, the entry level jobs are terrible. The pay is awful. You can't buy a house. You can't have a family. No, they don't even, I mean, so much, so much of, as, as a parent of somebody who is a relatively new member of the workforce and somebody who's about to graduate from college, I can tell you the other thing that I've noticed is there are not a lot of full-time jobs out there. Instead, a lot of companies just have decided because for lots of reasons in the United States, you know, when you hire somebody above a certain threshold, you have to pay them like benefits and health care is expected and stuff. So they just hire everybody at like 20 hours a week and figure, so people can work full-time if they want, but not for the same employer and not with any benefits. It's a disaster. So meanwhile in England, they give you a vision pro as you come to the doctor. That's, you know, that's nationalized health. And that closes the world most. No, no, it's not over. There's another story from the VBC. VBC, oh, fine. This is the world's most likely vision pro. Yes, it is. The Chelsea and Westminster Hospital is giving endometriosis patients vision pros to visualize what's going on and what their potential surgery might be like. By your feeling, the way you're feeling, I think this is really interesting. Thanks to Andy for finding this. Virtual reality helps patients prepare brandometriosis surgery. Come, let us march through our three or lower, do not do our them together. This is the other, like what is the vision pro good at? It's all these kind of like high end kind of industrial applications medicine and things like that where it's used for surgery. It's used for visualization like it's cool that they're doing this. Good job. Good job to the UK. Yeah, if you've ever wanted to see your womb in 3D, well, now you can. That's just not on public Wi-Fi. You want to put that through a VPN for sure? Absolutely. Now that's the most left-for-the-leaning vision pro segment in the world. We're done talking to vision pro. Yeah. Vision pro is the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your tethers to your battery packs. Yeah. Well, I'm the power will go when you lose your tether to the battery pack, but that's okay. That's fine. We'll workshop it. We'll work it out. The immersive is the opiate of the masses. Sorry. This is my case here. This is my break weekly with Andy Anaco, Jason Snell and Christina Warren, who's under how she got here. And possibly Carl Marx. Yeah. Yeah. He hiding in the corner there. It is time for a Marx brother. Yeah. He was one of the Marx brothers. Yeah. Sure. Carl. Carlo. Rat show. Yeah. Harpo and Carl. I'll give you a few. How about let me kick things off. I don't usually do this, but I got more than a few. Very aggressive. Thank you. I'll give you a picture of the week. Right here. This actually is from Scooter X in our discord chat. He mentioned the Artemis II iPhone wallpapers, which are available from basic appleguy.com. He's reformatted them so that you can put them on your iPhone with the proper aspect ratio, his favorite. That's beautiful. Wouldn't you like that on your iPhone? That's awesome. Yeah. Bar side of the moon and all of that. Artemis II. clips, a new view of the moon. Anyway, some beautiful ones. So thank you, Scooter X, for recommending that. I've got a couple of interesting AI picks. First of all, Google has made available its new Gemma model, which is a tiny model that runs interestingly, not only on a Mac. In fact, it runs if you're using Obama, or I guess if you're using Obama 20 or 1920, it'll run using MLX extensions. So it'll run natively on your Mac. This is a model based on Gemma that is extra small using a new technology. Google has developed to really compress these. But you can also run it on your iPhone. And I have been. It's in the Google AI Edge Gallery, which is an app you can download for the iPhone. It's free. And you can install an appropriately sized Gemma on your iPhone if you want to play with this new model. It's good. It has the virtue of being completely local both on your Mac and the iPhone. So you can rent locally at no cost to you and completely privately. So I just thought I'd mention that. And then believe it or not, your Mac already has AI on it, Apple Intelligence. And it doesn't just have to be for Gen Moji and writing because somebody has made a very simple way of making the Apple Intelligence available to you as a chatbot. It's called appfell, APFEL, the free AI already on your Mac. If you have Tahoe or later, it ships with a 3 billion parameter version of Apple Intelligence. And you can run it right in your command line. So let me-- you just type appful. And what should I-- what should I prompt it with? You've got a good to-- something to say-- to appful. Who's the biggest winner on Jeopardy so far? Now, one of the problems with Apple Intelligence is it hasn't been trained-- Past a certain point. Yeah. Past a certain point. So-- What's OK? Biggest Jeopardy J-E-O-P-A-R-D-W-I. That's the first test to get on Jeopardy. It's a start. So far. So it won't be super up to date. What's going on here? What's going on? Are we Fleming announced that over $8,000 from the-- Yeah, it might be that old. I asked it some-- I asked it where Artemis was right now. It said, Artemis is still in space. It's not working anymore. Oh, there it is. Here we go. As of my last update, the highest ever cash winnings, Ken Jennings-- Yep. 10 million dollars. And then Brad Rudder, which is-- we knew-- is 7 million. I don't think anybody's eclipsed those yet. So that's really not a great test. But it's kind of cool. I asked it for-- as you can see, a Hawaii jet tenorary-- I asked to do a little math problem for us. It can do those. It's fun. So it's kind of interesting. This is app full. It is free. What is the capital of the Belgian Congo? It knew that it's now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo and it's Kinsashou. What's the weight of water at a 10 square meter room that's full to 1 inch? It figured it out-- 254 kilograms. So you have this. It's already on your machine. And if you want to use Apple's intelligence models as a chatbot, you can with this app full-- which let me find the URL-- apethel.frazai.com. Yeah, from Apple in German. Apple in Sherman. Yeah. Because I think they are Austrian. It's what I think. It's got a brew install, by the way. So you don't even have to go to the website. If you want to just brew it, you can. Although you have to know what to type. You need to know their path. Yeah, author-fissio.tap/tap/apple. But anyway, if you search for Apple and AI, it's pretty cool. Pretty neat. Apple is probably going to shut it down as soon as it can. It doesn't actually call out to the network. It's on local. So there's two local AI as you can run. Christina, pick of the week. Yeah, so this is a fun one. Someone on Twitter actually-- I guess they were dared at DefCon to do this-- and then did it. And the reason I chose this was because, while I've been a medical leave, I've actually been working on a similar concept. But this person beat me to it. Anyway, if you are a Linux user or Linux Daveler, you may be familiar with the famous infamous Linux distribution known as Hannah Montana Linux. What? No, I've never heard of that. OK, it was a joke, obviously, but it was an actual Linux distribution that came out in the mid-Auts that was just a Linux-- it was just Ubuntu or something like themed like Hannah Montana. And it became kind of-- Exactly. And the whole thing is very funny. And so someone has basically created a new version of Hannah Montana Linux. And Hannah Montana Linux 2.0. So if you search that up on the internet archive, it is there. And it is-- I've been-- but here's the thing. The reason I chose this is, again, I actually had been trying to kind of vibe code and kind of do an updated version of this for the last couple of weeks. And when I saw this yesterday, a colleague pointed it out to me, I was like, OK, well, I'm glad that someone-- I'm glad there's another sickle about there who had the same idea as me. So yeah, this is great. Well, maybe you can do the big rewrite, like the Miley Silas release. Yeah, that's actually-- That was a good-- Exactly. If you totally could have Miley Silas Linux-- Two weeks from now, the 20th anniversary special with Miley. Well, that was the whole thing. What happened? They had an anniversary special couple weeks ago. And that was what put the idea in my head. I was like, oh, it wasn't. It was two weeks ago. And so I was like, oh, OK, I should put something together for this and someone else beat me to it. But I'm so glad that it exists. And what I might wind up doing is pivoting mine until just like a website that's interactive, like an interactive version of a modern day thing. I'm showing the Hannah Montana reel, but I guess our esteemed producer does not want to get us taken down. Probably not. Yankee Doodle went to the time, riding on a pony on a helicopter. So we don't get it though, Ms. Brody. Legally unencumbered music. Yeah, like a helicopter. You're taking it a week. Friends, you've heard me talk about Notes apps pretty much nonstop because I collect Notes apps the way that some people collect hot sauces. It is an endless series of things I'm interested in. As I used to have, I'm counting them right here. One, two, three different-- actually, four different Notes apps that launch at startup. I added a fifth one a couple of weeks ago because this is-- I did not know there was a gap in my Notes arsenal. It's an app called Haynote. It is written by the Swedish developer Jonathan Heyman. And what it is is just one window in which you can basically hit command return and create a new divider and then a new text area, all in the same scrolling area. And what you paste in there is going to be playing text, but it can be marked down. It can be HTML. It can be whatever. You can basically say, oh, by the way, this cont area-- my setup is always marked down. But you can say, oh, by the way, this is formatted as HTML. This is formatted as CSS. And it is the perfect thing for I don't need to create a document and fill it with this thing and then save it under file name. I'm just about to make a change to this 1000 line CSS file on a project. And I'm worried I'm about to screw everything up and not be able to revert to what I had before. Oh, I know. I will hit command enter in Haynote, paste it in as it is so that if God forbid, everything goes curfewy, I can just go right back here, get that code back, and replace it with what I had before. I have so many windows open in BB edit for exactly this purpose, like something that I just need to stash a piece of text right here because I'm going to need it either for backup purposes or the next half hour or just because-- Is it infinite scroll? Does it just go forever? It just goes forever. And so-- And this is actually really cool. This is kind of like whatever note was. Yeah, and it's just one window. It's not a project-oriented thing, like again, like every other notes app you've seen, where you have folders and projects. Though it is literally an endless scrolling pain of sectioned off blocks of text that again could be-- sometimes it's been like just a couple of sentences. Sometimes it's been again, like several pages of something that is needed to keep a hold of. And it is just amazing. It is like the eggs. Again, it's easy to find-- It's easy to find the one or two apps that are-- here's what's kind of handled 90 to 95% of what I need an app like this for. You are so grateful when you find something. I did not know what a gaping hole I had in my productivity or in my needs until this app I discovered this app. And it's free. It's on GitHub. It's available for multiple platforms. I think it's written in JavaScript or something. And but it's very, very polished. It's-- you can even-- and the other nice thing is like-- You could do your mermaid in this. This is nice. Yes. You can do anything in it. It's wonderful. How shall Python Ruby Russ? And there's a little bank of buttons on the bottom of the window. And so you can actually have it so that it floats above everything else so that if it really is something where, again, I'm going to be cutting and pasting things back and forth. My goodness. It's like, is there a PayPal donation button button anywhere on this site because I want to give this Jonathan Heyman fellow some money because I can't tell you how many problems this, how many problems this addressed facilitated or simplified for me. So again, it's esoteric again as the person who has like 20 or 30 pounds of hot sauces in the kitchen. This is not just another one of those. This is no no no, this one goes like next to the stove because this is one of my goals. - This is wild. - This is great. - Yeah. Very nice. - Hey note free, heynote.com. I've just installed it as you can see and I'm. - Yeah, I have too. No, this is great because I, in totally a person who has this sort of use case and like you, I have an addiction to note taking apps, but note that this is very cool. - Well, for one example, when we're doing like a keynote or something, I'm constantly transcribing writing as we're talking. So I have the notes from it, but I don't really want to preserve them. I've been putting in a city and but I have like, yeah, I really want that for exactly later. But notice it'd be a perfect place to put it. - Yeah, I usually just have an empty text editor open and just kind of fill in and then, you know, blow away when I'm done. But yeah, this is even better to have just like a, especially like the tab feature, like being able to have like different sections for different things, like that's really really nice. - Yeah. Thank you Andy. Another great recommendation. Another note taker to it. My, my collection. Another bottle of sauce. - Seven counting. (laughing) Mr. Jason Snow wrapping things up with the last pick of the week this week. - Yeah, it's a, what I like to think of is sort of a classic Mac utility. You know, Mac utilities, they're all about like productivity boost while you're using your Mac. I love them and this is Drop Zone five. New version just came out. Drop zone's been around for a while. It's 25 bucks on sale right now, 35 regularly. It's a, it's a shelf basically. It lives in your menu bar. You can drag stuff out of, you know, anywhere on your Mac up to the shelf. You can either store stuff. You can move stuff around and you can perform actions on stuff that you drag up there. It looks really good. It's got nice animations. It's got very nice graphics. There are a bunch of new features to do. - So it's like a dock of your, for your menu bar kind of? - It's kind of, it's kind of like a shelf on your menu bar, but you can also use it to perform actions. So like you can, you can drag up there and kick off an air drop or drag up there and kick off a URL shortener or attach it to an email. Those are all like defaults. It's got lots of different actions you can do. You can move things into particular folders. It's, you know, again, it's not like Apple doesn't make some of this stuff available, but they're trying to do the extra mile to make it want to replace the share sheet. 'Cause I always want to do the same share and it never is in the right spot. I always have to dig around. I could put this right there. This is great. - Yeah, it looks great. The animations are really nice. It's got a bunch of smart features. And also if you were a setup person, it's in setup. You can just get it from there. The new version is there, version five. - And I honestly, I use it like, that's how I air drop because it's just so much easier to use drop zone than it is to, you know, air drop and finder or any other way. It's great. - And that's like these are great for like a machino. We have not a whole lot of screen real estate where ideally in a multi-screen environment, you would have a window open to the finder for this folder you're dropping things into or this aren't after you send things to. But the ability to simply say, no, I've got this persific persistent drop zone that just simply hovers into place when I need it. That's how you handle like traveling two weeks on a 12 inch screen without any external support. I'm buying it right now, especially at 25 bucks. That's a deal. Such a drop zone. - Drop zone. - Thank you. - Wow, some good recommendations this week. Well, it's a for Hannah Matanel, is it? (laughing) - No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's just a fun one. I'm just glad that somebody else had the idea of doing that. And hey, maybe you can have it in a VM and just experience. - Just have it every once in a while. - New old days, yeah. - Just could pop up. This is finally going to be the year of learning some of desktop. This could be Hannah Matanel. - It could be, it could be. - It could be. Christina Warren, great to have you as always. We're so glad that you joined the panel and we appreciate that very much. Enjoy your return to work. We'll see you after your first day. - Yeah. - Next week on Tuesday. - Absolutely. - And everybody should check out GitHub, I guess. GitHub's going crazy right now. - Yeah, yeah. So you might have noticed, I don't know that this AI coding thing is really taken off the last six months. - Really? - And so yeah, we've had like a, I don't know, like 1200% increase in usage. - It's phenomenal. - It's ridiculous. So that's one of the reasons why the downtime has not been as great as we would like it to be because you don't expect literally orders of magnitude more usage to happen on your platform when things had been increasing at a steady pace than all of a sudden two of the big models come out and you go, oh, okay, well. - And they all use GitHub. I mean, I don't know what the sudden I have a dozen repositories. - Well, that's the thing, right? - I never had before. - And they're all vibe coded projects, right? Is the agent coding, but what are people going to use? They're going to use GitHub as their platform and you were like, oh, okay, well, so we have worked to do, but yeah, it's fun. - Oh, you're doing a great job. I appreciate it. Thank you, Christina. Thank you, Andy and I, go. Great to see you, my friend. - Great to be here. - You pinko you. God bless America. I don't want to love it or leave it. I want to love it and stay here and fix it. - There you go. Now you're talking. - Come on, let's go to Kelsey's bar. We'll finish the fight over there. (laughing) Great to see you. JasonSnell6colors.com. Jason's podcast is sixcolors.com/Jason. - Yes. - And anything else coming up that you want to plug, please go right ahead. - I'm happy to not be studying for jeopardy or writing about Apple's 50th anniversary for the first time in three months. It's great. - Whoo. - Free time. - Yeah, yeah. Get back to my to-do list now, which is very long actually. - I bet it is. - It's good. - We'll put it in the back. - Then you can forget about it. - Let's drop it right in there. (laughing) - We thank you all for joining us. We do Macbreak Weekly every Tuesday, 11 a.m. Pacific 2 p.m. Eastern time, 1800 UTC. We stream it live as we're doing it. If you want to watch live, it's, you know, minutes, I guess it's fresh. The live streams are on YouTube, Twitch, x.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, Kick. We're also on our Club Twitter discord. If you're in the club, you can watch there, and you certainly can hang there and chat with us. We really love seeing you. If you're not a member, please join YouTube.com. I'm sorry, twit.tv/clubtwit. We would love to have you. The show also ends up on the website, twit.tv/mbw. After we're done polishing it up, there will also be a video on YouTube, YouTube.com/twit for all the different channels. And then you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client. Probably the best way to do it. That way you'll get it automatically every Tuesday, as soon as we're done. Thank you all for being here. We appreciate it. Thanks guys. We'll see you next week. But now it is my sad and solitude to tell you, you gotta get back to work because right time is over. Bye-bye. (upbeat music)