MBW 1023: Don't Be Contemptible - Apple Sets a New Record for Its Second Quarter Results

It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy's here, Christina's here, Jason's here, and I'm here in Hawaii, but we're going to do the show anyway. It was a very big quarter for Apple. We'll talk about their quarterly results and some maybe negatives. A lot of talk about what Apple's going to do with iOS 26 and 27 just around the corner. Plus, you'll love the new Porsche for Laguna's sake. All that coming up next on MacBreak Weekly. This episode is brought to you by OutSystems, a leading AI development platform for the enterprise. Organizations all over the world are creating custom apps and AI agents on the OutSystems platform. And with good reason, build, run, and govern apps and agents on one unified platform. Innovate at the speed of AI without compromising quality or control. Trusted by thousands of enterprises worldwide for mission-critical apps, teams of any size and technical depth can use OutSystems to build, deploy, and manage AI apps and agents quickly and effectively without compromising reliability and security. With OutSystems, you can accelerate ideas from concept to completion. It's the leading AI development platform that's unified, agile, and enterprise-proven, allowing you to build your agentic future with AI solutions deeply integrated into your architecture. OutSystems. Build your agentic future. Learn more at Outsystems.com slash twit. That's Outsystems.com slash twit. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is Twit. This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 1023, recorded Tuesday, May 5th, 2026. Don't be contemptible. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show we have the latest Apple news. Hello, everybody. I am, as you might be able to tell, in Hawaii right now, but I'm going to still do the show because I care. That's how much I care. Jason Snell cares. He's in beautiful Marin County. Hello, Jason. Hello. Aloha to you, Leo. I wish I was there. I mean, literally, I wish I was there, but I'm not. I'm here. It's fine. It's really beautiful. It's very nice. It's also 8 in the morning. But other than that, it's beautiful. That's Christina Warren wearing her Met Gala outfit. No. No. No. No, I'm not wearing my Met Gala outfit. I'm wearing just standard developer chic, right? If we could even call it that. I don't even know if we can call it that, but yeah. You're at work today, which is great. I am, yeah. Not only am I at work, I'm not even at the Seattle offices, which is where I would normally be if I went into the office, but I'm at the HQ in San Francisco. Oh, nice. Yeah. All right. I wish I were back in the Bay Area. Well, I was thinking there were three of us. Honestly, Leo, I think all of us would rather be in Hawaii where you are. It's pretty nice. It is really a beautiful day, and it's just lovely. We're on the big island, and I'm on the dry side, so there's no rain. We went over to Hilo yesterday, and it poured. It was really cool. You get your choice on the big island, dry or wet. Also here from the library where it's always dry because the books need it. Andy and Atko, dry as is the humor. Right. So when we last met, we were preparing Jason's typing fingers and color ink charts because Apple's revenue was announced. Actually, it was an earnings palooza last week, Wednesday, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta, Thursday, Apple. And everybody had a great, I just want to say, everybody had a great quarter. Good job, everybody. Congratulations to everyone. Congratulations. My financial analyst, again, I'm not a financial reporter, so I basically say if Alphabet or Apple were a human being and they were ordering a burrito, would they be able to say, yes, add guac to that without asking first how much is the add-on? They could simply say, you know what, I feel as though I can swing extra guacamole. I'll take the whole moka hente, yes. Good for you, Tim. Another guacamole quarter for Apple. Although the market wasn't completely unanimously happy about it because, well, Meta, to be specific, spent so much money, lost so much money on AI, that even though they were profitable, the market said, that's a lot of money. And I think Apple, at the end of the day, down by 1% because they mostly met guidance and where they exceeded it, they didn't exceed it by enough to get people excited. They had a great quarter, but it's always about did you grow as much as we guessed that you were going to grow, and if you didn't, that's your fault, and we're going to tank your stock a little bit for the day. So because Apple's fiscal year is different than the calendar year, this is their second quarter, their Q2 results, but it's January, February, March. Right. Right. And it was a very good 17% up year over year. Year over year is what matters. Yeah, I mean, that's what people are looking at is they're looking at the growth number versus the year ago quarter, especially since the things can be seasonal, like last quarter is the holiday quarter. So if you go sequential, then this is what happened every year at Macworld. My boss would come to me and say, traffic numbers are down from the beginning of the year. And I would say that's because Macworld Expo is in January, and they announce all the new products then, and then we never get that number again. And that's why it's seasonal. You don't do that. You say, how'd they do Q2 last year? And everything was up, every category. In fact, in terms of all my little charts and all that, you could argue that it was pretty boring just in the sense that everything went up, like literally every category went up, every region for Apple went up. I think the fact that they did $111 billion in a non-holiday quarter for the second straight non-holiday quarter is bananas because these are the boring quarters, right? These are the quarters where they're not killing it on the holiday season. And the boring quarters that used to be, you know, not too many years ago, like in 2021, they were in the 80 billion range, are now over 100 billion. And this is 111.2. It's not a little over. It's a lot over. And some of that, I mean, what Tim Cook said is, this is the best debut for an iPhone, two-quarter debut for an iPhone series ever. Like the 17 really has killed it. And obviously, it's 50% of the revenue. So the iPhone does well. Apple does well. But, like, I think Apple is a machine now that just generates $100 billion a quarter, whether you ask it to or not, which is just kind of staggering. Wouldn't that be nice? Yeah. Services up. Now that purple sector of your pie chart is 28% on services. That's pretty good, even though they're going to give a billion dollars of that back to Google. That's still looking pretty good. Yeah. Profit, well, you know, for three months to make $29.6 billion, about $10 billion a month, $2.5 billion a week. That's okay. That's a decent. Look, I'm not kidding when I say, when I describe Apple as the world's greatest cash generation machine. I mean, it is true. They are throwing off enormous amounts of cash on a very, you know, on a quarterly basis. Enormous amounts of profit. And this number is really interesting. their gross margin, how much profit out of their revenue. It's almost half. That's a huge number. I think some of that's got to be because services is almost all profit. Services is almost entirely profit. And, in fact, I do a chart. It's the next one on my web page there. I'm trying to chart the moment. It's going to happen when Apple is going to have a quarter where they actually make more profit in services than from products, which will lead to a lot of think pieces where people are like, oh, because the margins on services, Like, you know, you make a TV show once and then you can sell it a million times and it doesn't cost anymore. Whereas you make a MacBook, every single one of them has a profit margin built into it because there's a cost to make it that's separate from, like, the cost to design it. But I will say we can over talk services, too, because services are driven by people who bought Apple hardware. Like, it's extra revenue on top of the money you spend on your iPhone or your Mac or your iPad or your Apple Watch or whatever. but like if you didn't own any of those, you would also not be subscribing to Apple services. So it's a little bit, it's more synergy than you might think when you look at the size of the services number. But remember, the services number used to be 9% of Apple's business, and now it's a full quarter of Apple's business. So they have done a tremendous job at, like literally, the iPhone is half of Apple's revenue in this quarter, and services was 28%. So more than three quarters of Apple's revenue is in those two lines. It's kind of staggering. Yeah, and I think Tim actually called out how well Apple Watch did. I don't know if it was a record quarter, but in terms of selling Apple Watch, people have – I'm sorry, I don't have to translate this from front of me. Basically, he marked out Apple Watch as an indication of the synergy of the entire platform, that they're doing a better job of convincing – reminding people that, hey, we have a whole portfolio of products, and that any one entry into the Apple ecosystem is a gateway towards more sales. That was a consistent message they were sending to shareholders. Here's the chart with the percentage revenue by product line watches in WHA. What is that, wearables? Home and accessories, yeah. Home and accessories. You know, as a Mac lover, it always saddens me to see what a small, thin sliver. And yet the Mac is the best it's ever been. And they are talking about a business that is just throwing off. Like, the Mac is selling $8.4 billion a quarter. Like, for the last two quarters, it's been $8.4, and then it was $8.7. And, like, the average here is it is really a good business, a huge business. It's just not. And this is a challenge for John Ternus, right? It's like you have to manage these different businesses, And you can't make every decision about the iPhone because you have these other very large and profitable businesses to manage. But at the same time, half your revenue is the iPhone. So you do need to do that. The Tim Cook get credit for services. That was really under his watch that they started focusing on ARPU, average revenue. I think so, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, credit, blame, I think. There's an argument. You can make either way on that, right, which is to be like have the focus on services been to the detriment maybe of other areas. But certainly from a financial standpoint, we can't argue with results. And, you know, I guess you could make the argument as well that part of the reason that they can maybe invest and have the types of hardware products they have and do those things is because they know that they can make up the margin on those services. Right. And speaking of Tim and John Ternus, we were taking bets last week on whether John would show up. He did. He did. He did. He read a 20, like a 250-word prepared statement. Yep. That was what he did. Did Tim say anything nice? Oh, I mean, it was very much like, oh, let me introduce you to John. John is great. He's a visionary. It's all the things he already said in the statement, but they said it again. And then, like, so let's throw it to John. And John is like, I just want everybody to know that Tim is the greatest executive, executive, executive, on the face of the earth. Yeah, it was that kind of a mutual admiration. Which is the point, right? Because this is a direct part of the transition, part of leaking this to the Financial Times. All of this is about reaching Wall Street and saying it's going to be fine. We're all very responsible. John Ternus' statement was like, you know, we're going to follow in Tim's footsteps. Don't worry. I'm not going to go, like, start spending money like crazy. And Tim is like, John's the right guy, and it's going to be good. Because that's the message that they're trying to send with this whole transition is like, don't worry. Because Wall Street, you know, that's the challenge there is that you want the shareholders to feel like Apple's in good hands. So they don't want to take a hit to their stock or anything like that. And I think they've been very diligent in that messaging. Yeah, although we might talk about this later, but they did announce a really big change to how they basically said that they're going to be not doing net cash neutral business anymore. That's where one of Tim's earliest things is that we're going to try to get to the goal of making sure that our net cash is equal to our debt so that we're no longer hoarding cash, hoarding cash, hoarding cash, as they did under Steve Jobs. And part of that was this is one of the reasons why Tim Cook has given back $1 trillion to shareholders, one of the reasons why the valuation has gone up to $4 trillion. So there's been a lot of people who have been sort of speculating as to why they're ending that right now. And one of them is that maybe it's because they really do want to get into not necessarily a spending mode, but that if perhaps part of their plans equals we want to acquire some companies that we think that could really strengthen our business a lot. Some people have been speculating about, oh, well, obviously there's going to be a big AI buy-in, and I don't know if that's really what Apple's going to do. But it does mean that there's a reason why they're suddenly saying that we're ending this 10-year-old policy. and the net effect of basically announcing that we are going to be spending more money invites lots and lots of interesting speculation as to what they're spending the money on, including, as Jason said, like services is racing forward, forward, forward. What if they just simply said we just want – what if we were to make our platforms a destination platform as opposed to an add-on platform that, hey, we've already got you with your Apple Watch. We've already got you with your iPhone. Why not sign up for a cloud service or a streaming service too? Maybe they're going to be fed up to basically say we're going to try to take money from everybody, not just people that we've already sold MacBooks to. Yeah, the net cash neutral thing is, I mean, yeah, in 2018, they went beyond just like restoring the dividend to talk about this net cash neutral at a point where I think they had like $160 or $180 billion in effective cash, which was ridiculous, right? But this is the thing is they make so much money. The profit is so great. They're like, what do we do with it? And it's true. Steve Jobs was much more like, let's hoard it. And then they started to spend it. And then finally they're like, we're going to just say we're going to be cash neutral. That was a Luca Maestri thing. He was the CFO at the time. What they've done, though, is they tried to say, look, we're going to still be returning value to shareholders. The board, as a part of this announcement, also granted another $100 billion that they can do stock buybacks on over time. And they still hadn't run through the last grant there. So they're like, we're still, don't worry. Like there's still value that's going to be generated for shareholders. But what they said was they wanted to uncouple those two things, right, which is debt and cash on hand. They wanted to – and not try to head for net zero. And the way they put it was they wanted it to be – they wanted flexibility there. And I think – I don't know. None of us know. We all really want to know what prompted that. But it feels to me like when you've got lots of AI spending happening, when you've got issues in your supply chain where, like, you can't get enough chips from TSMC, you can't get enough RAM chips at the right price from your RAM suppliers, and looking at, like, a more uncertain future in terms of what investments are going to be required in terms of AI especially, that saying maybe if we're throwing off $20 billion in profit a quarter, we might want to hold more of that back. because you never know what we might want to do with it. They could be targeting something specific, or it might be more like the game has changed a little and we need more ability to keep cash on hand so that if we need to do a major outlay, we can afford it. They are spending more on R&D. This is actually, for them, a huge increase, isn't it? $11.4 billion in R&D. Is that all AI or is that something else? It's not cars. We know that. It's unclear, but what's interesting is that as much like as they're spending an R&D for Apple, right, like when you look at their CapEx versus their competitors, it's not even at the same level. Google's $180 billion. Exactly. And I think Microsoft is also like at the $120, $140 billion. Amazon. Amazon, too, right? Meta is, you know. It's increasing next year, too, yeah. Yeah, you know, everybody else is spending, like, many, many times this, which I think, you know, to Jason's point is, like, I'm admirable to kind of think about, okay, what are they going to do with this cache? Are they holding it back for a specific purpose? Is it something that's planned for? But, yeah, they're spending more than they typically have. But, yeah, who knows what it's going to be. I think AI has to be some of it, but because they're not in the data center game, everything that they're spending, it's just a different math level. It's just not even the same stratosphere. I have a couple theories. One theory is that they want to be ready in case there's a moment of weakness where there's something that they could acquire. Yeah. Or if not, often we talk about acquiring and it's like Apple's going to buy some company. It's like, I don't know. I mean, it also could be in a moment, because if you've got all this cash and then there's a financial hiccup and some valuation goes down or some company needs an infusion of cash, You could step in and be a partner and an investor in some company that's like a core AI company or something, and they might find value in that. And having more cash, as the cash cow of Silicon Valley in some ways, right, having lots and lots of cash on hand in a moment where everybody else is spending huge amounts of money or going in debt in promise of future value is an advantage for Apple. So that might be part of it. And also part of me wonders, I keep getting stuck on the fact that, you know, TSMC has all these other contracts from other providers now and a RAM shortage thing. I wonder if they're realizing that, like, so much cash is being thrown around that if they want to reassure, because Apple's very conservative, they want to ensure not being surprised by supply constraints, right? They want to do that. But I wonder if that's part of this, too, is maybe they realize that if they can come to some of their partners with cash and say, build us a factory, that they'll be able to do that and, like, rationalize their component issues for the next five years or something like that. By the way, I completed CapEx with R&D. So Apple's R&D is $11 billion. Alphabet, $17 billion. Meta, $17.6. Microsoft, $8.9. So actually, they're not so far off. But it's a big jump for them. Indeed. For them it is. And since they don't do CapEx the same way, I think it's still – You can't compare them. But I still feel like it's a lot. I do wonder, kind of looking at, especially with the supply chain constraints, which they even had to address, the fact that there are shortages on the mini in the studio. If this means maybe to your point, Jason, if they are potentially going to be trying to throw money at the problem, My initial guess was, okay, they're going to do kind of what they're doing with the mini already, which is effectively, and I know we'll talk more about this later, but they're effectively getting rid of the entry-level model, which is not a good thing. And my initial thought was, like, they're just going to raise the prices across the board because that's what Apple will do, and they will blame the industry and everything else. But I do wonder if there's an opportunity with this sort of cash, in addition to maybe keeping it for some investment opportunities. They did that with D.D. Shuxing, which was a Chinese conglomerate about a decade ago. So it's not like they haven't done that sort of thing before. But I do wonder if that would be the sort of thing where they're like, okay, we're willing to maybe give up some of our margin and buy some of this time to keep our prices consistent and potentially win market share once things settle out or not. Every business should be doing this right now, right? Like there's potentially all sorts of, you know, headwinds are coming. Save some money while you can. If you aren't spending it, right? I mean, all your competitors are spending money like drunken sailors because they're investing so much in those cloud infrastructures and all of that. And Apple's not playing that game at the moment. And I think this is a recognition that they're not playing that game, but maybe they need to keep their powder dry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because data centers, you know, clearly compute is constrained. Actually, let's take a break. When we come back, let's talk about the supply chain issues, the Mac mini issues. There were some, I don't think if they're negatives, they might be actually positives if you can't make enough Mac minis to storm clouds. It's a problem, but a good problem to have, but still a problem, right? Yeah, storm clouds. You're watching Mac Break Weekly with Jason Snell, Christina Warren, Andy Anaka. We'll have more in just a bit. This episode of Mac Break Weekly is brought to you by WebRoot. 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That's WebRoot.com slash Twit. WebRoot. Now back to MacBreak Weekly. Back to Hawaii. Hello, everybody. Yes, I'm in Hawaii. I'm sorry. My apologies. Nothing I can do about it. How dare you? I'm stuck here. It's a perfect day in the big island. So, enough of that. Let's talk about headwinds, not tradewinds. Actually, this is a blessing and a curse. Tim Cook said on the analyst call on Thursday, it could take several months for Apple to make enough Mac Minis and Mac Studios to meet demand, and this is all because of AI, right? Cook said on the Mac Mini and Mac Studio, both of these are amazing platforms for AI and agentic tools. See, it's a good thing. And customer adoption of that is happening faster than we expected. So great, great results for Apple, except that they can't make them fast enough. That's got to be supply chain issues, too, memory. Yeah, they said it's really TSMC, that they're having their constraint on systems on a chip. coming from TSMC because they underestimated the calls of, like, how they were going to sell. And that TSMC, I think the implication there is also TSMC no longer has as much wiggle room to supply them with more. And so they ended up light on systems on chips. Well, that would explain the Bloomberg piece yesterday. Apple explores using Intel and Samsung to build main device chips. And not only to build them, but to build them in the United States. Both companies have U.S. fabs, apparently. So that solves two problems. It makes the administration happy, but it also maybe is a backstop to TSMC. And Apple's already working with TSMC in the United States as well. It's not like on the cutting-edge nodes, but they are going to do processors there. And, yeah, it kind of makes sense. It goes back to why they might be saving cash. These are strategic challenges where if you only have one supplier and something happens to that supplier, and we've been talking about Taiwan and China, right? But also, what happens to TSMC if somebody buys all of their other capacity, and so you're left with what you had reserved but kind of nothing else? You get a situation where you might be short on SOCs, and that's not great. So being geographically diversified is part of it, but having Intel or Samsung, especially keeping in mind, it's not going to be like a Samsung Silicon here, right? Literally, this is fab as a service. It's not excellent. It's the stuff we designed for you. Exactly. It will just be another supplier, right? It's just going to be using whatever fab is available. The same thing with Intel, since Intel is not an ARM fab, but they have a partnership with them, and they can make some of the chips that would go into those SOCs. Yeah, well, in fact, when Pat Gelsinger, the former Intel CEO, said we're going to split Foundry and Fab, one of the things he said, and we laughed at the time, is maybe even Apple will be a customer. Well, maybe Apple will be. Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead, Christine. So I was just going to say, no, maybe. I mean, it was not a bad strategy in Intel. I mean, I think the only bad part was that they did it a decade after they should have. Yeah, right. But it just knocked soared yesterday, 12%. Because on this news, now, this is a rumor. We should say neither Apple, Intel, nor TSMC. And it's a soft rumor, right? It was like this is just they're talking. Very, very, very preliminary. They did Apple tour a facility. But I think the strategy seems to be, and this makes sense, that they still want to do kind of cutting-edge nodes with TSMC because TSMC is at the cutting edge. But they've got lots of products that don't need the cutting edge. Right. And lots of systems, lots of different chips that need to be made that are on the older nodes, legacy nodes, Tim Cook's favorite phrase, or they don't need to be the high-performance chips. And, in fact, as we see Apple diversify its product line, there are a lot of Apple products that are using previously cutting-edge, no longer cutting-edge chips. They could shift their strategy a little bit so that instead of the lower-end chips being hand-me-downs from previous high-end chips, they could create a whole secondary class of chips that are designed for a process at Intel or Samsung that are going to go in your MacBook Neos and your generic iPads and your Apple Watches and other things that don't necessarily need the chips that are going to be in the iPhone or the MacBook Pro. That's an interesting conundrum that they're in, though. So we're talking about the 3-nanometer process that is being used not just by Apple's SOCs, but basically NVIDIA uses it too, and that's why all this capacity is being eaten up. NVIDIA is buying all of TSMC's capacity. Right. But the thing is, like, the Neo was definitely positioned as, look, this is not a high-performance MacBook. This is not just a good enough Mac. It's more than good enough. But the thing is, your expectation is that if you need a MacBook Air, go buy a MacBook Air. This is not a MacBook Air. So Apple, but Apple is in a position where this would be a great place to do either custom SOC, that is like to the limitations of what capacity they can get. But on the other hand, the minute that they release a 2027 model or 2028 model that is not every bit as fast and capable as the one before it, that's, can the product line survive that? Would they even write off on that? So they're still kind of constrained on what kind of moves that they can make. regarding the Neo, which is not just a really great selling machine, but there are also basically, Tim, I think, mentioned twice that we've got an entire school system that has decided, nope, we're not doing Chromebooks anymore. We're not doing Windows laptops anymore. We are basically now buying MacBook Nios because it now makes sense for us to actually outfit all of our students with them. So it's an important thing, and now it's becoming, it's an important product, but it's a low-margin product, And it's hard to know how that's going to affect the NEO in the next two years. Did they give any details besides the school about the NEO, how well it's selling or anything like that? Did they say anything? They said they thought it would be good, and it was way better than they thought. And that is, you know, right. And so they're dealing with that. And they did, you know, they cherry-picked, like Kansas City said that they're going to do it. They always cherry-pick some site. I think that actually the Chromebook, a lot of things, made sense for Kansas City. The Chromebooks is starting to recede into the background. I don't even know how committed Google is to it anymore. They're going to turn it into an Android, right? They've got the new operating system, Aluminium, that's going to debut later this year. And it's very much an Apple sort of play where they're partnering with Qualcomm to develop custom CPUs for it. But let's see how it works out. I don't feel a strong commitment. And I think schools are getting exactly a little tired of the whole Chromebook thing. So I wonder. I mean, maybe. I think the thing is even if Google's committed waivers, you have such a huge partner ecosystem, which is kind of their low-end laptop that they can sell in volume to schools, to businesses, to whatever. I don't know. I had the Framework CEO on Wednesday on Intelligent Machines, and they stopped making their Chromebook. He implied it wasn't selling all that well. Well, that was a more expensive device, right? The unfortunate thing with Chromebooks is, just to go on a brief tangent, and I think this is actually interesting, though, because it's different than the Neo in some regards, is that the Chromebook is simply a volume machine. It's all about what's the lowest selling price we can get and how many can we get them. They're like $300. They're $200. Exactly. And if you're buying them in math, you're buying thousands at a time. You're getting even better prices than that. You're getting them by the truck full. Can you replace the keyboards and screens? Yeah, you can. But a lot of times you're just going to kind of swap certain things out and move on. It's fast computing, right? Instead of fast fashion, it's fast laptops. It's emo computers, yeah. Exactly, right? And so a company like Framework, who made a really good product, and Google tried this too with the Pixel books a number of times. They were over $1,000, yeah. Yeah, HP has made a few as well that internally at Google you can even choose If you want to get one with, like, the high-end Chromebooks, you can get one with, like, I think 64 gigs of RAM or something. Right. But who would choose that? I'm not really sure. And that's sort of the problem, right? It's like if you go out of your way to make it repairable and you go out of your way to, like, make it easy to, you know, work with and all that, you raise the price to the point that it's like that's not the point. At that point, I might as well just buy a Mac. And that's, I think, why the Neo is interesting because it sort of is that middle ground where you're not having to be lowest common denominator, but it's still not super expensive, but it is easy to repair, at least for some of the parts, right? Like if the SFC goes, it goes. But that, I think, is potentially compelling. But I still see it as just a completely different game than what they do on Chromebooks. The iPhone, huge success. They said, again, like the most successful phone they've ever made, the 17 bestseller, the Pro and Pro Max. Over those two quarters sequentially, like if you define that as an iPhone launch, it's the best iPhone launch ever. And I mean, it's funny because it doesn't always line up like this, but it did line up this time. I think the reviewers in general all said this is very impressive, right? The changes in the 17 Pro are really nice. The color is nice. They tried to do this weird, you know, interesting product in the air, and then they took all those Pro features and put them down on the 17. And it turns out that the sales also followed. I do if you look at the China sales especially because China sales really have bounced back in the 17 era that many ways the 17 is just a successor to the 16 15 14 in terms of look but it is a different look It does have that whole aluminum back. It does have the color options. And I think that the story is basically like, make some nice visible changes and China will be much more responsive. And whether that's the reason or not, I don't know. But, like, China bounced back, and the iPhone sales went up even. And you could see how China was, like, a little bit below on growth the rest of the world, and now they're a little bit above it. So I think there was absolutely enthusiasm in China for the iPhone 17 line, and that helped drive that iPhone. But, like, it's just a winner of a launch. It's their best iPhone launch, basically. And it's hard to really pick a reason why a certain phone will go and another one won't. It really does come to it. I think they mentioned, I think they talked a little bit about this, about cycles of people are holding on to hardware a lot longer. And so that really affects it. And they sold really, really well with people who are upgrading their phones. Whether or not that was, wow, gosh, I was going to hold on to my iPhone 12 for another two years. But, gosh, the combination of style, features, and price has won me over and got me to buy early. Sometimes it's just time for people to buy a new phone. And if it's orange, that's the reason why they bought it. So I think that's probably one of the reasons why they are now staggering their releases to let's have a spring release and a fall release. So basically when you see some of these charts and it's always just like these point and then swoop and point and swoop and point and not really knowing exactly how much you're going to be making during those two big sales quarters, it'd be nice to sort of flatten that out and get money over the course of the year as opposed to just during these one, two upgrade cycles. at the very end Tim Cook mentioned tariffs yeah so they haven't really talked about this before they've mentioned previously that the tariff costs ranged from $800 million and a quarter to more than $1.4 billion even though they were getting some breaks on tariffs I know with the iPhone tariffs they were getting breaks they announced at the very end of the call that they were going to take any refunds they get, because remember the Supreme Court said those tariffs are illegal and there will be some refunds, that they're going to reinvest into U.S. manufacturing, which of course will make the president happy. What a great piece of diplomacy. Yeah. Where Trump is sort of discouraging people from taking those tariffs out, well, we'll take them back, but we'll reinvest them in U.S. manufacturing. They really wanted to make this announcement to the point where an analyst asked a sort of related question, and Kevin Parrick, the CFO, it was like about product margins. And in the midst of his answer, Kevin Peric is just like, hey, let me turn it over to Tim for a minute. And Tim Cook appears. It's like they never do that. And then Tim Cook makes this statement about tariffs. And it's very much like we're following the established processes. We're not doing anything. We're not suing anybody. But we're following the tariff reimbursement process. And if we get that money back, we're going to put it all into American manufacturing, which is also not only makes that kind of unassailable to criticism from the president and others, but it's also like money that they would be doing that with anyway, but they get to say they're doing it for the, oh, no, that's the tariff money. We're doing that. We're adding that in. It makes it, yeah, it clearly was a thing that, and then literally Kevin Perrick then just continued with his answer after Tim said this. So, like, they really wanted to get it out there. And then it was the moment I was like, no, this is the time. Let's do it right now so that they can say that. Yeah, I mean, you can almost hear like the tip of a big pen being tapped against the post-it note. I'm going to jump in because they're waiting for a tariff question and there still hadn't been one. And they're like, well, maybe this product margin question will do it. Let's just try it because they wanted to send that message. And you can see why, right? Like you can see why. And it fits with what they're doing. It's not obviously they're going to continue announcing their contributions to American manufacturing in all sorts of different ways. That's something they've been doing for the last, you know, eight years. They will continue to do that. And this allows them to frame any billion dollars they get back in tariff reimbursement as not a big deal because it just becomes another. If they take it away from the U.S. government and they just invested in America, hard to be criticized for that. They may not be suing over terrorists, but they are going back to court over the epic, and I mean epic, battle. Remember that last week on MacReak Weekly, the Ninth Circuit had said, no, you got it. Actually, I think they found Apple in contempt and said, no, you've got to do the changes in the App Store. Apple has now filed with the U.S. Supreme Court asking it to stay the Ninth Circuit's mandate. So the battle goes on. Yeah, and for interesting reasons. Basically, their basis is that, well, yeah, so they were hit with this order because they were, as you'll recall, they were cute with the judge saying, okay, fine, you're ordering it to allow developers to be, great. Okay, we'll do that. They can do that, but they'll still pay a 27% tariff on expenses, and we'll basically make it so they don't want to do that. Essentially, with this appeal, they're basically saying that, number one, because the original order didn't say anything about how much we could charge, number two, because the order affects all of our operations, all developers worldwide, not just Epic, and they're also saying that the current, saying this order won't affect Epic's ability to do basically what we've been told we have to let them do. So basically give us a little time and give us a stay while we try to talk. Let me rephrase this in a way people understand. They said, Your Honor, the 2021 injunction didn't say anything about App Store fees. They didn't say we couldn't make it 27%. What are they talking about? And that contempt thing, that hurts us. It hurts us. They also said that having that on the books will affect how they're judged. Like, well, you know what? Past actions actually have future consequences. Exactly. I don't know if you have children, but you might have explained that to them at some point. If you didn't want the contempt charge, maybe you shouldn't have been in the order. Don't be contemptible. Right. Well, and look, I fully understand that as, you know. They're doing what they have. They're very well-paid legal counsel, in-house counsel. They have to file the appeals. They have to go through this process. I get it. But there's a part of me that I'm like, just take the L. Because you know the Supreme Court is not going to hear this. Yeah. You know that. Like, just take the L. Well, do we know that? I mean, I don't know what we know. Oh, I don't think this. They've turned down every other intent that they've done about this. Yeah, that's true. I mean, I just, I don't think that. They were the ones who sent it back to the Ninth Circuit in the first place. Exactly. And there's also not really an interesting legal question here, which is usually, look, I'm not a lawyer, so I just, you know, watch legal shows on Hulu. Watch the rest of us. Right, exactly. But usually, from my understanding, like, that would be why the Supreme Court would take on something like this. It would pose an interesting question. I don't think there's an interesting question here. It's, you know, basically to your point, you're like, no, but why? But, Your Honor. It's interesting, though, because, like, so Google got the attention from Epic just as bad as Apple. Eventually, they threw in the towel and said, okay, we're going to, even though, like, we've lost, at some point they lost so badly, they basically, they took the judges, the judge basically said, look, I would love for you two to sit together and work this out before I have to actually enforce or enact this thing. And they actually worked out a system where Google basically rewrote all the rules for how they run the Play Store. And it was so, like, comprehensive. And both in their joint filing to the judge to say, once you set aside what you said before because we've just come up with this plan, even the judge was skeptical saying, so suddenly you've been fighting tooth and nail for the past five years, and all of a sudden you've had all these opportunities to solve this before and you didn't. But I'm wondering, like, what's the difference between Apple and Google such that, again, Google also lost, lost, lost, lost, lost. But they decided at some point, at some point, we need to have a consistent policy for our app store that's going to work internationally because we can't continue to fight these battles and have these uncertainties with our developers. I wonder why Apple is continuing to go tooth and nail with this. Maybe it is because they do control the entire widget end-to-end. They control the hardware platform, not just the operating system and the App Store and the APIs. But I would love to – I hope that I live long enough for – to read, like, the Apple 75th anniversary book in which they explain exactly why Apple refused to give an inch on this. I'm sure David Pogue will still be writing it. Right. And maybe it just comes down to stubbornness, right? Like, different companies have different philosophies. and Apple is going to be resolute in their belief, no matter how misguided it might. How long did they fight Google over the Steve Jobs and Google thing? That went on for a decade. Yeah, I mean, I understood it from a Steve Jobs is mad and he's not going to take it anymore. If I were advising John Ternus, I would say get with Phil Schiller, who's been running the App Store for a long time and who court documents show has been a measured – I mean, Phil Schiller is a company man, right? But even he was like, this may not be wise to go to talk. He was the only one speaking back out of any of them. He was the only one. He was the only one. Yeah, so I would get with Phil Schiller, and I would say, let's come up with a strategy that will allow us to try and set a new bar worldwide for how we're going to handle this because we don't want every market to be different. We want to exert some level of control over what's going on and what our fate is going to be instead of letting it be chipped away court case by court case. Let's see if we can do a reset because the thing is, and I'm not saying like, oh, let's dream on John Turner as having a ghost visit him in the middle of the night and have him make a change. No, it's like he's a new CEO. There's a new CFO. There's an opportunity for a reset where you can say, look, let's take a reset. And I don't believe in a million years that Apple's going to say, let's just throw the doors open and we don't care anymore. But they could try, and they should have 10 years ago, but they certainly now could try to say, what if we can set some new terms that make more sense, that is sort of tracking what all the regulators want in a way that works for us, but also allows a little more flexibility into the system to make it ultimately to make it harder for people like Tim Sweeney to pick them off in court, because now they will have given enough. Because I think what we've seen in a lot of these cases is Apple ends up constructing its own solution to the problem that still serves Apple while allowing people enough flexibility that it makes it harder to argue that they're being held down. And that's kind of where they want to go. And so fighting a tooth and nail, to me, it's like self-defeating. And that is a really ripe opportunity for John Ternus to say, can we do a reset here? Yeah, and interesting footnote to the epic Google case you were talking about, Andy. The judge in that that scolded the two of them and said, you guys work it out. I don't want to see you anymore. It was Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers, who is currently the judge on the Altman versus Musk case. And she's been kind of scolding them, too. She said, I don't want to hear anything about A.M. Doomerism. That's it. I don't want to hear it. I love her. She's pretty strong. That's good. No, I mean, when her initial order, like, for contempt or what if Rappel came out, like, that was one of the juiciest things I've ever read in my life. It was direct. I wanted to do, like, a reading of it because it was so good. It was just because it's rare that you see, like, judges who, A, you can tell Billy paid attention, and, B, just completely cut through the BS and was like, no, I'm actually not going to entertain this complete and total ridiculousness. This is what is happening. You haven't pulled one over on me. You're not actually smarter than me. It was so good. She rules her courtroom with an iron fist. She's good. All right, we're going to take a little break. Lots more to talk about. You're watching Mac break weekly. This is not a green screen. It's real. I mean, why? Although I was a little tempted. I did bring my green screen. And I thought, I could just take a picture of that. And then I sit somewhere more comfortable. But that's all right. I'm out of here on the lanai in the beautiful Big Island, enjoying a perfect day in paradise. And the Anaco in the library, a perfect day in the library. It's always a perfect day when you're surrounded by books. Not a cloud in the ceiling. Christina Warren, who is in a small booth in San Francisco at the GitHub headquarters. It's a shame because to the right of me, it's like this lovely brick facade. It's not the background. Yeah, it is cool. It's actually a pretty decent-sized little office, echo aside, but yeah. And neither of us are in danger of getting hit in the head with coconuts, which happens a lot more than you think. That's true. So you're taking your life in your own hands, my friend. We were out at a waterfall, Rainbow Falls, yesterday, and there was a guy selling coconuts at the back of the truck, and he takes the whole coconut, he takes a machete, and in his hand, I said, careful. He's chopping the coconut off in his hand. I said, you ever cut yourself? He said, no, I practice. And with somebody else's hand, I guess. I suppose at some point you've cut off all the fingers that are in the way. And so now you're cooking the same. Nothing left to get in the way. I said, you must have grown up here. He said, no, I'm from Texas. But he does grow his own coconuts. It was delicious. And Jason Snell, also here from his garage. We are all somewhere. Not a cloud in the garage either. It's amazing. Blue skies everywhere. We'll have more on MacBreak Weekly right after this. Hey there. This episode of MacBreak Weekly brought to you by Mill. Most food waste. You're going to be sad to hear this. Happens at home. Not at restaurants. Not in the supply chain. At home. Which means your kitchen, my kitchen, It's one of the most powerful places where you can actually make a difference. We decided to make a difference. We got the mill. And I couldn't be happier. We've had our mill now since November. 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MBW, but you've got to use the code MBW. $75 off mill.com slash MBW and use the code MBW. Mill, M-I-L-L dot com slash MBW. Use the offer code MBW. Did I mention that I have saved 368 pounds of scraps diverted from the landfill? Did I mention that? And it doesn't, there's no fruit flies, no sink, nothing. I love the mill. Mill.com slash M-B-W. You've got to check it out. Okay, let's get back to the show. Cinco de Mayo, May 5th today. In years past, iOS releases have usually occurred in the middle of May. We are expecting, I think, any day now, maybe this week or next, iOS 26.5 to be released to the general public. Some big changes. Jason, you usually use the betas, right? The developer betas? I'm on, I mean, it's late betas, so I try not to. I actually, by mistake, am on the Mac beta. But, yeah, we're at release candidate now. So my guess is that they'll be pushed out in the next week. Right. That's about when they've done it in the past. I think Chance Miller writing at a 9 to 5 Mac compared previous release dates of 18.5, 17.5, 16.5, and 15.5. It was almost always mid-May, second or third week in May. So, yeah, it should be soon. What are the new features? Apple Maps now has suggested places ads are coming. Sorry. Yeah. Sorry. Again, it might make maps better, genuinely. The ads? Yes. Why? Because if people, like right now, at least my philosophy is one of the reasons that the maps are as bad as they are is that the businesses don't ever prioritize updating the place data because it's not going to bring them any traffic relative to Google. So I don't know. Maybe ads will improve that. Maybe it will make it a higher priority, which will then increase the mapping data. I don't like it either. We've been using Apple Maps to navigate everywhere on the big island. They work quite well now. I haven't had any trouble with Apple Maps in years since then. I mean, Cook admitted that this was his biggest failure, in fact, I think he said at one point. At this point, it's so good that I think that every iPhone owner should have Google Maps installed alongside Apple Maps. But right now it's the platform that you would only use when you need the very best mapping app available because there are only like, I don't know, maybe 3% or 4% of situations in which Apple Maps is going to fall up short. It's an important 3% or 4%. When it's like, I need to make sure I know where the door to the emergency room on this hospital is. I don't need to know what block it's on. That's when you say, you know what? Why don't we ask Google Maps that? Apple Maps, you're great. You're great. Why don't you sit back? We're just going to have Google Maps about getting that thumb reattached. Yeah, yeah. I have several mapping apps, actually, on my iPhone, just in case. Although Apple has now added download. I don't know when they did this, but you can download maps. I didn't know that Google Maps did. So I downloaded the maps for Hawaii because there's a lot of areas in the Big Island where you don't have cell reception. Well, it even recognizes when you enter in a new area. Like when I landed in SFO last night, it said, oh, you know, welcome to San Francisco. Do you want to download this map offline? Which was a really nice feature. And I was like, okay. I mean, I don't anticipate losing connection, but go for it. Well, here you need it. There are a lot of areas. Oh, you know, I was going to say in Hawaii, you absolutely do. That's actually a perfect opportunity for that. and to recognize, I know you're at the airport, this is the time now that you're there to do it. Like, that's smart, right? Like, that's actually, that's really slick. Another very important feature, end-to-end encryption in RCS messaging. So they started doing it last version, but with iOS 26.5 Beta 1, RCS encryption has come back to the Messages app. So if you're messaging Andy and he's on an Android and it uses RCS, you'll see end-to-end encryption. Of course, Apple-to-Apple messages, of course, has always had end-to-end encryption. Yeah, thank goodness for that. So that was in a couple of earlier betas, I think 0.4 and even 0.3, but that was for carrier testing. But it's going to be actually widely available in 0.5. Although, like all things RCS, it is carrier-dependent, so it might not be available to everybody all at once. It might take a while for all the carriers to update. I expect in the United States, most major carriers will support it, chiefly because, of course, they're all using Google Messages as their standard RCS app, or excuse me, standard messaging app. Right, right. And encryption, very, very important. 100%. It's way delayed. I'm glad they're finally falling in line because that was one of those things where you just had to say, why are you saying that privacy and security is really important and you're not supporting an open standard for cross-platform encryption? So the standard didn't require encryption, right? But Google offered it. And I think Apple said, well, we don't want to use Google's encryption. We want to have our own in-house encryption, right? Well, no, they had a rational argument, which was that GDPR had not actually formalized the standard for an encryption. Google had basically as a gift to the standards committee said, we've developed the standard and we're willing to basically make it from a private thing to a public thing so everybody can use it. And I think Apple's official party line was that we're waiting for that to actually be formally integrated into the spec before we will do it. It would have been nice if they said, you know what, we're going to be given that the Android platform is 80% of all mobiles out there and that we can basically cover a big swath of those people by supporting this Google standard. Why don't we just be a little bit forward-looking? I mean, they were even dragging their feet on, wouldn't it be great if those beautiful photos that we're taking with our iPhones did not look like downscaled garbage when it's sent to a non-Android phone? But we can put that aside right now. I'm glad that however they got to here, they got here eventually. Yeah. Yeah, my daughter said, oh, she's on Android. Oh, you're using the Android phone now. And I said, no. No, I have one friend who I talk to a lot who's a green bubble, and it was so nice when RCS was rolled out because finally we could react to messages and photos didn't look terrible and you could send videos and, like, interact, you know, like a normal human but not using WhatsApp or Signal, group messages are still a mess. But, you know, it's better than it was. We're getting there. A couple of weird things you may or may not notice. With iOS 26.5 Beta 3, Apple introduced a new way people can pay for subscriptions on the App Store, monthly subscriptions with a 12-month commitment. In the past, you'd have to pay for the year to get the year price. So now developers, I don't know how many are doing this, will have a choice to say, oh, we'll give you the price, but you only have to pay the yearly price, but you only have to pay month to month. But you commit to a year. I don't know. I haven't seen that. Yeah, that's what it is. Adobe has been sued for that before. Well, it's not in the U.S. or Singapore. Yeah, it's just in other things. And I wonder if that's because Adobe has been sued for that in the past. And now Adobe has to make it very clear when you sign up that you are committed to it. like a 12-month thing, right? And they have to make it explicit. Like when you sign up for their, you know, Black Friday promo, hey, if you cancel early, you still have to pay. They piss people off. They cancel instead of getting a bill for canceling. Exactly. And so I don't love it from a user perspective. It will be interesting to know if a developer is adopted or not. At this point, developers don't hugely care that much about what users think about, you know, their subscription policies. So we'll see if it takes off or not. I don't know. Also, this thanks to the EU, Apple is testing live activity support for third-party accessories, not just Apple accessories. Also, pairing will be easier to a Magic Keyboard, trackpad, or mouse. Oh, there's a whole bunch of little things. A new Aniketut keyboard layout. Clearing up. I mean, this is literally sweeping the last bits into the computer. So is this the last version of 26? 26.5? Barring a, I mean, there'll be like security updates and other bug fixes that can happen, but obviously the bulk of the work being done at Apple already is on 27. Yeah, because that's WWDC is when they announced. Yeah, we're literally a month away from them telling us what's going to be in it, and probably about, I mean, a month and a week away from not only the conference, but the first developer beta release of 27. So that's where the bulk of the work is going. This is like the last little bits that they're getting out the door in the 26 cycle. Here's something that excites me for 27. There will be a button on your iOS 27 wallet that says create a pass, which means you can create a custom digital pass from any QR code. Your gym membership now, you don't have to wait for them. Gyms want you to use their app, right? That's why they don't allow you to add it to the wallet. But that's a pain in the butt. I want everything in my wallet. So now Apple finally giving up on developers doing this, have added it, or will be adding a create a pass feature in the iOS 27 wallet. I'm glad they're finally doing it. I mean, it's interesting because people built, I remember a decade plus ago, people built websites to basically do this exact same thing. Like it's been a relatively easy thing for anybody to do. If you just kind of reverse engineer the, I mean, it's not even reverse engineering. They document how to do it. People have had ways to kind of create their own passes on websites. But I think it's a really smart thing to, yeah, Just build it in. Build it into the wallet. Make it that much easier. Our local movie theater, you buy a ticket. They email you a QR code, which you then have to hold under their special machine at the theater. So it prints out a ticket. It's just the worst system. And then, by the way, nobody looks at the ticket. I guess they didn't want to pay for ticket takers. So you just then walk in. Yeah. Yeah. Even if this is a good example of like a feature that serves the user, but also serves the platform. Because when this feature came on Google Wallet a while ago, like it suddenly went from, OK, I guess my Starbucks card is in there. And I guess when I take Amtrak, my tickets went up there to my library card is in there. A lot of loyalty cards are in there. It's like, why would you not use it if all you have to do is simply take a picture of it? It turns into this beautiful like little pass that's always there. Or it's like, I don't care why it took Apple so long to do something that seems very, very basic, but I'm glad that it's there. Well, Apple made, I think Apple wanted people to use PassKit. Apple made a way for developers to do it. They wanted them to do it traditionally. And the developers went, no, no, we want everybody to have 14 apps. We want our own app. Which, again, is frankly kind of Apple's fault because they led for so many years. There's an app for that and there's AppIntense and all these other things. And they really have pushed developers to the point of being like, oh, the only way you can be successful is if you have an application. You can't just have a website, even though a website would be the better use case for things. Apple doesn't want to give up any customer information, right? So if you want customer information, you've got to do an app. Is that right? Well, I mean, a barcode doesn't give a whole lot. Yeah, I was going to say, these are just QR codes, ultimately, right? Like barcodes. I don't know how much of it is that. But, I mean, look, like Andy, I don't care how long it took. I'm glad that it's going to be here. It's a nice feature. I use Apple Wallet for everything when I can to the point that over the years I have actually created passes myself, you know, using like little one-off websites or whatever just to try to make things convenient. But it's certainly much easier to just be able to take a photo of your card and turn it into a pass. So we'll find out. There will be a lot more, I'm sure, in iOS 27. We will find out. WWDC. When is the keynote? June 6th? 5th? We're going to cover it, of course, Mike and I. Eight. Yeah. Is that on Monday? Monday. All right. Which is rare. What's the day last year? WWDC is always on Monday. Yeah, I was going to say, WWDC is always Monday, but usually, like, releases are Tuesdays. Yeah, the iPhone things are never on a Monday. Never on a Sunday. Never on a Monday. Yeah, so we'll be covering that if you're in the club. Now, I should mention that this is a good reason to join the club. We cannot stream those to the public. We stream this show on YouTube and Twitch and X and Facebook and LinkedIn and Kik and, of course, our Club Twitter Discord. But we can't stream the Apple events, the Apple keynotes in public because they take us down and they give us strikes and they're mean. So don't tell Apple, but we will do it in private. In private. We're going to have a private screening for club members. So if you want to watch that WWDC keynote, Mike and I will cover that on June 8th. and you can watch it in the Club Twit Discord. That's the only place we'll be able to make that available. I think we're going to do that now with all the keynotes. We're doing it with Google I.O. as well. It's a Club exclusive. Here's a scooplet. I am getting excited more and more about the iPhone Ultimate, and Sonny Dixon has put out, and I think he's pretty reliable on this. We know they're probably already making it, right? the first dummies of the final look of what the Fold will look like, as well as the 18 Pro and the 18 Pro Max. And then Unbox Therapy did a little video. They took the dummies and they made a video out of it so that you can kind of imagine what it will be like to have one of these little. Look at this. I can't wait. Now, it's not going to sit flat, according to Unbox Therapy, but we don't know. Of course, this is not a – this is a guess. But anyway, if you want to see the whole video, they're on YouTube. I've got to say that I'm sure that a lot of us are going through a little bit of nostalgia because we remember when, like, the iPhone was announced but was a long time before. It was actually shipped, the iPad, the same way. And so lots of people were, I'm going to make myself one out of foam core. I'm going to paste a picture on it so I can hold it in my hand and know what it would be like to hold on to this. And now we're seeing that exact same thing again. In fact, I think I might still have the foam core dummies that Burke made up for us. Thank you, Burke. Way back in the day. So we could say, oh, look. I took that on so many cable news shows. Oh, my gosh. You know what? I think I did, too. I think for one, like an iPad or something. It was a similar kind of thing. Yeah. That is a throwback. And what's great is now, because, like, you know, personal 3D printers are so good, that you can actually, like, print up a mock-up. Yeah, the AirBug one looks like aluminum. It looks really nice. Yeah, exactly. Go to SendCutSend or whatever. They'll mill you anything you want out of anything, anything they can make it out of. It's just amazing. Between this and how good people are at producing convincing still renders and video renders, it's like I'm not going to believe that anything is anything until I'm actually holding it in my hands. No. You can't believe anything. Rupert is more fun. Yeah. I mean, it's now a big, you know, in fact, there was a, this morning, something on X, that purported to be an accidental release of an iPhone app from Apple. And I thought, is that real? And I thought, I'm not going to mention it on the show because I just don't think I can trust it. You just don't know anymore. Oh, yeah. We mentioned this a couple of months ago. Oh, gosh, I can't remember the guy's name, but we featured his stuff on the show a number of times where he took this concept of the Frog Design Mac tablet with an integrated keyboard, disk drive, and everything, that was just a prop that they made in 1986, 1987. And he said, I'm going to make that. And he made it, and it actually worked with all the design stuff and all the keyboard stuff. And if this showed up on an auction site as a prototype, nobody would question it until they realized exactly how good engineers like this guy are. Well, this has been happening in China for a long time. I remember we have a listener who goes to China regularly. He brought me back a bunch of iPhones from Shenzhen. Oh, yeah. that are indistinguishable from iPhones except for the fact they running Android Right And the thing is you have to dig down deep but when I went to China like one of the few things I absolutely wanted as a souvenir was I wanted to go to a counterfeit market and get the best iPhone I could. And even back then, it was like it held up until you got like three or four levels into an app. And then you saw like just your basic stock Linux font. And that's and that's why, like from from now on, like any time I buy something, I'm not buying I'm not buying anything from the Apple store unless I'm not buying any hardware until I can actually break it open right there and verify that's a real thing. Because I'm sure that at the Apple store it's fine. But if you go to Best Buy, like they're probably just going to take a return, reshrink rep that, not knowing that somebody basically bought one of these really, really good AirPods Pro. Exactly. And, again, it pairs fine. It shows up everything you need. It isn't until you accidentally drop it and it shutters apart and you realize that. Does Apple put a lot of steel plates inside these things that make them heavier? Or is that like an impedance thing? It's for the antenna, of course. You're watching MacBreak Weekly, Andy Anaco, Jason Snell, Christina Warren, and, of course, you especially, our Club Tip members. We're really glad you're here watching the show today. Let's go to AI news. And actually, the big news is tonight there's a party. Sam Altman asked ChatGPT 5.5, if you were going to plan your own launch party, what would you do? And he said it came out a little bit weird, but guess who got an invite? Now, Christina, why are you invited to this party? Because I replied to the tweet, and I filled out the form. Awesome. You won the lottery. So I won the lottery, right? And I'm very grateful. Thank you very much, OpenAI, for learning me. And you were going to be in San Francisco anyway? No. So that's why you're in the city now? Yeah, absolutely. No, and they were kind enough to cover people's travel if you're in the United States. Holy cow. Yeah. So now, did you bring a fancy gown, a Met Gala kind of outfit, or what are you going to wear tonight? No, well, the weather is colder than I was thinking, and so I'm kind of having a little bit of a problem. Yeah, welcome to San Francisco. Yeah, but, like, I was looking at things earlier, and so I had something. The shirt that I'm wearing now, I don't know. I don't know if I have time to go get a jacket or not is the long story short of it. We will see. What are you expecting? What's going to happen? I don't know. I have no idea. What is actually fun? I will share this. I don't think this will bother anybody. I won't share names. But about 20 or 21 of the women who were invited, I guess we all found each other on Twitter, and we created a Twitter group chat. because there's so few, like, you know. The only ladies. Basically. There'll be a hundred nerds and you. Kind of, right? And so that's going to be kind of the funny thing is that we're actually, a number of us, we're meeting up, like, at a wine bar before the party. And then, like, all the women are going to, like, pop up to the party together. But, yeah, no, it was very, very kind of them and also very kind of GPT 5.5 to us. Like, I had no illusions that that would happen. and I just filled out the form, as one does, because why not? And then I was very pleasantly surprised when Friday afternoon I got an email that was like, you're invited, and I was like, cool. You weren't the only one. Sam Altman reached out with an olive branch to Elon Musk and said, hey, you can come too, buddy. You can come too. We'd love to have you. Five Five is out already, so it's a launch party for something that's already been released, although Altman did say we might have a surprise for you. So I wonder if there'll be a new model or something interesting. Well, one thing they did do, which was pretty cool, because apparently like 8,000 people, you know, applied to attend the party, and they only, you know, had capacity for less than 10% of that. But anybody who filled out the form got 10X Codex credits until June 5th on their account. That's nice. So, and this is not the first time that OpenAI has done things like that. So just kind of approach it for anybody out there. When they have things like their developer days or stuff like this, even if you don't want to go or even if you don't think you'll be chosen, fill out the stuff anyway because I have seen, like, their DevX team does a really good job of, you know, making their fans feel good. And let's be fair. You are in developer relations at GitHub, and GitHub Copilot is, is it not based on ChatGPT? Well, no, and we use a number of different models. Oh, okay. Our default model is actually cloud right now, Although, no, actually, it might be 5.3. 5.3 is our long-term model, but we use these cloud models. We have Gemini models available. Oh, that's nice. You know, Gemini, obviously, OpenAI models. So you can choose. But, yes, the original impetus of Copilot back five years ago when it was first announced was actually a joint project between GitHub and OpenAI, where we let them scan our public repos, and we developed our own, you know, kind of assistive stuff. Well, also the Microsoft GitHub co-pilot relation triangle. Well, yeah, but it was actually like a separate thing. Like Microsoft had invested in OpenAI at that point, but the GitHub integration thing was a separate agreement. So maybe they will mention this smartphone that they are building to compete with the Apple iPhone. In fact, they say they've moved up the date. They're going to try to get it out sooner than they had said. They were saying 2028. They say now because we think there's demand, we're going to try to get it out in 2027. I wonder if Johnny Ive will be there with his new phone. I think that you're going to have a scoop. You know, maybe, although it's funny because to go, you have to fill out all these things, and, like, they're pretty clear. You can't say anything. No, no, no, no, no recording or whatever. But, I mean, it's a party. Can you say where it is? Well, they have. They have their headquarters. Oh, okay. Which is where? I don't even know where that is. Is it in Mountain View? No, it was in San Francisco, Robert. San Francisco, okay. Was it OpenAI who said that? I think it was Ming-Chi Kuo who basically doubled down on a tweet he said last week that first half of 27, OpenAI appears to be fast-tracking its first AI agent. Mass production target as early as first half of 27. Ming-Chi Kuo, right. But he's usually pretty good. He's the supply chain guy. Other AI stories. XAI is bringing Grok's voice to Apple CarPlay. This has actually been a nice feature of CarPlay. They've started to allow you to add. I think you can put ChatGPT in there and probably Claude. You can also put Grok, and Grok will talk, which is maybe not a good thing. I don't know. I'm not sure I want to be talking to Grok anymore. Grok's kind of rude. So Grok voice mode will be coming to CarPlay. so can you do I haven't tried it yet can you do voice mode with chat GPT I don't think so I think Apple restricts that I think somebody else somebody who drives should chime in on that perplexity also is there it says this is from 9to5Mac when grok voice mode arrives on CarPlay soon it will join chat GPT and perplexity to the party so maybe you can I don't know if I should I feel like there was something with it which might be, maybe once you activate the app, you can use voice mode, but it might not be one of those things where you can just talk to it if it's running off. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sure you can't say, hey, Grock, you probably have to press a button on the screen and so forth, and you may not be able to do that when you're driving. Come to think of it, let's hope not. Here's from Apple Insider. If you are using Perplexity Computer, which is like their Claude Cowork, it's their app that lets the AI do stuff on your computer, Malcolm Owen writing at Apple Insider says, Mac Mini is the best platform for a personal computer. Good luck getting one. Go ahead. Oh, I was just going to say, if you're done with that, Mark Gurman broke some AI news today. I'm done with that. Mark Gurman broke some Apple iOS 27 news today, and it's very interesting. What he said is, and this is, I mean, it makes a lot of sense, But to see Apple or any tech company do this, it's another thing, which is, according to Gurman, iOS 27 will let you swap in whatever AI provider you want, not just for one thing, but for anything, for Apple intelligence, the whole thing. Like, they're going to create a base using Gemini that will be on every phone without you doing anything. But if you're like, I'd rather use Claude, you can, assuming that they provide, I think it's called extension for this, you would be able to just say, use Cloud for all my AI stuff. And iOS will just say, okay, now you use Cloud. So basically there will be a default that will be a white-label version of Gemini that everybody just gets. But if you have a preference, if you have an account or a specific functional preference, that you will be able to just pick an AI model, and it will be apparently everywhere, according to Kerman. So like writing tools, image playgrounds, Siri, like all of the places that Apple's goal is they will create the default or with Google create the default. But that if you want to swap in someone else's AI model, go ahead. Interesting. That raises so many interesting questions. It is the trend, by the way. Cursor announced that last week. more and more companies realizing that the lead model changes from moment to moment are saying, well, why don't we let you use whatever model you want to use at the moment? But then how do you pay for it is the question. You know, Apple's paying Google a billion dollars, we hear. You log in, and I think the app has to be on your device. You're not getting it for free. Yeah, yeah. The app is on your device. That's how it gets an extension. and then you're logged in using your account in that app or, you know, whether it's, you know, however they want to do it to the API, tied to the API, tied to your membership, whatever it is, and then, you know, you're charged or credited. I'm such a doctor for this because I have subscriptions to, I don't even want to say how many different AI models because every moment, oh, you've got to try Kimmy now. Oh, no, GLM. Oh, no, you've got to try QEM. And then pretty soon you have subscriptions for all of them. Also, I wonder if that will allow you to split things, like saying I want Nano Banana as my image generator. Right. I want Cloud as my general jackpot. I want Gemini for my research stuff. And also, I wonder if they're going to be imposing privacy controls that basically have to do – I wonder if they're going to require each of these AI companies to say you have to provide an API access in such a way that we will allow you in or we will basically forbid you to go in. And also, can I have a locally run AI, like on my network, saying there's some privacy things I just want to agent. There are agentic stuff that I'm only trusting to this one machine I've got on my network. So for agentic stuff, run it through this machine but through nothing else. Yes. First off, the way they do ChatGPT basically is like there is sort of this understanding that if you're using the base level, that it follows Apple's rules. But if you say, no, give me full-on ChatGPT and I've logged in, then you're following ChatGPT's rules. and Apple's like, that's between you and them. In terms of the granularity or using a kind of like bring your own model, that's a great question. My guess is that it won't be there on day one, but that they'll feel that, you know, that people will say, hey, you know. My guess is that, again, it's going to be the App Store model where it's like you've got to have an app, you've got to be approved by Apple to use the AI extensions, and then it appears as an option. That's my guess. It is brilliant. Like we've been saying for a long time, Apple just has to sell iPhones. And so if all they do is basically say, we don't care what you bring to the party, as long as you're running it on something that we sold to at a 30% to 40% hardware markup, we're good. Right. We'll make it easy for you. The only thing on the privacy issue, and I agree with Jason, I have no doubt that they will do it exactly the way that they do the chat should be team out, which is that they will say, hey, if you're enabling this third-party service, you're following their rules, we are completely taking our hands off of it. and I think that's fine. I think that's actually kind of an elegant way to get around the fact that they don't do, you know, mass trainings on things, which is one of the reasons why their local models are frankly not good. But so I think there's kind of an elegant in-run around that to still have a good experience. I think the challenge, though, will be, okay, well, then how do they, I guess, position these two things, The more privacy-efficient, you know, like, you know, not localized, but, you know, hybrid, you know, Gemini on-device and, you know, on-cloud model versus bringing whatever else you want. How they throw that needle will be interesting. I don't know if this is related. Apple Research just released a paper with UCSD talking about using multiple models in a diffusion model at the same time to deliver better answers. So maybe they use all, I don't know, you know, a lot of times the AI research Apple's doing is very blue sky. And I think Apple releases these just to remind people, hey, it's not just the other guys. We're working, too, on AI. It's always with the narrative of we're doing research that says that our strengths as a hardware maker are 100% applicable, meaning that if you're telling the world that you need an amazing amount of network compute power to do this, We've got this new method for running these models that will actually run just fine on hardware or just on a smaller number of compute capabilities. But isn't it ironic? It really does show you the difference between Apple's position in the world regarding artificial intelligence, the opportunities presented by AI, and also how fast AI is moving that this is still a platform where it's like, Like, if you want to use a different chat app, you can't. For SMS messaging, you can't. There's only one. WebKit is like, no, you can have multiple browsers, but it's always going to run in our renderer. All these different things, like our AirPods are locked to this. Our Apple Watch is locked to this platform. The fact that they're saying that, no, we will allow you to choose whatever you want as an AI platform. Just please, please, please run it on an iPhone. Just please use iOS, right? Yeah, exactly. I think you're right. It's A, because this is moving quickly, and B, because I don't think they would do this if they felt like they were in a position of strength or at least a position of parity on their own models, whether they were hosted or local. I don't think that they would be this open, because obviously that was the thing with WebKit. When WebKit, especially mobile first, came out, nothing else was even close. Chrome was a fork of that, essentially. And the same thing with, like, they built the watch to kind of be part of the ecosystem. This is almost the inverse where they're going, okay, we recognize that we don't have this moat just of being Apple, but we don't want you to leave. So we will do everything we can to make it happy for you to stay. Yeah, they keep, I'm sorry, but I can't, I couldn't just jump again, where they say, oh, you know what? If you don't like our App Store guidelines, you can switch to another platform. Knowing that Noah's going to do that, like, if you don't like our AI, you can switch to, wait, wait, Don't switch another. I'm sorry. We said nothing. We're open. Oh, we are. Can I make a vote, though? There's one thing they've got to do. And Siri dictation has now fallen way behind everybody else. It's the worst dictation. And I'm using, you know, OpenAI's Whisper, a variety of other tools. Jason, you've recommended many tools. But you can't plug them in to the dictation mode that Apple, at least not on the iPhone, that Apple's using. and that would be my number one thing. Just let me use something else to dictate this. Your keyboard sucks. Okay, fine. I understand the limitations of that, but if I could just dictate reliably, and Siri's so far behind. There was actually a very good piece on TechCrunch comparing a number of the AI dictation apps. Some of them you've already recommended, Jason. I think you recommended WhisperFlow. There's Willow, Monologue, Super Whisper. I've used that. That's the one you like, right? Yeah, I do. Voice Typer, Aqua. Handy I've used, typos. Handy is pretty good. Yeah. So look at all of these. They're all better than Siri. Every one of them. Well, first off, Siri is not dictation. They're different. What does dictation mean? Dictation is just dictation. There's a dictation engine that Apple is using. Terrible. True. But what these tools do is they are using not just a text-to-speech engine, but they are often then adding an LLM layer where they are kind of like smoothing everything out. Much better. And, you know, there are some cases where you don't want that, but there are also some cases where you absolutely do want that. Some of these are local models. In fact, the one I use is local. Yeah, so I feel better about it. It's not using any bandwidth. It's not costing me anything. It's running locally. And it's better than whatever the hell Apple's using. I think the iPhone's kind of more limited than a Mac. All of these are on Macs. So do you expect that 26 or 27 will improve? I would hope that there are underlying tech changes across all of the stuff that's ML based, given how fast it's all moving. The question is, do they go above and beyond? Right. Like it would be it would be really nice. Like if they if they made their dictation much better, it would be even nicer if, as you said, they let third-party dictation engines into the mix. But, again, will that be covered in the first round of releases of this? My guess is always to say no, because they tend to go out with, like, a very basic thing, and then they start to add the details as they go. But, like, this is one of those areas where there's been a lot of advancement, and that, like, not only are the speech-to-text engines better, But then when you add that proper kind of like transformer model layer on top, you end up with better output. And, you know, and different people, like I said, different people have different, like when I'm doing the transcripts of the advisor call, I do not want a language model rewriting what they said because I want exactly what they said. But if I'm just dictating a thing because I need to send a text message and it cleans up my stupid words that I got wrong to have it, And I look at it and go, yeah, that's what I mean, and send it. That's great. That's productivity. I mean, there is very good transcription, LLM-based transcription, that is much better than what Apple's doing. Oh, yeah, no, both layers need to be better. I think that for some people, that second layer, which Super Whisper is a good example of that, like what they're doing in a lot of those apps is like they're saying, well, when I'm in email, I'm going to run my raw transcription through an email context, and it's going to read more like email, and that's going to be better. and you can do with this double process. But there's also just a straight up, both the speech-to-text and text-to-speech engines are dramatically better than they were a year ago, let alone five years ago. You know, I use Whisper to talk to my agent, my Claude agent. And on Apple, I'm always having to say, period, question mark, new sentence. Yeah, Apple actually has, the funny thing is. And Whisper doesn't do that, it just knows. So I always have question mark and period. Well, you don't, you know, I don't think you have to do that anymore. I'll tell you, there is an API in at least Tahoe. I don't know if it's in iOS 26 or not. But in Tahoe, there is a new, better speech-to-text API that you can use for transcription, and it works really fast, and it works on device. That is an Apple API. Yeah. How do you choose that, though? Well, on the Mac, this is the thing. On the Mac, there's, like, an app you can install called Yap. and then it'll grab from your microphone, it'll grab from your system audio, and it works really great. So, like, they're making steps here, but I think what you're saying is if I'm on an iPhone in core keyboard, press the microphone dictation, I want it to be much smarter about that context and know that I'm not doing an old drag and dictate kind of hello, comma, I have a question, question mark kind of stuff. You want it to just be there. And I think they're, I would be surprised if that's not improved. Yeah. We're going to take a break. The Vision Pro segment coming up on the nation's number one Vision Pro podcast. Just a little bit. You're watching Mac Break Weekly with Andy and Hako, Christina Warren, Jason Snell. I'm in Hawaii. I'm going to go get a little tan while we watch this commercial. Oh, I don't have a commercial. Thank you, John Ashley, for not doing anything. I am going to do a commercial for Club Twit. How about that? A little plug anyway, a little begging for Club Twit. If you support and believe in independent media like this, the best way you can show your support is by joining the club. I think it's really important. Podcasting is great because we're not spying on you. It's an RSS feed. We are beholden to no one, and I take extra steps to make sure that nobody has an inside track on any of our shows. But that means we need your support to keep doing it. We do have ads, yes, but they only cover about 60% to 70% of our costs. The club really keeps Twitter afloat. If you're not a member, I want to invite you to join. It's $10 a month. You get ad-free versions of all the shows, including this one. You won't even hear any begging from me. We'll cut that out also. You also get access to the Club Twit Discord, which is really great. It turns out if you have a social network where people pay to join, the quality of conversation goes up by a hundredfold. Great people, great conversations, not just about the shows that are going on, but about everything that geeks are interested in. That's the Discord. You also get access to special programming. We don't put anywhere else, like, as I mentioned, our keynote coverage for the WWDC keynote coming up next month, also coming up soon, actually, Google I.O. We do special programming. Stacy's Book Club is coming up this next week. Micah's Crafting Corner. Home Theater Geeks this week in space. I go on and on. We do a lot of extra programming for our club members because they support it. We'd like your support. Twit.tv slash club. If you're not a member, we'd love to have you. All right. On we go with the Vision Pro. What do you see? What do you know? It's time to talk to Vision Pro. There isn't much to say, actually. No. But I have to do it anyway. Otherwise, now we're going to keep our statuses for number one. That's right. We've got to keep our liquor license. Vision Pro has been used for hundreds of cataract surgeries. This is Marco Zivkovic writing at Apple Insider. That's interesting. I think surgeons are using it to, I guess, augment their vision. Yeah, this is happening. I got an email from somebody who's using it for arthroscopic procedures as well. Like, there's, yeah, this is not surprising, right? Like, Microsoft found with HoloLens. Like, there are lots of high-end applications. Yeah. Epson was doing stuff. This is 12, 13 years ago with, you know, kind of their like AR type of glasses where you could, because I remember looking at CES probably in 2014, maybe 2015, where you could look at someone's arm and you could be able to view the veins much more easily. And they were, you know, aimed at nurses and things like that. So health care being, that was also a big place that things were adopted for. HoloLens, some of the other, I think the Samsung stuff. So I'm not surprised at all to see that this is an area where there's getting some use. The first VisionPro ophthalmological surgery was done by Eric Rosenberg of SightMD. This was back in October of 2025. He has since made software to do this, co-authored something called ScopeXR for extended reality, designed for ophthalmic surgery, integration with 3D digital surgical microscopes via HDMI, USB, and wireless NDI. So they get a stereoscopic feed from a surgical microscope. Diagnostic data is also shown in the Vision Pro. And it can also be fed to remote professionals for consults, for mentoring, for students, which is pretty cool. So they wear the Vision Pro. They are able to do the surgery using an ophthalmic microscope, 3D microscope. Wow. That's very, very cool. So that's one good use. It's almost like this wasn't really a consumer product. Interesting. Yeah. Back when it was a rumor, the table stakes for those kind of headsets are always any industry that can afford to write their own software for it and basically customize the hell out of it for a specific use case. They're going to be buying it as long as it's good hardware. The challenge is always going to be as a general interest, general use device for people who do not bill at $8,000 an hour for architectural services or whatever. That was always going to be the challenge. Let's talk about the rumor that Mac Rumors wrote about last week. Oh, boy. Oh, yeah. Julie Clover, the headline, Apple has given up on the Vision Pro after M5 refresh flop. Mac Romer has learned. Let's start with the headline because the story does not back up the headline. Maybe we shouldn't blame Julie Clover because she probably didn't write that. Yeah, I mean, the story is a little bit hypey, but the headline is definitive in a way the story is not. And then hours after that story broke, Mark Gurman went on Twitter and basically said, no, I reported about this a year ago. There's nothing new here. And John Gruber and other people, and I've heard through the grapevine too, like it's not true. What Gurman reported a year ago is they used to have a group that did Vision Pro because it was a new product. and now the people who do the Vision OS software are part of the software group and the people who do the Vision OS hardware are now absorbed into the hardware group. What they did is say we're not actively developing another big heavy headset because they're worried in the short term about more things like the metaglasses and doing a response to those lighter weight things. But that's not the same as saying the whole thing is dead. It's more like the M5 is, like, do we expect that in a year or two they'll be able to come out with an $800 headset? I mean, it's not going to happen, right? So they're working on some other stuff. I think what Dan Morin said on Six Colors that I thought was good is, if we get to the 27OS release and Vision OS 27 is kind of like tumbleweeds, that's a bad sign, right? That's a really bad sign. But I don't get the sense. Like, they're investing. Our friend Alex is gone to Apple, right? Like, they're investing in content. They're investing in the OS. They're investing in it as a platform in a lot of ways. But they also, I think, are aware that they aren't going to sell any of these. And the framing of that headline is being M5 refresh flop. Like, did literally anyone think that the M5 version of the Vision Pro was going to, at $3,500, was going to stoke up more sales? Like, they did that for inventory reasons because they were running out of M2s and they needed to switch it to an M5. But, like, nobody expected it to be anything so that somebody would, like, say, let's do an M5, and if that doesn't sound like hotcakes, it's out of here. It's like, that's just a ridiculous narrative. Like, we all are well aware at this point of the limitations of the Vision Pro. It's not the processor. It's not the processor. It's not the processor, not even on the list, right? And, like, I enjoy the Vision Pro, and I think it's impressive in a lot of ways. But, like, I would never advocate for them to consider it like a product that is important right now. I think at this point they've shipped it so they should keep it around and think about the future and think about where all that technology might be applicable in a product that would reach a large number of people. But I don't think even its biggest fan would say that product is going to exist in the next five years. As John Gruber points out during Fireball, it was just last week. We even mentioned this last week that John Ternus and Greg Joswiak talked to Tom's guide and talked about the future of spatial computing. And I don't know what spatial computing means without some sort of XR device. I don't even think you could do that with spectacles. I think you need a helmet, a nerd helmet. And remember that the Vision Pro uses Sony display modules that were only going to be able to ship in terms of like several hundred thousand a year. So it was never going to be mass market. I think it's going to be what I'm keen to see is that if at some point we will see a $1,200 rethink of it, something that is more along the lines of a MacBook Air version of this. Or an Apple TV. Remember when they did the refresh in 2010 on the Apple TV and they took it from being kind of like the Mac Mini type of device to actually being a set-top box that had integrated applications? So if they're only on spatial computing, what do you need for spatial computing to work? Well, look, that thing, I mean, first of all, spatial computing as a concept implies a level of, like, Mac performance and windowing and stuff that I think you could revisit and say maybe that was a bit much. But I think, I mean, the way I read it is there was a real internal struggle over designing this thing, and they decided to get really kind of high end with it, making a bunch of decisions to ship sort of like no regrets, highest end. And I remember when the rumor was that it was going to be 3,000, I was blown away because I assumed it would be 2,000 at most. And $3,000 was too low. And so I – and John Ternus was involved in a lot of this. And I would imagine that there will be a time when they say, okay, we are close enough now that we could probably do a product that – also close enough in terms of the content because the content is very slowly coming. But if you imagine maybe three years out, four years out, if they could get a thousand dollar one of these and suddenly they have the infrastructure to do sports and theater and they've got a bunch of movies and they've got a bunch of other content and some apps have been developed and like they have a better sense. That starts to sound like maybe it's an interesting product. So maybe, you know, maybe they will get there eventually. And I think that would be really encouraging. I just think, unlike every other Apple product, they have to think long-term and as this is a direction that they're going in and that this is all just for exploration. Because it doesn't make sense otherwise, right? It doesn't make sense. Yeah. I mean, I could see – again, I realize that I'm looking in hindsight. It's like if Apple found itself in two different modes as they're designing this, we can either develop a very basic model and then do the super deluxe model, the ultimate expression of this, like building upon the success of this first, like more MacBook version of it rather than MacBook Pro or Mac Mini versus Mac Studio. And then we'll make the Pro version, the Vision Pro, like in a couple of years. that would be predicated upon the idea of this first version being a big enough success to merit that kind of development versus, you know what, let's go out guns blazing, let's basically make the best version of this we possibly can because the people who are going to be buying this are going to – we're not going to get the people who are buying MetaQuest sets. We're going to get people who want, like, the finest thing. And then later on, based on the success of the Vision Pro, we will make a more affordable version of it. I could see Apple making that second decision. But either way, you can feel all of the arguments that went on on the development team about how the fundamental question of, again, who are we selling this to and what are our expectations of it? You could see the claw marks on the side of it for all the fights that probably went behind the scenes. And you could see it at launch, right? Like, I mean, I got, like, hammered online, like, on all the social networks. because it wasn't just Twitter. Like, the Masadon people came at me, too, which was funny, because I was like, I'm not going to buy this. This is a dev kit emasqueraded as a mass consumer product, and it's not a mass consumer product. This is a dev kit that they are, you know, not positioning the right way. And that's exactly what it was, right? And I will, like, gloat now, because I was like, I was exactly right. As soon as I saw it announced, as soon as I learned more, that's what it is. And you can see, to your point, like, there were lots of tensions inside. How do we position this? Who is this for? how do we do the exploration? And look, the constant strategy, I think, you know, makes sense to continue to go after that. What I do think we should be prepared for, though, is that no matter what you know platitudes they say about the importance of spatial computing I think that we have to think about the fact that Apple I sure is looking at different modalities and different form factors for where this content could be displayed and how it might work that are completely different from what the Vision Pro is now. And maybe they are able to reuse some of the work and content. Maybe they're not. I'm sure they've taken a lot of learnings. But if they're going to continue to invest in this, the one thing I will say that does probably bring true about like the macromers report which was kind of an amalgamation of other things is that in this current iteration of where the product is now this is not what anybody is working on and it shouldn't be it should not be because because it's not a good product and it's not a seller right like when you have you know you're constrained by resources you should not be doubling down on this of all things yeah i i think it's like i think it's not a product this is the thing i mean i i'm with you christina about the DevKit thing. I think when I wrote my review of it, I basically said, it reminds me of the early days of a computer where you'd spend $6,000 on an Apple II and then say, what does it do? And the answer is, you tell us. Yeah, you tell us, right? A basic program and play blackjack or something. It felt very much like that. And the problem is, and I really do believe this, I wrote a piece about this at some point, that Apple doesn't know how to market products that are not mass consumer products anymore. and that Vision Pro is the example where they use like an iPad playbook for Vision Pro. It's like, no, no, no, no. That is not what that product is. It is an entirely like theoretical conceptual developer kit. We're out on the edge. Let's try this out. And I think it hurts the product that it was ever sold as anything other than that. I will say this, though. Ben Thompson at Stratechery said something last week that has stuck with me that I think was really good. He tried the new meta display stuff, and he said he felt like he liked the new meta display that's a very light, like little tiny thing in your eye with some basic overlay information. And he also got the demo back when of that tech demo of the Gemini, like, AR specs. And he said his realization was lightweight overlay is a thing, and VR is a thing. And his take was they don't really go together. That, like, there's, like, a lightweight overlay, which is what the Metaspecs are trying to do, and there's, like, what the Vision Pro is trying to do. And I thought that was a really interesting idea because I think it says to me that, you know, maybe these aren't two, maybe this isn't one thing. Maybe it is two different things. Maybe, really, there was a place for something. And remember, there's a rumor that they were trying, and then they put it on hold, and they killed it, making a version of this Vision Pro that was instead a tethered to a Mac. Yep. And it did two, and so think about it. You could do extended display, which is a good feature of the Vision Pro. And if you're tethered to an Apple device, it probably would give you access to, for example, all of those great videos that you want to watch on a Vision Pro. And that makes me think what Andy was saying. And, like, there's probably a product, not now, but in the next few years, that's not a Vision Pro. It is a severely cut-down thing that is maybe a Mac accessory. Yes. But that lets you do some level. And what it's not doing is it's not a spatial computer. It's not its own iPad with its own apps on it and a bunch of windowing. It's a simpler concept. There are fewer, you know, there's no display on the front. There's a lot less Chrome. There are maybe some fewer sensors. and it's lighter and, you know, maybe it's tethered or maybe it's not, but, like, whatever it is, it's a product that you could look at and a price tag that you could look at it and say, actually, that's worth buying, but it's not what the product is today. No, I agree with you. I think that maybe, like, if I were to do a post-bordem or whatever, I think that they made the decision to not make it a tethered product, to make it an independent product, and they made that for the reasons that they made that. I think in hindsight, that was probably, at this point, maybe not the correct move. I think that, you know, maybe... Yeah, that was Johnny Ive, by the way. Yeah, oh, I'm sure, right? But I think, like, treating it more like CarPlay, treating it more like an accessory, and again, you could have it wireless, you could do whatever, and saying, look, we already have these great, you know, Macs and even phones that can power this sort of thing. Why are we going to double down and build this into the device itself? Because that adds to battery, that, you know, decreases battery, that adds weight, that adds heat, that does all kinds of things, not to mention that the cost. It's like instead you could have a very good situation. Because if they sold for $1,500 just a dumb display that connected to your Mac or, you know, a high-end phone, I feel like more people would buy that. Of course. Than being like, oh, no, I have to be $4,000, and it's still not even going to be as good as my Mac or, you know, or whatever, and I'm not going to have access to all my things. The storage on it is weird and all of that. It's a very Jurassic Park product in the sense that they asked if they could without anybody asking if they should. And, I mean, it really is because so many of the decisions, they just decided, well, we can make it a standalone computer. We can put a screen on the front in order to facilitate human connection. And all of these decisions. And, like, you know, Johnny Ive, this has been reported a lot. Like, they were going to do a version where there was, like, a box that sat on the table that did all the processing. And that made it a lot lighter. And Johnny Ive was like, no, we must do it all on the device. And it's like, well, so much for that box. And, like, yes, I wonder with John Ternus and maybe even with Mike Rockwell, if he sticks around at Apple, if they will take another run of the product. Because, look, say what you will about the Vision Pro, but even on day one it was apparent, we're going to learn a lot. Apple's going to learn a lot. Users are going to learn. Like, we're going to learn a lot about what this thing does and doesn't do from it existing. And, boy, have we. I will just say that it is such a perfect sister product to the Apple Car, because I really feel it's the same generation, the same institutional thinking. We are a company that is great at design, we're great at integration, we're great at software, we're great at hardware. If we build this, they will come. The only mistake they made, unlike the Apple Car, they released it. I mean, here's the thing. Andy, do you remember? There was a report that came out about Project Titan that said, and again, not to beat on the guy because he did some amazing work, but like late Apple Johnny Ive, I think, was just a big bag of mistakes because he was bored. He was so bored. They were trying to make a self – they were trying to make – at some point in Project Titan, they were trying to make a Rivian, basically, or a Tesla. They were trying to make a really good computer-assisted, luxurious car. And then there was the report that they had pivoted and that they were only designing a car with no steering wheel where everybody like and no driver's area because it was totally going to be full self-driving. And that was the moment that I was like, oh, no, there's no high on their own supply now. And it's like, what are you even doing? And I agree. Both of those products seem to go in a path which was what is the most we could do? What is the maximalist like? Because Apple is a giant astride the world. We can make anything happen. And with Vision Pro, they did get to a thing that they could ship. With Titan, they literally couldn't ship it because you can't ship a car that doesn't have a steering wheel, right? You just, it doesn't even. Level five is three, at least four worse than level one. Yeah. They were at the point of the engineering standards for self-driving versus technology. I love the optimism and the forthrightness. Let's not have any limits. Let's imagine what this product could be. But at some point, part of the product discipline is putting the limits there. And I do think that in his last years at Apple, Johnny was surrounded by luxury goods, felt that they could do anything, and made a bunch of product decisions that you look back on and you're like, why would anybody pay for that? But, you know, that was – so I wish OpenAI all the best is what I'm saying. I like – I got to say that I like Christina's comment that you can just tell how bored he was, which is not the same as having – not wanting to put in effort. It's like I'm bored with the stuff that is sensible for this company. I want to design things that Apple really should not be making. On the edge. I want to be on the edge. And I'm so important to this – whether he was aware or not. I'm so important to this company that if I suggest let's at least put together an exploratory group, on a satellite. Like, who's going to say no? Who's going to tell Sir Johnny Ive no, right? Well, that's the problem, right? I mean, ultimately, I think this is why he was pushed out and whatnot. It took to get to that point, but this is why he and Steve Jobs did work so well together, because Steve Jobs was able to be an editor, right? But when you're bored, when you don't have an editor, when you don't have anybody really directing you and you can do whatever you want, it can lead to really ridiculous, ultimately not great products, even if they're beautiful designs, even if they're interesting experiments. And I'm not taking anything away from, like, the brilliance of Johnny Ive, who's probably the greatest living industrial designer we have. But, yeah, you could just tell the guy really wanted to design futuristic things and was tired of making, you know, like, actually, like, with MacBooks that actually made sense. Yeah, he's the kind of person who looks at the steering wheel and the dashboard and is like, it's been done. Can we do something different? And it's like, okay, but, like, look at all the clutter on this dashboard. We just have just one big sign that says brace for impact. Actually, the Ferrari has a lot of switches that he designed. But Steve was his great editor. That's why they were, just like Woz and Jobs were a great combination, Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive were a great combination because they pushed each other and they could say no to each other. And then when Steve died, they needed to keep Johnny around to keep some credibility. They felt they really needed to keep him around. But, yeah, I think he was burned out, and I think he wanted new challenges and was interested in new stuff that was not necessarily practical. And, you know, I do think the Vision Pro is a product from that era. And that's why I, you know, I hope after technology advances and after they've spent some time updating Vision OS and creating new, you know, spatial video and coming up with lots of other ideas and learning what works and what doesn't work on this platform, I hope they do eventually get another crack at it because I think there's probably a pretty great product that's an actual product that people would buy there. But it's not there now, and I actually don't blame them for taking some time off to let that cook while they do something like make some sunglasses that are AirPods. Like, I'm okay with it. And that's your Vision Pro segment for the week. This is why we were so good at this. Give me a slice of bologna, and I can make a sandwich. We can solve anything. That's right, but it's good bologna. Put it in, Coach. Stephen King said, I make bologna, but it's good bologna. Just a word of warning, you might have seen Notepad++ for the Mac. This is a very popular PC program by a guy named Don Ho, no relation. The Notepad++ for the Mac is not by Don Ho, or anybody even Don Ho knows, but by a Russian fella, Andrei Letov, who is kind of stealing the name, shall we say. It is not, and Don Ho is very clear about this in any form or fashion related to the original, and you can ignore the app. And I'm glad we never recommended it as a pick of the week. Notepad++ is awesome on Windows. It's a much-needed app on Windows. It's a great app on Windows. But, no, it was interesting. When I saw it kind of get linked around, I even made a point to try to point out, I was like, hey, it's cool that someone did this, but this is not officially related in any way. You should know that. And, frankly, if you're a Mac user, you should just use VB Edit. And that is going to be my standard advice, right? Because Notepad++ is a fantastic open source project. It's under the GPL. The developer is really responsive, and it's fantastic. But just because it was ported over, like it's not all the same menu thing. And it's also purely vibe-coded. It wasn't ported in any sense. Vibe-ported. The guy who announced he was going to change the name to NextPad++. Again, just use VB Edit. The free version is great. The paid version is great. Yeah, there's a new version of VB Edit coming out in the next couple of weeks. And for those who don't know, they used to do Text Wrangler. They don't do that anymore because the base version of BBEdit, like 90% of the features are available for free. So you should just get it. BBEdit should be on every Mac. Yeah. It should. Like, literally, it is one of the first applications I download. Unless you use Emacs, in which case you don't need it. Well, okay, but like if you're a sane person. BBEdit has Emacs key bindings. You can use Emacs. Yeah, exactly. It does. And it doesn't even assume that you want Emacs. If you want Vi, that's fine. You want V.I.? It'll help you. Yeah, it's true. At some point over the past 23 years, everybody's been complaining about anything. I think that's the next version that adds the V.I. key five. But, yes. Porsche's vehicle in the next Laguna Seca will be stealing from your six colors. Last weekend. It was last weekend they ran that. Okay, yep. And they did a retro six colors to reference their race livery that they had back in the 80s. And it is gorgeous. It is the six-color apple rainbow in the proper sequence. and it's got the rainbow Apple logo on top. It even says Apple Computer on it. And it's got Apple Computer in modern Tectura, the old Apple II font. So good. Good job, Porsche. Yeah. Also, by the way, John Ternus has a Porsche and is a fan of Laguna Seca Raceway. So, like, he's totally driving that car sometime. Yeah. If he hasn't bought it already. If he hasn't. If he didn't drive it last weekend, he'll drive it next weekend. So like a certain double-digit percentage of all Apple fans everywhere, as soon as I heard about this, like I went to the Porsche website, went to the press site, and downloaded the entire image package, but the poster is not there. There's like a poster that they put in the Instagram post and the social media posts, like two garage projects on one track in the vintage Garamond condensed font on a background of like original Macintosh beige. So they must have had Apple's approval for this. I mean, you can't use Apple's logos and stuff. Yeah, absolutely. Apple must have said, yeah. Oh, yeah. This was like celebrating. It's a Porsche anniversary and an Apple 50th anniversary, and this is a joint thing that they're doing. Yeah. Apple Music, I believe, is actually a sponsor of their cars now, too. So there's like existing deals there. So, yeah. Yes, I'm sorry. Laguna Seca was Sunday. I apologize for getting that. I'm just shocked that the poster isn't available for sale. I can't tell you how many different websites I hit to. There must be some. I'll be rewarded. If I keep clicking through, clicking through, I'll find some sort of, like, Porsche.store.home.whatever that will have, like, a link that nobody knows about. I saw this post. I thought I'd just pass it along. David Gelfman, who worked for Apple for 12 years, was on the team that delivered the iPad, the very first iPad. in fact, had the original iPad before it was released, had a friend who was terminally ill in the hospital and thought, I would really like to show this person the iPad and show them some photos on the iPad, but I know I'm not supposed to show it to anybody. So on March 23, 2010, a month before the iPad's, actually not even a month, a week or two before the iPad's official debut, He wrote an email to Steve Jobs explaining the story that he wanted to show his friend the iPod. He said, I know, you know, I have carry permission, but I can't show it to anybody. I take Apple security very seriously. I was hoping to get permission from you, Sir Jobs, to show her photos on the iPad, even though it's not to be released until April 3rd, to which he got a two-letter reply from Steve Jobs. Okay. and I'm glad he shared this with us because that's a little insight into Steve. And his friend was dying of liver cancer, which, of course, Steve, I think maybe even by then had had a liver transplant. Certainly not aware of the consequences of all that. All right. I think, without further ado, we can skip right to the bits of the week. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. Andy, Christina, and Jason. And, okay, I got a kind of cookie pick of the week. I'm just going to throw this out there. If you've ever been annoyed by a cat dancing on your keys, you'll be interested in this app. It's called FurWall. It blocks catastrophes. Believe it or not, the app, which is available on the Mac, you can also view the source on GitHub, watches the camera locally for a kitty, and when they see the cat on the keyboard, it will kill those keystrokes so that the cat, and who hasn't had a cat? For some reason, when you're paying attention to something, cats get jealous, and who hasn't had a cat walk on their keyboard, typing and inserting junky keyboard? I've literally had it happen during MacBreak Weekly, so yeah. There, clear wall. Can I share my experience? I was visiting a friend of mine in Queens. I do not live there. He does not have an iPad. He does not even have a notebook. And I was like, I got up before anybody else, and I said, oh, I'm going to get some work done. I put my iPad and my Bluetooth keyboard on the kitchen table, turned away from the kitchen table to get a drink, turned back, and one of the cats was sitting on the keyboard looking at the screen. Like, what? You've never seen this before. Is it this instinct? You didn't want to type here, did you? It must be instinctive. What is it? That's so weird. I am project of the week. Yeah, so this is one. This app has actually been around for a while, but I need to coordinate with people in different time zones from time to time, and it can be frustrating to do that. And I've even built tools before, and then I remembered that this app exists, and I was like, why did I do this? I should just have used Clocker. It is a free menu bar world clock where you basically, if you want to use it to display your calendar, you can. I don't use it for that because I use Fantastical, and that just works better for me. But you can basically just set, like, whatever time zones you need to see. And in your menu bar, you can just, you know, either invoke a shortcut or pull it down, see what time it is around the world. What I really like about it is that you can basically scroll forward to see, okay, if I need to see what time is 7 a.m. in, you know, Paris for me in, you know, on the West Coast. and I'll be like, oh, okay, it's midnight or, you know, it might be, you know, 11 p.m. depending on the tradeoff. It will be 11 p.m., I guess. So anyway, you can do that. It's just a really simple app. It's updated regularly. It's completely free. Big fan. I can tell you how old this is because in his calendar announcements in the screenshot, it says pre-order the new iPhone SE. So you get some sense this might have been around for a while. What a good idea, though. Very simple, just in the menu. I like menu bar utilities. The problem is there's limited space in the menu bar. There is, but what I like about this is you can designate it to just like look at a clock or one or two time zones, but then you can click on it and then see all the different time zones that you need. So it's just another clock, and then it doesn't take up any extra space. Andy, your pick of the week. My pick of the week is an Android app, believe it or not, but it is absolutely Apple-related. A lot of people have – they might have AirPods, and they might also have an Android phone, and they were happy, sad to realize that, yes, they will work as Bluetooth headphones, earbuds, but a lot of the features just are Apple-specific and will not work. LibrePods, L-I-B-R-E-P-O-D-S, has been around for a while and restores a bunch of those functions to using them on Android devices. I could use this on my Linux machine. Yes, exactly. So a couple of different things recently happened to make this app even, even better. There are two problems of getting compatibility with a bunch of features. One of them was that Android itself had a bug in its Bluetooth stack. And also, like all headphones, Apple did something kind of weird with how they implemented Bluetooth. And basically because Google put out an update a couple months ago to fix that bug finally, the developers were able to finally address those problems. And now, number one, you don't need to have a rooted Android device in order to run it. You can basically run it on most regular phones. And secondly, you get features like accurate battery status. I'm reading off the list here. Immediate ear detection, so like when you take the buds off or off. Conversational awareness is enabled. Listening mode, you don't have to actually control it from the buds. You can actually do it from the app or from a widget or from the quick settings panel. And like you said, it's compatible with Android, compatible with Linux, and I believe it is actually free. So it really is nice to see developers step into the breach and figure out how to fix things when Apple or any other company will take the product compatibility to a place, but not all the way to the finish line. I think there's still a few features that don't quite work, but for somebody who, like, again, I want to buy AirPods, because in terms of earbuds, they are just so exceptional. But I've always had, okay, I better get the Sonys or they get something else because I just can't – I'll spend most of my time with these between my Apple stuff and my Android stuff. I can't have just 40% of features on my Android stuff. But now it basically means that, yeah, maybe the next time I buy earbuds, I will buy the AirPods Pro because I've always just sort of like really, really, really envied the noise cancellation and the sound quality, you know, all the other little features. It is GPL licensed. It's open source, and as with all good open source projects, it is hosted on GitHub. Thank you, GitHub. Jason Snell, your pick of the week. Yeah, I'm going to pick Pedometer Plus Plus version 8. It's an iPhone app, but even more importantly, it's an Apple Watch app. David Smith, disclosure, a couple of friends of mine do this company, run this company. David Smith is the primary developer. It is a labor of love for him. He's the one doing the maps on iOS, too, isn't he? So this is what David has done. He is a hiker. He's like an extreme hiker. He goes up into Scotland and just hikes all over the mountains in Scotland all the time. And so he built this new version. It's got a bunch of new features. The one that impresses me, though, is he wanted a map that looked good on his wrist on his Apple Watch, even in a dark mode. And so he worked with a cartographer to generate good maps. If you're going on a hike, you can set the hike, and you can see where you are on the trail map, and you can see it in either mode. And it's like it is a person who cares because he uses this. And this is not his biggest app. Widget Smith is undoubtedly as big as that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But Pedometer Plus Plus, he uses it. And they also, because he does these super ultra-long hikes, they introduced a new mode in Pedometer Plus Plus 8 where it gets vastly better battery life on the Apple Watch by reducing the amount of time that it measures your heart rate and stuff like that. It goes into, like, a super low power mode for all of that. So, like, it is, if you're a hiker or somebody who does a lot of walking, it is more than just a pedometer. That's what the pluses are for. So, like, great maps. I want this. This is great. Carefully, like, not just taking stock maps, but, like, working with a cartographer to do good maps, good design, and even the simple stuff like the, you know, your step count on the Apple Watch especially is gorgeous. So it's just a huge update. It is, I think, clearly the best pedometer app out there on the iPhone and the Apple Watch. Made with care by a very small team. It's David and a couple of people he's brought on board since then. I think he has a new designer on this app, so it looks really good. It's one of those indie apps where when it starts out, the programmer is the designer. It's like, well, that's okay. But eventually you get to the point where you get some other people involved. And so him working with a designer and a cartographer and doing all this stuff. And if you go to David's blog, he actually has a whole post about how he is a hiker, and that is why he was working on this. He spent, what do you say, six years trying to get better maps on his Apple Watch for these hikes, and he feels like he's done it. So it's worth checking out. And I also just love, since I know David a little bit, he recommended some hikes when I went to Scotland last summer. He cares about this. He uses his own product. And as a result, this product is so much better than it would otherwise be because it's made by people who use it and care about it and want it to be better. So Pedometer Plus Plus. There's a free version, but there's also a paid version, the Pro version. And I would get the Pro version for the Expedition Mode alone. This looks fantastic. It's definitely made with great care. If you're, and I think MacBreak Weekly users are like this, you know, you're not just an Apple Platforms user. You're somebody who likes and appreciates when somebody sweats the details. You know, yesterday, Lisa was saying, because we went all over the place. We saw waterfalls and stuff. I wonder how many steps we took. And it's not the easiest thing on an iPhone to figure out how many steps you took. I need this totally. I'm going to download it and use it today. That's really good. Yeah. Pedometer Plus Plus, 13 years in the making. Version 8. David Smith stands behind his apps. Very nice. Sometimes he launches apps and they don't go and then they disappear. But, like, the ones that click, and this one is, like, obviously near and dear to heart. Well, I subscribe to Widget Smith, too, so I'll add that to my list. Thank you, Jason Snell. You'll find Jason at SixColors.com. All his podcasts at SixColors.com slash Jason. And, of course, you talked a lot about the Apple results on Upgrade and any other podcasts. I updated that SixColors.com slash Jason page just for you, Leo. because I know you say it every week. So it's got a new picture of me, and I reordered the podcast. I put Mac Break Weekly or higher up, because I want you to feel good when you start at that page. I wasn't paying attention to that. I'm not that kind of guy. You weren't asking, but I had that moment. Well, when I last revised this page, it was just when I started on the site, or on this podcast. And so I put it, I stuck it in there, but now it's rising in the charts. It's floating upward. Are you playing a game on this? You've got a button in front of you. What is this picture from? Oh, this is a, I was hosting a game show on stage in London. I love it. That's the Relay 10. So that's me as a game show host, basically, instead of what everybody knows me as, which is a game show contestant. There I am. Look, I can also be a game show host if I need to be. Thank you, Mr. Snell. Always great to see you. Andy Anako, I-H-N-A-T-K-O. I have no idea how to spell Anako, except I do because of that mnemonic. You're in the club. Anything you want to say about your life? Next week. I might have said to say about my life. His life begins next week, ladies and gentlemen. So very exciting for you, Andy. And Christina Warren, who has to quickly go and get her gown on. Her gown. Yes, for the big ChatGPT 5.5 launch party. So nice to see you, developer relations, at the great GitHub FilmGirl, Film underscore girl on many, many platforms. She tried to change it, but she couldn't. No, you know, I did, and then I was just like, I just gave up. And you know what? At the Met Gala last night, Sabrina Carpenter, I thought, had one of the best outfits. Oh, I haven't seen it yet. It was custom Dior, and it was made out of film reels from the movie Sabrina. Oh, my God. It was incredible. It was so good. And a friend of mine texted me. She was like, she's literally film girl. And I was like, you know what? She's stealing my bit, and I don't even care. I'm not even mad. I'm just so happy. because the outfit was so good. Everything was so good about it. I was like, I don't even care that this is usurping the username that I've had for two-thirds of my life. Hey, give me some advice. Are you all excited about the new Christopher Nolan film, Odyssey? Yeah, Odyssey. Which launches in July on IMAX, the 70-millimeter film versions. Filmed mostly at sea in a Viking longboat. You know, our local movie theater in Petaluma has a sign out front that says IMAX now. I don't know. I guess they're going to put an IMAX. A lot of things mean IMAX now. Right. That's the problem. It's a laser IMAX. No, that's not obviously the 70 millimeter film. I have to go to the city. Right. But it still will be incredible. A laser IMAX is good, isn't it? It is good. It's just not the same formatting. I understand. Yeah. So it's not even the big square screen? No. I love that someone referred to it as the latest movie in the Bring Matt Damon Home saga. Yeah. It's so true. He's made a lot of those movies. He gets home, though. This time he does get home. It's an epic, right? Yeah. And look, like, Oppenheimer was such a big moment. It'll be interesting to see. It's going to be the summer movie, right? Yeah. Let me give you the – so my friend Todd Vaziri, who works at Industrial Light and Magic, he did a post on his blog about – and this is literally, like, last month – about what IMAX means. So I'm just going to run through it here. IMAX means large format film cameras, but it can also mean large format film, but it can also mean a big digital camera. But it also means a very big theater screen, but it also can mean a regular-sized theater screen. But it can also mean a movie on a home streaming platform that has the exact same pixel dimensions, data range, file format, and encosing specs. But it also means film projection, but it can also mean digital projection. But it also means a tall aspect ratio, but it can also mean a different tall aspect ratio. But it also can mean a mixture of aspect ratios, but it also means a movie that was shot with non-IMAX cameras that alternates between aspect ratios that can be played in big or regular theaters, but it can also mean a movie that was partially shot with IMAX cameras and 2K digital at 35mm, but it can also mean a movie that was fully shot with IMAX cameras that has a consistent aspect ratio like the Odyssey. But today, IMAX most frequently means a movie shot on digital cameras and mastered in 2K, potentially up-res to 4K for certain shots, that sometimes has a taller aspect ratio seen in a regular-sized theater. So it's super clear, Todd says, what IMAX means. So, in other words, pay no attention to that sign out front of my media. It's a brand that means it should be a cut above in terms of quality. But it is nothing. I find it funny because Disney just announced a new format, and it's basically like fake IMAX. And IMAX, it's like, harumph, I never. And it's like, look, do not accuse someone of the other. What are you doing? IMAX is becoming like Dolby. What are you doing? It is. Dolby is exactly what it is, right? But Nolan is one of the few directors who actually will shoot for the format. is if you have the opportunity to see, for this particular IMAX format, it's the first one. If you have the opportunity to do it, it will be incredible. I saw Oppenheimer in San Francisco at the Metreon and on the 70mm film. It really was. Quick tip, if you are interested, Oppenheimer sold out everywhere and it's 70mm. I think the Odyssey is also the same. No, you can't. Get your tickets right now. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, well, I guess I won't go see it in Petaluma. This is why I bring this up because I know you find a normal human. Yeah. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. We do MacBreak Weekly every Tuesday, 11 a.m. Pacific, 8 a.m. Hawaii time. I'm going to go that way instead of that way this time. Actually, it's 2 p.m. East Coast time. It's 1800 UTC. You can watch us live. as I mentioned in the Club Twitter Discord, but also YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, Kik. If you don't want to watch live, don't worry. It's a podcast. That means you can get audio and video downloads from our website, twit.tv.nbw. We do have a dedicated MacBrigley channel on YouTube. That's video, of course, and you can use that to share clips, which I think you should tell the world about this show. We've been doing it for a little while now, but still some people don't know about it. And easiest thing for you probably, subscribe on your favorite podcast catcher, and you'll get it automatically as soon as we're done. Thank you, John Ashley, our producer and technical director. Thank you to everybody watching, and a special thanks to our Club To It members. We'll see you next time. But now, even though I don't have to go back to work, Boo! You need to go back to work, because great time is over. Bye-bye. Thank you.