MBW 1010: A Strand of Woz's Beard Hair - Apple's Record Quarter

It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Jason Snell has the week off, but Micah Sargent joins us. Shelly Brisbane is here. Andy Inaka will talk about Apple's staggering iPhone sales. A record quarter, yep, Jason Snell predicted it. Apple goes the subscription route, but how far is too far. And all the specs finally revealed of the iPhone Fold. Next on MacBreak Weekly. Podcasts you love From people you trust This is Twiz This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 1010 Recorded February 3rd, 2026 A strand of Waz's beard hair It's time for MacBreak Weekly Time to cover the latest appful news As you may remember from previously on MacBreak Weekly Jason Snell is on vacation. The wonderful Shelly Brisbane's filling in today. Hello, Shelly. Hi, Leo. Good to see you, too. Actually, I'm not sure which seat you're in. You're either in the Snell seat or the Lindsay seat. You're in one of those seats. She's in the Lindsay seat. All right. Then she's, by the way, from the wonderful Texas Standard Radio. Then in the Snell seat, that would be Micah Sargent. Hello. Yay. Hello. Host of iOS today. He's doing a long shift today. He just got off iOS today. Yeah. And also Tech News Weekly on this same bat channel. Same bat channel, same bat place. And let's not forget Micah's crafting corner, the chill place. The chill. Every month in our club. What are you doing now? You were doing paint by numbers. Paint by number is still on. It's still happening. I've got a lot of great stuff down the pipeline now. It's just been great. We all just hang out and we talk about our crafts and we talk about life and talk about the food we're eating. It's just a nice chill zone. I think I'm going to be tuning in this Friday to your... Well, I'm getting... I got quad-pilled, but I'll explain. Also with us, Andy and I go from the library. Hello. Hello. Excited as heck because it is 32 degrees outside today. First day, it's not above freezing, but it's at freezing, which is, I mean, I've got flip-flops on. I've got like a steel bucket full of like margaritas here. We're all basking in the joy of just being at freezing. And suddenly Andy's in Margaritaville. Wasted away. So, so, there's a lot of little stuff going on. I guess it's kind of hard. I don't like doing it without Jason here, but he left us with a bunch of color graphs. The quote of the week is Tim Cook's quote of the week. The iPhone has sold in staggering numbers. Yeah. There are a whole bunch of – and there are humble brags, like, all throughout his comments and the Q&A about, yeah, I mean, we're supply-constrained, but it's not because of the AI industry, like, taking our chips. that we just can't build these darn things fast enough. I mean, we thought we had enough. You guys, you just keep buying them. And you know how, like, you know, okay, wearables is down 2%. Okay, okay. But if we could have bought, if we could have sold as many AirPods Pro as people were wanting to buy, we would have been up, up, up, baby. I mean, how embarrassing. And we have to give credit. Jason Snell predicted last week it would be Apple's biggest quarter ever. Yeah. It wasn't, I mean, a real stretch to predict that, but. Yeah. I mean, almost every metric, and they were very, very happy to report this, almost every metric they had is, like, not only, like, up, up, up, but in many cases, like, record for, like, the last two or three years, maybe even record for, like, forever. China, for instance, they were, like, whereas in previous years of these calls, one of the biggest Q&A questions has always been, well, how are you doing in China? Because you're facing a lot of headwinds here. And I don't know what levers you're able to push. That's another buzzword that's come up in the past, levers. They're pulling levers to make things happen. And now it's like, no, it's like up 38% somewhere. And adoption rates, we have like the number one selling phone, number one individual selling desktop PC, number one individual selling laptop in the MacBook Air. So, yeah, I mean, this is a good day to be Tim Cook, so long as they're not asking you about where you're getting your DRAM from in the next two quarters. or so long as you're not asking about... What he did over the weekend. Don't ask him what he did over the weekend. Where did he gone? I just hope it wasn't to see Melania for a second. I'm just hoping. Tim said, you know, I'm going down to the local AMC. I just got to see it again. There were so many details I missed. All I can say is at least Apple TV did not bid or win the bidding for that. That's all I can say. Oh, can you imagine the way that they've been making F1 everything and notifying me on every device about the F1 film? I can only imagine what that was. They really over – they did that – they've done that all the time. They did it with Coda. They do it – it's a promotional vehicle. And I think they should learn – take a lesson from Amazon. We've all come to hate Amazon, the Fire TV, the Echoes, because they're just promotional devices. Careful, Apple. In fact, there's a few things we're going to talk about. Yes. Be careful, Apple. But let me first give you the top line. Highest revenue ever. This is, remember, for three months, $143.8 billion in three months. iPhone, $85.3 billion of that, much more than half. iPhone sales grew 23% year over year. So no wonder Tim's saying this is the strongest iPhone lineup we've ever had. Oh, my gosh. Oh. Oh, and yeah, revenue up 38% in China, as you pointed out. Mac revenue down 7%. That's the poorest of all of the Apple categories. But with all of these, like all the analysts and everybody are basically talking about where – another buzzword on your bingo cart is difficult compare, because this quarter last year was a huge, huge, sweeping introduction of new M5 MacBooks. So that was like artificially high, and they're saying, well, okay, yeah, and it's down, but that's compared to a very unusual high. They've got a lot of Apple Mac stuff coming out this year, which will probably propel them ahead a little bit. There's also another story, which is that Mac minis are flying off the shelves because of this new AI agent, which I have put on my mini as well, OpenClaw, NayClawedBot, NayMultBot, which is a very risky but highly rewarding AI personal assistant is the best way to describe it, that has personality, that will work overnight. And as just the tiniest, tiniest bid to security, people are saying, well, I went out and I got a new Mac Mini just for that so that it's on its own machine. But then I gave it permission to do everything in a credit card. And so, what the heck? Anyway, apparently Mac minis are sold out all over the place, especially the base model, because you don't need much. So, I think the next quarter might be better for Mac. Gross margin, not so gross, 48.2%. That's 40.7% on products, but look at the services margin. And this is going to inform some of the stories we're going to talk about later in this show. 76.5% profit on services. it's all profit, basically, all the way down. So a really great quarter. The graphs from six colors are just full of green. iPad up 6%. Wearables down 2%. And that's the thing. With that down, I'm pretty sure it's been down, down, down, down, down for a while in terms of wearables. And do we – anyone have any insight on that? What are we thinking? Well, as Andy said, part of it was they couldn't make enough AirPods. It's a demand. I think watch maybe people is saturated, do you think? Well, and the watch and AirPod upgrades that happened were not revolutionary. I mean, I think they were fine incremental upgrades, but that's not the kind of upgrade that causes people to ditch whatever device, especially the watch. It's a pretty long-lasting device. I think people think of watches like computers, but they really aren't. I mean, if you don't keep a watch five years, it's because you have extra disposable income because you can easily do that if you want to. And so it doesn't surprise me that they're down a little bit. I don't know whether some super revolutionary new product would make them go up, but that seems relatively flat. I mean, 2% is not particularly. There's nothing to worry about. As Jason Snell points out, the quarter set an all-time record for operating cash flow of three months, remember, $53.9 billion. Jason writes, accounting nerds, this is your stand-up-and-cheer moment. The cash must flow. He also points out that when asked about Google and their deal for AI with Google, Well, Parikh, this new CFO, said we aren't going to provide any details on our arrangement and collaboration with Google. And when Ben writes this, Melody has tried to get more out of cooking only to be stonewalled, he replied on the call, this is on the analyst called Bummer, okay, I tried. And Tim says, you did, through a squall of laughter. There were two main themes through the Q&A, and one of them was supply constraints. The other one was actually not just AI, but specifically Google AI. And then they were just consistently pairing this off and saying that essentially, if anything, they were trying to minimize the contribution that Google was making, or at least trying not to highlight it. I think the closest to something that was kind of interesting we got was that Tim wanted to at least put analysts focused on the idea that Google and Apple are collaborating together to build this thing, as opposed to, no, Google is basically giving us the machinery we need to build the stuff that we want. And also basically trying to compartmentalize it, I think, into they are helping us to build the new version of Siri, as opposed to Apple intelligence is going to be broadly based on the Gemini model that they are building for us. So they're trying to basically not make analysts think that we are desperate and we basically had to rent out this capability. They're also asking questions like they're trying to ask, well, now that you have this deal with Google and now that part of this deal appears to be that some of this work is going to be hosted by Google servers, is that going to affect your capital expenditures? That means you're not going to have to spend quite so much on your own compute support for this. And, again, he kind of parried it and gave a non-answer. I think they're trying to, again, make sure that the focus is on, no, we are an AI company. As a matter of fact, one of the most interesting quotes, a surprising one, I think Tim actually explicitly in his opening comments, I don't have the quote in front of me in my notes, but basically saying that the Mac is the number one top best platform for AI anywhere ever. Why? Why? Yeah, that seemed like an ambitious thing to say. Maybe he, I don't know. No, actually, it is interesting how much of, it actually surprises me, because a lot of what the latest stuff in AI is command line bases in the terminal. But if you install OpenClaw, for instance, it says, well, use Homebrew to install a bunch of these plug-ins. I mean, it's very Mac-focused. Like I said, people are buying Mac minis. You can't run it on Linux. In fact, you know, I think if people really think hard, Linux would be a much better place to do it. But Apple, you know, has put NPUs, you know, neural processing units in its system on a chip. They have a lot of RAM that is accessible to the, you know, it's not in the GPU, but it's accessible to the AI. And that's what AI loves, a lot of RAM. So, you know, the tagline on the the tagline on the Mac mini page on the Apple site is built for Apple intelligence. And I'm sure Apple is happy to have you conflate Apple intelligence with A.I. So it's just kind of a fun juxtaposition when you think about all the Mac minis flying. And there were a couple of announcements that really focused on A.I. on the Mac. We'll talk about that just a little bit. But before we get off the earnings, let me mention services crossing 30 billion dollars for the first time ever. It's really services have been the, and this horrible thing called ARPU, average revenue per user, has been a real focus of Apple. And it's a real success. I think there's no question about that. Well, service is just going to beat that up, you know. Well, yeah. And I think Apple is going to get a little greedy on this. We'll talk about that, too. Apple says two and a half billion active devices around the world. I think that's including Macs, right, and watches. Yeah, that's everything. Yeah, it should. And that factors into a little bit of services. Amongst the record setting they've done is record setting in advertising revenue, although they don't break services down into category of performance. But I think they did say that, yeah, even on the list of things that have set records, they included, I think, advertising in that list. And they were asked a question by an analyst saying that, well, I see that services is doing well. I see that you're basically extending advertising, probably referring to the use of ads in the App Store, by saying, well, are you looking forward to extending the reach of advertising into, say, and he specifically asked about Maps and Apple TV. And that's where Kevin Parix said, again, didn't answer directly, but essentially said, well, we think that the growth is mostly because we've got all these devices, which implies that we have, that Apple has a lot of different eyeballs to put ads in front of. But they did say that, yeah, the advertising is something that we are very, very happy with and we feel as though we haven't reached the bottom of the well yet. The last thing, before we get off of the earnings call, the other thing that I thought was really interesting is how boastful they were, correctly so, about how well they're doing in China and India, essentially making the point that we haven't found – we have yet to sell iPhones to everybody out there who wants to sell an iPhone. And it's not just about supply constraints. It's about markets where they're – particularly with India where they're saying that, hey, look, we've got – we're making huge, huge inroads. Basically, the data that we're seeing in our sales and quarter-to-quarter is showing us that there are more and more people in India who are coming to iPhone from the Android platform. They're already trumpeting how well they're doing in China where, again, we are finding people are coming to our Apple, to MacBooks and to iPhones from their existing devices. So it's not as though that's waning. It's like we have not tapped the end of that vein yet. We're not desperate to keep selling iPhones to just existing customers. We are actually converting people in these markets from Android users and Windows users and Huawei users or whatever to the Apple ecosystem, which is another thing that I'm sure that all the analysts and investors are very, very tickled to death to hear. Mark Gurman's Bloomberg newsletter on Sunday said, Apple's historic quarter doesn't change the need for AI reckoning. Now, remember, he's writing for Bloomberg now, so a lot of what he talks about is really intended for investors, right, and so forth. he says the next 25 years will be defined by AI Apple will need to rebuild its hardware and operating systems using an AI first mentality with voice interactions and AI agents replacing the current app centric model. That's a stretch for me. That's a stretch. I think what's happening, I'll be honest, and I spend a lot of time with AI nowadays and we cover AI on intelligent machines, is that the world is splitting into kind of two camps. The people who have been really AI-pilled, who don't care what operating system they're using. In fact, one of the things all this agentic AI is doing is separating you from brands and big tech companies. They're all just switchboards to whatever you want. And honestly, the command line is probably the easiest way to do that. And then the other group of people is people who want an iPad and a GUI and they want to click on buttons and stuff. Apple would make a huge mistake catering to that first group and abandoning the second group, which is their core audience is a GUI or GUI users. Am I right? Exactly, yeah. I mean, that's sort of the whole point, I feel. It's the whole point. Yeah, so it is. You don't want to lose them. Is it an antiquated? I think it's not only the GUI, it's the familiar interface, but it's also AI skepticism and the degree to which, because AI is so integral to so many business endeavors, that it's really being rammed down people's throats. And I think they feel it in terms of advertising, in terms of messages they hear all day long, not only from the tech companies that want to sell them stuff directly, but from, you know, underwriters on public radio in my part of the world or just random ads you might hear. So in such and such company is an AI company now. And I think for a lot of people, and it could be a minority, but I think for a lot of people there is AI rejection or AI skepticism because it feels like something that they didn't really want. And I think the proponents of AI will point to the high use of ChatGPT and Gemini and all of the other agents out there, and they'd be right to make those points. But at the same time, there's enough AI skepticism in the world that it makes sense for Apple to keep its foot in what is – I can't think of a better word, but I don't like this word – traditional computing, computing in the way of, you know, you're moving files around, you're swiping left and right to manipulate objects. and that is comfortable to most people and frankly accomplishes much of what they want to accomplish because a lot of AI is still speculative and it feels like something that hackers do, especially if you're getting involved with command lines and agentic programming and that sort of thing. So I think Apple is right to sort of keep its feet on both sides of that fence. Yeah, I think that's an excellent point and that was another thing that was kind of hinted at in comments in the call. essentially that we don't know exactly what people want from AI yet. We're just going to tell you that we're ready for it, whatever happens. But it's, I mean, if Apple has historically been, like, their big revolution in the 80s, of course, was to bring the GUI to the mainstream, maybe they're in a position to sort of leverage that sort of spirit and create, use AI not as a feature that you turn to or something that you have to sort of throw your blind trust in, but as the new interface for the machine. The ability to say, collect all of the really good Apple news from the last week. I want to highlight on the earnings call, and please put it in an Omni Outliner spreadsheet organized by topic. And that's simply, instead of actually going through pulling down menus, cut, copying, pasting, switching between apps, it just simply happens for you. That could be part of it. And I'm sure that we'll be talking about a major acquisition that they made this week. And we'll talk about that later. But that implies that they're very, very interested in AI as the human-to-computer interface, whether it is wearables or just simply this desktop has a microphone on it. Why not just simply ask it to do the thing that you want it to do, and it'll do it. German writes, even if Apple continues to thrive in the smartphone market, it could still lose its standing in a fast-changing tech world. the company's own senior executives understand this and privately question whether Apple has the right ingredients to win in the AI-first landscape. I mean, German has bought into this whole thing. I think it is a real challenge for Apple. And I think you're right, Shelley. I think there are a lot of people. Microsoft is the poster child for this. Microsoft is thrusting Copilot down users' throats. Their stock market punished them last week. Huge drop. They lost billions in cap because of that, I think, and because of the cost of doing that. And I think users don't like it. I think Apple, whether intentionally or just because they couldn't get it together, has ended up in the right position, which is that AI is something you choose. You can absolutely do it if you want on a Mac. You can absolutely do it if you want on an iPhone. You can choose any AI you want, but it's not being thrust down your throat. I think Apple would be smart to note what's happening to Microsoft. Right, and then there were features in the early days of smartphones that were available, but that had not yet been adopted by users, and the smart companies let the users be their guide in terms of when those features became available. They sounded sort of outrageous, like you'd get push notifications from your phone, or you'd have text messages so that anybody could contact you at any time or advertisers could get in touch with you via banner ads. All those sort of things that we kind of take for granted and expect from smartphones. There was a time when the phone was thought of as a phone and we make and receive calls via numbers on it. And so users had to come to adopt it. In fact, it happened more slowly in the United States than it did in Europe. So it was sort of an interesting situation for companies like Apple and others who are making smartphones in the late, you know, in the aughts because they had to sort of modulate what can we provide versus what do users want. And I think, again, the pressure from investors and from businesses who are adapting to AI for reasons because they have to, that kind of pressure is putting companies like Apple in a position of trying to lead users down roads that are not ready to go down yet. Well, and one of the things that really worries me is this focus on subscriptions. We've already seen the Creator Studio. Gurman said he thinks that Apple has decided ARPU, that subscriptions are the key to future revenue. He says we already have subscriptions tied to Apple Music, iCloud Plus, Arcade, Apple TV, and, of course, now Creator Studio. And incidentally, people have noted that if you are using the iWork versions that aren't part of the studio, you're getting ads now in iWork. And that's what we're talking about, Andy. Apple's also looking at this ad revenue. I think subscriptions and ads are consumer hostile. I don't know if users are going to like that. First off, I'm not sure how much credence I give to the German comment because that came in the newsletter in the Q&A. And so he's not citing, hey, I have sources that say that this is a direction that they're going in. He wasn't saying I have sources that say that they're trying to put more ads into Apple TV or whatever. I think that this is just him looking at input of questions and coming up with an answer. However, yeah, I mean, people are really, really kicking back, especially on Reddit and other public forums, about how it's not just you double-click on the version of iWork that you actually own that you already had, and, oh, well, there's a splash screen when you launch. Oh, by the way, hey, how about we switch you to a subscription? They're complaining that, no, in the UI, it's like in the toolbar, here is like a call to action to switch to the subscription model, which would absolutely bite. That absolutely is just crossing the lines they shouldn't cross. And, again, they did say that, Kevin in the call did say that we have 2.5 billion active users. That's a lot of surfaces on our devices in which we could potentially put ads. He didn't want to go as far as to say, yes, every time you drop down the Apple menu, we're going to lease out the space of the Apple menu in the upper left-hand corner to have like whatever mini ad you want to run. But it does say that, yeah, we are very, very aware that there is some untapped potential here to go to. And, yeah. And what makes it especially consumer hostile, I mean, it's one thing. You've had iWork for years and years, and people may be attached to pages or numbers or Keynote. I personally think Keynote is the far best of those iWork apps currently because numbers and pages have been allowed to lie fallow, even though there have been some minor improvements. there's still a lot wrong with those apps. So it's one thing to take an app that people love and say, you know what, we can't give this away to you anymore. We have to support it with ads or whatever version of that there is. If it's an app that's beloved and that people have been getting valuable use out of that's free. But it's another thing when you have an app that has not grown along with the platform, has not become more sophisticated, has not become something that people can't use something else to get the work that they want accomplished. and then you say, hey, we're going to put ads in it or we're going to try and mine you to subscriptions. Because for an awful lot of people, Google Docs, Google Sheets is right over there. Or if they have a 365 subscription, they could go the Microsoft route and get the Copilot pill, whatever. There are many options out there and it doesn't seem like that Apple Pages and Apple Numbers are a strong enough reason for people to go, you know what? I'm going to put up with a few ads or I'm going to add a subscription. unless you're already using the Creator Studio tools and that you might find pages and numbers, those versions, an adjunct to what you're already doing. But if you're just an iWork person, I just can't see that it makes any sense. Wasn't it, to me, maybe my memory's wrong, one of the real selling points of the Mac was all the stuff that came built in for free. Without bloatware or, you know, without all the ads, without all that stuff getting in the way, without all the cruft, that was the whole point. It was everything you needed in the computer. Yeah, it's the same. And iOS has always had that advantage over Android, too. Yeah. And that's another thing, by the way, pro tip to anyone who's going through this process right now of considering Creator Studio. If you subscribe to Creator Studio, don't forget to then go back if you have a subscription to Final Cut Pro for iPad, because you're going to need to cancel that separately. Oh, they'll charge you again? Yeah, they'll charge you for the things that are part of the subscription after you subscribe to it. So go make sure that you've canceled all of those. And if you do have a subscription to Final Cut, you probably should get the Creator Studio, right? That would save you money. Yeah, absolutely. Especially right now, you've got, I think, a month of free trial or a week. I can't remember how long now. I don't think I'm going to subscribe to Creator Studio. I thought when I heard about it, I thought, this is going to be great. By the way, I opened pages and said, oh, you have 14.5. You really should upgrade to 15. That's the new version. And, of course, that's the Creator Studio version. It says, we're not going to update this anymore. I'm sure that's true for all the other iWork apps. So, well, it remains to be seen. I mean, I guess they'll continue to work. They won't ship with those old versions. They'll ship with the new version. It doesn't mean you have to subscribe to Creator Studio, but it means you will be importuned to do so. Well, again, if you're used to using those iWork apps, whether you use them on a daily basis or whether you use them to just do monthly checkbook balancing or some sort of personal thing like that, or you double-click a document and it happens to open in Pages because that's what you have on your Mac, there's going to be a point of friction because it's not going to be available anymore in the way that you expected it to. Another thing about Creator Studio, just as a marketing thing, that's kind of interesting to me, it feels like people who have the Adobe bundle may have some resistance to continuing with it because it's expensive and all that sort of stuff. But at the same time, as somebody who's been using Audition more regularly than Logic for the past several years, Audition is Adobe's creative suite. Yes, it's an audio. That's audio. It's great. You could say the same thing about Photoshop or Illustrator. But as somebody who's been using those tools, my muscle memory says, okay, I'm an Adobe person. So if you're going to convert somebody to creator studio, you either have to be somebody, it feels like to me, who's like in the final cut or logic universe and therefore says, okay, I'm going to choose Apple's products over Adobe's products. Or God forbid, they might have to have both if they're using Photoshop and logic for some reason. And I just sort of wonder, like, is the goal to convert Adobe users to Creator Studio and convince them that all the tools that they have are there and that they're better? Because there are a lot of people who have issues with Adobe interfaces. But again, you get muscle memory. It's not that I love Audition. It's that I've learned how to use it, and my muscle memory is such that I'm going to continue to use it. But to convert somebody over to a whole different set of tools, I don't know, it's an interesting question as to whether people are going to make the choice. am I going to pick Apple or am I going to pick Adobe? Because each of them has a subscription. Apple's subscription is arguably a better value, but it kind of depends on what you need. Yeah, it depends on what you need, though. If you're a Final Cut person, it probably makes absolute sense. It feels like that's the people who live, at least to some extent, in Final Cut and maybe Logic. But if you're kind of on the fence, I sort of wonder where you come down. Is cost enough reason for you to switch from an Adobe lifestyle to an Apple lifestyle? And watch our MacBreak Weekly. It's so great to have you, Shelly Brisbane. Oh, it's so good to have you back. Of course, from Texas Standard Radio. Andy Anaco and instead of Jason Snell, a little Micah Sargent. Always good to have Micah on the show. Good to be here. I'm just working with you every week. I know. The tech guys. We've moved away. We've been back at it in a long time. I can't even hang with you, man. So little rain here. I should mention, and we've mentioned it last week, I'll mention it again, Christina Warren will be joining the panel in a couple of weeks, I think February 27th, end of the month. A couple more shows, which is great because we get a chance to see people like Shelley again. And I have a feeling, Christina, now that she's working at GitHub, will take some time off from time to time, as does Jason. Andy, you never take time off. I don't know why. You don't go anywhere, I guess. well I hope if you invite me back that I'll get to be on the same show with Christina she's great, you're going to have a great panel well good, you will, deal, okay, deal, I promise you yeah, we're really thrilled to get Christina on, as you know, she was a long time at the Ultimate Apple Weblog, TUAW, then at Mashable, she hosted for a long time a really great podcast called Rocket, she has been at GitHub for a long time, took a brief sojourn at Google's DeepMind. I wish I could get her to talk about that, but it was quite secretive for some reason. It must have been something. But she went back to GitHub, which there's a story there, I'm sure, too. Anyway, Christina Warren will join us at the end of the month, and we're very happy about that. And we're happy that you're here on MacBreak Weekly. Is it a big story? I don't know, that Apple has changed how you buy the Mac at the Apple Store. remember it used to be choose your Mac and then there was some configuration stuff now it goes right to the configurator so if I choose let's say I'm going to buy my Mac Mini it goes right to the Mac Mini did you see that? let me go back again let's say I want to buy a MacBook Pro it used to say pick one of these three models now it goes right into this full time configurator once you click the buy button, and this is where you choose 14 or 16 inches. This is where you choose what kind of display, what kind of chip. Is that a big deal? It actually seems kind of sensible. Yeah, I mean, there's been a lot of really interesting analysis, think pieces about this, like a lot of speculation. I think this suggests that Apple knows that AI is going to be more important, So people, their customers are going to want more direct control over how they configure this and get the features that they want. I think that it really does go to the simple thing of they're doing this because they did a whole bunch of testing and they believe that they will sell more Macs this way. Or sell more features maybe, right? More of sell. No, well, basically make more money per device this way. And I think that really is all there is to it. It's interesting. They're still offering a Final Cut Pro license or a Logic Pro license when you buy a Mac Pro. That's interesting. That is kind of funny. Actually, when you get down to it, like, again, if you go into the store, here is an item in a box. Great. I'm going to take this box, put it in my cart, and pay for it, as opposed to here is some parts. As opposed to going grocery shopping where it's like, oh, that's right. I need bread. I need a loaf of bread. It's like, ooh, this brand of peanut butter next to the bread is kind of nice. I should grab it. You know what? I've never tried like a nice... Choose the drop down. Crunchy or smooth. Choose the drop down. Do you want sugar or no? Every single thing is like a food pellet for the rat. No, I'm going to tap this bar and get this food pellet. Ooh, I want that food pellet too. So that why I certain that they did a whole bunch of testing They thought that we can increase revenue per sale per checkout if we basically give people not just one buying choice but a series of buying choices while also giving them the idea that, oh, no, I'm taking more control over the configuration of my PC. PC manufacturers. I just bought a Lenovo laptop, and they do it probably their influence by Apple, the way Apple used to do it, where you go to the model, the thing you want, and then it shows you some pre-configuration with stuff. And then there's a button on some of them that says build it, where you get more like the Apple choice now. But even if you were pre-configuring, you still had choices to make. Right. So you would say, okay, you could buy a bigger hard drive, you could buy more memory. Yeah, you always had that configurator, didn't you? Right. And I think the thing I liked about it, and it still exists on the compare page, I liked it because you could sort of create a theoretical comparison between this MacBook Pro and that MacBook Pro in terms of price and chips and the like. And, again, you can do that, but you have to go to the compare page explicitly, which is how I always did it for iPhones. Because whenever I'm on an iPhone podcast, the day new ones come out, I'm like, okay, I can't remember which one has this processor. No one can. So you just compare them three by three. But you're not doing much more configuration than you did at the start. The only thing that I sort of find weird, I do have this sort of lens of if I'm explaining this to somebody who is not a Mac nerd and who's like, okay, I need a MacBook Pro. What do I do? The only thing that's odd to me is that if you consider your MacBook Pro, you choose 14 to 16 inches. Okay, I know what that means. Choose the M4 or the M5. Well, the M5 is faster. Okay, now I have to choose how many cores and how many cores I want. And for some people, that's going to be a confusing choice for people who are not computer experts. They're going to choose, and it's not good, better, best, which was the configurator gave you that, good, better, best, and then you could add little bits to it. You could start out with good, but then you could say, I want 80 gigs of RAM or whatever and make it something very different than what it started out to be. So now you have sort of this more granular thing. As a somewhat novice or non-tech Mac configurator, you might be confused by, Well, not only do I have to choose the chip, but I have to choose the level of that particular chip plus all the other little things. I think it's not going to ultimately make that much of a difference. And I think Andy's right that it's obviously about selling more stuff per Mac. I don't think it sells more Macs, but it does sell more stuff per Mac, theoretically, because every choice where you have the slower versus the faster, they're going to show you why the faster is better for you. and if you think $200 or whatever the difference is is not that big a difference, you're going to go, yeah, why not? I mean, I bought the M4 Pro Mac Mini instead of the M4 Mac Mini. They convinced me. I think I was going to do it anyway. But the more granular the choice, the more confusing it can be to some purchasers. I acknowledge we're probably overanalyzing this. A lot of criminology. But I do think it kind of is an acknowledgment from Apple that the people who are buying Macs are the more sophisticated audience because this is, in my mind, for a more sophisticated audience. And buying the Macs online as opposed to going into the Apple Store. Well, that's truer. Yeah, in the Apple Store, you could better. If you want a MacBook Pro and you go into the Apple Store, if you want a laptop and you go into the Apple Store and you go, hi, Apple genius person, what should I get? They're going to say, well, this one's bigger. This one has a screen option that you can get better screen. This one has more memory available to you. And they're probably going to work you through those configurations, whether they're the good, better, best version that we're used to online. So it's the same kind of thing, and they're going to certainly try and upsell you. If you say you want 16 gigs of RAM, they're going to tell you why 24 is better. So in a live context, they've been doing this for years. Apple, you mentioned this a little bit or alluded to it, Andy, Apple's second biggest acquisition ever is an AI company, according to the Financial Times, $2 billion. that's second only to the Beats acquisition for Q.AI which is pretty speculative. It's an AI audio startup that uses facial expressions to understand you. It's silent speech. What? It sounds really sketch. It's weird. This was a Google Ventures startup so Google's probably happy that they got that check. But it is not like Beats where you say, oh, I understand. They want more consumer-oriented rather than technology-oriented speaker headphones and earbuds. This is a core technology based on micro expressions that it can see off of a human face to speculatively. People are saying, well, that will help you recognize speech because it's going not just by the sound but also by what are the mechanics of what is the face doing, but also the idea of what can we do for control of a device via facial expressions. Obviously, for a $2 billion check, they feel as though this is a fundamental technology. The team has, which will, of course, now be Apple employees, goes back a long, long way. This is actually the second company that the CEO has led and then sold to Apple. They created the previous generations of this guy's technology was the Micro 3 Xbox Connect sensor. So he's been working on this technology for years and years and years and years. But, yeah, it's dazzling when you have that big of a check for something that is such a broad idea, such a broad thing. It really does make you speculate, well, gee, if Apple is coming up with a wearable, let's not think about how accurately it could read lips. Let's think about does that mean that I can just go and suddenly it's actually ordering lunch for me and picking up and hiring an Uber for me? My take on this is it's a talent acquisition that these are machine learning experts, you know, and they will be applying their skills to a different technology because unless, okay, here's the, okay, The conspiracy theory is this will help you with ad sales. If I can turn on the camera and see how people are reacting to my ads, I can target you there. My thought was that little Pixar lamp robot, Daly Bob, that they were turning them working on. It's not reliable enough for me, Mike, to look at you. I mean, we do it as humans, but it's not a reliable signal to look at you. How many times do you get in a conversation where you go, what? Yeah, exactly. Are you mad at me? Yeah, what did I say? We're not sure exactly. We see it, we sense it, but we're not sure exactly. I don't think that's a reliable enough signal for machine learning to work off of. A third possibility is that they just feel as though it's patent. In addition to having lots of patents, they say this patent portfolio is so valuable that we would like to own it, not necessarily because we would like to build products that are enhanced by these patents, but that means that we have an arsenal of no matter what we do for the next five or ten years, we can basically say, no, no, no, we own the patent to that sort of technology. You can't sue us about this or you can't block us or modify what we're going to do about it. So oftentimes the value of patents is often tactical as opposed to strategic. I'm sorry, strategic rather than tactical. I'm sorry, I get those two. I'm going to vote for it's a talent acquisition entirely, that the technology itself is probably not that interesting. But maybe we'll see. The other thing about patents, and every once in a while you get some leak of a patent filing, and people are quick to jump to how that patent filing is going to lead to a specific product in six months, which is ridiculous. And so I am not as skeptical about the technology itself, and I don't even think it needs to be taken entirely literally. Because even if you say on its face, facial expressions are not precise enough, I think there is a way that that kind of technology, if it's far enough along, could be applied and could be combined with gestures or some other more definitive indication of what one wants to do. I'll also say that it's great for accessibility for somebody who has speech difficulties or physical motor disabilities. And I love the idea that in all or in parts, probably in parts, could be applied to some sort of accessibility-based head-worn interface. I love that idea. Yeah, but does the average person want a camera on them all the time and their computer analyzing their expressions? I mean, does the average person want a lot of things? I don't necessarily think that's the case, but again, I agree. And the technology, and I hadn't thought of the ad, that's diabolical, the idea that, oh, jeez. My mind went there, I'm sorry. Well, and let's remember that Apple has had a huge brain drain in their AI and machine learning talent. You know, everybody's leaving. I mean, every week Mark Gurman's got four more people going to open AI or Meta. So Apple's looking anywhere it can. $2 billion sounds like a lot of money. Certainly a lot of money for a technology as speculative as this. QAI has no demos. They have no videos of demos. But maybe it's not too much if you get a team of four or five really good AI experts or machine learning experts. And you can put them under very long-term contract. Well, that's why you have to pay a lot of money. Right. That's what Mark Zuckerberg's paying. That's what it costs nowadays. $2 billion, though. That's a lot of money. I'm not skeptical. I'm saying this is where I have to throw up my hands and say I don't know what to think because every time I think, oh, well, maybe it's this, maybe it's that, you keep hitting it, $2 billion. So Apple had a lot of reason to think that this is going to work out great for the company. And at $2 billion. How much did they pay G. Andrea, though? There was more than that. Yeah. For one guy. I can't remember. I can't remember. But it wasn't $20 billion. $20 billion a year. What? Something like that. When didn't we see that number? 20 million is much. You're out. Okay. Maybe it wasn't a year. Maybe it was over a multiple years. Yeah. And presumably the quote-unquote one guy has got a team. I mean, I would doubt that it's one guy driving over in his Maserati. He's probably got some folks with him. Also with Jandrea, Apple, you have a company that says we were caught flat-footed by AI. We have next to nothing going on in AI. We have the opportunity to buy the head of AI at the company that is from Google, who is right now basically invented all of the AI that all the tools being used right now are based off of. Yes, of course, we're going to hold out our checkbook to basically buy a way into having an AI department that can actually compete. And get the investors to chill out. So whatever the actual outcome of it, if a lot of this is about getting the investors to chill out, then, you know, there might be some value in spending even larger. $20 million a year. Sorry about that. $20 million. That sounds more realistic. Yeah, well, it's funny how that we've inflation, because if you told me you were going to pay me $20 million a year to do anything, I would be, yeah, that seems fair. That's a lot of money for one person. But so, yeah, you're right. $2 billion. But if you've got 50 people for $2 billion, man. The Costco bulk pack? Okay. Yeah, that's right. You've got a bulk pack. It's a pallet full of AI. You know who Apple did get, which is really interesting. They bought an AI company and one of those fried chickens that they like so much. Sebastian DeWitt has moved from Halide. He was the co-founder of this great camera app. Remember all his great blog posts about how Apple's camera worked and all that? Founder of Halide and Lux. he is joining now this is weird Apple's human interface design team he's going as a designer not as a technologist he worked as a freelancer for Apple according to 9to5Mac on Find My Mobile, Me and iCloud but again he's not going as a developer he's going in design he did lead design for Halide and did a very nice job and the company was eager to point out that, well, yeah, that doesn't mean that our company is going away. As a matter of fact, they had a blog post that really outlined an ambitious and intriguing new direction. They developed a brand-new image pipeline that is kind of – they want to continue to make the brand of this app that this is the professional camera for stills. This is the no-AI version of it. This is a pipeline that is designed to make sure that if you want deep, deep, deep shadows, you will get deep, deep, deep shadows with this pipeline that we have, as opposed to every computational model, which is say, no, look, there must be some detail we can get out of there. Let's not have – most of the times I've been super disappointed by phone cameras when I've stopped at sunset and the street lamp is making these beautiful shadows against the wall. Like, wow, that's just such punchy blacks and I want to save this. And then I get, I look at it on my laptop, oh, so basically instead of these beautiful dark blacks, I've got this gray mush that kind of shows the bricks in the wall. Okay, no way to interpret my artistic, right? So, hey, like, Lux says that losing Sebastian DeWitt is not a big deal. Yeah. Okay. He actually came from a design background, I guess, so I didn't know that. And he's a mighty good-looking fellow, so that's good. Yeah. I mean, when you think about it, if he is a design guy and not a camera guy, you know, you can either spend the next 10 years having opportunities to improve the design of this one app, or you can improve the design of all apps for one of the most culturally significant sets of platforms on the planet. It is hard to say no to that. Absolutely. Yeah. It's absolutely hard to say no to that. Apple getting a lot of heat for telling Patreon creators, we're going to take 30%. of your donations. You don't mind that. We're going to do it November 1st. Patreon has said, look, switch. If you're a donor to a creator, do it on the Patreon website, not through the App Store's in-app purchase system. I'm surprised, actually, that Apple hadn't been taking that cut. I guess I was, I will be honest, I was surprised about that, too. When I read this, I thought, oh, wait, that's new? It doesn't surprise me. It is absolutely rent-seeking, though, isn't it? I mean, Apple had nothing to do. It didn't need to. Yeah, it didn't need to. Well, and it's an opportunity for creators to say things like, please buy on the website, please donate to us on the website instead of through Apple. So it's another opportunity to ding Apple as a creator who wants to get support from their patrons. patrons, and it just seems greedy, and it seems like it creates negativity on Apple that Apple doesn't need. I mean, why do that? Apparently, according to TechCrunch, only 4% of Patreon creators use the in-app purchase. I mean, that's an interesting statistic to me, because my first thought when I saw that was, as Micah said, I'm surprised they didn't do it, but I also wonder how many people donate through apps, Patreon apps. Like, I don't use the Patreon. Like, if I'm going to donate to somebody, I'm probably going to find the link on the website. On the website. On the website. And they may direct me to the – I'm not going to manage that subscription in the Patreon app. I don't know what advantage there is for me unless, I guess, if I'm managing multiple things that I'm a Patreon of, then I can, you know, manage my spending or whatever within the app. That would be the advantage for me as a consumer. But I personally don't do that. I've never done it. I'm going to be honest with you. I didn't really know that. app. It's not safe. Yeah, I don't have the app on my phone. It's a terrible app. I removed it from my phone because it was just so horrible. It was horrible. Even on my phone, accessing it through the web is 10 times better because it puts the focus on all the cartoonists that I want. Oh, wow, Danielle Casero has a new – it's Friday, so she has a new set of cartoons. That's what I'm there for, not to see recommendations, not to see things just being pushed at me. I mean, I said it was despicable because this is – I've always thought that the App Store is Apple's personality when it drinks, okay? It's the one area where I don't know why you run this so badly. It's Mr. Hyde to it, Dr. Jekyll. Is that what you're saying? Well, it's just like I can't – and if I'm going to sift some good news to talk about Apple about this is that the big news is that they're extending the deadline for complying with – for Patreon doing this. It used to be a few months earlier, and they extended it to November, but now that's it. The thing is, like, when this comes up in other situations about the 30% tariff, so to speak, I just keep saying, okay, again, Daniel Corsetto is doing five beautiful, beautiful hand-painted cartoons a week and posting it. But how are you entitled to 30% of her money for all the work? Are you saying that, well, of course, we're responsible for a third of her success? Like, no, you're not. Like, she had nothing. You had nothing to do with anything there. You're just basically saying that any time there's any money that crosses hands, I need to wet my beak a little. And that is basically in every mob movie directed by Martin Scorsese you have ever seen. Well, right. And nobody is depending on the app as the vehicle for consuming those cartoons. I mean, I guess you could, but you're going to consume them on the web. Or if there are a lot of people who have extra podcast content or extra video content that is available through their patron page. But unless that app is a particularly desirable means of either watching that stuff or aggregating it in some way, what's the benefit to the people who are actually the patrons, never mind the people who are getting ripped off? Yeah. I just think that in principle, there should be some sort of movement inside Apple to say, wait a minute, are we really saying – I can understand why we're saying that – while we're saying that we've developed these APIs, we've developed this marketplace, we've developed this app store, and in many cases, we are worthy of a 30% cut. the fact are we really going to go so hard to the wall that anytime any money transacts at all, we deserve, we have earned 30% of that. Even when all you're doing is saying that, yeah, you know this comic book that you want to buy through the Kindle app? Yeah, we deserve 30% of that. We're going to make sure there's no profit margin whatsoever. We want to take it all. Like, again, what did you do to earn that 30%? And I'm glad there are ways around it. Again, I'm totally with you, Shelly. Like, again, this does not affect me at all. And fortunately, all the creators on Patreon have enough of an advance notice to appeal to their users directly and basically make that messaging that if you please, please, please don't sign up through the app, please, please, please sign up through the web because I will get more money off of it that way. But I just think in principle that this is not a good look for Apple ever. And there's a way for creators to message that that will get the users to understand. Like, it's very easy to make pithy messaging that says, we let us keep the money that you want to contribute to us and also boo Apple. And that's why I think it's dumb that Apple's doing it, because I think it would be very easy and almost necessary for a creator who's trying to preserve their 30%. They have to ding Apple. They have to say, Apple is trying to pick our pocket, which means they're picking your pocket. Come on over and do it via the website. Proton has a very interesting website. They call Tech Fines Tracker, Big Tech Small Consequences. Proton, of course, the Swiss-based software company that does ProtonMail and so many other applications. Their point is that these fines are such a small percentage of the overall revenue of these companies that they're meaningless. Proton says that Apple last year, this did not show up at Apple's quarterly earnings report, paid $851 million for privacy and antitrust violations. But that was down from $2.1 billion the year before, so that's good news. Proton also points out it would take Apple at its current run rate three days, three hours, and 28 minutes to pay off the $851 million. So the amount of fines is about equal to the amount of money they just paid for QAI. So it takes them three hours and 28 minutes to make that back. That was in 2024. I know, I know, but still. Exactly. $2 million is not the same to you and me as it is to Apple. It's cushion change for Apple. So anyway, I did not know about this site, but it's a good site to kind of keep an eye on. And it's also graphically great. They show that, you know, Google's fines last year were $4.24 billion. But that's, again, just a fraction of the total amount they make. The fines are growing. Meta, only $228 million last year. Amazon, $2.5 billion. Google, $4.24 billion. But again, look at the stack of coins that Google has. It's a cost of doing business. You put that in there with the rest of lunches for the employees and things like that. At the end of the day, there are some poison pills inside a lot of these regulations. They could. That's right. Where it's like, hey, 10% of all worldwide revenue. The thing is, like, Google and Apple, particularly Facebook, too, they're too big to regulate because if they really, really wanted to say, look, we're sick of this. We're sick of you flouting our laws. We're sick of you saying that, no, go ahead, find us wherever you want. We'll either pay it or we will just not pay it. What are you going to do? Ban Gmail from your entire country? What are you going to do? Make the iPhone not work in your entire country? We don't think you're going to do that. So let's negotiate to something that we think that we can tolerate. The $851 million came for four different fines in February. South Korea fined Apple $3.2 million. Again, some change for data illegally obtained without users' consent. France, $162 million. Now we're talking some money for violating privacy laws. The EU at large, $571 million for breaching DMA rules for the App Store. I think, though, all of these are on appeal. I don't know if they actually cut any money. That was my question. Has it been paid or is it? Yeah, I don't think so. Italy, $115 million for Apple abusing its dominant App Store position. So two for privacy and two for the apps. Proving once again that a duopoly is not freedom of choice. Yeah, yeah. No fines from the United States of America, I might point out, because we love Harry Apple. There's a great picture of Sebastian DeWitt. I was looking for that. Good-looking fellow. He should be in the movies. Leo's got a crush. I do have a little man crush. Good-looking guy. Camo is doing Apple for Sherlocking them with continuity cam. I really like Camo. I use Camo. Lisa's borrowing my laptop because her screen cracked, and so her laptop's at the Apple Store. And, you know, when she first logged on to Google Meet or Zoom, there was no picture. And she said, what's going on? I said, let me look. Oh, you're on Camo, but you don't have a Camo camera attached. So Camo was before continuity camera, a great way for using your iPhone. I still use it. as your camera. Continuity doesn't have all of the features. Reincubate, the company that does camo, has accused Apple of copying its technology. This took a long time. Continuity camera came out in 2022. Yeah, that's the thing that surprised me the most about this is how long it's taken for this to happen. I wonder if Reincubate was sort of working through whether this is something that they would even have grounds for. I've spoken to one of the founders of the company quite a few times. Back when the pandemic was going on, Matthew Cassinelli and I both talked about Camo when it was in its earlier days and ended up talking to, again, the CEO of the company. And I kind of was curious whenever Continuity Camera came out. I asked him, you know, what's and for him, he mentioned that he has always felt like it was its own entity. And because of the extra tools that it provides, the extra features that it provides and the fact that it works across platforms as well, made it unique enough to where it had its own standing. And I kind of wondered, though, that despite that, how long would it take for sales to be impacted by Apple's own continuity camera? And I wonder if it's just gotten to that point as well as. Right. As more devices support continuity camera, they didn't necessarily when it first came out. Yeah. There's a blog post that kind of goes into it. They're basically saying that when they got Sherlocked, they had a very, very intimate relationship with Apple that they actually go into a little bit of the history, essentially saying that, look, they were – Apple were – a lot of our better users were at Apple. They had thousands of users inside Apple. They were encouraging us. They gave us some exposure during the keynote during 2022 WWDC, all this sort of stuff. And when it happened, there was a lot of behind-the-scenes communication between Camo and Apple about, hey, what the hell, man, and a lot of sympathy and, hey, stick tight. We're talking about it. We're trying to figure something out. And implied in the blog post was that one of the things they were considering is, well, what if we just buy you out and solve this problem and do all this sort of stuff? And so basically after two years, they basically – the author of the blog post is saying, well, we feel now as though that they were just trying to get us to shut up and go away. And so at this point, we are basically trying to defend our patents and suing. But, yeah. Well, it reminds me of Massimo because part of that issue was that Massimo and Apple had talked about the technology that ended up being the blood oxygen in the watch. And so Massimo was saying Apple stole from them because they had access to their stuff. So if, in fact, Camo and Apple were talking, then you could see that there would be more either opportunity for a lawsuit because, oh, we can prove that there were conversations, even if they weren't at the time as acrimonious as they presumably are now. And I have no personal relationship with the Camo people at all, and I don't want to cast aspersions on them. but having a rich company like Apple is going to attract those who will attempt to get money from them either because they've legitimately been economically harmed or because it's a target of opportunity. And again, I don't want to say that that is what's happening. It might not be. They may very – Camo may very well have an absolute rock-solid case. I don't know that either. But money is very tempting, and Apple has a lot of it. It may well be that Camo was doing all right until recently, and then suddenly sales completely dropped off. Well, right, and that's kind of their point. It's like, look, we've been economically harmed. We made this product that used to be needed by a lot of people who didn't have access to something called continuity camera, and now we don't because continuity cameras everywhere. Well, here's one way to make money. If you've got an old Apple I prototype board lying around. Right over here. But it's called the, quote, Celebration Board. It sold for $2.7 million. It is such an early prototype. I love the description, actually, if you read it from RR Auctions. It's such an early prototype. And the way they know, it's a pre-Bite Shop order. Remember, the first big order for the Apple I was from Paul Terrell's Bite Shop. And Steve and Woz walked in, you know, without shoes on and said, man, you want to buy these? He said, well, yeah, if you can assemble 50 of them. Well, this predates this. And one of the reasons they know it is because it used a unique mix of hand-soldered components sourced locally for testing rather than from their later standardized purchasing. Like, and this is meaningless to me, but I think Burke will understand it, two common silver Sprague 39D capacitors, not computer-rated but easily available at a radio repair shop. It also has some unique modifications to the 74-123 timing circuit, consistent with the diagnosis of timing issues before full-scale production. And there's, I think, a beard hair from Wozniak in one of the solders. No, I'm making that up. What they do is they go to this guy. There's a guy who evaluates these, Corey Cohen, and makes reports on them based on, you know, what he sees on it, which demonstrates that it is, in fact, that it must have been, in fact, one of the very first Apple I prototype boards. So somebody thought that was really super valuable. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of money in the tech space and a lot of people who were like children in the 80s. And you think that people are willing to spend, wow, that's silly. You're spending $250 for a He-Man figure that you had when you were a kid. Yeah, how about $2 million for the computer that you wish that you read about that was part of the Apple legend? I mean, Apple ones were always like through the roof valuable. I still remember back in the 80s in Bike Magazine had classified section. Even back then when an Apple one was maybe 10 years old and really not part of anybody's childhood per se, someone had one listed for $10,000 in the mid to late 80s, and that was in itself pretty astronomical. This is part of, we talked about it last week before that, Steve Jobs' personal effects, like his clip auction, like his clip on bow ties and stuff. But they ended up raising $8 million for this stuff. The other thing that sold for a lot of money was the very first check written by Steve and Woz. And Steve and Woz both signed it, a $500 check before Apple was even incorporated. It's dated March 16, 1976. and it sold for $2.4 million. A piece of paper. Was it the autographs? Was it the historical significance? And is this just going to go on somebody's yachts, the wall of somebody's yacht, or is this a historical document that is going to be kind of loaned out to museums and exhibitions the way that fine art is loaned out? I hope it's the latter because there are a lot of people that like, they like to see that tactical evidence of history. Apple historically has not been terribly interested in preserving or celebrating its history. They used to have an actual history department, and then when Steve Jobs came back a second time, he said, yeah, we're not doing that anymore. Go away. But these artifacts are actually – this is part of not only tech history but American cultural history and, in one argument, world cultural history. And these things need to be preserved, and these things need to be accessible to researchers and to people who are just interested. Well, I don't know why anybody would spend $113,000 for six of Steve's pre-owned clip-on bow ties, but somebody did. That makes less sense. I can see the Apple I board in the executive offices of some tech company. I'm not saying it's worth it. I'm just saying I can see them putting it in the executive offices, and they put a nice light behind it. The cheapest thing you could get, maybe I would buy this. I don't know. I could afford it, I guess. Steve Jobs personally owned Apple One computer ribbon cable. Went for $3,000. So they took an Apple One apart and they sold it piece by piece. Steve Jobs personally owned. I don't know if it's signed. I don't know if his DNA is on it. They found it in a basket in his office or something. By the way, I think the providence of all this is it was from Steve's house. His childhood home. His Joan Baez 8-tracks went for $6,250. And his bedroom desk, $81,000. I would like to think that the provenance of that ribbon cable, if it actually goes from an adult Steve Jobs history, is that some underling had that thrown at their head by Steve in a fit of anger, and then Steve yelled at him to pick that damn thing up off the floor because it's garbage, and he put it in his pocket, and now he's got a little bit of payback. The Apple Garage, which I guess was untouched for years, and so the owners of the Apple Garage, there's the ribbon cable, by the way, and the auction house assures you it's, what do they call it? It's in fine, good to fine condition. I'm just imagining them dismantling it item by item, and now they're getting down to the cables. For a while it was, you know, hard drive enclosures. Well, not even hard. That would have been too long ago. but you know something bigger and then all of a sudden they go down to you know from dot matrix printers all the way down to ribbon cables it's amazing that somebody bought it for three thousand dollars but like you know some people have history disposable okay yeah exactly it is a piece of history like the math we did for apple it not you know it maybe probably for some rich enough you know Elon Musk it a second worth of earnings or something But they see then that person is going to pass on and their descendants are going to go, well, what do I do with this? What's this ribbon cable? I don't even know what this is. It's like I'm thrown away. It will be thrown away. That's rough. You're watching MacBreak Weekly. Andy Anaco is here. Micah Sargent filling in for Jason Snell. It's wonderful to have Shelly Brisbane back from Texas Standard Radio. What were the big stories this morning on Texas Standard Radio? Oh, well, let's see. It's very hot in Texas prisons, and there are no standards to regulate it, even though there are standards to regulate the heat in county jails. So we did a lot of data analysis. So what you're saying is commit a misdemeanor, because if you do a felony. Yes, right. You're going to be very warm in the summertime. It's going to be too hot. A lot of data analysis about which prisons are the hottest. So I suppose if you wanted to choose, if you were able to choose the prison you went to based on its heat, I don't know. Isn't it colder in the winter? It's not hot now, is it? Let's see. Andy was talking before the show about it was just hitting freezing in his area. And I was checking. We were at 67 degrees. Nice. We actually did have some very cold weather last week. We had ice, not snow, but we had freezing rain, which meant the entire city kind of went crazy and didn't know what to do. Nobody drove anywhere for like two days, and the schools were closed. But now we're back up to 60 seconds. It happens here in the first rain of the season. Everybody is like, we forgot everything they knew. Shelly, I think I'd almost prefer that because in New England, because we get these, I mean, Texas is not expected to be able to deal with that because you almost never really get it. In New England, it's like, oh, wow, bummer. So you've got like 14 to 18 inches. We are, oh, well, so you'll be at the office an hour late. Let's say a half hour late, hour late if you're really, really like, oh, damn it. I got to shovel. I got to shovel. We got 62 degrees under sunny skies going up to 67. Later this afternoon, a good Tuesday afternoon. Oh, it's the weather. It's the radio guy coming back to life. There he is. And that's your Backbreak Weekly Weather Report. Traffic on the 8th coming up. All right, on we go with, actually, it's rumor time. A lot of rumors. I am excited about the, I think I probably will buy the iPhone Fold. We now see the specs, and people seem to agree, at least all the Mac blogs, that these are pretty credible. So I will, this is from Ybo, Instant Digital, the leaker. the volume buttons are not on the left side. What do we do? What do we do? They're instead placed directly on the top right side of the device, similar to the volume button placement on the iPad mini, which will challenge users' iPhone usage habits. iPad style layout, and basically they're attributing that to the fact that, okay, so the logic board is on the right side and on the left side, so they have to put all those physical controls on the right side. That makes sense. In my mind, I hope I'm right, I'm thinking of it as an iPad that folds up into a phone, not a phone that unfolds into an iPad. That's going to be the weird thing, though, because when this was more speculative, when we knew that they were working on it to actually try to actually ship this sometime in 2025 or 2026 or 2027, that's like, gee, wouldn't it be great to have something that's kind of like the Samsung Fold, where it unfolds into a kind of a substantial tablet sort of experience, and now we're getting closer and closer to actual, like, the predicted ship date, it feels like it's going to be more of a passport size. And now it's like that's kind of changed how excited I get because I've seen devices like that, and, like, it's fine, it's great. I don't know if it's enough of a transformation of experience to make me feel as though, If I were shopping for a new phone with a $2,000, $2,300 budget, if I would think that, yeah, that's enough of a transformation that, yeah, I definitely want to spend more money for that rather than getting an absolutely maxed out iPhone 18 Pro with a calfskin Horween leather case and all the other accessories. Let me continue with the Weibo Woomers. The power button integrated with Touch ID and the AI button, camera button, are still on the right side. As you said, Andy, the speculation is because the motherboard's there and then in one room wires across. Left side, completely free of physical buttons. The Weibo Woomers says this results in the iPhone with the largest battery capacity ever. You've got a lot of real estate to put a battery in there. Single punch hole front camera design, smaller and cleaner active area cutout. The rear dual cameras, microphone and flash, are arranged horizontally on the right side. The module appears to have a completely black base, not matching the body color. Currently, white is the only color confirmed. Two other colorways are expected to be announced on release. That's the full Weibo Wuma report. We'll have traffic on the 8s coming up. So, you know, again, it's just a rumor, but we are getting into that time frame where they're probably going to start to have prototypes. And a lot of these rumors are coordinating with each other, or rather sort of intersecting with each other. We've been hearing Min-Chi Kuo and a bunch of other panel supply chain analysts talk about this for the past couple of years. We're seeing a lot of, oh, well, yeah, that makes sense. Yes, we've confirmed this. There's still a lot of excitement. Like, I'm wondering just simple things like how does Apple anticipate people using this, and are they going to lock people into it is either a closed phone or it is an open tablet sort of thing? Like, are they going to let you do sort of the – one of the nicest things about this sort of design is that you could do things like have a video player or a chat app like FaceTime where you have it sitting flat like on the table, and the top half of the screen is giving you your actual video and has the camera embedded in it, but the top that's like flat on the surface is actually your control, so you can hit a mute button, you can hit a volume button. And is Apple going to give developers modes like that, or are they going to say, nope, it's either completely closed or it's completely open. There is no in-between to take advantage of. Do you think they'll do the iPad OS on it or a modified iPhone OS or just straight-up iPhone iOS OS on it? It would be a shame if you open it up and you can't use it as something like a tablet. I can't imagine justifying that expense by saying, well, it's a phone with the biggest screen we've ever put on an iPhone. Not that it's going to be a super productivity device. There are things about the iPad OS that are not ideal, including the, I mean, the windows make it better, but I don't know that I really want to mess around with windowing on a phone. And then the sort of multi-column approach, I think iPad OS is still inferior to iOS. I'm open to sort of seeing what they do, but iOS is kind of the gold standard, and I guess I wonder whether they would go out from iOS and add a few iPad OS features to take advantage of the real estate rather than trying to, you know, make iPadOS work for a phone. You think maybe they would make it iPadOS-oriented, so to speak, but nonetheless basically say, well, you can't do multi-windowing, you can do split view and slide over, stuff like that? iPadOS Lite? I wonder about that. Yeah, I mean, that might make sense. iOS Plus? I also just want to say... iPadOS. I also just wanted to add my futile complaint about the volume buttons on the top. I don't like it. It doesn't mean that that's not going to happen. Yeah, I'm with you. I don't like it either. I'm not a fan of it. I mean, you know, visual aids here. I'm reaching over with my other hand to the top or I have to go up like this. There are going to be some people who will be converting to the assistive touch accessibility feature to manage volume as opposed to trying to get up to the top. I think for some people with motor disabilities, it's going to be an issue. But even if you don't have a motor disability, I'm used to having the volume buttons under my thumb. And used to is the operative word, of course. I don't know how much of it is being used to it and how much of it is this is just really inconvenient. It doesn't make sense because I've never had a phone with volume buttons on the top of any kind, way back to flip phones. Volume buttons belong on the side. So we'll just see how people take to that. Yeah. Well, there's also a rumor, I don't know how credible this one is, that Apple's going to do another folding phone. Just as Samsung has a phone, I've got a product demo. Well, I put it somewhere. A Galaxy 7, 8 soon to come out that folds like the iPhone sort of will. They're going to do a flip phone. They're like a Galaxy Flip. I think I would go for an iPhone flip phone. I really do. Okay, look, I don't know about you all, but the number of people to whom I have spoken who were born at the end of the 90s, okay? So like 97, 98, 99. I don't know people. Actually, I do know some of my nieces. Are they like four years old now? What is this? Yeah, exactly. The number of people I've spoken to who come at the end of the 90s who, A, call themselves selves, 90s kids, but also B, live in the nostalgia of the 90s. A, back to me, I get annoyed by that because they're not actual 90s kids. But the point is, I'm telling you, nostalgia is a very powerful thing. And also, what is the word? Delusional nostalgia is a very powerful thing. And so you have no idea the number of influencers that you're going to see with flip iPhones if they are this sort of new but old method of flipping from the top. I bought the Galaxy Flip because I too thought, oh, that's what I want. I want a smaller phone, not a regular phone that opens to a bigger thing. But I've kind of put it by the wayside because I don't really use it. And I don't really use the Samsung Fold either because it's Android. And I really think that what will be compelling is an iPad that folds up into a phone. But you want the phone that folds into a smaller phone. Okay. Did the Flip sell well? I can't. I don't know. I don't remember. I actually don't know if it sold well. I don't know. Well, then you've got to make more modifications to iOS. You're going to have less. Right. You're going to have more difficulty porting. You can have the iPad OS versus iOS argument, but if it's a vertical Flip phone, that's going to be a different. Well, for instance, one of the things that the Samsung Flip does is it's smart about whether it's half folded. So apps will actually take the top half of the screen and then use the bottom half for the keyboard. Like, you have to redesign stuff. Not necessarily. I mean, Apple could make a commitment. I think it would be a compelling product. I'm with you, Micah. One of the things that Apple does extremely well is that they're just really good at developing an object that is very, very satisfying as a physical object. And the idea of having a phone, which is, again, in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, people took great pride in what cigarette case they had and what lighter they had and what fountain pen they had. The phone is now that exact same thing. It is something that you have on your dresser, and you pick it up on the first thing you get. And the idea of having not this bar thing that has a glass screen on the outside that you have to kind of keep protected, but the idea of, no, here's this beautiful little folding thing that I can slip, not just in sort of the biggest pocket that I've got available to me or choose a purse based on can I fit this phone in here, but here's something the size of a compact that I can just simply bury inside. It is good for lady pockets. It's absolutely great for lady pockets. And the flash of I'm going to flip it open to make a call, then I'm going to flip it closed. It's done. It doesn't necessarily have to have multiple modes. When it is open, it is simply an iPhone. When it is closed, it is simply an object. that I think the way that I would imagine it would be kind of like what Samsung did, which is there is a supplemental OLED screen on the outside that is simply giving you like a watch OS sort of widget experience that you can choose. And when you want to take selfies or take pictures, it will give you the selfie camera. So it would be an interesting way if Apple were to really prosecute this concept, the idea of what if you had a phone that you could use without necessarily having to open it and be distracted by everything that a huge, regular, multi-touch smartphone surface gives you. See, that's what I want a folding phone for. That is the only reason I want a folding phone, so I can have an outside screen like that. Well, we'll see. It's from Mark Gurman, and he says that Apple tested a bunch of different form factors before they settled on the larger folding form, But now they're reconsidering a clamshell foldable. Information also said they had some prototypes. German points out the product is far from guaranteed to reach the market. So it's just something they're thinking about. They'll probably watch with interest. You know, Samsung announced that their tri-fold, they have a tri-fold now, is going to be $28.99. It's going to be almost $3,000. so remember it costs more to make these things they're not it costs more and then I feel like the people who have them barely use them I don't see a lot of people I can't even find mine I think it's for the $2 million Apple check crowd where this is not going to be my primary phone God bless America I've got $2,500 $2,600 to spend on a phone even if it's not going to be my primary driver. Actually, on that, there actually have been enough marketing studies now that there have been folding phones available for so long. I would have imagined that given the price, most of the people buying these are not necessarily buying it as their primary phone. They're saying, well, I got the second line, the second phone for when I want a foldable, but I still got a normal phone. Turns out that most people, when they buy these folding phones, even for $2,000, they're actually trading in their existing, and they are using it as their daily driver. Yeah, that's what I did. I don't know if that would be the same story. This was my only Android phone until recently. And, you know, Samsung did it right. It's really thin. It's light. It feels good. You know, I mean, I think they did a good job with it. But Android, I know you're an Android user, Andy, so I won't smirch Android. But it doesn't use the real estate any better. It's just like a bigger screen. It's amazing that Google decided two and a half, maybe three years ago that, hey, how about if you actually – how about if you didn't have – sorry. Even in the tablet era when the Android tablet makers were trying to compete with the iPad, even then Google was so far behind on the idea of, oh, well, we'll just have a phone app that just basically stretches in size to fill this iPad-sized screen. It's only in the past two or three years that they seem to have gotten really, really serious about understanding what you do on Android when it's not a phone-sized screen. Samsung had to build pretty much all of that infrastructure themselves, not only for their tablets but also for these foldables. And they've actually been collaborating with Google to develop these systems because Google, for some reason, decided that wasn't super important. Gurman also says the new MacBook Pro, the M5, J714 and 716, should come out soon. they are slated for the 26.3 Mac OS software cycle, and that means in the next month or two. He also says, good news, that OLED M6 will probably be out this year in the fall. So good news for me because that's the one I thought maybe I would get, although now I'm not so sure, but we'll see, we'll see. Actually, there's a breaking news, so to speak. Apple just a couple hours ago announced Xcode 26.3. We're going to get to that. Sorry, I didn't see you on the show, Doug. So, go ahead. The next one down. We will be talking about AI. I think that's enough on rumors. Andy's right. We're going to move on. Watch a Mac break weekly. Andy and I go, Alex, Lindsay is being replaced soon. But until then, Shelley Brisbane is with us, which is wonderful. Alex's seat, as I mentioned, will be filled by Christina Warren, end of the month. And for Jason Snell, who's on vacation. Or maybe he's at Apple's 2026 TV event today. Yeah. Which I didn't know about. I don't know. He said he's on vacation. We'll see. Anyway, we're glad to have Mike. Air quotes around that probably. Well, maybe he's on the way to vacation. He's coming out there. I'll leave for that. All right, Andy. So, agentic coding comes to Xcode. Apple clearly stinging a little bit because the first thing that happens last week, Google, I'm sorry, Anthropik announces Claude Cowork, which only runs on a Mac, and is designed to be kind of a cross between Claude Code, which is command line based, and Claude the chatbot so that you can chat with it and have it do stuff. We talked a couple of weeks ago on Twit with one of my favorite security guys, Alex Stamos, And he said it was very impressive the way Google Anthropic had wrapped co-work. It's a virtual machine, which is why it takes so long to launch. I mean, they really paid attention to security for this thing. Also, in response, OpenAI announced, oh, well, we got something Mac only. Our codex coding agent is now an app on Mac only. And I think Apple must have said, we got to do something. So they have announced Go ahead Andy, it's your story? No, no, no, I just saw it Like 10 minutes ago I don't know anything about it I will tell you, it's Xcode 26.3 And they're integrating Coding AI right into your workflow So you can either use Claude Agent Which I'm not sure what that is, if they mean Claude Code Or OpenAI's Codex Directly in Xcode To me Honestly, I'm less interested in these IDE-based tools like Codex or Google's Antigravity or Xcode with an agent built in or VS Code with Copilot built in. I think the command line is the way to do this because, honestly, once you start using this, you're not really writing that much code. You're letting the agent do this. The thing that I always wonder about is I'm not a professional developer. I'm not part of like a team, a hundred person team that's building something super important that a corporation is going to be run off of. I'm always wondering whenever I see, great, hey, we've added agentic coding features to our systems. Like, great, how are you helping these developers integrate it into the existing code base? How are you integrating this into testing, into validation, into certification, into compliance with all kinds of other things? Like, as somebody who uses AI a lot for scripting, for coding, for even writing little apps, where I'm the only person who's in charge of this project and nobody, no small, medium, or large city is going to lose electricity because I didn't do this correctly, I don't understand. I wish I had more understanding about how significant this is for people who actually do real coding, as opposed to people like me who are just amateurs or have been working at a company that can't afford to basically have an entire coding team and has to basically create a purchasing system by scratch and only has about $500 in which to do it. Yeah, I mean, this is how I code with these agents is on a command line in the terminal. I mean, that just really seems to be the best way to do it. In fact, I recently asked it to do a podcast rewinding app, and I'm very excited to have this because I don't know if you've noticed, but, you know, a lot of times people return their podcasts after they subscribe, and they're not rewound, which means our staff here at Twitter has to rewind that podcast before we put it back on the server. So I've got an automated podcast rewinding app. Well, I mean, I have... Claude said, by the way, I'd be happy to help you build a podcast. Before I create a plan, I need to understand more about what you're looking for. Be sure and make sure it has some audio so that you can hear the rewinding. The whole thing should play backwards. Oh, you know what? Maybe I will do it. That's actually... That would be funny. Maybe go backwards. Okay, I'm going to do it. Very high speed. There you go. Yeah, and just like VHS rewinders, it should be shaped like a little car. Okay. And you pop the podcast in. Yeah. Where do you put it? Do you put it in the trunk or do you put it in the roof? Where do you put it? I think it opens like a funny car. You know, the whole top comes open. You pop it in. Then you slam it down. I will have that by this time the show's over. You will. Anyway, if you use Xcode, I guess it's nice to have agentic coding. I think you use Xcode to write code. This is the same thing Microsoft's doing. And, by the way, Firefox always gets a lot of heat for it. Just kind of painting your stuff with AI doesn't do the job. In fact, Firefox just announced, okay, fine. We're going to have a switch that you can just turn off all AI. I mean, no AI at all. And I bet you a lot of people will use Firefox for that reason. So I haven't played with OpenAI's Codex app. I suppose I should. Have any of you tried it? I have tasted it. And does it have a creamy vanilla center? You know what? It's a little bland for me. I don't know. I've just gotten so used to Claude code. Yeah, command line is where it's at. Yeah, it's kind of underwhelming. I really want to tweet this or something. The metaverse is text-based. We didn't know this. We were worried about legs and facial expressions. It's all text-based. If you're really fancy, and you can do this with Codex or Cloud Code, I guess, you dictate instead of typing. But other than that, it's text-based. So if you want to try it, if you're a Codex user, I'm kind of of the opinion, and maybe I'm wrong on this. Again, there's two classes of people. There's people who want to type at the terminal, and there's people who want to click with their mouse. and the mouse clicking people don't really want this. Just give me a menu. Maybe, I don't know, maybe there's a market for it. Maybe a generation is going to have to retire. There's so many technologies or so many systems and changes to society or a workforce that don't really dig in until a generation ages out of the system, leaving a population that is more open to not necessarily doing things the way that they were trained to do, you know, back in the 1900s. Are you saying that it's old-fashioned to use a command line at Terminal? No, no, no, just that people have certain expectations. I am an old man. I understand that. Microwave ovens are standard issue for every single kitchen. There was a generation that said, no, no, we don't – that's not how you heat some – you can't – The oils have to relate to this. Versus, well, no, we're not going to cook everything with a microwave, but basically it's going to allow me to do my potatoes beforehand and then when it's time to plate, quickly nuke them up, hand them over to Chef Mike before I plate them at the last minute. Yeah, you actually, you're one of the people who's taught me the value of microwaving. I was that old guy who said, I'm not going to microwave. That's not cooking. That's electronic. All right, let's talk about some tips. I didn't know this. I probably should listen to some of our shows more often, like Hands on Apple with Mr. Micah Sargent. But when 26 came out, they turned on the ability to auto-size columns based on file names. I used to double-click. In fact, I only found out because I was double-clicking the thing and nothing happened in the column. Now there's a setting in the Finder view that the column will always be as big as it needs to be. Finder has spreadsheet features. It rolled out from numbers and fell into Finder. Yeah. Yeah. So it came out with Tahoe 26.1 Apple. I just thought maybe I'm not the only one. I hate column view. This is a TIL. You hate it. Maybe that's not an old school thing. I hate column view. It started with Next Step. Steve Jobs added it to the NextCube computing system. I liked it so much there. And I was thrilled when Mac added it when they acquired Next. It's just the natural way to look at files, isn't it? Why do you hate it? I hate it. I'm a list view person. Okay, I understand. I can dig that. For me, it's too much visual information at once, and I want to be able to go, okay, I'm one direct, like I'm nesting. We're getting inside this folder. I'm looking at all the things. Okay, oh, wait, I've got to go one more deep. And I don't want to keep scrolling over to get to where I'm trying to go while also being distracted by all of the things that came before it because I can conceptualize where I am in the nested directory. Maybe that's not a problem. I have no sense of direction. You need the breadcrumbs. I totally agree with that. I think I like column view because I keep my windows pretty small. If I let them get too big, then you have four or five columns, and that's just unworkable. But usually my column view is a sidebar and a couple of columns, and then I have another window over here because I'm dragging stuff around and moving it here and there. But you make your windows too wide, it gets out of control, and I don't like it at all. Weirdly, I found this in the rapid weaver forums. I clicked on this link and I thought, who, where, how? Well, it was one of the places. But it has the command line. If you are not yet on Sequoia, I mean, if you're not in Antahua, if you're still on Sequoia, you can use a defaults command to enable auto-sizing. So you have to go to the Rappi. You're just finding more reasons to use the command line. Command line, baby. Will computer users use? Passwords now has, this is a nice feature in iOS 26. Did you talk about this on iOS today? Not this morning. It's one of the new features we wanted to. Many weeks ago, probably. Yeah, exactly. Okay, well, I finally got, again, this is the TIL section. This has always been a hassle for me. When you create a new password, if you don't copy it, you don't add it, it just, you know, something goes wrong. Sometimes there's a pop-up comes up on the site, and then you don't get it saved. Well, now Apple has added a new password box that you can go to where all the new passwords that you've generated but aren't saved. It's a new menu item. It's called the Generated Passwords menu item. Bitwarden has this. I imagine all good password managers have it, but Apple has now added it. And that's, I don't know, maybe it's just me because I created password. No, it's that sort of issue. No, it happens a lot. That's truly, yeah, it's an issue. I have that happen with one password often where, again, it's usually because of it needing to do those JavaScript injections on the page to be able to show you all the stuff. And so then something on the page will mess up if there's like a timer that pops up, whatever. And then, oh, great, what was that password? Well, now I've got to use the forgot password dialog and try again. So, yeah, this is, I think, a very good feature to have. I have not yet seen the Apple TV show Drops of God. Have you, as anybody? It's about wine. I haven't heard of that one even. Until today, I saw that headline. Yeah, here's a new way of promoting Apple TV shows. They made it Drops of God Wine Guide in Apple Maps. Oh, yes, I did see this part of it. Yeah, so look, Apple put together or really talked about these guides, right, that would be part of the Maps experience. and I think I've maybe used this feature twice. Did they take out the 3D flyovers for a while? They seem to have been taking those out. There's apparently a Chief of War map guide to Hawaii. Yeah, that's the Jason Momoa. Actually, it's not a bad show. I watched one, just one episode. But it's got like 10 highlights of Hawaii. I don't know. What's the kind of interesting use of them? Yeah, I like them stuff. It's promotional only. Exactly. Just let me turn them on or off. I hate them. Not just the ads, but I don't like that they're in the way. And they do seem to be less in the way than they used to be, maybe before iOS 26. But I don't like them. More of the promotional stuff. By the way, one of the things Apple does absolutely right, and it's brilliant, is their regular Apple platform security updates. The January 2026 PDF is out now. And Apple is more forthcoming than anybody on how they do their security. It's always impressive. This is more than 100 pages, actually more than 200 pages, 362 pages of in-depth descriptions of how Apple does their security. and they really do a good job with Blastor and Lockdown Mode and all of this stuff. They even talk about how they do random number generation so that you know it's done properly. You know, they use entropy sources from the secure Enclave hardware and timing-based jitter collected during boot and stuff. Steve Jobs will, I'm sure, Steve Jobs, what is going wrong with my brain? Am I, can I have a stroke? Steve Gibson will be talking about this, I'm sure, at some point. You know what it is? I am, I've been clawed-pilled. I was going to say, yeah. I'm not in this world anymore. I'll be, I and the other AIs will be taken off in just a little bit. Anyway, the Apple platform security document is out. Help.apple.com. Really, really, really good. And speaking of security, they've done something with their C-Series modems that is really good. I did not know another TIL. Maybe you all know this. It was a TIL for me, too. I did not know, but your cell phone provider doesn't just know where you are based on triangulating the cell towers. There is a built-in feature of all cell phones and all cell phone carriers. They can request your exact GPS coordinates. and in this day and age that may not be good news because as you know cell phone carriers are very very cooperative with the law enforcement ice agents and so forth remember the good old days when we just worried that they're going to be collecting that data the worst that would happens that we'd be marketed against yeah i know and now then i am mine it's a safety issue it's a safety issue so one of the things that apple's new c series modems does and you could see this setting, I actually turn it on in your cellular data options, is limit tracking. It's not just cell towers. Now, I'm not completely clear that this turns off the GPS feature because, unfortunately, the carrier has to support it. So, so far in the U.S., the only carrier that supports it is Boost Mobile. Isn't Boost and MB&O, aren't they? Yeah. T-Mobile? Yeah. That seems odd that that's the one that supports it. Well, it tells you a little something about these mobile carriers and their real priorities, doesn't it? I guess. It's just confusing to me technologically because, I mean, I understand that. I guess I don't know enough about the innards of the cellular network, but if they're an MVNO for another carrier. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And Apple Insider in this report says at the very end, and we probably expect the carriers to sue Apple over this. So don't depend on it. They're going to make the argument that the reason why we need to collect GPS information is to basically understand, map out where our customers are not getting good signals so that we can adjust our towers accordingly, which is fair and valid, but again, it would have been a better argument. It was a better argument five or six years ago than it is today. Yeah. Oh, by the way, Shelley, Scooter X in our club chat says T-Mobile sold Boost Mobile to Echo Star, the Dish company. That was part of the deal so that T-Mobile could merge with Sprint. Oh, that's right. The whole lie was, oh, don't worry, because there's going to be a whole new cell carrier from Dish, which is Boost Mobile. So there you go. The more you know. The more you know. T-I-L. This is the T-I-L episode. So, Apple TV Press Day. I didn't know about that either. Learned about that. Today I learned. Just today I learned. Looking for your invite, Leo? Yeah, where'd that go? Apple TV Press Day. They unveiled some new stuff in Santa Monica today. It's a major invite-only media event. Oh, I get it. I'm not media. That why You mean you not Anya Taylor Yeah Anya Taylor is there Yeah I would kill to meet her Jon Hamm Kurt Russell Jennifer Garner Keanu Reeves James Marsden and more They unveiled some new TV shows. There's a new teaser for Imperfect Women. Don't know what that is. Lucky is coming to Apple TV July 15th. That's a limited series with Anya Taylor-Joy based on the novel Lucky. Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed which sounds like a Cinemax title but no, it's a comedic thriller starting Tatiana Maslany coming up May 20th. Outcome a dark comedy film with Keanu Reeves We already knew about Monarch Legacy of Monsters. There's a new trailer. That's coming at the end of the month Kate Fear. Remember Kate Fear? What a scary movie with Robert Mitchum and then there was a remake not so long ago that wasn't so scary. They're going to make it a third time. Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg producing. It'll be a psychological thriller. June 5th. One of my favorite genres. Have you seen the Robert Mitchum version of Kate Fury? It is. Yeah. I don't think I have. I have to add it to my list. Your Friends and Neighbors Season 2 trailer and the new ad. Can I show this or not, John Ashley? It's an ad for Apple. Are they going to take me down? It's called The Humans of Apple TV. And what it is, and it's great, is behind-the-scenes pictures from Apple TV shows. And I love it. It's really fun, and I recommend it. But I can't show it because I don't know why. And it's supposed to tell us that AI is not controlling Apple TV, I think is the point. Oh, it's humans. Oh, you're right. Remember that ad where we crushed all the stuff you used to create? Yeah, forget that. Forget about that. You know, Leo? I'm going to show it. It's a slideshow. I'm not playing the music. No, and you're providing commentary. And I know it's fair use, but that doesn't mean Apple won't pull us down. Look, it's humans. It's humans. And also there's humans. Oh, there's other humans. There's a human. I like that picture. Oh, that was a recent piece. Of the Severn stars with their hair all must because it was like an explosion. I can't remember what happened. There was a reason that their hair is all must. No spoilers. But the reason there's a hair all must. This is a slideshow, which makes me think that either, A, they got this idea way too late to like a rain fig, or all the stars are like, I will film this special 10-second clip for you. How much will that talk to my age? Well, not even clips. It just fills. It's exactly. I saw this picture. Oh, they wanted money if they wanted more. I get it. I saw those pictures and I thought, well, is it a promo for the Photos app or something? I mean, why are you showing slideshows? Because they didn't think ahead of time to do behind-the-scenes video, I guess. I don't know. There's actually a lot of behind-the-scenes video of Severance, especially of that opening of the last season where he's running and running and running down the corridors and stuff. The way they filmed that was amazing. It was. F1 TV is now exclusively on Apple TV F1 starts in March believe it or not they don't have a lot of time between races and they have already started putting some programming on Apple TV which I looked for and could not find but I'm told maybe they were waiting for this big event that I wasn't invited to so there is a new section called Get Ready for Formula One on Apple TV. Rev up for 26 with highlights, previews, and more. So a lot of little short videos like Lando Norris, Ride with the Champ. And actually the one I'll probably be watching, which is 2026F1 Rule Changes. That's gripping. That'll be a thrilling ride. Yeah. Yeah. So there's videos and so forth schedule. first Grand Prix coming up just a couple of months, F1 TV. And the nice thing for me is I paid a lot of money for my F1 TV subscription last year and I guess it's all just rolled into my Apple TV subscription now. Can you trade it for a Creator Studio subscription? I just want an invite to next Apple TV. That's all. That's all I ask. And now, ladies and gentlemen, before we get ready for our picks of the week, it's our Vision Pro segment. and the number one. What do you know? It's time to talk to Vision Pro. Number one. Vision Pro podcast in the works. Nothing to say except that this is the second anniversary of the release of Vision Pro. It came out on Groundhog's Day 2024, which had been, so yesterday was the second anniversary. Congratulations, Vision Pro. still exist. Still being here. For only being for all intents and purposes cancelled as opposed to actually cancelled. Is it cancelled? I feel like Apple semi-committed to it. They're committed to the platform. It doesn't feel as though they're putting a lot of effort into making people think about buying one of these things. And expanding the reach. I think they feel as though everybody who was destined to buy one of these has already bought one of these and that we don't... There was no mention of it in the earnings call. At all, really? Tim did not boast of... They didn't break out Vision Pro sales. So if you're the devil, you say. Okay. There's also a dog show documentary on Vision Pro. And I should mention this because Shelley's here. Sorry. I just want to make sure I understood what I thought I heard you say, Andy, which is that There is a dog show documentary for the Vision Pro. Oh, you don't know about that? It's called Top Dogs, two episodes? Yeah. The reason I'm asking is because I want to make sure it's not actually a mockumentary called Best in Show. Oh. Don't mock the dogs. We do have to mention that I think a lot of people were watching Best in Show and other wonderful efforts by our late lamented friend. What's your favorite? It's hard to say, honestly. Like, my favorite character that she's played? Yeah. She's just so good. I mean, River Rose really is really good. Yeah, Schitt's Creek. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I have to go all the way back to Lola Heatherton on SCTV. I was just going to choose SCTV generally. I don't know that I would pick a character. I would just say all the SCTV. And the thing about Schitt's Creek, though, is if you, for some reason, have missed it or only watched part of it. There are many, many wonderful compilations on YouTube of Maura Rose that are worth your time. I'm just quickly seeing if I can somehow get Schitt's Creek into the Vision Pro. Immersive Schitt's Creek. Yeah. You kind of want to hold that family at arm's distance. I don't think you want to be immersed in that family. That's the way I feel. I did love her. I did love Catherine O'Hara's a Mighty Wind character as well. All of those mockumentaries. I was going to say that Catherine O'Hara did an interview with Julia Louis-Dreyfus on her Wiser Than Me podcast, and it is excellent. Wait, I love both of them so much. If you want to hear Catherine O'Hara just talk for 50 minutes about wonderful things. Hang on, what is her show called? It's called Wiser Than Me. Wiser Than Me. And Julia Louis-Dreyfus interviews older women. and Catherine was on last season. And in fact, right after she passed, they re-released it. Oh, yeah, I see. She wasn't that old. She was two years old. 71. I know. She's not old. I know. I was shocked. I thought, why is this happening? So brilliant. So wonderful. Oh, and for your benefit, I know you're a dog lover. This is the Vision Pro. Top dogs in Apple Immersive. It's so realistic you can feel the dog. If you put various fur items in front of you, you should be sure. All right. Somebody's saying Catherine O'Hara was a great actress, but she was a terrible mom. She would leave her kids home alone and get on an airplane. Shocking. In her defense, that was a pretty big house. That's a lot. Easy. She had a lot of kids. So easy. Also, Macaulay Culkin seems fine with it. He tweeted a very nice remembrance. after she passed. So he's cool. She's all right with it. When she passed a couple of days ago, going through all of the tributes from so many, she was beloved. Sometimes somebody dies. When Chevy Chase dies, don't expect quite so many loving tributes. But boy, she was beloved. She was beloved. And that's our Vision Pro. I had to get something else in there. I couldn't just leave it with me. Two-year anniversary thing. I do want to mention this before we move to the picks of the week because Shelly put the story in and she's the expert on this. The Winter Olympics are coming up. And for blind or low vision users, there is some good news. It's going to be a very accessible Olympics. Tell us about that. Well, and I know this isn't precisely an Apple story, but maybe I thought of it as one because I've watched a lot of Peacock on my Apple TV, and Peacock, one of the NBC properties that's going to be streaming the Winter Olympics. NBC has had audio description and closed captions on the Olympics events for a long time, but they're doing pretty much all of them. And I assume that the thing that makes it possible to have audio description, particularly on live sporting events, is that they're not live, is that you have the chance after the event has happened in Europe to do the audio description before it plays the United States. You can turn this on. I should turn it on. I've never turned on audio description in movies or anything. It's an SAP channel. What does it sound like? Well, it's actually sort of an art form because if you're doing it in a movie, you want to do it when there's dialogue not happening. The funny thing is if you're watching, sometimes the description will have to come a slight bit before the action has happened just so it can catch up. But there are companies and individuals who, you know, will provide audio description. All of Netflix originals are described. Peacock has a lot of audio description, which is why I was excited to see that they're adding this to Winter Olympic coverage. But the live sports aspect is really interesting. And I shouldn't say live because they say they are replays. But the idea that you go from a television show or a movie that's scripted and produced long before they do the description to an event that happened today and somebody can create audio description, that's exciting. So I can watch ski jumping, which is my favorite, or figure skating or whatever it is, and it's going to be described to me. Do they do it like Hispanic soccer broadcasters? Go! Or do they do it more like golf and now she's jumping off the diving board? See, that's a really good question with sports because movies, a really good audio description for movies or television kind of matches the tone. So if you were watching Ted Lasso, for example, you would have somebody who was pretty easygoing and sort of had a charm about them. Whereas if it was a tense drama, you're going to have somebody a little more intense and the guy points the gun and he shoots or whatever it is. But usually the description, if it's well done, it functions as narration as opposed to sort of overdone, you know, over the over there. They're not trying to resell. It's not like a trailer. It's like in a world. It's more like, OK, and Jon Hamm and, you know, the actor. What's it? Bob enters. He's wearing a gray wool coat. Why are you telling me he's wearing a gray wool coat? Because that will probably become relevant later. He wouldn't tell me. He wouldn't tell me what he was wearing. That's what's funny about audio description. So why are you telling me that he's wearing a gray wool coat? That's going to become relevant. Because if you didn't tell me, it probably wouldn't become relevant. Okay, I kind of want to watch something with this. I do, I do. You get description about facial expressions, which is really helpful to me, because even if I can see the action, a lot of times I miss the subtleties of facial expressions. So it's very helpful to sort of get. I like director's commentary. I won't listen to director's commentary on the first viewing, but if a movie was good enough to watch twice, I would often turn on director's commentary. Right, and I will say that well done audio description, unlike director's commentary, doesn't cover over the actual audience. Yeah, director's commentary. That is one of the annoying things. Right. That's why I have trouble. We use chewing gum wrappers to simulate light in the background. Meanwhile, yeah, that's why you don't watch it. What is he saying? What is he saying? You don't do it the first time. The Rose Byrne movie that she's nominated for an Oscar for, If I Had Legs I Would Kick You, is so brutal. It's so difficult that Lisa and I abandoned it halfway through. Oh, wow. I went back and finished it because it was a tour de force. She's in close-up. You don't see really much else except her face and her reactions. It's two hours of how stressful it is to be a mom. Her husband's a captain on a ship, and he's distant, and she's got a child who's got a disability, and just everything's going wrong. And just it's all of this stress for two hours. But I wanted to finish it because I was, A, she's going to win the Oscar. It's a complete tour to force in acting. But I wanted to give it, you know, didn't want to give it short shrift. I saw one reviewer said, I watched it, but I'm never watching it again. But I did watch it again with the director's commentary because it was fascinating to hear. I was trying to figure out, why did they make this movie? They must have known how challenging this was going to be for audiences. You saw it, obviously, Andy. No, you know what? What happened was that I was interested in it, both because of its reputation and also, hey, Conan O'Brien in a romantic role. That should be interesting. And then I said, well, what's it about? and I'm like... You have to make yourself watch it. I need to be in a frame of mind to see something very, very intense. It's on the list for that when that time comes, but I'm not... That's not... So I will tell you this. It might help. Conan is a genius in it. And the author and director... It's only your second movie. The last one was like 10 years ago. The author and director said, I grew up being a fan of Conan's. and I wrote him a letter when I was in middle school, and he wrote me a letter back. So I thought, maybe I'll just cast him in this movie. It is not a comedic role. Exactly, yeah. She said he was terrified about doing it because it's not funny, and he's brilliant. There are a lot of movies like that where it's like Magnolia and The Hours, both those movies, those are great movies. I'm so glad I saw them. I'm never going to watch those movies again. I've watched Magnolia a bunch of times because I love Paul Thomas Anderson. It's just amazing. But anyway, I think anybody, as long as you know what you're getting into and if you want to see incredible acting and you want to see Conan O'Brien in a role that is not typecast, she said she had a conversation with him. Oh, no, she was listening. No, no, no, she was listening to this podcast. And he got into a deep conversation with somebody. She thought, you know, he could be deep and serious. I should cast him as the psychiatrist in this role. And I was like, what? But it was brilliant. Anyway, how did we get on to this? I don't recall, actually. I apologize. I think you took us there, Leo. I don't know how exactly. I got you there, and I'm sorry. Again, I'm not really of this world anymore. Rat hole. Thank you. Let's start with Shelly and our picks. Yes, again. Oh, yeah, I appreciate the jingle to start the picks off with. Picks of the week. They're all rat holes. Right. So my pick of the week is an app called Transit. It is not a new app, but it has been updated a lot since I last used it. I was in California for a few days a couple weeks ago, and so I had the chance to take the BART and the AC Transit and all of the various transit outfits. And one of the things when you're taking buses, especially if you're in an unfamiliar area, that you really want is how long is it going to be before it arrives? Is it late? Is it going to take me where I want to go, obviously? But transit has just done such a good job with the interface that it's very glanceable now. It's much more glanceable than it used to be. You get real-time information about where transit vehicles are. You can obviously plot routes, which you can do in Google Maps or Apple Maps, But this app is specifically geared toward using public transportation and making connections because that's often a big deal. It's like, well, I've got to this bus and I'm going to go from here to here, but how do I get to the next one and how many minutes do I have to get there? They also crowdsource a lot of data, which can be both either annoying or really useful, depending on your point of view. So they will say just using the app, if you allow it, crowdsources your experience. experience. So you hit the go button and you are being tracked on a transit trip for your own purposes. The point is for it to tell you when to get off when your stop is coming up. But that data and the data about how on time the bus you're actually riding is passed along to the aggregate for the benefit of other users. Also, it includes some polls. So while you're riding the bus, only while you're riding will the polls pop up and they'll say things like, rate the safety of this stop, good, bad, average, whatever. And then you agree to answer a poll question, and then you get one more poll question, and you answer that. And the third poll question is, have you had enough, or would you like some more poll questions? So it does a pretty good job of being respectful of your time. And as I say, the interface is just really attractive, and I think it strikes the right balance between crowdsourced social app and leave me alone, I'm just trying to get home on the bus. So you live in Austin. Are you able to pretty much, I mean, how's the mass transit there? Can you get around to it? It's okay, and I use it. I think the thing in Austin is that I don't really need a nap because I kind of know how often the buses I typically take are going to come. And I also am at home a lot. I don't go out as much as I should. But out there, I mean, I was, having lived in California in the Bay Area for almost five years, I knew the area, but I hadn't been in Oakland, which is where I was for a film festival. And so we were getting from where we were staying to the film festival and to other places around the Bay Area. And so even though I knew the area, I didn't know the sort of ins and outs and the rhythms of the transit and how to switch between BART and AC Transit, for example. So it was really good for the experience of somebody who's, oh, I'm taking public transit now, but I'm not really sure how to do that where I am. Awesome. Thank you, Shelley. So great to have you. I appreciate you being here. I appreciate you having us. And I will have you with Christina. Awesome. I'm making a mental note of that. Hooray. If you've ever gone to the Apple Store and said, why don't they sell that MagSafe demo charger, you should know about the Apple Unsold website. This is so cool. Which will be taken down any minute. Actually, they say due to a surge in recent orders, we aren't allowing people to order anything right now because we've got to catch up. But what did they buy out? Some Apple store that was closing or something? But the MagSafe demo charger is $119, but it is available. The Vision Pro tray, the GoldenEye cable, the Apple Watch Band. You know, I bet you Rene Ritchie has already purchased the Apple Watch Band tray because he has a lot of those. Anyway, what a strange idea. It's Apple unsold. the Apple products you can't buy anywhere else. I think somebody bought a storage locker and found cases of things and said, you know what, I'm going to make hay from this while we've got them. The only other answer is that these are like knockoffs, but it is an – They say they're genuine and they're inspected. And it's an exhaustive list. It's like there's nothing that you could find in an Apple store display that it seems that – They don't have the giant iPhone from like 2008, 2009, but everything else they seem to have. And it's like I'm chagrined to find out that, no, those display items, they aren't free. You're not allowed to simply take them. Okay. I'm glad to have an opportunity to actually pay for them if I'm giving them one. Appleunsold.com. And as long as I've got you, let me give you one more. Bugs Apple loves. Why else would they keep them around for so long? Total time wasted by humanity because Apple won't fix these 32.4 million years per year. So if you ever hit one of these bugs, and there are a few of them, you will recognize this page. Mail search doesn't work. The search bar is purely decorative. I don't know if that's a bug or a feature. But anyway, this is great. They have all of the long-term bugs and the consequences. Auto-correct won't take no for an answer. You fixed it. It unfixed it. You fixed it again. It unfixed itself again. And they say the math of how many hours lost. This is such a snarky site. I love this. It's well written. It's so great. Apple Pay. Card icon changes address. The credit card icon doesn't change the credit card. I should send them some accessibility. bugs if they don't have them. Oh, I bet. Sometimes those are ignored. I bet. According to our completely made-up estimates, Apple could fix this in eight engineering hours. Instead, humanity wastes 33.87 hours every second, clicking the Apple card, hoping they could change cards. Nope. Changes the address. So good. Some of us would have said, hey, I'm sick and tired of these long-standing bugs. I'm going to write a long blog post. Or, hey, I'm going to do like a 10-minute long YouTube video, but someone figured out that, yeah, the best way to do it is to create a website and communicate it this way. And I'm sure this is being shared and researched inside Cupertino. It's better than a strongly worded letter. Yes, not calm. That's fantastic. Highly recommended. Andy and I, go pick of the week. Well, we've been talking about Catherine O'Hara, which led to me saying, hey, wow, I haven't seen a mighty wind in a long time. Where can I find that? Where is it on streaming? and this is where I found this really good site called RealGood, R-E-E-L-G-O-O-D. It's not new, but it's new to me, where you simply type in, well, what you want to watch on streaming, and it will show you exactly where it is streaming right now. It's only streaming for free on Pluto TV, but it also, of course, will have affiliate links. Here's where you can rent it on every other platform. It's such a game changer for viewing because it also has cool stuff. As someone who subscribes, I subscribe to three streaming platforms. I might cancel a couple of them because I'm not using them enough. But this platform will help because it will tell you what's coming to streaming this month. And also, if you subscribe to HBO Max, here's what's leaving the service this month. That's nice. So if you haven't seen The American President yet, you probably want to see it before the 30th. Or before you cancel your HBO Max subscription. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And you can do searches based on it. It has static pages or, excuse me, constantly updated pages, but you can also make a list, which I think is great. So you can say, and you enter in the services that you subscribe to, so it can tell you. Schitt's Creek is available on Prime Video, free with a 30-day free trial, just in case you haven't seen it. This is good, Andy. I'm going to sign up. It's free, right? There's no. It's free. I think they make money off of the affiliate links from those. You can see Unlock All Regions with NordVPN, so that's a lot. Exactly. You know what, that's the kind of ad I like. It's bookmarks bar in the web browser grade useful to me. That's how good it is. Really nice. They have reviews. They have comments. Especially because all the content, especially like the catalog movies that keep moving in and out between different services. It's really hard. HBO is not going to promote, hey, wow, we've got Around the World in 80 Days, the David Niven and Content Floss version. But because it's not like the sort of thing you want to promote over this wonderful Mel Brooks documentary that everybody's heard about. But it's like, hey, wow, HBO got it. I haven't seen that in like 10 years. Content Floss. Great. Let's watch that sometime. Let's add that to the watch list. Well, if you run an old movie podcast, you use sites like this all the time. I like that. You've said, all right, we're going to talk about this movie. And then you realize, oh, crap, it's not streaming anywhere. or here's where it is streaming so we can tell people. This is great. What was it? Real Good? R-E-E-L Good. RealGood.com. Dot com. And finally, Mr. Micah Sargent. Yes. So you did say pick of the week. Therefore, I'm doing a pick. Look, there's lots to be stressed out about. And for me, when I'm stressed, I can remember my great-grandpa getting in trouble for my great-grandma because he would be sort of like running his fingernail against another part of his fingernail. And so I tend to sort of pick at my nails, and I need to not do that. And so for $8, you can get a delightful fidget called the Picky Pad. And essentially what this is is a gel that has tiny little beads in it. and all you do is you just run your fingernail across it and the beads come out and then you collect them in your little picky pad case, which is this, and then the great thing is afterward you can microwave it. I was going to say, because I know you're not a fan of germs, there's got to be a way to sterilize it. Yeah, and afterwards you can microwave it and start to refresh with a new picky pad. I might get that. That looks cool. It's honestly, it does what I needed it to do, which is to get me to stop picking at my fingernails. So I could just pick out all these little beads and pop them down. And it's just a nice, it's a quiet fidget, too, which whenever I'm on camera is very helpful. Oh, yeah. I used to have a fidget spinner. Somebody sent me a fidget spinner. And after a while, people started saying, what's that sound on your shows? There's this really weird, and I went, oh, crap, I've been spinning the fidget spinner. I wanted to show you this. My daughter gave me a thinking putty. It says it's Crazy Aaron's Thinking Putty. And it's very similar. And you just, but I can't get it open. You play with it. And she said, yeah, it's only slightly used, really. Slightly used. She ran out of time to get Christmas presents. So that was my Christmas present this year was only a slightly used thinking putty. The pickie pad looks really, really interesting. It's nice. I like it a lot. Yeah. $7.99 on Amazon. I could have it by tomorrow. It comes with a little case to keep it free of hairs and all that stuff. And then it has a little, this bag has to collect your beads so that whenever you start over fresh, you can pop them all back out. I don't get it. The beads come out of the... Yeah, so it's like you're pulling beads out of with your fingers. Oh, I get it. Yeah, the beads are inside, and you're just sort of running your finger across, and it's just a satisfying feeling. Oh, and when you microwave it, it melts and reabsorbs. It reabsorbs the beet so you can start fresh. Just for sterilizing it. No, no, no, no, no. I didn't, and again, TIL, it's called trictotillomania. Yeah. So this was actually originally invented for people who pick at their hairs. That's not something that I do, thank goodness, for me. I'm happy that that's not the case. But just as, again, sort of a fingernail picker, this has been very helpful to do this instead. Yeah. Wow, well, now I'm getting into my thinking putty. Now you're getting into your thinking putty. It's quiet, too, yes. Thank you, Mr. Micah Sargent, doing double duty today. Good to be here. Did the IRS today earlier. We really appreciate you sticking around for MacBreak Weekly. And are you going to do Paint by Numbers again next time? Yeah, we'll be doing Paint by Numbers again. And I think in the future I'm looking forward to getting one that's widely available so that we can all paint by numbers. All paint the same. All do the same numbers. That's Micah's Crafting Corner. The next one is February 18th, third Wednesday of every month. It feels like we just did it. I know. Time is flying. I love it. It's such a relaxing, peaceful show. And I like the illustration of the cruel work or whatever the new point. As you can imagine, Anthony Nielsen. And AI, because Anthony did not. Yes, and AI. And he did not needlepoint that, I know. Our user group actually is coming up on Friday. It's going to be a very interesting one. We're going to probably do set up Open Claw and see how many credit card numbers we can lose. This is all part of the fabulous Club Twit. Your membership helps us keep these shows on the air. You might have noticed there were no ads today, at least as we produced MacBreak Weekly. There might be some, if, well, knock on wood, there'll be some additional ads later. There will be some on YouTube. But you don't ever have to see any of those ads if you join the club. So ad-free versions of all the shows, access to the club, Twitter, Discord, all the great conversation that goes on in there, and it really is a wonderful hang. And the special shows and events like the user group, Micah's Crafting Corner, Stacey's Book Club, all the things that we do in the club. Photo time coming up February 20th. Our assignment is flowing. things like that but the main reason to do it is because it makes a huge difference to us in our bottom line it's about 25% of our operating expenses you know without our club members we wouldn't be doing all these shows I can tell you right now we couldn't afford to so if you're not a member please join us we'd love to have you twit.tv slash club twit thank you Shelly Brisbane Texas Standard Radio can I hear it if I don't live in the Lone Star State? I'm so glad you asked. You can find Texas Standard anywhere you get your podcasts. We broadcast on 30 public radio stations across Texas at 10 a.m., and sometimes there's a repeat. But for those of you who can't remember that or who aren't in Texas, just go to your podcast client and look for Texas Standard, and there we are. There you go. The national daily news show of Texas. I like it. So nice to see you, Shelley. Thank you. Nice to see you. I appreciate it. Andy Anaco, you'll find him at a public library near you. Yes. It's nice to be in a place where the heat is set so high because no one who's using this building is actually paying for it. In my house, I've got it at a rational level, but it's nice to basically say, oh, you know what? I could be wearing a T-shirt right now. It was pretty fun. How nice. So good to see you. Thank you, Andrew. And, of course, Micah Sargent, bless you. Thank you. Happy to be here. It's great to see you. Happy New Year. We'll see you again real soon. And all of you will see you again real soon. We do MacBreak Weekly on Tuesdays, 11 a.m. in the Pacific time zone. That'd be 1300? No, 14. No. 1400. Math is hard. Daylight Savings begins in a bit of months. Can Claude help me? I was going to say, Claude has an assistant to do that. Get on the command line and ask Claude to help you. No, the worst thing you can do is ask AI what time it is. It's very confused. It doesn't know. There's no time in AI. It's like, I don't know where I am. I don't know where you are. I don't know where you are. I don't know what you are. 1,400 East Coast time, and that would be 1,900 UTC. The only reason I mention when we do it is because you can't watch us record the show live. We stream it in the club, in the club to Discord, but also YouTube, X.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, in Twitch and kick. Watch us live. We'd love to have you in our chat rooms and watching live. After the fact, you can, of course, download the show. We have audio and video versions available at our website, twit.tv slash mbw. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to MacBreak Weekly. Great way to share little clips with friends and family. Everybody can see YouTube. It's a nice way to spread the word about our show. And I think probably the best way to consume MacBreak Weekly would be to subscribe to it and your favorite podcast. client. It's free. There's audio feeds and video feeds. Just look for MBW. And if you like it, would you do me a favor and leave us a five-star review? Tell everybody how great this show is, because that helps us, too. Thanks for being here, everybody. We'll see you next time. But now, I am sad to say it is my sad and solemn duty to tell you, get back to work. Great time is over. you