Episode 971: MacBooks are coming! Cheap MacBooks are coming!

unscripted unfiltered unafraid welcome to the mac world podcast my name is michael simon and i am joined by my colleague jason cross good morning and our producer roman loyola oh hi there this is episode number 971 and if you're an apple fan and you haven't been living in some far off far-flung place you know that this week's episode will be about march 4th don't call an event because it's an experience we'll talk about what that means why it's an experience why there's a lot of questions about it so we're gonna we're gonna get into all that stuff plus what we expect apple to do that day in the days leading up to it what we're gonna get what we're gonna talk about a little um and then we're gonna have a uh a second segment kind of about ios 26.4 because that also came out on Monday of this week. Then we'll have this week in Apple history and we will close with our common corner. Speaking of that, you can contact us through Blue Sky Facebook on threads, search for Macworld, look for the Blue Mouth logo, send us an email at podcast.macworld.com, send us a personal email, comment under a video, comment under a post, just find a way to get in touch with us. We will collect all those comments and talk about them on a future show. All right, Roman. So before we get into the – so Monday was a holiday for us. I swear to God I worked the whole day because Apple came out with a bunch of stuff. iOS 26.4 beta came out. The thing came out. And then yesterday, my day is over, and then Mark Gurman decides to release a report about AI stuff. So let's talk about that real quick. It's been a real busy two days for Apple stuff, even though nothing has really happened. It's not all that new. It's just kind of like here's some updates on stuff that's been talked about before. So there's three products that are allegedly coming that we, like Jason said, we've heard about them. Smart glasses, a smart pendant, it's been called now. It was a pin. Now it's a pendant. And AirPods with cameras. Yes. Not like smile cheese cameras, like gesture cameras. Yeah, infrared cameras. So they're not for taking photos or video. They're for recognizing movements so that you can control stuff. Right. By waving your hands in the air. That's been rumored to maybe come out sometime this year, which that's believable. We actually thought that was something we would see in the AirPods Pro 3. And now it's like, oh, but there'll be another AirPods Pro this year. but not AirPods Pro 3, but maybe it'll be called AirPods Pro 3 something, or it'll just be the new AirPods Pro 3, or we don't know what they're going to do. Or maybe a separate AirPods Pro Ultra or something. Right, AirPods Ultra, just AirPods Ultra. Yeah, it'll be something. I don't know. Yeah, so the idea is that you're able to kind of control stuff with your gestures, your hands rather than tapping and stuff. Kind of like Vision Pro. Jason, you have Vision Pro. It works pretty well on that. Yeah, I mean, they use a lot more than just a pair of IR cameras for all the hand tracking and stuff that goes on there. And I don't think it's meant to be something that precise, like you're literally inch by inch being perfect. It's meant to use machine learning things to clearly recognize waves and swipes and stuff like that. It's not going to go individual finger, hand gesture, precision stuff. I don't think we're going to go that far. Not in something as tiny and simple and relatively inexpensive as AirPods. And Gurman kind of lumps it with all these other devices because they're going to use AI in some way to – I don't even know. Why are they part of the glasses? What's the AI angle here? They're all part of the iPhone is the thing. He said none of these are going to be standalone devices. They all really require an iPhone. So you're going to be doing something with – like imagine you're – for the AirPods example. If they were going to release – yeah, if they were going to release this for – and you're not doing it with any other product, it's just your AirPods. If you wanted to – there may be a hand gesture you could use to pause playback or skip to the next track or something. Skip back, whatever. Raise the volume, things like that. Maybe you could just turn a big invisible dial, like it's turning volume up or down, instead of having to say things or touching your ear pod, which never really works very well, or dig your phone out of your pocket. So the glasses are supposed to work the same way. These glasses are not going to be AR glasses with a display. In fact, they may not even have a display. They're going to be like the meta Ray-Bans where they have cameras on them and microphones and speakers, and they're meant for you to just kind of be looking at something and say, hey, Siri, what's that? Or taking pictures, taking videos without using your hands, always having Siri available to play music or listen to a podcast or whatever. the um there was a story this is going to be longer than three minutes i'm sorry roman so this all these companies that apple kind of competes with meta google um um what's the other other one i'm thinking of uh not nvidia whatever but although like all the competitors are investing heavily in ai and there was a chart like open ai you're like they're working on those types of Yeah. So there was a chart I saw recently sometime this week about so it's called capital expenditures, which is basically what companies are spending on for the future, whether it's a cloud center or a server farm or whatever. And everyone's chart is like through the roof. Amazon, Meta, Google, like it's all going up, up, up. that Apple is just steady. And we're going to reach a point where Apple is going to either win or lose this strategy because it's pretty clear that Apple has said, okay, we understand that AI is important, but we're not throwing gobs of money at it. We're going to go at our own pace and innovate on our own terms, and we'll get there eventually. Maybe they'll get there before everyone else. Maybe they'll get there better, but they're not doing it in the same way. And these products- Yeah, there will come a point in which Apple does spend some tens of billions of dollars on some data centers for their own data centers. I don't think they're at the point where they, I think they're at the point where they're testing sort of M5 chips to the data centers for their private cloud compute. They're going to have to scale that up at some point. That'll show up on their CapEx next year or whatever, but it's nothing like- But not like hundreds of billions of dollars a quarter. Yeah, right. Yeah, which they're never going to get that back. Right. Somebody did the math on sort of OpenAI on ChatGPT, which is the sort of most popular, biggest fish with consumers right now and everything. And they're like, well, all the money they bring in from all the subscriptions and all of the corporate contracts and all that other stuff that they have isn't a tenth of what they spend. Sure, yeah. So if they 10xed what they charge everyone or had 10 times as many customers, well, that would work. But if they 10xed what they charge everyone, they would maybe break even. That's how unsustainable this all is. And you can't just say, well, we'll get a billion more customers. Well, no, that increases your costs too. like so yeah uh apple might end up winning just by the fact that it had its best iphone quarter ever ever and it's the one losing on ai yeah it's and ai's been not a part of the story it's it's nobody's buying an iphone because of ai so this might actually hold up working out pretty well yeah and and so the report that we're talking about with those three products like that's not a moonshot these are like strategic steady simple expansions innovations whatever you want to call them that enhance with and and and for ai features but it isn't like this big giant bet on the future of that is you know uncertain yeah they definitely need all of them need like the new siri that works good yes but um which is comfortable we'll get to that later which is hopefully coming uh the pin most of all the pin is the one that seemed dependent whatever they call it is the one that seems to be further furthest out it should be about the size of a air tag maybe a little bigger a little thicker and the whole idea is it provides cameras and microphones for your iphone while your iphone's in your pocket or whatever so that siri can do smart stuff for you with its local compute on your phone right and but without you having messages to your AirPods and you know it all obviously works together yeah you don't have to sit there and hold up your phone to something to take a picture of it you've got like a pin or a pendant on and it's just kind of recognizing your environment you know and you know you can laugh smart stuff like people all laugh and say oh well we saw these and they failed like that that humane pin most famously oh yeah but humane doesn't have two billion iPhone users and iPad users and AirPods users and everything else that these things connect into so it is a different strategy when Apple does it. And they had that whole laser projector display thing and all this other stuff that wouldn't work. And yeah, they did not have a back-end service that worked. It wasn't the idea that a pin is dumb. It's that the idea is the pin should just be microphones and cameras for a smartphone that does everything. And yeah, we'll see. Well, that seems to be the one that's furthest out and the most iffy about whether they'll release it. the AirPods seem to be pretty far along and the glasses the report said they've made great strides on the glasses and are hoping to start production in December for release next year so maybe we'll even that might be one of those products that Apple announces six months before it releases like they did with Vision Pro and Apple Watch and stuff so that would be interesting That might be the one more thing on September. Yeah, sure. That could be. It's obviously related to the iPhone, so sure. But yeah, there is definitely exciting things happening. As an Apple user, I kind of like this approach. Slow and steady. Don't burn a bunch of money chasing something that may or may not happen. This seems to be the right strategy. Siri problems aside. i i do i like it when apple tries things even the things that fail like the vision pro isn't working out but uh but they need to keep trying things this can't just be the iphone mac company forever they've got to keep trying things so i'm excited to see new things that they try yeah and speaking of iphones and macs those are coming within the next week and a half to two weeks so apple on monday which was a holiday in the u.s released a or sent out invitations to members of the media for not an event and it's literally called an experience it's in three places special apple experience yeah there's uh There's one in New York, there's one in Shanghai, and there's one in London. Right. It's at 9 a.m. Eastern time. They all kind of coordinate to the same time. And from what we've heard, it's not a keynote, which is pretty clear because they would call it an event if it was. And it's not really like a product launch in the sense that we don't know. Like things might come out leading up to that day. and on that day a bunch of people gather and they just kind of try them out or get a hands-on for the first time um we're expecting a several like i don't know what's gonna announce because there's a bunch of things that we've been we've been expecting for a little while chiefly the macbook the uh m5 pro m5 max macbook pro that we've been expecting every week since like december so that's almost certain to be one of the things then the m5 macbook air is also certain to be one of the things almost certainly yeah the iphone 17e i would assume is one of the things the ipad air well maybe the the 17 the iphone i'm i'm iffy on that one okay uh are i think that might drop this month ahead of that. There's not a lot ahead of the March thing, you mean? Like next week? Yeah. Or even this week. The previous rumors and stuff were that it was going to be the 19th just like the 16E was. The 16E stock has disappeared basically. They're not restocking anything. So yeah, I think it's very possible that And that, in particular, drops earlier. Either tomorrow or next week. So today, we're recording this on Wednesday, the 18th, and nothing. It's 1.30 and nothing came out today. But Monday was a holiday that could shift things to a day or two. Yeah I wouldn be surprised if we saw something next week And then on that Wednesday all of the new stuff is there and people get to test it out including the The the sort of prevailing theory here is that we going to have one of those things where it several days of releases on the Web site with slick videos you know and this So like M5 MacBook Air announced on Monday and the M5 Pro and Pro Max on Tuesday and then the new low-cost MacBook on Wednesday. And they're all to ship Friday. But the people who go to the press members and stuff who go to these special experience things get to try them all out on Wednesday. Yeah, so you kind of quickly glossed over that, but the star of whatever this thing is will be or should be or is rumored to be this low-cost MacBook. And we've heard of rumors for – I mean it's been years and years and years, but like ramping up over the last couple months. And it looks like it's actually going to come out on the 4th. So what we've heard is the screen will be a little bit smaller than the MacBook Air, possibly like a little under 13 inches. It'll be powered by an A19 or an 18 Pro iPhone chip, and it'll come in a variety of colors. The invitation had kind of like a gradient ombre pattern of yellow, green, and like a little bit of like aqua blue at the very bottom. and those are some of the colors that have been rumored so it's possible that like this macbook will be quite a departure from the colors that i've always been used for god decades now yeah supposed to be fun colors and the other thing about it was that despite being low cost it's still going to be aluminum yeah and apparently apple's got a new manufacturing process that is far more cost effective for how to make an aluminum body out of this that's not plastic um but it's not the thing where they have all these cnc milling machines like micrometer milling out blocks of aluminum and stuff like they do for higher end macbooks i'm i'm desperate to know what this thing's going to cost yeah that's the thing so what's what's low cost to you guys like what would like if it's 740 it would not surprise me if it's $7.49 or $7.99, but I'd be disappointed at $7.99. I'd be like, ugh. $7.49, I'd be like, oh, okay. If it's $6.99, they've killed it. It's great. They've done a good job. That's a good price. It's more expensive than the sort of crest of the sales hump for laptops and stuff, but it's significantly less than MacBook Air, right? It's significantly less than the $1,000 thing. Now, if they can do $599, I mean, $599, if it can be $600, then they're basically $100 more than that $500 sweet spot everything sells for, and they will not be able to make enough of it. It will be, they will be, they'll just be the top seller in every Best Buy and every, they'll just, they'll be flying off the shelves. So if their goal is make more people have Macs, don't make this a profit center, make this a grow the market share thing, then $599. I just don't think Apple would hit $599. I'd be happy with $699. Sure. I'd be like, okay, they did it. That's low cost. Roman, what's your – $799, I'd be like, spend $200 more. Roman, what's low cost for you as a Mac user? To me, low cost is – oh, so I guess it's two different things. To me, low cost as a Mac user is like $749. Okay. But to me, low cost is $699 and under. So, yeah, Macs have a different – for lack of a better terminology, They have a different pricing standard. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, most of the PCs you get at that range are plastic. If we're going to be aluminum and have a design with those, it's not going to be $500. The different pricing standard is part of the problem that this is supposed to address. Right. So that's why I think they can't really get away with it being like $799 and go like, look, it's $200 less than a MacBook Air. It's like, well, but still $800 is not where everyone's trying to buy a laptop. So you can get a MacBook Air for $800 any day of the week on Amazon. They're always that cheap. So $799 I don't think moves the needle at all for people who are looking to get into a Mac. Yeah, the fact that that's new and not a refurb or last year's model or something. It's like, yeah, but it's got like a lesser chip anyway, and it's smaller and whatever. I think they're going to have to do more than $7.99. Yeah, I think at least $6.99 in my mind in order to really turn heads. And if it's $5.99, like Jason said, they can't make enough of them. Yeah, I have a hard time seeing Apple do $5.99 unless it's one of those things where it's $5.99, but the storage is so anemic or whatever that you always want to get the $699 version. You think they would go under $256? I guess they could go to $128. Absolutely, yeah. I can see it being like $599 with 128 gigs of storage. And then us and everybody else would say, no, buy the $699 version that has $256. And they'd do great. They would be able to run those ads at, say, $599 and get people into the stores. The other question is, like, will the RAM be upgradable? Because it's not on an iPhone. It's not on an iPad, really. I mean, unless you get higher storage, you're stuck with what you get. It's been a million years since they've designed a chip where the RAM even hooks up to, like, an SODIM, like the laptop RAM cartridge things. No, no, I mean – They're soldered on the motherboard. No, no, no. I don't mean, like, user replacement. I'm talking about when you buy it, will you be able to select more RAM? Or will it be like an iPad if you want the 1TB version to get 16 gigs and otherwise you're stuck with 8 or whatever? It'll be 8. I mean, I'm sorry. I think it'll be 8. Oh, you think it'll be 8, not 16? Oh, I think it'll be 8. I think it'll be exactly the same as the A18 Pro or whatever, right? Yeah, that's the iPad starts. I know, I think it's 12. I think the iPad – Roman, look that up real quick. I think the iPad Pro starts at 12 gigs of RAM, and then you can get 16 if you go up to 1 terabyte of storage. The iPad Pro, yeah, because they have M1 chips. Yeah, M4, M5, M4, M5. Or M series chips. This will have an A series chip. I think it won't have any more than any other A series. Like it'll be – You think it'll be like iPhone RAM? Like they're not going to put any more than they would in like an iPhone Pro. uh i it hmm what does the iphone pro have the iphone pro has 16 or so 12 i forgot to look all this stuff up eight it has eight okay the 17 pro has eight uh the it's uh let me see 12 gigs yeah it's always eight the 17 pro the 17 pro the newest iphone went up to 12 it was eight before now the 17 has, has eight. So is eight, I guess eight's enough. Like if we're talking about a real low cost machine, that's not designed to do high end stuff, eight gigabytes, 128 gigabytes of storage and an 18 pro processor, we'll say is, I mean, that's, that's enough to get, to get where, I mean, it's, it's enough for, for like the iPad air and stuff. So that's essentially what you're buying. You're buying an iPad air with a built in magic keyboard. Kind of. Like that's kind of what this is. I mean, it's going to run Mac OS and stuff, right? If it's. So the rumors are that it's a little under 13, which is basically that iPad Air screen, which is 12.9. If you flip it, that's basically the size of it. Add a keyboard. And there's your. Keyboard and trackpad. There's your MacBook. What do you think they're going to call it? Run Mac OS on it. MacBook. Just MacBook? Plain MacBook? Just MacBook. Yeah. They're going to resurrect that old, just like they did for that little 12-inch one that wasn't so hot. Non-pro, non-air, non-just. I think it's probably too big for them to call it something like MacBook Mini or something. Probably. I can't imagine what else. Maybe MacBook E? Or SE. No, they'd have to give it a number. Either E or SE. They've dropped SE, though. Not from the watch. They don't do SEs. They do for the watch. Oh, that's true. they do for the watch they dropped it here so it could be macbook se or it could get a number and a e or it could be just macbook i think it's just going to be just macbook yeah we're guessing now yeah we are guessing there hasn't been much in the way rumors about what it's going to be called but um i tell you what if it's 599 i'm buying one just a half like i don't even need it but like a little tiny fun little mac a laptop that i can toss around and not worry about and leave my MacBook Pro at my desk all the time is perfect. You know, and this thing could have killer battery life. It could be a really nice laptop, actually. I mean, like I think I said this last week, the daily laptop I take to the couch with me and whatever every day is an M2 MacBook Air, the first MacBook Air where they drop the wedge shape. I've been using it for several years now. And it does everything I want to do with a laptop fine. Like I'm not, it's not my only computer. I also have a desktop. So for heavy lifting, I'm using my desktop. It's doing all the web stuff and everything. And something like an A18 or an A17 Pro would be absolutely as fast as this. Maybe even faster. The storage and stuff might even be faster. So, you know, I shave a fraction of an inch off the screen. It's fine. Yeah, I agree. Give me some colors. Yeah. it's it's it's pretty exciting we haven't had like a new back in a long time like something like i remember back when um apple silicon was just getting started like there were a lot of rumors about the new iMac and it's going to be retro and it was fine like it's it's okay yeah this thing is like you know it could be like the laptop we've been waiting for for a long time from apple not Not to mention that people just don't buy desktops that much. Yeah, that's true. People buy laptops. So it's a lot more addressable market here. There's a lot of other stuff we should mention that might come out that sort of first week of March 4th. Right. There's a lot of other things coming out the first half of the year. We've got, we mentioned things like the iPad Air is due for an update, the iPads due for an update. The Mac Studio, if it still wants to be all about Macs, Mac Studios need their M5 updates. um mac studio display oh that's another one yeah the studio would also bring the m5 ultra processor presumably um because we haven't seen that yet i wonder if those aren't like a little bit further out if this is a consumer iphone 17e macbook low-end macbook ipad event mac studio doesn't really fit but studio display is is long overdue for an update it's been like five years it's way too expensive yeah they're all 15 and those things are all due this first half of the year right so if i it wouldn't surprise me if it was all sort of kept to the laptops and then maybe all this desktop stuff happens a month later either at their 40th 50th anniversary or something yeah or if it's ready or it gets even later than that so yeah as you said there's a ton of stuff coming between now and like WWDC will say what does this like event type thing what does this mean for like a spring event like will they still have something in April you think or does that kind of push it push that stuff maybe to like May yeah I don't think they're going to have an event the way they say like you know an Apple special event you know like this is not this is an experience you know where they have essentially a keynote even though it's pre-recorded and they have a bunch of people out to apple park and all this other stuff like i don't necessarily think one of those happens this year but i do think they're gonna do something for apple's 50th anniversary yeah i think so too like yeah like it'll definitely be recognized on the website in some way and they'll have yeah i if it's just that if it's just like celebrating apple's 50th and like a timeline a slick website with a timeline look back at apple history i'd be disappointed give me a 50th anniversary mac or something that i can order for a limited time or something you know do something that would be something if they come out with like a retro something or other that's limited um even if it's not retro just even if it's just modern but it's like you know a space black 50th anniversary macbook pro or whatever while supplies last anything just just give me give me something that recognizes that it's other than just like a trip down memory lane on the website so the official anniversary is april 1st that was when apple was incorporated back in way back in 1976, right Six Yeah six So um yeah yeah we about we about a month ish out from that so yeah we we see i mean we haven really heard anything tim cook kind of alluded to employees that they were going to mark the occasion in some way i don't know what that means if that means within apple park celebrating or if that means you know to customers to consumers who knows but that is happening um so this experience thing why do you think they didn't do like an event like it's a strange thing they've never done so they've done these experiences in fact roman you went to one a bunch of years ago for the when the imac pro came out they had like it wasn't an event it wasn't a keynote but they gathered all the media together they shut off the MacBook Pro, the iMac Pro, and you wrote about it and went home. This is like announced and generating some level of hype, but like people aren't going to really watch anything. They'll get a bunch of news stories with pictures, I think. Right. There won't be a live stream, like you turn on your TV app and there's a big banner ad for the live stream at 10 a.m. Like that's not expected to be what's going on here so like why why not right right why not like what is i don't know maybe everything comes out before that wednesday because there's even a time for it i don't know it just it seems weird and interesting at the same time like i'm curious to see on that wednesday like what like what do not do normal people see anything maybe not maybe it's just for members of the press and they're just gonna write stories throughout the day and people will read them and they'll move on. Normal people go to the apple.com and there's a new product announced and it's got a cool video, but it's doesn't have John Ternus out there talking about all about the engineering and all that other kind of stuff. Right. Like, and maybe this is a new way of Apple kind of collecting a bunch of things at once into one launch without, without an event. But this seems to be more difficult for Apple to coordinate than an actual event would be at its own headquarters. Yeah, they've done the whole, like, we're going to release a new product every day for three or four days thing before. But that didn't come with an experience in three different cities at the same time. So, yeah, it's strange what they're doing there. I guess they just want to get more people to have their hands on it, and they don't want to give out 100 of them to random press members before it ships. And they don't want people to gather at Apple Park because that's what normally they would do is they invite members of the press to watch the video, and then there's hands-on after. This seems to be like a different type of thing. I don't know. Interesting. I mean, obviously, we'll have coverage of it, and we'll probably talk about it on the podcast next week as well because that's another weird thing is they gave two and a half weeks of lead time before. Usually, it's about 10 days. It was an extra week or so of announcements. So it's interesting. It's exciting. We'll see. I'm very interested to see what this new MacBook is all about. All right. Also on Monday, the first beta for Mac OS 26.4 came out and didn't have the new Siri as we had heard the week prior. This was supposed to be the big, huge update that we've been waiting for now, what, 27 months for this big update. and it came there's a lot of new stuff in it it's clearly like i got like a major update it's not like 26.3 really had nothing this has a bunch of new stuff but it's missing new series we weren't sure if it would have any new series we the even after the report the report was like certain major features are going to roll out over the next 26.5 maybe 27 but that didn't mean like the main brain transplant and some of the other features wouldn't come out, like recognizing on-screen stuff or whatever, wouldn't come out in 26.4. And it still may. It's just not in Beta 1. We still don't know what's going to land in 26.4, but Beta 1 has no new series stuff at all. It has no testing switch. Our guys who look through the code never saw any flag or anything so it's it's completely new series free yeah um it does have plenty of good new stuff yeah it does have um right a bunch of new features there is even like there's an update to apple intelligence that enables um ai playlists if you're an apple music subscriber there's a new mac feature that lets you set the battery limit like there's good stuff jason you can run through the futures if you want. There's a new video podcast thing where you can switch between the audio and video podcast seamlessly. Like in the podcast app. Yeah. If they published both a video and an audio podcast. Something we're looking into, by the way. We do our podcast on video on YouTube and everything, but we're looking into the video on the podcast app. Apple Music has some new UI stuff for playlists and albums, some big new full screen stuff. They also have you mentioned. They make a playlist thing. The colors change to match the color of the album. And it's like full screen art if it's available. It's quite nice. Yeah, it's just a little more visual punch. They're testing RCS end-to-end encryption. The developer site says this will not be a 26.4, But there is a switch in the messages settings to enable end-to-end encryption for RCS as a testing thing. That's going to probably be in 26.5 or something like that. They turned on stolen device protection by default. There's an update to the Freeform app, like it got its Creator Studio update thing. There's a new urgent smart category and reminders. a couple releases ago they made it so you could mark a reminder as urgent now there's like a smart button to show all your urgents and stuff and they put the blood oxygen thing back in the health app after the lawsuit got worked out however it's working out or whatever they made it so that you can take your blood oxygen but you can't see it on the watch it only shows you the result on the phone but it wasn't listed in the vitals section now it's just like back in the vital section and they show your average bedtime and stuff so these are like not huge things the apple music stuff's probably the biggest changes so far but it's beta one we we typically see a couple more things trickle out over betas two and three and then the last couple beta releases are really just getting it all in shape for release yeah nothing nothing new but had new siri come with all this stuff it would be a big update it would be huge yeah and there is still i'm still thinking beta 2 beta 3 might introduce new siri but not the yeah couple of parts that are still delayed or they might have just been like now that the news broke and now that we're just we just came out there and said it's still 2026 or whatever they might just put this whole thing to ios 27 yes apple did come out and kind that confirmed i think it was cnbc that siri is coming in 2026 so you don't have to worry about it being punted to 2027 but um i it's i think this is all over my head but like what's the so they got gemini so that was that was one of the bigger things like they were trying to build siri from the ground up but obviously took a long time they then they they said this isn't working they scrapped it so they they teamed up with google so what maybe you know jason maybe you don't but like what could be the hold up to what's not working okay um i think it's not working because it's not just like gemini but they slapped series voice on it right like that's not what it's intended to be they're using the foundation model which is sort of like saying like you're it's like the cpu for your computer it's not the whole computer right you can have a bunch of different computers with the same cpu like it's they're using the foundation model but they have their own guardrails things have to run on apple's private crowd compute for this release some stuff runs on your phone not in the cloud um and and so that requires a certain amount of there's basically a traffic cop who has to take the thing that you ask and say is this a are they just asking for a timer? Because I run that on my phone. I decide to process this request completely on device. Or are they asking a question for internet knowledge or whatever? Do I need to hand it off to ChatGPT or can Gemini just answer this or whatever? And so from what Gurman had said in his report, it sounds like that's part of the problem is that some requests are taking too long. Some requests are getting answered by chat GPT, even when there's something that the new server should be able to answer. And some of these, and there's an accuracy problem. Some of this stuff's not accurate, which is, you know, you've got to have a high bar for this. So I think it's just not, it's not all coming together well. Yeah. Yeah, and at this point, we're almost two years into the delay. Well, we call it a delay. Apple never actually set a date, but it's a delay. As far as customers know, they've been waiting for it. They got to get it right. It can't roll out and be wonky because people are going to blast it. Like it's going to be like we waited two years for this thing, and it takes 45 seconds to come up with a response, and that's wrong. Yeah. Yeah. It's already a problem where if you say, you know, the memes and stuff out there are that you said, what day of the week is September 12th? And it says now playing September by birth, wind and fire, like, you know, and it plays the song. It can't be doing that kind of stuff. It's got to get these things right. So I'm constantly screaming at my Siri in the living room because it does the wrong thing. And I don't even ask it to do much, but it's always like for one. So I have an Amazon Echo with a new Alexa on it. Right. Which is quite good. And I have a HomePod mini with with, you know, the old Siri on it. And it like HomePod takes at least five seconds longer than Alexa to do basic things in my house. And I'm like, it's no longer than it used to be. But the new Alexa is very, very fast. So like the bar that's being raised for these types of things. When you say do stuff in your house, do you mean like turn on lights and stuff? Things like that. Oh, wow. So ever since they updated the home architecture, which you've gone through all that, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, ever since they did that, it's been really instant for me. Like just lights, things like lights and locks. I don't know. Right. My phone is. When my HomePod mini takes the request, first of all, it goes, uh-huh, and then it waits two seconds, and then it'll do it. So it's not like forever. Do you pause after you trigger Siri? I don't think so. My wife does all the time because she waits for Siri to say, uh-huh, or she waits as long as it would take Siri to say, uh-huh? I don't think so. My son certainly does. And he's always yelling and saying, turn on the lights. Yeah, I just say, Siri, turn on the kitchen light. Just like that. No pause. And it happens pretty instantly. Mine's at least like three seconds where it'll be like, gotcha. And then the lights will go on. Yeah. So that's an issue. It's gotten to be where I can only rely on Siri for three things ever. and it's all things I do on my the HomePod in my living room I know exactly what you're going to say I turn on and off lights and stuff I set timers and play a song no I don't use it for music because I've got a Sonos and stuff I would rather if I was listening to music no it's lights it's timers and we add things to our shopping list we have shared the shopping list in reminders you can share that with somebody so that's our grocery list uh and so anytime we run out of something from we yell from the kitchen siri put this on the shopping list and it does it pretty pretty well uh for some reason it doesn't like my wife and she it's like 50 for her and then i say the exact same thing and it works but it's funny um but those things work the the new siri is probably not coming with 26.4, maybe coming with 26.5. We'll see. But 26.4 will be a good update. It'll come out in about, I don't know, five to six weeks, I guess. That's usually the development cycle. I give it 50 whether there is new Siri minus a couple of the big features like the app intense and the personal context Those are things that are they're already testing in 26.5. So, OK, we'll see. We might get new Siri without those things. We'll see. All right. Yeah, we'll see. But lots of stuff coming in the next couple of weeks. So stay tuned. OK, Roman, this week in Apple history is. This week in Apple history on February 20th, 2004, Apple released the iPod mini. It had been previously announced that January at Macworld Expo. And then it came out. Well, today's not the 20th, but in a couple of days, some of you here listening to this now, it might be the 20th. So it'll be 22 years ago. When you say released, that means it was – It was announced at Expo in January, and then it started shipping in February, a month later. Yeah. I kind of remember delays. I don't remember. Maybe certain – maybe it was worldwide. Hold on. Let me look it up really quick. Yeah, see, Mike and I were talking about this pre-show. I had to look up where I was working at the time, and I wasn't working at a Mac publication at the time. So I wasn't involved in the coverage of the iPod mini release. So I don't have a lot of memories about it. I just remember the colors came out, and everyone was all, oh, look at the shiny colors. The colors, I mean, it honestly wasn't that much minier than the actual iPod. It was small. Right. But the colors were a big thing. It was small, vertical. It was, yeah, and it was kind of like this, like, vertical, slim with rounded sides. The sides were really smooth and rounded and everything. So I'm looking here. On March 25th, they announced. So it was supposed to release in the U.S. on February, and then it was the rest of the world in March. and that got pushed back to july because of demand in the u.s they couldn't get enough of the um this says four gigabyte one inch hard drive so that's the the base model yeah um they were so popular it was four and six yeah yeah or eight six six yeah so they had to push back the global launch to july that's that's a bunch of months because they were so popular in the u.s i remember they announced they had like it was like a quarter of a million pre-orders which would be a bad day now for apple but back then it was it was huge because you know the the ipod i don't know what the annual sales were but it was only a few million so 250 000 pre-orders for the ipod mini was like oh my god it was like like like like blow away numbers i bought one for my wife that i still have somewhere i don't know where it is but they were cool and it you know that was just another step to making the ipod a just a global smash that the windows support obviously was a big one and um the ipod shuffle also helped when they i think it was a hundred bucks and it was just you know just stuff and you know the ads and the earbuds and everything else but um you know the The coolest thing about it was the drive to me. This was before you could affordably put four gigs of flash in something this size. So they actually had what's called a micro drive, which is an actual spinning hard drive, but this big. It's like the size, a little bigger than a compact flash card. It's this tiny little micro hard drive, like spinning hard drive. Famously wonky reliability on those. but it let them get a four gig thing which was a lot less than the regular iPods at the time at the time I think it was 10 or 20 but still it lets you hold a ton of music a lot of people didn't have four gigs of digital music for a lot of people it was basically all the music they ever cared about they could still put on there and we still had to this was before the iTunes music store so you still had to rip CDs and organize them and pull an album out of work. Was it? When did iTunes Music Store start? If it wasn't before it had just launched. Hold on. Let's see if I can beat Jason. Oh, 23, you're right. It was the year before. So it wasn't. But people were still real. This was, yeah. It wasn't quite like the big thing that it is now, like digital music. Yep. I always said, like, if I had Apple Music when I was in college, like i'd be like oh it's nothing like so much money on music back things of today yeah you still had 99 cent tracks or 9.99 or 12.99 for a digital album yeah you guys were buying music no we all had napster so i was using it for journalistic purposes i know i i had a ton of napster stuff but um like before that like when was napster napster was like 90 99 2000 when it was when it was really popular it was the late 90s yeah yeah so like mid 90s i was still buying tons of music pearl jam and nirvana and shit like that like there was a sweet spot there was a sweet spot there where napster was popular enough and reliable enough at least for popular music that sometimes I owned a CD and I downloaded it from Napster because somebody else went through the trouble of properly doing all the tracks. It was faster and easier than ripping it myself. They did all the work and I own the album, but I'm just not going to rip it. This is easier. It's such a quaint time. Those 10 years when you pop the CD in and you would compose all the music. Back in the day! So, yeah, iPod Mini was, I don't know, one of those, not quite a watershed moment, but it was a big deal. Yeah. It was a big deal. Yep. That does it for this week in Apple history. And I guess we should go just go straight into comment corner. Yeah, let's do it. Yeah. All right. This comment comes from Doug M via email. Email, he wrote, it kind of ties into our earlier discussion. Where did my email go? No. Uh-oh. I had it here for a second. Oh, here we go. Am I the only one who finds the idea of an A18 or A19 MacBook completely ridiculous? It's supposed to be an affordable MacBook, yet you can purchase an M3 iPad for less than $500 today. Apple should simply make macOS available on the iPad. They could even charge for the license or allow customers to choose between macOS and another operating system when purchasing the device. That's never going to happen. Ever. Like Apple would never do that. No, they wouldn't do that. It's a good idea, but Apple kind of stepped away from the philosophy of charging for the OS, what, a long, long time ago? Right. I think the main issue with just macOS on the iPad is it necessitates that you need to have a keyboard and some sort of pointing device, a trackpad or a mouse or something. Or it just doesn't – it's not going to operate. I mean, macOS has no touch. and anything so ipad os 26 is as close as we're gonna get to mac os on the ipad and that's just visual there's so many things that mac os does in the background that ipad just doesn't do and won't do right and you can the way it supports external devices and all this other stuff there's there's a ton like you said yeah and you know i am curious to see like so this macbook um macbook it probably will cannibalize ipad sales to a certain extent because if it's even if it's 699 you can get an ipad air for 599 you can get the 13 inch ipad air for 699 it's the same price like there's a lot of pricing overlap there but i believe that the mac and the ipad are inherently different and geared towards inherently different audiences. And I, I, like, I don't think the, this, this budget MacBook kind of precludes the existence of, of the iPad air. And I don't think that, uh, uh, an iPhone chip powering a Mac, you know, is, I think it's, it's a smart idea in the sense that there's a lot of people out there. Like, so I use my parents a lot as a baseline for this stuff like my dad has a macbook air m1 an old one and i always ask him like why do you have it because he doesn't do he's retired and he doesn't but he likes to sometimes sit on a on at a desk and do like banking or do like email yeah like there's a whole group of people that want the experience of a of a mac but don't need a 1500 machine and the ipad i know the magic keyboard exists and i know i don't think most people are using it that way most people are using it as a gaming device or a video device like like they're separate so like i understand what this guy's saying like it makes sense to me as that type of user but you're just like i don't think that's the target audience for what apple is going to target or the audience that i was going to target with If you have an iPad Air and you're going to say, well, it's going to run Mac OS, so it's required to be already hooked up to a keyboard or it's not going to work. And a trackpad, it's like, well, now you've added on a Magic Keyboard trackpad. Well, now you're already in this low-cost Mac price. Above it. Which one's going to have better battery life? Do you have a 12.9-inch screen? All this other stuff. I'll say this like my wife and I are on other sides of this split where she'll do a lot of sort of like you said things like banking reading articles on websites and stuff like that like on her phone. She'll just sit on the couch and do work but not like not her job work but the work we do in our life not just doom scrolling TikTok but all those things and she'll choose to do it on her phone. i don't like to i prefer to use a more desktop experience for those kind of things so i grab my my macbook like anytime she's like send me some money like i go to my macbook open it up and i go to my banking site because i i don't like to do all that stuff on my phone and some of that has to do with old eyes some of that just has to do comfort i prefer the format you know yeah and you know the iPad like so my wife has a older I want to say it's an M to iPad Pro with the keyboard and she'll use that as her like when she's trying to do something on the phone she's like oh this is too small she'll take that up like they all these things have use cases I do think though that at some point Apple has to pare down the iPad lineup because it's just this there's too much there are too many offerings yes particularly so if this MacBook now exists in the iPad Air range I think we're going to see um maybe ipad ipad mini ipad pro like maybe the air goes away like i don't know but they got to um figure out a way there because it's just there's we've said it for a while but this mac is going to shine a huge spotlight over the the just enormity of the ipad line yeah and the fact that there's two sizes of the pro and the air right and then you have and then you have the regular ipad then you have the mini it's like that's i don't know this the world need this many iPads. I just don't think so. All right, Roman. What's next? Oh, you're muted. No, you're muted. Still muted. I think we lost Roman. Oh, no. Sorry, I was muted because I was coughing. No, that does it for comment corner for this week. Okay. Look at us. 55 minutes. All right, we're getting there. for those of you who want a tidy 60 minute podcast, we're, we're, we're working on it. And that does it for this episode of the macro podcast episode number 971. Thank you, Jason. Thank you. Thank you, Roman. Thank you, sir. And thanks to you, the audience for tuning in. You can subscribe to the macro podcast. I thought I remembered it, but I forgot. Undefeated. I was thinking of the comments. You can subscribe to the Macworld Podcast in the podcast app on Spotify, YouTube, at the Macworld Podcast channel, or through any other podcast app. If you have any comments or questions, you can contact us through podcast.macworld.com. Search for us on Blue Sky Facebook, Threads, TikTok, YouTube. Just comment under a video, comment under a post. Look for our Blue Mouse logo. That's how you know it's us. And send us a comment. and you can join us in the next episode of the macro podcast as we talk about everything in so you know what i looked away from the page to see if i remembered it and i still i i gotta rewrite it with the word everything because i always say that joins in the next episode of the macro podcast as we talk about the latest in the world of apple see you next time I'll see you next time.