MBW 1012: Joining the YOLO Club - Apple's Special Experience Event on March 4th

It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Jason Snell, Andy Anako are here. Dave Hamilton's filling in, and we've got a packed show for you. There is an event coming up March 4th. What will Apple announce? We'll also talk about some of the new features of iOS 26.3 and Mac OS 26.4. There's some Vision Pro news, and Apple buys Severance. All that and more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is Twit. This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 1012, recorded Tuesday, February 17th, 2026. Joining the YOLO club. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we cover the latest Apple news. Dave Hamilton is joining us. Hello, David. Hello, Leo. From Gig Gab and MacGab. Are all your shows named Gab? You know, I tried to call the business show, like, I don't know, Business Gab or something, but no, it's just business brain. So it's got the illiterate. It's got the double letters, so at least it's got something there. Great to see you again, David. It's great to be seen. Thanks for having me. Thank you for coming back. Andy Anaco also here. He comes back every week. Yep. Andy came back the very next week. It's nice to have the week separated into things I need to get done before Mac break and things I need to get done after Mac break. It makes Mondays the right amount of pressure on a Monday. I like to think of this show as your binder divider in your life. You're the great trapper keeper of Angie and Otto's life. You are the unicorn leaping over the airbrushed van in the middle that says that, You know what? I think we're going to go from math into Western Civ today. Wow. And last but not least, Jason Snell from SixColors.com. As those of us who do not have regular jobs, having regular podcasts really helps you know what day it is. It does. Honestly, it's really nice to have that. So you got an invite. We're going to talk about that in a second before I do that. And I don't have to lie. Yes. Or mislead or say, I don't know, Leo, what will happen. And I know literally nothing about it, but I know that I will be there. So that's good. I have a message to all Ramadan Mubarak, Gong He Fat Choi, and Laissez-les-bon-temps rouler. Because today is, weirdly, it doesn't happen very often, Ramadan, the Lunar New Year, the year of the fire horse, and Mardi Gras that Tuesday. And I was able to do all of those in their native, roughly, very roughly. Anyway, that's kind of wild. Welcome, everybody. Glad you could be here despite the holidays. Before we continue further, I do need your computer screen. Oh, I can provide. Very well. There was nothing important happening, but I shall do that right now. March. March. Now I have to, though, say, if you see my computer screen, that's not good. You should be going up to the left of your Zoom window and clicking the meeting tab. Just as I have just done, so that you see me and us. Hello, everybody. March 4th, you are going to New York City, Jason. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Are you excited? I mean, sure. New Apple products are always exciting. They're calling it an experience. I don't know what that's about, but I think it's probably just like a bunch of demos. It's in New York, London, and Shanghai at the same time. Yeah, yeah. So they're doing – they've been tweaking their product rollouts for a while, and I've gone to New York a bunch of times to do this. It does seem silly. If you're thinking, Jason, you live in the Bay Area and they're in Cupertino, it does seem silly to fly all the way to New York. It does, but that's just they want to have a limited group. What they're going to do is they're going to put, like, a bunch of people together and do demos. Presumably, like, if there's a MacBook Pro, they'll have, like, pros showing pro things that can be done on them. They like to do a lot of storytelling for the media. And so you've got to limit where you can tell those stories. So they're doing more than one. They're doing three in Shanghai, London, and New York City. And there'll be new products, presumably. I don't know anything about the details, obviously. They haven't told me anything but to present myself in New York City on the day. And so I will, and we'll get new stuff. And so am I excited? Like, I don't know if I'm excited about schlepping across the country, but I am excited that they gave me more than two weeks' notice, and then I'm also excited that I'll have stuff to write about and talk about. So that part's great. And grateful that they decided to make this happen in mid-February as opposed to, how about mid-January? Like, at least it's a little bit less of a curse. Well, they didn't overwrite my vacation, which was really nice. I appreciate that. I had a bunch of stuff going on the first couple weeks of this month, and they thank you, not really Apple, but just Providence, that I managed to dodge that. And, yeah, like we've been early in the year, right, we do a lot of anticipation in what's going to happen, and there's not a lot going on, and this is the official sort of like Apple coming back from its pre-holiday break to roll out a bunch of new products, and that's always a good time. The invitation, okay, so a little tea leaf reading. Okay. Cremlinology. Cremlinology. Cupertinology. Has a sliced-up apple in three different colors, people have noted. A yellow, a green, and a baby blue. Do you think, we've heard rumors that the MacBook, should we call it MacBook nothing, Andy? That's what you like to call it, MacBook. You know, someone mentioned that I never even considered that they might call it the iBook and re-reporting that name anymore. Oh, bring back the iBook. You know, instinctively I feel as though since there is nothing called just the MacBook, nothing, they are going to call it just the MacBook. But now I'm like, I'm kind of pushing for iBook because – I don't think there's ever going to be a new i anything. Yeah, exactly. Well, there's always an iPhone. There's always an iPad. Right. A new i thing, though. So, yeah, I think MacBook is probably the most likely name, although they might have another thing for it. And, yeah, Mark Gurman said, because he's reported about this for a little while now, that they tested a bunch of colors for this thing, and these are three of the colors they tested. So it's possible that this little MacBook will be a colorful little MacBook. Not flashy. He says it. He says it. Kind of like the iBook was colorful, right? Yeah. They haven't made a colorful laptop since the original iBook, in fact, right? Like, since then, every laptop they've made has been basically some sort of mono-chrome, something white-black, silver. Silver. You know, gold-ish. Dark blue. There was a dark blue. Yeah, I have the midnight. It's black with a little blue undertone is what it is, just like the sky blue. It's just silver with a little blue overtone, and that's all it is. So, yeah, maybe we'll get this thing in fun colors, and German does say it is aluminum, not plastic, but that they're going to use a new aluminum process, and, you know, that's interesting, right? Maybe it's cheaper or maybe they feel like this product is where they want to test that. I don't know, but it probably doesn't have anything to do with the anodization dye that leads to them being colorful, although maybe they'll talk about that. But he says it is aluminum, just a new process that they haven't done before. And this could be the residue of every trick and technique they've ever figured out about how to make something a dollar and a half cheaper. And then that's how they get to the price point. as low as it's going to get. Yeah. And literally the residue, it may just be, you know, because it's probably recycled aluminum. So it's just like dust for all the aluminum and then put that in a hopper. Remember all those Apple watches that we said we replaced the battery for you? Yeah, actually we just ground it up, and now we're recycling the aluminum from there. But hey, so they're calling it an experience, not an event. Will they live stream it? It is 6 a.m. my time. So here's what I think is going to happen. I think they're going to do product announcements that day. Like ship out the press releases and the video thing. Yeah, yeah. I think they'll announce some products that week at 6 a.m. Pacific like they do. And this event is at 6 a.m. Pacific, right, like 9 a.m. Eastern. Yeah. And so that is their product drop time usually. So my guess is they'll drop some announcements. And those announcements will have newsroom posts and maybe some videos, but it's not going to be like a video event necessarily. and then what we'll get at the experiences will be, like I said, probably a briefing, a little bit of an overview of what they are, and then also their demos. Just, like, get your hands on so that those of us who go to this thing will be able to walk away saying, you know, I held that iPad or I picked up that laptop. And, yeah, exactly. You can boast for a little while of being the only person to touch it, but also have, like, a take on the colors or whatever. And what it feels like in your hand. I mean, if it's a new aluminum and, you know, is it, you know, what does this unibody of aluminum feel like versus the other unibody? Let's hope. Maybe they'll play the Rolling Stones. She's a rainbow again. Maybe it's time to dig that one out of the vault. Maybe it's 3D printed this time or something. Like, we don't know what the process is going to be. Lego. Lego laptop. Sometimes, yeah, I mean, some products, like if there's a new MacBook Pro and it's got the M5 in it and it's not that interesting because it's exactly like the M4, It's less useful, but when there's a brand new product or especially any product you hold in your hands, getting a hands-on experience with it is really beneficial. It makes a difference. I remember going to the iPhone events when they started making the bigger iPhones, and it was like, you know, I wanted to put it in my pocket. I want, you know, and I asked them, like, you're not going to freak out if I put it in my pocket, right? And they're like, no, do that, you know. You've got to do that. You have to, right. I'm not the one who's going to tackle you and rust you to the ground. That's a guy that you haven't seen yet. Yeah, you haven't seen him, and hopefully you won't. That's right, yeah. And, of course, Krispy Kreme is offering free donuts in celebration today. No, I guess that's something else. But anyway, what are the odds that it's just the MacBook? I think it's low. You think there are going to be other things as well? I think there are going to be other things there. I have a hard time believing that they would create a whole event, essentially experience, just for one product. And we know that the MacBook Pros are out there, and we know that there are some other products that have been sort of, like, suggested. The displays, possibly, too, right? Studio displays. And in the past when they've done this, it's been, like, a Mac and then maybe also, like, iPad stuff. 26.4 is coming out in March. So that's March. Yes, yes. The only reason I might think otherwise is Apple's 50th anniversary is April 1st. Tim Cook has said Apple's going to celebrate. Yeah, I don't think launching a new MacBook Pro or something is a celebration of Apple at 50. I think that'll all happen now. Also, what Jason said earlier, I think it's the sort of flexibility that Apple can give itself when it runs an event like this, where it's not, hey, Tim's going to be on stage, is going to introduce some videos, and a couple of product managers are going to come out in sequence and show you different things. And then we all go to a demo area. If they basically have – if they decide that we have this – we've rented out this huge space and we are going to create experience spaces so that we can actually create for people who want to specifically get information and do a video or do an article about the new MacBook, here is a MacBook space. Go to MacBook World. Here is Pro Display World. Here is an area level of Super Mario Land that is designed specifically for whatever they're doing to an iPad mini. God hope. God can only hope. So basically, they don't have to do this linear like Act 1, Act 2, Act 3 stage show. They can make it a little bit more like Disneyland where you're going to – we have these different facilities. We have, I'm sure Jason is right, where it's going to be less, here are tables full of stuff, shoot your videos, collect information. It's like, no, group three is now approved for this area. You're going to be met by X person who's going to be the storyteller. It's going to be like a Disney princess meeting at Disney where it's like you get to be with Cinderella, and Cinderella will tell you a story and then hand you off to whoever, Ariel, whatever. Snow White. To answer your question, Leo, the biggest thing on Polymarket is that the iPhone 17e, 94%. Ah, that's right. That's coming up sometime soon. Well, maybe. Sure. Maybe at the same event. And you get people's attention. It's also possible they'll do a couple staggered announcements, and, like, it's primarily about. Do you want to jam it all together? Does that seem like? Well, I mean, they have machinery that they have to crank up to do this, and they want to get people's attention. It's possible, though, that they'll, you know, again. I think a Mac announcement where you've got a bunch of different Macs, but this Focus is the brand new one is, you know, not a bad one. Like even if there's also a pro and there are also displays that are relevant for the pro customers, having that all together. Again, they could just release every product one at a time by press release and little drips and drabs, but I think that they find that they seem to find some marketing value in getting people together and telling these stories about their products in various places. and they're not going to do a road show where there are PR people going out every week to Shanghai and every week to London. They kind of put it all together and say this is our big shot for our spring product release, and, you know, I think that's fine. Okay. It doesn't make sense that they would hold off the MacBook Pros until WWDC in June. That seems like a long way, especially since you've got the pipelines backed up a little bit. You've got M6s coming. Yeah, Garmin says that the M6s are coming in the fall, possibly, end of the year, and so you want these out now and turn over the M5s right now, and then you maybe got room for the M6 in the fall. I think that is a reasonable assumption. Also, one of the peak buying periods for laptops, particularly less expensive laptops, things that might be bought by individuals who are getting ready for school or whatever, is actually make sure that they're out and saturated by April or May because that is a specific window that you absolutely want to hit. Yeah, also, there was somebody I think Dave said about, like, you know, it's not just laying out on tables so you can do your video. So my last experience at one of these things, they did actually have a room where the video creators were invited to do some shooting so they could get their B-roll and stuff without it being in the midst of everything else. So they kind of think of all of those things and put the detail together. But I don't get to go to that because that's not my deal. But, you know, they'll put – they'll ask, you know, I just – Well, that's not the content you create. Exactly right. Exactly right. And actually – They tailor it for you. And the problem with having it all mixed together there is that the people who are there to do one job are clashing with the people who are there to do a different job. And it's better to have – I mean, they've really thought this through a lot. So I imagine that's what it would be like. On the other hand, you really want to use all your stuff in one thing? I mean, when you, I don't know, apparently there's as many as 20 new products coming out this year. So I guess you aren't, there's no way you could use all your stuff in one thing, if you know what I'm saying. Yeah, you don't want all your stuff in one thing. No, but they do need to clear the pipeline ahead of WDC and, you know, whatever that's going to be. I mean, you know, people can only think of so many things at once. I don't know why I'm arguing against it. I shouldn't be. Okay. So we think 17e, MacBook, somebody said in the chat, the Discord chat, MacBook Prozaic, maybe some M5 MacBook Pros. I think definitely. Yeah. Now, there is one clock that's taking an opportunity that Apple might want, which is they're selling a lot of Mac minis. They must be noticing this. To AI nerds who are buying them, in fact, buying them in droves, apparently. controls. Yeah, they're, I checked the morning. You're running OpenClaw, aren't you? I am running and loving OpenClaw. Are you running on a Mac Mini? No, I'm actually running it on the old iMac 2019 Intel. Perfect use for it. The screen died, right? So the backlight on the screen died a couple of years ago, and I just couldn't bring myself to throw it away. And then the other day, I was like, oh, this is perfect for OpenClaw. It's really not, though, because Intel GPUs are not, none of the LLMs are optimized for Intel GPUs, so I can't really do anything local on it. But you don't need to because of the law is basically using cloud LLMs. Cloud LLMs. So my thinking is that if Apple were to release, for instance, a high-end Mac Studio with a lot of RAM, it would probably sell very, very rapidly. German says it's coming, but I think German is unclear whether it's going to be part of this or if it might follow in a month or two. And I wonder how much of that... Especially if you could find a RAM. Kind of. I mean, it depends on how... You're never going to... Well, I don't want to say never. Well, you don't have NVIDIA cards on it. You don't have a hundred NVIDIA cards on it, right? Like, you're just... It's not efficient. It's not cost efficient to compete with the compute... You know, the paying for compute power of the cloud LLMs. You might have a dumb local LLM to sort of be your orchestrator, maybe. But, you know, it's just as cheap to pay $20 a month to Kimmy and get K2.5 if you don't mind your data going back and forth to Beijing. And then that's your orchestrator. And when you need the compute of something more, you're not going to compete with Claude or OpenAI. Yeah. But there's something to that. A couple of different commentators last week, especially since OpenClaw is like all everybody wants to talk about, have noted that in particular, like the Mac Studios and the Mac Minis with lots and lots and lots and lots of RAM are sold out unexpectedly for the next few months. Now, that could be because of OpenClaw. It could be because anybody who thinks, gee, if I was planning on buying one sometime this year anyway, I'd better buy one now before RAM prices go even higher. So that's speculation, but that's an interesting data point, shall we say. Oh, no, people are buying them. I think it's not for everyone who wants to run an open claw. I think there are those use cases for sure, but then there's everybody else. That's all. Also, in terms of the Mac Studio, what I would say is it wouldn't surprise me if Apple prioritizes the MacBook Pro because the MacBook Pro is a very popular product that generates a lot of profit margin for them. And that prioritizing, remember, if they're all using a limited supply of M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, they might want to prioritize the MacBook Pro a little bit because it's a higher volume product, and then the studio will come along. But I agree, they do seem to be having a moment with local AI on the M5, and I'm sure they want to take advantage of it. It's just an open question about whether they're going to be ready to ship both of those products in early March or if one of them is going to have to lag a little bit. Yeah, a month ago, OpenClaw basically didn't exist, so nobody was doing this. I don't know that they have time to pull it all together. But I do think there's a new studio display coming. That seems to be pretty hot. Yeah, I'm excited about that. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, yeah. I just think of the prices. Well, it's going to be exactly what you expect, which is disappointingly expensive because that's what Apple does with their displays. It's the same, you said. I bought two. I mean, it's going to look the same. It's going to have a higher refresh rate. Maybe it will have better sort of HDR support. Good to get an update for it, but I think it will probably be disappointingly expensive. Can you run it with your iMac there, Dave? What's that? Can you run it with that old iMac? I could, but I could also, I mean, what's sitting in front of me on my Mac Studio is ViewSonic's 5K display, and that's less than $1,000, and it's awesome. It's great. By the way, we've lost all the AI bros because about 20 minutes ago, Anthropic released Sonic 4.6. Oh, no kidding. I got to go, Leo. Yeah, I know. All the claw guys are long gone, so we're not disappointing anybody. I heard you can't install it on your murder drone, so what's the point? Talk about Apple not being able to react to, like, open claw becoming a thing. But I would say Apple knew probably a couple years ago going into the M5 that one of the features of the M5, and they hammered on it when they announced the M5 last fall, was that they had dramatically improved AI on that chip. That chip is much better than previous Apple Silicon chips are for AI. So they knew that some aspect, and they're the ones who showed off, like, the Mac minis that were all connected together as a cluster, right? As a cluster of Thunderbolts. So, yes, exactly. At least a half dozen creators had YouTube videos on the same day. I've made this $50,000 cluster of Mac minis. Well, they're all back to the drawing board, those guys. Right now, they're quickly installing Sonnet 4.6, 12 days after Opus 4.6. I mean. Opus 4.6 is amazing. It is. And apparently it's not going to be the new default for co-work and the cloud chat bot. I don't know what for cloud code. Anyway, for those who are – you were saying, what does this have to do with Macintosh? Nothing. Well, except for, as usual, anything that has any technology that's based on silicon in it is going to be going really, really, really, really, really expensively up. Yeah, because of RAM. But I also – Actually, Western Digital announced that it's sold out of hard drives for the year. Good heavens. Because so many AI whatevers are buying them. I guess data centers, I don't know. Well, I'm glad I held on to that USB 2.1 floppy drive. I know. I know. Infinite storage, baby. Infinite storage. Yeah. So that's actually another question. I wonder if Apple will address this at any point. How is this going to impact Apple? I mean, it's impacting everybody else. I think to answer your rhetorical question before and this one, how does it impact Apple users or Apple, I think what we're seeing with the user interface of AI first, right, where you tell the chatbot what you want and then it goes and does it for you on your computer and you either tell it with your keyboard or your mouth or, you know, your voice or whatever. I think that is the interface. Like what we use with ChatGPT right now is the interface for everything that we do in the not-too-distant future. I think a year, a year, two years. I mean, we're already doing it with agentic browsing, right? You tell it, you find me these settings in my router we were talking about pre-show, and it just goes and does it, right? I don't need to know how to navigate that. I don't need to know how to navigate JetBlue. I think that's where it impacts all of us, is that we are seeing the future of the interface, and it's right in front of us. No, I completely agree with you. I don't want to learn everybody's disparate interfaces, and I don't even want to learn Apple's. I just want my computer to efficiently know what I want to do and then do it with me. Well, Dave, that raises a big issue, because now do you need a Mac? I mean, if the computer kind of fades into the background. That's a great question. I mean, you're probably talking to your open claw through a chat bot, right? Correct. And it's doing most of my work. You're doing it from a phone. Correct. Yeah. And I can do it with my voice or my thing. It doesn't matter what the thing is. So really the question is, which operating system integrates that well first and then best? And I think the answers to those two questions, and they are separate questions, and Apple has often not been the former but often been the latter. You know what I don't like is because it's going to be harder and harder to do this stuff locally because you can't get hard drives, you can't get RAM. You need your old iMac sitting on the floor. We're more dependent now on these, what they call them, hyperscalers, these massive companies with billions of dollars worth of GPUs than ever. And I don't know if that's a good thing. But, geez, we're headed into very interesting territory. Let's just put it that way. And it's somewhat unpredictable. The classic problem has always been that AI, developing these models is you need the resources of a nation state in order to do it. And so it's always going to be really, really difficult for anybody to be like the Apple versus IBM in 1976. Except for China. Google versus Microsoft in 2000. And like when when when does when is the next small startup with a really good idea able to grow and able to create something that's very, very responsive versus a four trillion dollar, three trillion dollar company or a government like China, like the United States dictating policy on how this foundation model has to behave? Because, again, they have the ability to write the check to actually build the foundation model. So they get to decide what it can and what it can't do and what it can do. And we'll tell the citizens of the country what it can do. Deep Seek, though, is in some ways the garage of AI. It is a Chinese company. In fact, we're waiting for the next Deep Seek model any minute now. It shocked the world a year ago and changed how AI works. And, in fact, I think it's kind of the engine of how all these new AI models are working. there are a number of really strong open weight models that you can download from China, like DeepSeek, like GLM, like Minimax. Even Meta has an open weight model. I don't know for how much longer they're going to keep doing that. So there are kind of – but if you can't get the hardware run locally, it doesn't much matter. I mean, you could put them on a VPS too, right, which a lot of people are doing. Sure. You know, you spin up a VPS and other stores. Yep. We live in interesting times. We sure do. Okay. So I'm just saying Apple, you know, might want to jump on that bandwagon. Now, somebody speculated, I don't know if it was Mark Gurman or somebody, but the fact that there are three events, one in New York, one in London, and one in China and Shanghai implies that there will not be a new Siri announced at this event because is new Siri available in China? China requires that they use Chinese models. They're still far away from getting it from the US coming launch. Kerman has reported that they're behind on that and that they're delaying it. But also, I think, I'm just going to say, people are overthinking it. If they're like, aha, it's in Shanghai and therefore no Siri. Because if they did have a Siri announcement to make, they'd just make it and they'd show it in London and New York and not show it in Shanghai. And they'd have a bunch of Macs. This is not a Siri event. It was never going to be a Siri event. So I think that's a case of people over-reading the details. I think they just wanted to cover the world and multiple world time zones. It also confirms, though, the theory that the announcements will be done by video and press release, rather than at these experiences. These experiences are hands-on experiences, not the announcements. Yeah, absolutely. And that was a significant piece of news this week, that when Gurman broke that story that, yeah, Syria is not in trouble in trouble, but if you're thinking spring, don't think spring. it's going to be a lot later than that because they're still having trouble with it. CNBC had a report that the stock took a dive 5% that day. Or was it 5 points or 5? I think it was 5%. And Apple actually, they had to reach, Apple was actually so concerned about it, apparently, that, yeah, they actually responded to CNBC saying, we are still definitely on track to get the new Siri out by the end of the year. Mark Bloomberg. Bloomberg, I like that. Mark Bloomberg. Mark Kerman. Mark Kerman. Mark German had a tweet. Hey, I didn't say we're going to release it this year. He responded. Steve Kovac, who now works at CNBC, which is cool. We know Steve well. Said Apple has confirmed to him that it is on track to release news theory this year. I've seen a lot of people who say, how dare they take Mark Gurman's report and then hold it against Apple in the stock market because Apple never said it would be out this spring. And that's what the Apple statement is. Look, all we said would come out this year, and it is. Yeah, but that's why. Gurman knows. So here's the thing. So Gurman, first off, Gurman knows that they were trying to get it out this spring and that they couldn't do it and they had to push it back. It's not a delay. Apple didn't delay it. But Gurman's insider reporting is that they hope to have it sooner and they haven't. Also, what I would say, because I've heard this from a lot of people, a lot of people, like it's just not fair that Apple stock went down based on this Mark Gurman report. And what I would say to that is Apple stock was where it was. The way the stock market works, people, is based on the price is based on what information is known and baked into the stock. So Gurman's report that they were working on this was baked into the stock. It's not like everybody forgot everything except that Apple said that they'd come out with it next year, which is now this year. That's not how this works. So the German report was baked in before, including a little optimism that they were close to getting this out. And then when German said, actually, it's going to slide a little bit, the stock went down. There's so many misunderstandings and overreactions about this. This is how the stock market has always worked. It's just now Mark German is part of it. But there's always been Bloomberg's business. Fair. That's why you spend all that money on a Bloomberg terminal. And people tend to think like, oh, I can't believe. Well, here's an example. Apple, especially people who are fans of Apple, will get upset because Apple will have a big quarter. This used to happen back when Apple was not doing as well as it is right now. Apple would have a big quarter and their stock would go down. And people were like, it's so unfair. They just hate Apple. The truth is what Apple's reporting was they had already given guidance that that was what they were going to do. That wasn't news. The news was their new guidance, which was lower than Wall Street expected, and so the stock went down. That's just how it works is there's information, and then there's new information, and the stock changes. Especially in this era of AI where a lot of stock prices are inflated by the promise of AI. A lot of speculation going on and people placing bets on that. If Apple wanted to pump their stock, they would announce on March 4th, hey, and by the way, the best hardware for running an AI is a Mac Studio or a Mac Mini. I mean, they could say that. I'm sure if they're releasing M5 products that it's going to come up with. Actually, the M5 I've also just seen is going to be the core of their new servers. They're, you know, privacy-forward AI servers. So they're going to say that. They're going to say, of course, this is the chip for AI. We've got, you know, we've got neural net units built in. We've got lots of unified memory. This is it. Yeah. Also, Apple also, again, the stock is always informed by whatever happened last and whatever, and they're not going to react however they reacted. Remember that Apple got a bump after one of the reasons why it got such a bump recently was because analysts were deciding that, you know what, we're kind of getting scared of all of the increases in capital expenditures that Google and every other AI-based company are making. We kind of like that Apple is being a lot more reserved in terms of how much it's spending to build out its compute. And so they're going to benefit from that one month, and now they got hit with it on the other side of it this month. I think long-term, we've talked about this, there may well be a benefit to Apple not spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI models. Once again, it's just relaxing and back, relaxing, saying, you know, we'll wait until it all settles out, then we'll be here. It tells the tale that when you look at Apple's machine learning page, news page, every single paper that they publish is all about, if you thought that this technique could only be done on heavy compute, no, we figured out a way to do it nearly as well on phone-based chips, on local-based chips at 8% of the energy load. So they really are consistently telling the story that, no, we are not the company that will be building the transformative AI that will heal the world. We are the company that will be doing something that runs locally on your own device, does not rely on us having to spend a lot of money, does not rely on you, the consumer, having to spend a lot of money for a $20 a month subscription because of all the power that's being consumed to do all this notebook LM stuff. We have figured out a way to do it safely, sensibly, and economically. Well, I spent a lot of money on Bloomberg, so let me read you what Mark Gurman said that spooked the market. Apple's upgrade to the Siri virtual assistant has run into snags. I think that was the word that sphared the market. Snags during testing, potentially pushing back the release of several highly anticipated functions. The company is now working to spread the new capabilities out over future versions, possibly postponing at least some features until 26.5. 26.4 is supposedly next month, 26.5, I don't know when, maybe June, or iOS 27, which would be September with the new iPhones. Testing has uncovered problems with the software, including issues with Siri properly processing queries. That means being Siri, Siri being Siri, taking too long to handle requests and accuracy issues, prompting the latest postponements. We had, Gurman had reported earlier that they were dogfooding this internally at Apple. And I can imagine, you know, the fire alarms that go off when Siri hallucinates or, you know, says something wrong. And Apple, unlike these other companies, you know, Google, you know, Google didn't care that their Gemini model said you should put Elmer's glue to keep your pizza together or eat rocks to get your minerals. Google said, that's okay. We're going to full speed ahead. But you know Apple is not going to tolerate that. And rightly so. I think people would go, do you hear what Siri said? Siri is so stupid. Apple is in such a good position. Google, the storytelling behind Google versus OpenAI is, I mean, Google had all of this stuff basically ready to go. They had all this stuff inside the labs, and they were saying, but it's not working the way that a consumer would expect a tool like this to work, So we're going to keep working on it until it works a lot better and or figuring out a limited way to create features for this where it's not going to create problems. Then OpenAI said, we are a startup. We need more investment. YOLO, we're just going to release it and whatever happens. And now Google spent almost like three quarters of its business year trying to explain to all investors and all analysts that, look, we did the original research that all of OpenAI's work is based on. We are not behind. We have stuff we've built that we haven't released yet. But, okay, now we've got to join the YOLO club because it's starting to affect our bottom line. So there's a degree of craziness that we are going to have to sit back and witness. But Apple will never join the YOLO club, will they? They're not the YOLO club. But also that's not their business. They're always – whatever they do with AI, it has to be underscore either selling more phones and more iPads and more notebooks, which is going to be their main priority, or making some sort of services package even more valuable. But mostly it's going to be about here is how much better this iPhone is going to be this year than it was last year because they are still – as good a job as they're doing in increasing their services revenue, they are first and foremost a company that makes hardware and sells it to people. Well, we accidentally dipped into the rumors section. We will get to the other rumors in just a little bit. I guess, you know, when it's something like this and German says it, it probably has a status a little bit above rumor. He didn't pull it out of his butt. He wasn't trying to make a deadline. He has a source. As Jason often points out very correctly, sometimes you have to smell that there is some storytelling going on here, that he's taking facts that he knows about and trying to create the context around it for the purposes of explaining it to people. But this is not someone who simply says, it seems like a likely thing. So why don't I just report that that's probably what's happening. Right, right. All right, let's take a little time out. You're watching MacBreak Weekly, and there is a lot of Apple news today. There's even a Vision Pro segment. And so, John Ashley, prepare with non-baloney stories this time. We're very proud of it. Prepare the Vision Pro theme. Dave Hamilton's here. It's great to have him from the Mac Geek Gab podcast, which is even older than us. But it has a springy, youthful step, and it's a wonderful show to listen to. Also, Jason Snell, who will not be with us on the day before the Apple event, March 3rd, because he's flying to New York. Yep. I won't be here either. I'm flying to Orlando for a security conference. So I guess, Micah Sargent, you're on. Micah will be here. And I should mention that starting next week, Christina Warren will be filling Alex Lindsay's seat. Christina was getting some stuff done before she could start on a regular basis, but she will start next Tuesday on MacBreak Weekly, also here, Andy and Co. 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In other news, one of those pesky little patent lawsuits has finally been settled. Apple has defeated Optus. These were over 5G patents the lawsuit brought seven years ago. There is still a case hanging over their heads in the UK. But in the United States, it's over. Now, six years ago, Optus was ordered half a billion dollars, but Apple appealed. and won saying those aren't fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory license terms. Case went back to a new trial. Optus won again. Remember these cases, these trials are held in East Texas. Always a great place if you're a patent troll. Always a great place. Did I say troll? Non-participating. They got great barbecue over there. That's why lawyers are going to have to be flying someplace. That's the only thing that's the reason why they filed there. You joke, but there's no truth there. It's true. Optus won again with a $300 million award. Apple appealed again, finally overturning the verdict due to not the merits of their case, but flaws in the jury process and the damages methodology. That sent it back, this is a saga, to trial for a third time. A jury in the Eastern District of Texas unanimously found, and this is very rare, that Apple did not infringe any of Optus' five patents. Optus has nothing to say. I guess they might want to appeal and keep this thing alive. And, of course, as I said, it's still alive in the U.K. I actually can't comment on the merits of the patent. But 4G and LTE, if they keep this going long enough, will disappear. And then, you know, who cares? Apple says, we're going to be nicer to developers. We've heard this. We've seen this movie before. Yes, we have. And they said it's the EU in lieu of actually being regulated even more. Instead of doing anything, yeah. The U.K.'s antitrust regulator said they will closely measure the effectiveness of these four promises. One, in app review, Apple will make sure, and this is the U.K.'s CMA says they must, as well as Google, incidentally, make sure to review apps to be distributed on their app stores in a fair, objective, and transparent way and not to discriminate against apps which compete with their own preferential treatment to their own apps. Does that mean that developers can say, you rejected my app, but there's 14 apps just like it in the store that you keep? Are we allowed to do that yet? Because until that day comes, it's not fair. Yeah. Well, there's also the issue. For instance, there's a new keyboard going around on Android. I cannot type on the Apple keyboard. All these little keyboards. So many complaints about the Apple keyboard. So there's a new one that's big and round and has a different layout. and people are swearing by it, saying this is a much better, because you shouldn't be taking this old school keyboard and putting it on a phone. You should do something that's phone native. But Apple won't allow it because why? Well, because we got our own keyboard, and sorry. So I think that's good. Apple also must, and Google, rank apps in their app stores in a fair, objective, and transparent way, same three words, not to discriminate, same terms or preferential treatment. As far as data collection goes, making sure Apple and Google safeguard the app data they gather from developers in the course of app review not to use that data unfairly. Somebody must have said Apple stole my idea or something like that. And, and this is the one I really like, enabling developers to more easily request interoperable access to features and functionality within Apple's mobile operating system. Yeah. We're talking about NFC. We're talking about connectivity to watches and earbuds and stuff like that. That is one of the most serious bones of contention, one of the most legitimate bones of contention, that Apple will allow the Apple Watch to do both magical things with connection to an iPhone and also the mundane things that you would expect any smartwatch to do with connection to a phone. but they will not allow even the mundane things to happen to a third-party watch on the basis of, oh, but messages and alerts and notifications are the most personal and private, and we're going to stand by our users and make sure that those nasty, nasty data collectors by the name of Garmin and by the name of our competitors, in other words. Yeah, exactly. We won't allow them to display notifications because we're doing God's work here. This has always been a contention. I remember in Windows days, back when Windows was dominant, people would complain that Microsoft had all these secret APIs that only they knew about and only they could use. And if others used them, Microsoft would get mad and deprecate them. People say the same thing about Apple. So, by the way, Apple says, you know what? We're happy. We're happy about this. The commitments, this is the quote, the commitments announced today allow Apple to continue advancing important privacy and security innovations for users and great opportunities for developers. But only in the U.K., right? They don't have to do this in the U.S.? Oh, yeah, only in the U.K. And also, let's be clear, when a cop pulls me over for speeding and says, do you promise to take it slow? I say, yes, no tickets. Yes, sir. I think this is a great thing, too. You believe it in the moment when you're saying it. I just dodged a $150 ticket and points on my insurance. I think that the cops are great. I'm glad we're working together to find common solutions. Thank you very much. So your podcast, Dave, are mostly audio. Do you do any video podcasts? We do video, yeah. Oh, you do? We do. Yeah, Mackie Cab, we live stream it. And, you know, it's just, it's too many. You put it out as audio. Or do you put it out as video? It goes onto YouTube as video. We do not, we've never released it as video because up until, well, even up until and including today. You know where I'm going, don't you? You would have to have two feeds like you do, and that always seems stupid to me. Right. So, but. Apple has changed things, at least with the Apple podcasts. Ish. Not really. It will not help you. If, like, right? Because what happens. We know it's not going to help us because we don't host any of our shows on any of the places they make deals with for this. So this is the story. Apple Podcast is launching a feature that will allow you to start a podcast in audio and then switch to video. You get both. Two. Two forms in one. Spotify has this feature now. Spotify and YouTube both have that feature. I mean, I think we have that feature. You just download the video like everybody else does and listen to it until you want a picture. And then you look. But even your shows in the new beta, your video feeds, look better, right? They can go full screen now and do all the things. Oh, okay. So that's good. Yes. But even though that works, in order to have them in the same feed, you would have to not put your video in the RSS. you would have to put your video on the server of a host that could then stream it to Apple using HLS. And it's one of the four blessed hosts, right? Acast is one of them. Amazon's Art 19. Triton Digital's Omni Studio, which is iHeart Media. It's the big guys. And Sirius XM. They generally, when they announce podcasting partners, it's because they preset a bunch of partners that they've worked with up front. There's some hope that others will join. Yeah, I'm sure. But my point is there doesn't need to be a provider. Leo is a great, like this is a perfect example. Why wouldn't Apple let you, they're letting you do the video feed as it is, and even making that better, like the experience of consuming it better. They're letting you do your audio feed, obviously. Why wouldn't they let you take the enclosure tag that you use for your video feed and put it in your audio feed as an alternate enclosure and use both of those? The change here is that they're supporting streaming for the first time. HLS. HLS, which they've always supported video podcasting, right? But not together. Not together, but I think the bigger news here is not the togetherness, I think it's the fact that it's using HLS to stream, so when you switch over to video, it's going to use a modern streaming format invented by Apple to support this stuff. And so I think that's great. I suspect now that it's been announced and part of Dev Beta 1 that there are probably some specs out there. I don't think this is Apple playing keep away. I think there's probably a spec for what you need to have offered on an HLS server and a spec for what you need to put in your RSS to indicate that the video feed is available at a streaming server. and that anybody can support this. I will point out that Spotify is hosting the video just like audio. Spotify hosts the video themselves, whereas Apple is continuing with the tradition of saying, we don't actually want to pay to host your media. You do that and then talk to us later. Yeah. We're on Spotify video, by the way. I don't think we get a lot of downloads, but we do have it on Spotify video. But normally a video comes from Cashfly or CDN, and I guess, I mean, it would be nice if, I don't know. Of course, as soon as this press release came out yesterday, I presented it to our engineering team, and they said, well, don't know yet because there's not really any details. There are some details, and you're right, Jason. They're very open with the spec and how it all works. There's nothing, as they've announced thus far, there's nothing that you add to your RSS, your hosting company, once they have all this infrastructure in place. They submit a file per episode to Apple to say, we are the official host of that episode that you're seeing in this RSF feed. And then Apple on the back end marries the two together. What happens if somebody uses Pocket Cast, though? I mean, you have to use Apple Podcast for this, right? In order for this experience. But Pocket Cast, and I don't know if they do or not, but in theory they could already be supporting. They could support it, too. which does the same thing, but instead of having to have a special host, you could have your video come from Cashfly with the alternate enclosure tech. You do a lot of video, Jason. Yep. Are you going to adopt this? Are you going to do it? I have to look into it. For Upgrade, we do a YouTube version of the show, and we tried to offer that on Spotify, and we pulled it out. And the reason is, and I imagine this will be true of Apple as well, that there is an assumption that your audio and video versions are identical, and so you can toggle between them and just turn the video on and off. And that's actually not true with our workflow. We have an audio editor who makes a really, really nice audio version that we prefer. And then our video version is, you know, we cut the cutout parts and all of that, but our video editor is not the same person, and they're not making the same edits, and they're not doing a detailed audio edit because it would cost a lot more money to do that for a relatively small audience. And this premise at Spotify, and I assume at Apple, is that your audio and video versions are the same, which would require us not just to flip a switch but to completely change our post-production. And you basically need somebody who's capable of using a video editor to do audio editing, which is – I know people like that. We did it. It can be done. We did it, and it was hard. Yeah. Our editors went kicking and screaming. Right, John Ashley? You Reddit now basically edit the video and then export an audio track. Yeah, you do everything. I edit it both. You do it all in Premiere, and the audio track would be the same. Yep. Yeah. So we don't do that. So that's a hold-up process. The idea that they – I think a lot of this is premised on the idea that all the audio version of your podcast is the audio track from the video version, which I think says something about how podcasting has been going lately, that everybody's sort of starting to think that the video version is primary and that the audio version is just video with the picture turned off. And I actually don't believe that and don't agree with that. And so, I mean, we'll see. I may be forced to change my opinion, but it's the same reason why I don't record podcasts where I make reference to things that are on screen because I know that a large percentage of the people can't see what is on the screen. So it's a bad idea. And even from an audio standpoint, listeners, consumers of the content, content consumers are far more tolerant with audio glitches or odd pauses or any of those things that audio listeners completely get thrown off by. You're more tolerant of that when you can see what's happening on the video, right? The experience changes, and therefore we had to pull our video off of Spotify because the audio mix on our video is not the same. Even if we don't have any edits or cuts, the blend of the audio on the video version is different than it is on the well-produced audio version. But what Spotify currently, anyway, does is as soon as you upload the video version, the audio from that is your audio. The audio in your RSS feed is no longer. That's where the audio comes from. Yeah, the audio in your RSS feed is ignored the moment you upload a video to Spotify. It's just the stuff. So Darren's post is looking at the tech specs. So there are some tech specs. Yeah. And Apple says to use the new HLS, HTTP live streaming capabilities. By the way, Apple started doing this with their event streams, and that's why initially you had to watch them in Safari because the browser had to support this weirdo format. To use new HLS capabilities, you can't simply drop a video file onto your own web server and link an RSS feed. Instead, you must generate a unique API key within your Apple Podcast Connect account and provide it to an approved hosting partner. The host then manages the complex HLS file chunking and playlist generation, sending that data directly to Apple via the API. So this is very proprietary. That's a non-starter as far as I'm concerned. You know, to me it's really important that podcasting be RSS. Agreed. Right? Because that's an open standard, open format. 100%. You can't be spied on. I mean, no company owns it. It just works. But things are changing in the podcast universe. For instance, many podcasts, including ours, have direct ad insertion. That you can do with HLS. That's one of the things Apple made a big deal about. Yeah, and I noticed that all of these companies do direct ad insertion, right? Yeah, and Apple is going to take a percentage of it. Apple will actually skim some money off the top of your dynamically inserted ads. What about your baked-in ads? Are they going to try and come after that? They can't get that. No, but they are taking a piece of the pie here, of the DAI. That's part of the deal with the four chosen companies. I think so. They're all ad agencies. Well, they are, but they've given up. Instead of just choosing their chunk of the pie and then giving the rest of the podcast, they take their chunk of the pie, they give some to Apple and the rest of the podcast. I realize this is very inside baseball, and for those of you who listen to the show, I mean, here we have three podcasters kind of go, what are we going to do about this? Because there's a lot of consternation going on in the podcast universe. In order to do DAI, we don't have a provider that can do it in video. So the direct ad insertion is always for audio only. And in order to do that, we have to put the audio on a hosting company that does that. Same kind of thing as your video with these HLS. I mean, that part of it. It'd be nice if the world supported it, I guess. I don't know. I wish we didn't have to do any of this. That's why I always tell people, join the club so we can just stick with RSS. We don't have to do direct ad insertion or any of that stuff. But, unfortunately, the club, as wonderful as it is, doesn't support us sufficiently to do with that. Not yet. It'll happen. I hope so. Yeah. Yeah. How is it going for you? You're doing that, right? And I know, Jason, you're doing that. Yeah. I would say our revenue, I mean, at different points of the year, obviously, things move around. But on the whole, when you zoom out, it's about, I would say, 40% is our premium. Yeah, ours is about a third of our operating costs. Yeah, so you're close. Yeah, yeah. It was 25%, and the only reason it's a third is because ads dropping. Because ads drop. Well, that's the thing. That's why I say you've got to zoom out. Yeah. It goes up and down. The premium is the only revenue. Yeah. It's the primary. And I guess, Jason, kind of in a way, with Six Colors, you've kind of always been in that boat a little bit, that the premium subscriptions are very important, I would imagine. Yeah. I mean, we started our membership for Six Colors and Incomparable and sort of a year after I went off on my own, and so that's always been there and leaned into that and upgrade as well. And it's always – I think it's a really healthy way to run a media business these days is that you've got some stuff that you give away for free, supported by advertising. And then for the people who really care, they can get – they can pay you directly, and you've got that relationship with your core audience. And, yeah, I think it works pretty well. And so that's why, kids, you should support your favorite shows, your favorite websites. I know the Internet used to be free, but never really was free. No, we still trade attention for content. Yeah. And we're, you know, all these guys and gals, we're all busting our humps to give you content you enjoy, content we enjoy doing. You know, we're committed to it. We believe in it. And if you do, then you should support it. And I'm not just talking about me. I'm talking about everybody. Preach on, man. Yeah, I do it for open source software, too. You know, I think it's really important that we remember that this stuff isn't really free, and if you want good stuff, ultimately you've got to pay for it. Apple has updated its own iOS usage figures. I think this is maybe the first time they've done this, isn't it? They do it every year. Oh, they do it every year. Every year about this time. It's a little bit later. The numbers are very similar. How many people have updated to iOS 26? But it is a few weeks later. So I think I would probably say that adoption is slightly, very, very slightly less than it's been in the past. But people who are like, oh, nobody's updated to iOS 26, that's not true. In part, that's not true because Apple literally has a big button. Well, okay, it's not literally a button. Apple controls when the rollouts go out. And so you can see, if you talk to any app developer who's measuring this, you can see, like, there's a wave. And it's like, that's a first wave. And then there's another wave. And Apple controls more and more iPhone users getting the, not mandatory, but the, you know, I'm going to do an update and update is available. They will nudge you. From day one, you can go and say, I want this update. But then, like, a month later, they'll take 20% of their user base and they'll say, you should update. And then another 20% and then another 20%. So they control. This is a figure that they can boast about. But also it's indicative of the system they've built that allows them to control updates. so that these people, it's very hard to stay behind. 74% of all new devices, new iPhones, use iOS 26. But when you include older phones, phones older than four years old, that number goes down to 66%. Right. A lot of them can't run it. They can't, right. So that goes down. But it's pretty good. App developers care about this, right, because app developers like to get off of old OSs onto current OSs as quickly as possible, and Apple has made that a focus of theirs. It has security implications as well. I know that you bring up all these security updates that Apple does. This is one of those implications is even if you're on the latest version of the previous OS, you're not as secure as you are on 26 because 26 has got a whole bunch of things that they did fundamentally to make it better and more secure than the last one. So that's part of the story. You know who's happy to see these numbers? Tesla. That was the head of German's Power On newsletter this week. Tesla CarPlay held back by need for wider adoption of Apple's IO. Why do they 74%? Actually, one of my Six Colors listeners pointed out about this. So basically, they want to do CarPlay for Tesla. They have never done that, by the way. They've never done it. Android Auto never had CarPlay. But Tesla's having trouble selling cars right now, and this is a motivator. CarPlay is a motivator for a lot of people buying brand-new cars. I will not buy a car that doesn't have CarPlay. Exactly. So they're going to do it. They caved on that. But what they found was, and German mentions this, and then one of my readers on Six Colors who has an aftermarket thing that hacks your Tesla screen to show CarPlay reported this as well, that when you're in self-driving mode, you end up in a very weird situation where the Apple map is saying you're going this way and the self-driving is saying it's going that way. And it's very weird. And so Tesla went to Apple and said, can we have a modification to Apple Maps that allows these two things to stay in sync because they're very disconcerting to the user? And Apple said yes. And they put it in an update. It's unclear whether it was in 26.3 or in one of the tertiary updates to 26.2, but an update that solved this problem. And what Gurman says is Tesla is basically waiting for them to solve that problem and waiting for that to push out so that enough users had it that they didn't say, hey, you've got CarPlay, but you have to wait for an update. But instead it can be, you have CarPlay, and you probably already don't need to do anything. So they're really just, first off, it means this is totally happening because you do not ask Apple to make OS modifications for a thing that you're thinking about doing. It's totally happening. No, Apple doesn't do them. There's a commitment that's been a legal commitment. Probably, yes. There's a legal commitment here. You're right, Dave. They're not going to do this extra work without that. And you can see why Tesla's kind of up against it in terms of sales numbers that they want to do it. So now it's just a matter of when Tesla pulls the trigger, it sounds like, because with 26.3 out the door, it sounds like, you know, basically most iPhones that are whatever, 70-odd percent of iPhones are probably able to support this feature without an update. And it's not that big a deal, right? I feel like the existence of the update on lots of phones isn't as important as the fact that there needs to be an update available that gets you this feature. Because you never want to launch a feature and say, hey, great, great news. We have a new feature. You can't use it yet. Wait for Apple. But according to Gurman, it's out now, the version that was necessary. So I would not be surprised if there wasn't a Tesla software update in the next month, maybe, to support this. Because it sounds like it's a done deal. So Tesla discovered, this is from Gurman, the compatibility, and it was specifically really between Apple Maps and the in-house mapping software. Yeah, because they're using, I think Tesla uses Google Maps API. Right. And they've got some customization. And so they, yeah, they would fall out of sync. And like my reader at Six Colors said, it is disconcerting to have that moment. Now, we should say all the usual disclaimers apply. This is not CarPlay Ultra. This is CarPlay in a window. So you've got the sort of like Tesla's got its app interface. This will presumably be an app with air quotes called CarPlay that you can open, and it will be the CarPlay window, and then there's also other information available on that screen. But this was the killer was they didn't like the fact that you would sometimes have navigation that didn't stay in sync. And so Apple did the necessary changes. Tesla asked Apple, Mark says, to make engineering changes to Maps. And now, you know, with iOS 26, you'll have the updated Maps. So as soon as, you know, 74% of a new phone unit, I figure you probably have a newer phone if you have a Tesla. Maybe not. I don't know. It seems like that's a good. You spent all your money on a Tesla. I don't know. Yeah, it seems so. Yeah, maybe you're broke. I mean, there's a lot of phones that can run 26. If you don't have full self-driving, you're not broke. You're not broke. You're not paying for gas anymore. You know, Apple is not afraid and Tesla, I'm sure, is not afraid to say, look, if you're using a six-year-old phone or whatever and it doesn't run 26, you don't get CarPlay. You don't get CarPlay. Yeah. All right. You're watching MacBreak Weekly. Jason Snell from SixColors.com. Andy Anako from the library. And Mr. Dave, MacGeekGabPodcastHamilton. It's good to see all three of you. Thank you for being here. I did not get bit by this, but I guess Apple last week had an outage. Find my and iCloud outage on Tuesday evening. Did any of you get bit by that? Is that me? If I did, I didn't notice it. You know what? Everybody's having outages. GitHub was up and down all week. I mean, everybody seems to be having issues. Well, I mean, the Internet was built for resilience, right, For data so that it could route around nuclear disasters, right? If you needed to get data from New York to San Francisco and Chicago had a nuclear bomb, you go through Dallas, right? That's how the IP part of TCPIP works, right? But what has happened, and it does work. Nothing about that has changed. What has changed is instead of decentralizing everything and all our resources, we have centralized all our resources. Everything's on AWS. Everything's in the cloud now. Everything's here. Everything's there. So it's like when Cloudflare went down, that was like, oh, my gosh. In fact, Cloudflare had problems again this week. Yeah. Well, of course. Like, there's infrastructure issues. And then you suddenly realize, wait a minute, down detector runs on Cloudflare? It's got to run Cloudflare. How are we going to know Cloudflare's down? I mean, Cloudflare proxies and keeps, like, secure and keeps fast, I don't know, what, half of the Internet, 60%. I mean, it's a lot. And I love them for doing what they do. I think it's great. We're just all interdependent now. Yes. I guess that's the way it is in the world. I mean, we've chosen this path. We just didn't explicitly say this outcome was part of it. So Creator Studio is out. All right, show of hands, how many people bought a subscription? Not me. Not yet. None of you. Not yet. Well, okay. I already own Logic and Final Cut on the Mac, and so I would need a particular use case on the iPad, really, to make it even remotely worth it. And you're not a big Pages Keynote Numbers guy? Well, those come with it. Those are free. It's free with an upsell, right? I don't care. I am a big Numbers guy, and I don't need their clip art. I just don't need their clip art. So, no, if I was shooting a multi-camera thing and needed Final Cut on the iPad, I would subscribe for a month for that, and then I would probably cancel. But I don't think I'm going to subscribe because they have allowed people who already had those apps on the Mac to just keep using them. For now. The time will come. The day will come when people like you and me will be, oh, it's time to anti-yes. Okay, fine. Of course. And the price is fair. Of course. If I needed Final Cut, I don't have Final Cut. I used DaVinci Resolve, and I thought, oh, maybe this is the thing to get Final Cut. And I mentioned it on MacGeek where we do a lot of Q&A, right? Like that's what we do on that show. And I did not realize I was asking a question. And I got so much email that was like, if you are good with DaVinci Resolve, do not switch to Final Cut. You will hate it. It's terrible. I'm like, all right, well, save some money for a little while. So there you go. Well, something you should know if you were thinking about it, One of the things Apple offers with this subscription is generative AI features. Apple says, quote, at a minimum, and I'm reading from Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica, users will be able to generate 50 images, 50 presentations of between 8 and 10 slides each, and presenter keynotes and keynote presenter notes for 700 slides. More usage may be possible, but this depends on the complexity of the queries and server availability and network availability. Well, Stephen Troughton Smith says, after creating an entire app with OpenAI's codex, the entire app used 7% of my weekly codex usage limit. Compare that to a single awful slideshow and keynote using 47% of my monthly Apple Creator Studio usage limit. There's some concern that the limits are too low. Well, but, you know, Stephen Troughton Smith is, and I say this with love and camaraderie, is a nerd, right? He's a power user, man. Correct. He knows how to use OpenAI Codex to do this stuff. Apple makes it very easy and integrates it into the software, and we pay for that privilege every time we buy a Mac, every time we buy an iPhone. Like, this is part and parcel of the Apple experience. That said, if it turns out that Apple has set these restrictions too low and that everybody who's a subscriber tries to do something in Keynote and realizes that they can do one thing or two things a month and then they're out and that's a frustrating experience, I would imagine they'll change the terms at some point. They'll just revise it in some way because I think they don't know how people are going to use this. In fact, what I would wager is that they're going to be able to raise those limits because they're going to discover that 95% of the people who subscribe don't use them. And so they're not going to worry about it. Because remember, they're paying OpenAI essentially for that, for all those queries. Dave, you use Cloud Codex, right? Or Cloud Cowork, rather, right? I have used Cloud Cowork, yes. Can it make keynote slideshows? Yes, it can, right? You know, I've never tried that, but I don't see why it couldn't, although I could come up with reasons why it couldn't. Most people just make PowerPoint. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But, I mean, but probably, and let's say it does, it's probably not as smooth an experience as using Keynote to do it. But to your point, Jason, about Apple raising the limits, I was having a conversation with someone at one of the AI companies, whose names we know that just wants to remain on background, saying that they are constantly internally adjusting their limits because they know they want to give people that user experience, right? And so I guarantee you if one of them is doing that, all of them is doing that, right? And so Apple is also going to be doing that. And Apple, candidly, is pretty darn good at the customer experience. You know, complaining, Kvetch, as we might about little nitpicky things, They're really, really good at delivering a smooth experience to customers. And so my guess is that these things will go away very quickly. All right. Let's cover some other rumors. They're talking about the new C2 chip, which presumably will be in the next iPhone. Apple is rumored to have a next generation C2 chip. This is from 9to5Mac. Three advantages. The new modem will bring improved battery efficiency. I don't know how people would know this, but it will have this new feature, which I really like. Apple has it in the 26.3. Limit precise location, which means that cellular networks cannot really triangulate it on your location. That's lately people are very sensitive. But that only works on devices that have the C2 chip already, right? Right. The 16E. Currently only the Air, the 16E. Yeah, exactly. And the iPad Pro with M5 support that. I wonder, you know, this would be interesting to see if the 17E does. I would bet it, well, I don't know. I mean, the chip's been around. They just haven't had enough of them to put in there. That's why it's not in the 17. It's about production. I guess that makes sense. It's about production. And then the thing probably you most care about is better performance when the signal is weak in data particularly. Apple told Reuters, if an iPhone encounters congested data networks, the phone's processor could signal to the modem which traffic is the most time-sensitive and put it ahead of the other data transfers. I guess that's QoS. So that's interesting. Yeah, and Apple's built their own system for their own, you know, their own operating system works with their own chips, and that's the standard thing. I feel like, you know, we all expected there to be more horror stories about the C1 and the C1X that haven't happened. And so I think that's the number one reason they didn't put it in all the phones is, like, what if there's a problem? Let's put it in the low-end phone, and we'll put it in an iPad, and we'll see what happens. And the answer is, it's fine. It's absolutely fine. I have an M5 iPad Pro, and it's, you know, so it's got the C1X in it, and it's great. It's just not an issue. I think I'm surprised because I thought that there would be more issues just because it's so complex, and Apple is trying to roll in here with its first product. And I think what this suggests to me is that Apple did spend a lot of time doing a lot of testing before they put this in a product. Yeah. And how do we feel about rumors about this C2 chip being one of the other side of the box labeled big star features being direct-to-side-like connectivity? Like, we already have, like, I'm trying to figure out, like, I see these kind of features labeled really, really nicely for what if you're outside of normal connectivity? It feels like to me, Andy, that you probably don't spend a lot of time hiking in the wilderness. I might be wrong on that. Yeah, but if you are spending time hiking in the wilderness, you should probably have a dedicated device that doesn't just simply rely on my phone. It's like I'm going to have a transponder that taps directly into existing networks of SpotWatch or something. I think it's the – So there's already – T-Mobile has done a deal with Starlink, and they're using some 5G frequencies. I think what this is referring to is the fact that there are some frequencies that can be used for satellite 5G constellations, that if you added support for those frequencies in your modem chip, then those carriers that have those partners would then be able to give you that. Now, obviously, this is only ever happening when you're not within a range of an actual cell tower for that carrier. But I think that is one of the trends. So that's how I read that report is that it really is probably more just about adding some frequency support for 5G by satellite from different providers. Okay. How about this? Mark Gurman brought it up, but the latest from Apple Insider is that Apple is still looking at a clamshell folding phone. We're talking about the folding phone that will open up to an iPad. Audi. Audi. That's an Audi. This is an Innie. Is this an Innie? Is that what you call this? Okay. I do. I'm not qualified to call it anything, but I call it an Innie. Innie and Audi. I've had both. I've had Innies and Audies, and I'm not talking belly buttons here. I'm talking about I've had the Galaxy. Both fold. This is the Fold. And then I've also had the Flip, which is the, that's the Innie. It's an Innie, yeah. It's a Fold from small, like those old Flip phones of yours, right? And I thought I was going to really like the Flip because it's pocket handkerchief size, right? It's this small, it's purse size. And then you get a normal phone when you open it up. But then now I kind of coming around especially with the new Fold is so thin that it really like a regular phone in your pocket And then when it opens up it like a little bit like an iPad or something And I kind of coming around to that being Andy maybe that your iPad mini right there Maybe this is the iPad. You'll never see another iPad mini again. What I like about the iPad mini is that it'll run you like $500 and not like $2,000. Yeah, right. There's got to be a mini. No, I mean, Apple, right? Yeah, Apple, I think that a folding phone of a kind where it folds out to a standard-sized smartphone, and when it's folded up, it's A, more compact, and B, presents you with almost like an Apple Watch widget interface for the outside screen. I think that's right up Apple's alley. They can design the hell out of it, make it as attractive as possible. Also, they can probably manufacture it as something closer to the price point of a standard iPhone or even if they have to go to the level of a pro. The thing is, like, a $2,000 phone is rarefied error. I don't think anybody who can't trade in a phone for at least $800 worth of credit, that is going to be a big, big hill for them to climb. And so I would love the idea for Apple to prove what they can do with a passport-sized folding phone, again, standard-ish looking outer screen that unfolds into something with a little bit more oomph when it comes to productivity, creating stuff, watching videos, whatever. But I think that the real sweet spot for Apple is going to be, again, make something that when you just have it sitting on your dresser, It looks like a beautiful Cartier compact or cigarette case from the 1930s or 1940s. That's the sort of stuff that will get people saying, or I could spend an extra $180 and still have a smartphone, smartphone, but boy, does that look nice. It's hypothetically pleasing. I agree with you. And I think there's another reason Apple might want to be looking at this. If you're looking at some sort of agentic AI device with its glasses, AirPods, a pendant, and you think that you need the computing power of a phone, if you can make this phone smaller, that kind of makes a better companion because you don't want to take it out of your pocket. You're not going to look at it that often. It's just really a little computer you're carrying around. And if the interface becomes more about me telling it what to do than me having to see where I need to point, then the innie makes more sense. Yes. Yeah. That's what I'm thinking. So maybe. Yeah, smart. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe that's – well, we'll see. I don't think they're going to announce it in March. I mean, the beauty is not every iPhone needs to be for everybody. And so they can make different shapes, and they've got room to do that if they want to. And I'm sure there are people with small pockets or no pockets who would be very interested in a phone that can fold up a little bit smaller, even if it does mean that it's a bit thicker when you do so. And you get the fun stuff like having a little screen on the outside that gives you some information. And, like, there's lots of cool stuff about that. Right. It could be a little iPod. The iPod flip. The iPod flip. That's what they're talking about. Dan's talking about that on YouTube, are you there, Jack? They're not allowed to call anything an iPod unless it has a headphone jack. I'm sorry. I'm a hardliner on that. Yeah, you're probably right. All right. Let me think. It's dangerous. Yeah, I know. It's risky. We got an update at 26.3. We've got 26.4 just around the corner. Is it too soon to talk about iOS 27, which will be out in the fall? Mark Gurman's talking about it. He's calling it the Rave Update. That's the code name, he says, inside Apple, R-A-V-E. And he's implying that it's kind of a snow leopard. It's a cleanup. And maybe there'll be some benefits like better battery life, but it really would be more about efficiency improvements, bug fixes, a snappier, more responsive OS, says Mark Gurman. That makes me excited about macOS 27, assuming all of this is true. Oh, yeah. I guess they do the same thing, yeah. Let's hope. There have been a lot of people complaining about fit and function of apps and UIs. All these things have been really, really stacking up. I don't know whether this is a concerted effort, whether this is just the time, or whether it's winter and people are really, really bored and things have been annoying them a little bit for a while or now it's time to get up. But I've seen so much traffic. I've never seen so many complaints about the iOS keyboard, so many complaints about, well, okay, yes, the new Mac OS and how it does Windows layouts and how it can't lay things out properly without making certain user face elements obscured and other things. Apple Music is getting a lot of flack. Apple did sort of a flex thing, hey, well, gee, Spotify raises prices. We don't raise our prices. And that prompted a lot of people to say, yeah, that's because your app stinks. I stopped using Apple Music so many times. And I don't know how much this is like a scarlet letter on Apple's chest or anything like that. But there seems to be a lot of, I don't know, a lot of motivation for a lot of people to suddenly complain about basic functions and basic, you know, the panel gaps, so to speak, in Apple software and how we keep working on AI. We think you're doing – that's an important thing. We're really proud about the folding phone, but could you please just make sure that, like, the keyboard actually works properly? It's not slow. It doesn't, like, seem bogged down. And I don't feel as though when I use an Android phone or when I install a Gboard, I don't feel like, why is this not everything that Apple gives me for free with my phone? Yeah, we're seeing a lot of that at Mac GeekGab because we get questions every week. Like, that's the content of the show. And there is a greater percentage right now of complaints, complaints may be the wrong word, but just questions about, hey, why is this slow? How do I troubleshoot this? How do I diagnose this? That point to operating system stuff versus, you know, third-party things that somebody's done or, you know, whatever this sort of norm is. And it absolutely, you know, we've been doing this show too long, but it reminds me of the leopard and snow leopard days. Like, it really does feel like that in terms of, you know, in our little bubble of seeing all the questions come in. It's like, no, this is heating up. I don't think you're, I agree with your anecdotal assessment, Andy. So, yeah. Well, one of those issues is, and I don't, you're going to have to tell me how this works. I'm going to come across this, is the resizing windows on Tahoe. It was supposed to be fixed with 26.3, right? Window resizes now follow corner radius instead of using square regions. What a story. They're round corners. But they didn't. But they didn't. But they didn't do it. This is the story, yeah. And the last beta, they thought, oh, no, no, no, you're not supposed to be able to go outside the corner in order to resize a window. And so they fixed it, and then they unfixed it. And they changed the note from we fixed it to we're aware of this issue. Because the issue was that they changed the corner radius, and it was hard to resize windows on Tahoe. And it really was. When I read this story, I was like, that's why it's happening. But they pointed out that you could actually, if you put your mouse just outside the corner, you can resize it from this invisible place. And it seems like somebody at Apple was like, oh, that is a mistake. We should take that away. It's impossible to resize these windows. And then somebody was like, no, no, no, that's not what I meant, but it was too late. So they just sort of like reverted it and said, we're aware of this issue, and that presumably in a new beta they will figure it out. Because it is, you've got to be able to grab that. The grab handle is so few pixels now that I can't tell you how many times I've been like, click, click, click, try to do it over remote access. Like, you know, forget it. LabCat Software had a blog post about this, basically showing the original problem where one of the problems he was documenting was the horizontal scroll at the bottom of the window is actually obscuring the handles for resizing columns. I say, oh, great, so they fixed it. yeah, now the bottom, now the bottom scroller obscures like the bottom content in the views of this window. So still not the sort of thing where it's like you would think that you would look at this build and say, oh, we fixed it. No, I don't think that you fixed it. I think that you swapped one big problem for still an existing problem that, again, is the sort of panel gap that just once you see it, it's like why is a $4 trillion company shipping software with this kind of a problem in it? You've got to love Norbert Hager because he's the guy who did Launch Bar and Little Snitch, a really great Mac programmer. He has actually written a little program to test how the window drag is working. His blog post is hysterical. I mean, obviously he cares a lot about this. Like I said, I guess I've maybe noticed that maybe I don't drag windows that much. I don't know. It's weird. And I think scroll bars are also, for many, many generations of releases, are like, why do you not think that I ever want to grab the thumb on the scroller and move it to a place? I don't do it anymore. I have a scroll wheel on my mouse. Good for you. Wonderful. That's lovely. I'm so happy for you, Leo. But so many times on my iPad. You actually grab the scroll bar. Yeah. Really? I'm trying to find something visually within a view, and I just want to move, move, move, move. Oh, stop it. And it gives you random access. And I realize, no, it's not here, so I want to zip all the way down. And the thing is, so I've got to, like, move, nudge the pointer, like, into the window to reveal it. And then it's such a tiny, tiny little target, I have to make sure that I mouse down on this super slim target before it decides that, oh, Andy was just fooling. I'm going to hide the scroll bar again. You know you can have that scroll bar be there all the time, right? There's this thing in system settings. But this is supposed to be something that's actually functional, and it doesn't actually function. Oh, no, it never functions right. You just got to leave it on all the time. You know, in a way, this is why I use Linux, because almost invariably these things can be adjusted by the user. Yeah. But Microsoft and Apple really have – they're very opinionated, and they don't really make it accessible to the end user. This is how it works. This is how it's going to be. And this is a perfect example of, yeah, I don't care, but Andy cares. And it's a shame that you don't have a way to do this. At least on Windows, there's a very brisk third-party ecosystem of people that have all sorts of tweaks for Windows. I don't see that in the Apple world, and I guess because Apple probably prevents it. Oh, no. There are lots of facilities that do it on the Mac. But why hasn't somebody done that with a scroll bar? I'm surprised that the guy that bothered to do, like the Little Snitch guy, that he did the whole article. I thought you were going to tell us he came out with a utility, and I was ready to download it. I think he's anticipating that it's going to get fixed, and he's not going to have to do it. Why should I write it? I mean, you can turn the scroll bar on. Yeah, we did that. So, like, what more do you want there, I guess? But there's, like, what is the name of the app? There's an app that better, is it better? Touch Bar. Better Touch Tool does a billion different things beyond its name. So that's one example of a super nerdy thing. They can't be in the Mac. A lot of these can't be in the Mac App Store. Some of them can be. Right. But there are lots of them. So to say that you can't tweak Mac in a way. You totally can. You can't tweak iOS things because it's totally locked down, but it's not like that. And by the way, I am talking about iOS as opposed to Mac OS. Oh, okay. Yeah. Oh, that's fair. On your iPad. Yeah. So it doesn't have the – but I agree. I think that almost everybody should – if you love technology and you love platforms and you want to learn, you want to have experience, at least once you should try installing some friendly form of Linux like Pop OS, like on an old laptop, maybe not necessarily locked down Apple laptops, but the experience will – even if you don't wind up using that as a productivity laptop or a productivity desktop, The first time, like, I finally updated, like, a Chromebook that I had, too, that I upgraded to Popolis, like, a year ago, down to a huge, huge, huge new release in, like, December and January. And the ability to, like, update, no, the update's not available. It's like, okay, but if I go to the command line, I can basically say, yeah, don't believe your own reporting that the update is not available. I'm telling you it is absolutely available. Download the update and give it to me. I said, yes, sir. And it's like, that is something that on every other platform, particularly Apple, I would just be okay for reasons beyond my control and understanding. I was not meant to understand why, for some reason, the server does not want to give me this update. However, if I can say, no, I promise you that my hardware is up to date. It's up to spec. You can't, it is, you have released this update. Just give it to me. Like, oh, not that everything in Linux is wonderful and terrific, but you would love to have the ability to simply say, yeah, I know for a fact something that you don't know. So please, please, please trust me and do this thing I want you to do. We did get a new version of Mac OS, iOS, iPad OS, Watch OS, TV, all of the OSs. 26.3 came out this week with a number of new features. I presume you all have downloaded it and installed it, right? Other than my podcast machine, which is not on top. You don't mess with that. No. Yeah. The privacy feature that we mentioned before in the iPhone, the limit precise location came out in 26.3, but you have to have a C1X modem to do that. But that's a very nice feature. I talked to somebody who worked at the telcos to kind of support this, and he said almost all telcos will support it. I was a little concerned because it said that, you know, it only works right now with, what was it, Boost Mobile, but apparently all the telcos are expected to support it. So that's good news if you're a privacy advocate. I'm just looking at some of the other. There's so many little features. There's obviously security updates. This isn't a huge update, right? Not really. There's a lot of cool stuff that involves interoperability. There's been some updates to RCS for end-to-end encryption. Not yet. 26.4 is going to see that probably. But there's a lot of infrastructure that's already in place. Migration assistance stuff is already in place. The transfer to Android feature, which makes it easier to go to Android. Yep. Why? Why would Apple do that? It has to be because of the EU, right? Yeah. Yeah. Apple offers to transfer photos, messages, notes, apps, as well as the phone number, not Bluetooth pairing information or data from the health app. So that's cool. Good for you. Apple also has a move to iOS on Android, which Google can't stop. But now you can go the other way as well. I think I have to double check. I'm going from memory. I think that there was something last year about Apple and Google realizing that for compliance purposes, it was in their best interest to at least understand each other's frameworks for migration. I'd have to double check that, though. That would be a very, very positive thing if that were true, though. Apple also fixed many security vulnerabilities. In fact, there was the zero day, which was under active exploitation, according to Apple. An attacker with memory write capability, okay, may be able to execute arbitrary code. That seems like, I'm not a big surprise. If you can write to memory, you probably could do that. Apple's aware of a report that issue may have been exploited in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals on versions of iOS before iOS 26. That sounds like nation state. Yeah. Here's the pro tip, which is if you see an Apple security note that talks about targeted individuals, this is what it is. It is not for regular people, right? When we were talking about the WebKit bug that they closed a little while ago, that was a similar example of it. It was a targeted individual. We are talking nation state level. We're talking the kind of people who should have lockdown mode on Which is not everybody, right? Because lockdown mode actually kind of ruins your experience But it means that you're much more secure Targeted individual security items are not the same as general public security items You really need to have somebody gunning for you It doesn't mean that they've seen it trying to just scam people out of things in their bank account It means that there are nation states that are trying to infiltrate people's phones Yeah, it's been in iOS since version one. It was discovered by Google's Threat Analysis Group at CVE 2026-20700. Again, patched in the newest version. Google researchers called it an out-of-bound memory access flaw. Oh, no, that was for Chrome. Never mind. I take that back. But it was in the dynamic linker. It is fixed, but it has been there a long time. And these things, you know, some of these bugs are so obscure and so difficult to find that if somebody does find them, they're worth millions. And what happens sometimes is they close a bug and then, you know, so there's this constant churn to find other areas of exploit. So sometimes you'll find these incredibly obscure things that nobody even bothered to look for until they had run out of other things to try. And then they try it and they find this thing and then it gets patched. And this is what I was saying earlier, too, about like the advantage of going to 26 is there are a bunch of things that just are more secure in 26. And the same will be true of 27. And so it's something to keep in mind. But again, it's especially true if you are a reporter on a sensitive issue or you're an activist or a dissident or somebody where a nation. I guess if you're working on nuclear stuff in Iran, I mean, stuff where somebody might want to know what you're doing. that's when you need lockdown mode, and that's when you need, you know, all of that kind of stuff kicks in. 26.4 will be out in March, Apple says. Maybe they'll announce it at this event. I don't know. That's when you'll start seeing encrypted end-to-end encryption in RCS. Is that what we think? They're testing it. Yeah. I think that's right. I think they're testing it with just iPhone to iPhone, but the idea is that ultimately that will allow encrypted RCS. Yeah. Is the encrypted machines available on Android? Yeah. Well, it's not part of this official spec, which is why Apple didn't support it out of the gate, right? But Google has effectively their own standard, if you will, that everybody over there has adopted. Is this Apple adopting Google's standard, or is this Apple? And I don't know. I'm just asking. I think it's interoperable. Interoperable. I think that what Apple wanted was some blessing from the standards body. But I assume that what Google is doing is already with the blessing of the standards body. I would be shocked if they were implementing something that's not. RCS is an independent standard. However, the way that most carriers choose to implement is just to simply pay Google's own RCS service to make that happen. particularly given that Google Messages is the default messaging app for all Android platforms everywhere. It's open to everybody to use Signal, and then I wouldn't have to worry about that. Or like a lot of the world. I get yelled at when I say most of the world. Or like a lot of the world, use WhatsApp. I mean, most of the U.S. is atypical in that regard. But like when my son went off to college, he was like, oh, everybody on campus. He went to read. Oh, great school. Everybody on campus uses WhatsApp. He's like, that's just the norm. It's the future. Yeah. Actually, I was going to interview Guy Kawasaki at Crossed Wires. We didn't, but he's got a new book out. Everybody's got something to hide. Why and how do you signal? And he talks a little bit about why signal would be preferable to WhatsApp. I think WhatsApp's ownership by Meta might be number one reason. problematic yeah but the but the the issue with every messaging app is you gotta it's got you gotta have your friends have to use it that's that's the issue you know and so if everybody's using whatsapp you're going to use whatsapp it's better you know if i message will add rcs for everybody and it will sometime someday probably this year that will make it a good choice i think whatsapp does not hide metadata, and that's the issue that Guy Kawasaki has with it. So a little hat tip to AaronP613 on X that was digging into the beta of 26.4 and found this code string, CarPlay. When you're not driving, turn on location services and iPhone settings. apparently Apple TV is coming to CarPlay when you're not driving open Apple TV on the iPhone and review the privacy information when you're not driving sign into Apple TV on iPhone I don't know that I'd want to be a passenger in that car stop driving Apple TV it's when you're not driving so it's probably locked out So this is, like, the Teslas have a bunch of video apps. It's while you're charging. They only work in the backseat. Yeah, they only work in the backseat. And that's the truth of it, right? It's like my wife primarily drives a Chevy Bolt, and it's got a really nice, I mean, for a little cheap compact EV, but still a little compact car, it's got a pretty nice CarPlay screen. Oh, I love the Chevy Bolt. And why would you not be able, if you're sitting somewhere charging, and if you've got a Chevy Bolt, it's really slow, to put something on that screen, to play video on that screen. So it makes sense to me. It'll be locked down. It'll only be when the car's in park or the sensors indicate it's not moving, et cetera, et cetera. But it's a good feature. I think a lot of TVs have YouTube or some way to watch something. Of course. Or play games. It'll probably be more locked down than we want it to be, Given the changes we've seen to CarPlay over the last few years where you can't scroll through more than 20 things while you're driving, and therefore you have to pull your phone out of your pocket, which is dumb. But, yeah, I guess you're right. It'll be perfectly safe. Tahoe 26.4 will add a charge limit slider. So just like an electric vehicle. You know how your electric vehicle, you can say don't charge past 80% to protect the battery. It's going to do the same thing. you can set it to 100% or less. Go all the way down to 80% if you want. I wonder if that's really, really effective though because it seems as though times when people try to validate that this will extend the life of a battery, they've found that we can detect that maybe it's getting some extra cycles, but it doesn't seem as though it's the difference between a battery lasting four years and five years. It works on EVs because they over-provision the battery in the EV, And so it will rotate which cells get charged, and so that improves the battery life. I don't think they do that. I don't think my MacBook's over-provisioned at all. I think it's exactly provisioned. Yeah. No more, no less. No less. Maybe they're just doing it because, you know, EVs have it. I don't know. We'll find out when it comes out. Well, you can do this on your phone, right? Yeah, they do that on the phone. That's right, yeah. Yeah. And as you were saying this, I'm like, well, you can do that on the Mac. It's like, oh, you can do that with Al Dente on the Mac with third-party software. So, like, there is, and the folks at Al Dente will tell you that this actually helps your battery. To Andy's point, I don't know, like, how much it helps your battery. And probably more correctly, what type of person and use case you would need to have where this would make a notable difference. But if you are someone that leaves your laptop plugged in all the time, you know, 99.2% of the time, maybe this makes a difference. I don't know. You remember the reports, I think, within the Wall Street Journal of people looking over your shoulder at your passcode, then stealing your phone because they knew your passcode. Actually, Apple, I think it was in response to those reports in 2023, added this stolen device protection. It's not on by default, but in 26.4, it will be on by default. So it keeps people, it requires Face ID when you're accessing passwords. It's designed to keep people from, once they know your code, from doing other things, accessing your passwords, your bank accounts, safety features like Find My and Trusted Devices. It makes it a little harder. It's not just the passcode. You'll need to do Face ID as well. Right, and there's a really sweet tweak here, which is there's the option to have it not on when you're in a familiar place, which is like when you're at home, and you don't have to set them. It's automatic. You don't get to set them. Yeah, exactly. So I suppose if you're in an insecure place regularly, you have to turn that feature off. But for a lot of us, if you're at the office or at home, it's going to work normally. But if you're out and about in the wilds of the dangerous world out there that your parents warned you about, then that feature kicks in and it makes you have to authenticate more often. Do you have that turned on on your phone? I did. I thought I didn't, and I just looked, and I do. So there. It will be on by default. It's kind of interesting. When they're really sensitive stuff like your Apple password, changing your passcode on your phone, adding a face or a fingerprint, turning off Find My. If the user is outside of the trusted location and attempts to change those, there will be a biometric scan followed by an hour delay and another biometric scan before you can make the change. So that might irritate some. Until the phone gets stolen, in which case, you know, it's good to be aware of. Yeah. I mean, all forms of security are going to be irritating. If they're not irritating, they're probably not been implemented. That's the cure. Yeah. I mean, it's irritating that you can no longer just simply replace the camera module or replace a module on a phone without having to go through some rigmarole to like to enroll this this component with and attach it to this this phone, which makes it harder to repair, harder for independent repair shops to function. but you can't deny that it also is making an iPhone 17 that gets stolen, not quite so linear a process for selling and making profits from. And activation locks certainly worked for iPhone theft. So, yeah, that's good. And finally, as you probably know, starting in Mac OS 27 this fall, no Rosetta, no Rosetta 2, no Intel apps will work on your Macs. And so the next version of Tahoe 26.4 will be a little bit more annoying to remind you that whatever app you're using that requires an Intel Rosetta translation layer isn't going to work come this fall when you upgrade. Okay, just as a point, it's not this fall, it's next fall. Oh, it's 28. 28. Oh, wow. Okay. So don't, just calm down. Everybody calm down. I'm sorry. Which is, we can laugh about this, but the thing is, people who are still running like Rosetta apps, that must be one freaking important app that has no replacement, no modern alternative. Or the thing is, we have the system that is working. This is how we get PDF files through a certain gateway that has to go to a certain place inside our lab or inside our company. and we cannot get the $50,000 it's going to take to refactor a brand new alternative to this. So, again, it seems like, oh, well, gosh, we kind of forgot this thing exists. The people who are still using it are like we – this is like a Y2K bug sort of thing where the world is going to end if this one machine that's probably running like a G3, G5 Mac is still plugged in. That one thing has to keep the entire business going. And if it doesn't, we need to find the $50,000 now because how long are we going to be able to keep Rosetta going? Oh, I know what I was confused by. I was confused by the fact that the next Mac OS 27 will work on Intel Macs, right? This is the last – Tahoe is the last Mac OS that will work on an Intel Mac. Right. I had it kind of flipped. And then 28 is the last one that you'll be able to run Intel software on. No, 27. 27 is the last one. And then 28, they'll pull Rosetta's all. Even then there's an asterisk because, like, there's some games that are old that are never going to get updated, and they're going to – I think it must be that Apple is paying. The reason that Rosetta has to be installed, and I've never heard a good answer, but the assumption here is that they have to pay a licensing fee for some aspect of Rosetta, and as a result, they gate how many people have Rosetta. And so it's very funny that they're going to actually allow it for a very limited list of whitelisted things in 28. and again I think the reason is they don't want those games to all break and those games are never going to get updated because games, but it's going to dramatically decrease the number of people who are running Rosetta and I think that's the goal. I didn't realize I was running Rosetta on my computer but I looked in Activity Monitor and I added the Kind column and sorted by Kind and I noticed that the Waves plugin server which is something many, many audio nerds run is Intel. I had no idea it was still Intel. So hopefully Waves will make that change. A lot of really crazy stuff there, yeah. And the Twitch Studio Stream Deck plug-in also is. Yeah. So you don't necessarily know. I mean, to Andy's point, there are those companies that are like, this is the one thing that keeps the whole operation going. But then there's also the one thing that you didn't even know kept the whole operation going. I know Apple has talked about, you know, games as being their little thing. I'm going to tell you a little theory, maybe a little secret, which is if there is a key piece of software that's running in the background that is necessary for a bunch of people, maybe in a professional area, for any time when 28 is coming out, and Apple has talked to that company, and that company is like, we know, we just can't do it yet, Apple will totally whitelist that company. I mean, they will. Or Apple will send engineers to rewrite it. But I will say that that's what's going to happen, is they will be talking to them, right? Like, why? What can we do? And maybe they will find a way to fix it. Because Apple's not interested in, like, having an apocalypse when 28 comes out. But in that classic Steve Jobs fashion, also they want to knock all the laggards out and say, no, you need to do this. It's been how many years now? You need. Because that'll be the fall of 27, right? So it will have been more than seven years of Apple Silicon. It's over, right? Like, time to move on. That's why you had 27 in your head, Leo. It's not Mac OS 27. It's Mac OS 28 in the fall of 27. Oh, 27. So confusing. Very helpful. But I do the same thing you do, Dave, with the activity monitor. But I started doing that like two or three versions ago. As soon as I started getting Apple Silicon, I had in my head, I don't want Rosetta running. I don't know if it uses up CPU cycles or slows things down. So I have not, I mean, I sort by kind, and I haven't used anything with Intel in a long time. Yeah. And actually at that time I made a list of apps that were running Intel and actively looked for Apple Silicon versions of those apps. But to Jason's point, like Apple's not going to let the entire live audio industry crater because Waves doesn't work on a new version of Apple. And I like your theory, Jason, that they have to pay some fees, and that's the reason. Yeah. If that's the case, they could go to Waves and say, it's going to cost you, buddy. Yeah. I think they will go, right, this is the stuff you never hear about, but they will go to that developer if they haven't already been there and be like, what are we doing? How can we help you? You need to come over. And they'll be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we just have this old code base and this weird FileMaker database that we're using or whatever. You know, you pull over the sheet and there's like the bugs all scatter. And you're like, oh, no. But then they'll work with them. And that's what will happen first. That's what's helpful about having Apple having all the money. They can do this when it serves Apple to have it. Right. They don't do that to everybody. But there's a benefit to them not looking bad because a bunch of their Pro customers are like, I can't buy a new. I mean, the story is going to be like, I can't buy a new MacBook Pro because it has the new OS on it. and it will break all of my old audio software. They don't want that to be the case. That story will never be told. Guaranteed. Yeah. Yeah. Guaranteed. They'll make it happen. A never-telling story. You're watching MacBreak Weekly. So nice to see you. Dave Hamilton, MacGeekGab, and apparently GigGab. And GigGab. Which is a great name for a podcast. Thanks. GigGab. Wasn't there JibJab? Is JibJab still around? JibJab. Yeah. Yeah. That's still around. Yeah. So anything you want to plug? What's going on in your life these days? Oh, I mean, Mac Geek Lab will be 21 this year. Unbelievable. Yeah. It's a great compliment to what you slash we when I'm here. But what you do here, you're talking about all the news. We're answering people's questions and sharing cool stuff. I did the answering people's questions on the radio for 19 years. Yeah. And my hair turned gray. Yeah. My heart started to fail. I just, and at one point I even said, I will not answer any more printer questions, so don't ask. I love it. It's a thankless task, but it needs to be done. It needs to be done. I mean, for us, it's, our listeners thank us all the time. Like, it really isn't a thankless task. And what I love about it, and we joke at the beginning of the episode, but it's really not at all a joke, is that we each get to learn five new things. Oh, yes. It's a great way to learn. I am the one that gets to learn the most. I learned because I was so afraid. I'm on live radio. And we didn't screen the calls. I mean, it would just, somebody would call, ask a question on live radio. It was a tightrope act. Yeah, no, we only do that some of the time. Most of the time it's questions that have come in that we have filtered and researched. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, for sure. Some weeks is fun, but not every week for 19 years. No, no. In the early days, I probably would be able to do it with Claude Cote in my pocket. You know, I just have an AI who can answer. You were probably doing that pre-good Google. I would use Google. But you know what? In the earliest days, I started doing it in 2004. It wasn't impossible to know most of the answers. No, you can't know everything now. Today, I don't think I could do it. I mean, I retired at the right time. And it's hard work. I mean, it was really hard work. You're exactly right. You do learn. You absolutely do learn. It keeps me sharp, which I love. And like I said, I love learning things. I always say I want to be right in the future. It's not so important to me to have been right in the past. I mean, I like that when I'm right. But, you know, we can't be right all the time. And so I like learning. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's fun. You know who answers questions all the time? Glenn Fleischman on SixColors.com. That's true. Yeah, Glenn. I'm so glad he's there. It's great. Yeah, yeah. We're glad to have him. He decided to come over from where he was writing in Macworld for many years, and now he writes Help Me, Glenn on Mondays for us. And he's doing well? Yeah, he's doing great. He had heart surgery a little while ago, and he's reached a point now where he can actually be in better health than he was before because they fixed his heart valve. So it's pretty awesome. Yeah, he's got a – you know, he started another Kickstarter, I think. Like, that's a sign again that Glenn's doing fine. Another book. Doing another Kickstarter. Doing another book, yeah. What's the book on? Old publishing things. I think it's a collection of essays about historical publishing and flong and things like that. His book, How Comics Were Made, is just fantastic. I just really enjoy that. Of course, SixColors.com is more than just Glenn Fleischman. It's Dan Morin, who was on last week. And this guy here, this is Jason Snell. Yeah, we've got John Maltz, who writes a funny column on Fridays for members. He does the riddles, too, right? The questions. Doesn't he do questions? I don't think so. Is that him? I don't think he does. No. Oh, you know who that is? It's Howard. Does that on the. Oh, yeah. Howard Oakley on Eclectic Light. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Glenn's project is called Long Time No See. Forgotten stories of printing and labor, because, you know, there's always another Kickstarter. Oh, my God, Glenn. Yeah, he's just, he has made a thing of it. There's a specialty now. Yeah. Old publishing things and doing well at that. I got to get him on Intelligent Machines with Jeff Jarvis and they can, you know, talk about linotypes and things for hours. Yeah, I think it's actually kind of fun. Flong is an actual old printing term. It's very weird, but nobody's heard of it now except Glenn reminds us. Glenn is going to single-handedly drag the word flong back in the dictionary. Here we are. he's keeping the flong alive yep wasn't there a flong song or am I confusing that all? you're thinking of Ludo live long and prosper that's it and Andy Anako is here it's always a pleasure oh I have to find the little AI thing they made for you in the library oh it's back here did you see that Andy on their discord I've seen a couple they're so creative There it is. Andy Anatko from the library. He looked very distinguished, I might add. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. That was a selfie I took at the Metropolitan Opera. Oh. Very operatic. That's not an AI image of you. That's the actual you. The books are different. Yes. But that is an accurate representation of how many unread books I have pretty much everywhere. Yeah, I know. I know, and I keep buying more, which is just nuts. I should just put everything on the Kindle, but I like the paper. I got the – my turning point towards the dark side was when I came across, in some published article the idea of oh well I often buy books to bank them against time when I have more time to read It like that what I do I bank these When I see like a good deal on a book that looks nice I just buy that and I be banking it because sometime it'll be right there on the shelf when I've got it. Exactly what I think. And it's like, yeah. This is, again, one of the many things that this library does for me. It's also, Andy, you bought these 11 books about a year and a half ago. I haven't touched them since. Maybe put them into the book sale. It's a problem. You know, you'll take a picture of the spine so you'll remember that they exist. I feel like they're trophies. Like it's a trophy. Also, I have to be honest with myself that there are some books like David McCullough's biography of John Adams. Awesome book. I wind up rereading that like once every year, once every couple of years. So, okay, that gets to stay because you keep dipping into that. I feel that way about Neil Stevenson's Quicksilver and Kryptonomicon. I need the hardcover volumes. But the biography of Bob Fosse that you bought because there was that miniseries on Lifetime or whatever on FXX, like, okay, again, you've got enough enjoyment out of that in 2002, 2020 or whatever. I think it's time to look at that. But, you know, you recommended that Jerry Lewis biography years ago, and I still have that. King of Comedy. King of Comedy. There are very few celebrity books that really, at the end, you feel as though the author got under the skin and explained, here is, if you've ever been baffled by why is this person the way that they are, okay, let's start with page one. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. We're really glad you're here, especially our club members. Thank you for your support. We do know how important you are to us. And if you're not a member, man, I'd love to have you. Twit.tv slash club. Twit. Ad-free versions of all the shows. You also get a lot of benefits. We have a lot of special programming we do just for club members. Somebody was saying, I want more AI stuff. And I'm thinking maybe our AI user group, which right now means on the first Friday of every month, should be maybe weekly. There's so much going on. We have so much fun with it. We have an AI show. But the user group is like the hardcore people are really doing stuff with AI. Anyway, lots of great stuff. Photo Time. We have Stacey's Book Club. Anyway, if you're not a member and you want to support what we do, this is the best way you can do it. Twit.tv slash club twit. One of the things we do as the premier Vision Pro podcast in the world is our regular Vision Pro segment. Hit it. Now you don't leave me hanging here, man. It's been so long. You actually made me. Totally not on purpose, Leo. That's like when you do the high five and the guy doesn't reciprocate. You should leave me hanging there, man. Or shave and a haircut. Two bits. Don't do that. No, do nothing. It's like do nothing. Don't do nothing. It makes people feel like. I can't do nothing. There's something wrong in their tummy. Yeah, see? There is big news on the Vision Pro front. It came out two years ago. And at that time, people were saying, where is the YouTube app? Indeed. Now there is one. Now there is one. Is it any good? I haven't had a chance. I've been really busy the last two weeks. I have not had a chance to try it out. I hope so. I assume. Google blocked the other ones that people had written, right? Yeah, I think that was the sign that it was going to happen. It was just a matter of Google's will and maybe if Google, I don't know, Sometimes I feel like some of these, there might have been a deal signed with Meta to put it on their platform for an exclusive amount of time or something like that. But, yeah, I wish I could report about trying it. I haven't. But the M5 version supports 8K video, and it all supports 360 video. And there is a bunch of that content. So it is another content source. This is every video on YouTube. But you really would want the 360s, right? Can you get the 360 on the 360 video? Yeah, that's the point, is you can watch any YouTube video on it, and that's nice, instead of it being in a browser. But the big point of it is that you can watch those immersive videos that are on YouTube, as well as like 8K videos that are super high resolution. You can watch all of those. The Google Cardboard legacy. That was such a great idea. Way back when I had a Ricoh 360, and I took it on a cruise. I think this is almost 10 years ago. Oh, I took it to the Galapagos. That would be kind of fun. Here's sunrise at Machu Picchu in 360. It would be kind of fun to put this on a Vision Pro and you could watch it walk around. Or at least turn around, yeah. Turn around. Turn around, not walk around. But the key was it wasn't – it was that Google just put this capture mode into pretty much every – would run on any Android phone that you got, which meant that people would just simply do captures wherever they were, wherever there was worth capturing. And I really wish that there was something, is there a good analog to that with Vision Pro? I always assumed when we were talking about the rumors of Apple doing VR slash AR that there would be some sort of repo where, hey, here's an interesting, here's the Boston Public Library. I think I'll just, like, stand in the big atrium here and just turn around and look around and capture all this data so that other people can virtually virtually visit the library, at least what it's like to stand in this place and look around. And I'm surprised that there isn't stuff like that. Well, now you can see what people with cardboard apps could use 12 years ago, yeah. And then I hope you can explain it, but Vision OS 26.4, again, this is in beta now, but will be out soon, unlocks foveated streaming. Yeah, they were already painful. They already were doing foveated rendering, which is basically they render, because the processor can't render every single pixel, they render the pixels you're looking at, and then it sort of smears out from there. So the ones that are in your peripheral vision, which you can't really see clearly, aren't rendered clearly. That was in the UI, but what this has done is added it to video so that you can have the part of the video you're looking at at a higher resolution will look higher resolution. because the fact is, even with the M5, the Vision Pro cannot properly render every single pixel of those giant, well, they're teeny tiny, but high-resolution displays. So instead, they have to sort of, like, focus on the parts that your eyes can actually see with clarity, and so they're extending that to video, which is great, because the effect will be that it will feel higher resolution when you're watching video. Well, that was one of the things when the Vision Pro was first announced that people were raving about how Apple had figured out how to maximize the use of the hardware by learning where your eyes were and only showing you the highest res where you were looking. It's brilliant. So it makes sense that they would continue this. More things in more places, right, to make it more valuable. And it's good. I mean, like we've talked about it here a bunch. Like, watching video, these are both good stories because they are about the thing that the Vision Pro is best at right now, which is as an entertainment device. And so doing more entertainment device-y things with Vision Pro is a good idea. Would it make that video from Machu Picchu look better? Depends on its resolution. It's got a pretty low resolution. But if there's a high-res image, again, I haven't had time to try any of this stuff yet. It uses NVIDIA's Cloud XR technology. Yeah. So I don't know if that's related to Google's XR. I don't know what. Fovea streaming enabling apps to display high resolution, as you said, low latency immersive content. Okay. So it's just going to look better. Yeah, so it prioritizes the part you're looking at, which is as it should be. Just as your eyes do. Yeah. In the real world. Right. Yeah, right. That's the point, though, It matches what your eyes would naturally do in the real world. Exactly. Exactly. And if you've ever taken a screenshot in a Vision Pro, you'll notice that most of the screenshot is blurry. It's because it's only rendering the part you're looking right at. The rest of it is leaving blurry because your eyes can't notice that. And when you turn to look, it updates and then it renders that part. And so you never see the fuzzy part because it's in the peripheral of your vision. And that saves CPU cycles. It does. And for streaming, presumably it saves some bandwidth, too, but it saves CPU cycles. It's good. It couldn't save bandwidth, could it? Because you need all the data. You need the data. It can't go get this stuff fast enough. I don't know. I don't know. What do I know? I don't know. Yeah, you might be right. Oh, I just realized you're wearing a Reed T-shirt. Now I get it. I realized that when I said it. It didn't even dawn on me that I put on a Reed T-shirt this morning. That's where Steve Jobs went. as well as your son. Yeah, exactly. He learned about calligraphy. For a while. For a very brief while. My son only went there for a while, too. He, like Steve, found a better path to the final outcome. Everybody in the computer industry of my generation dropped that at college, including me. I mean, that's what you did. Same. I never finished. I'm still on a break. Yeah, me too. That's what I say. I could go back any time. We could. We could. We could. If you want to go back, text me, and I'll let you know what my son figured out, because he found a much more efficient path through this facility. Yeah. Yeah. One of the things I always thought would be cool is my university lets you, as an alumnus, graduated or not, go back and audit classes. So, of course, you'd have to live in New Haven, Connecticut. I was going to say, where did you go? I went to Yale. Also, it would be kind of cool, though, if I lived near, I don't know if I want to move to Haven, but if I did, I could attend all the classes that I used to enjoy. I used to live about 30 minutes. Yeah, that's where I grew up. Did you really? I grew up in Norwalk, yeah. Do you feel like a Connecticuter? Well, that's because I am. Yeah, I grew up in Rhode Island. A nutmegger. A nutmegger. Yes, a nutmegger, that's right. A nutmeg state. Yeah, that's right. Fellow New Englander solidarity. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. So I now have two reasons to get a Vision Pro. One is my antiquated videos. I have a tour of Rome. You know, I would just, I would hold. I actually have it right here. I would hold the 3D camera aloft as I walked around Rome, and I just have all these videos that I can't really enjoy. I have a 360 GoPro, and I've done some stuff with it, but, like, the idea that I could share it with people, like, I posted, I did a podcast that we did and recorded in 360, and it's on YouTube, but, like, what, who could even see it now? Yeah. And so it's just, it's, this is good. More places, because in the long run, when I was down at Cupertino and talking to those people who were building immersive video, what they believe is that in the long run, this is an interesting format that people are going to be able to see using some future device in some way. They're laying the groundwork now. The more people who can use this content, the better. And this is actually a good example where there's a bunch of content on YouTube now that now will have a new platform that can view it all. And so that's great. That's one reason. And then the other reason will be if they put out an F1 Vision Pro app. Any word on that? We haven't mentioned it yet, but all the F1 stuff dropped into the Apple TV the other day. It's coming up. Stay tuned. Okay. So stay tuned for that. Before we go to that, I have to wrap up the Vision Pro segment. Okay. You know it's been a while since you don't say, that's the Vision Pro segment. And that's the Vision Pro segment. Thank you, Leo. Hey, F1. Oh, no. Shave and a haircut. We can't close it twice. The world ends if we close it twice. Yeah, that's it. Don't do it. That's a double squiggly bracket. No, don't do that. Don't do that. We'd have to go back in time in order to do another parenthesis on the other side, and we don't want to just... Just hit Command Z. Just Command Z. Yeah. It's all good. Yeah. But F1... If we use D-Max, that would all be automatic. All stuff for. Yeah. So the new F1 channel... So the new F1 channel... Yeah. I did... I went... You know, I'm really mad because I went through this rigmarole a couple of weeks ago where you connected your F1 TV account to your Apple TV, and that was a bunch of steps. I guess maybe I don't need to anymore because the new F1 channel is now on the Apple TV app. The season begins in March. It actually begins right after Apple's event. Yeah, so maybe I'll meet some F1 drivers or something. Oh, that would be cool. So, yeah, this is basically in the main TV app. There's now an F1 section, and then they're promoting the heck out of it on the main screen, as Apple does with everything that they do. But it is a sign that the F1 season is coming. And I guess the Vision Pro-related thing is will they have a Vision Pro story at some point during the season, whether it's day one or not, because everybody sort of has this vision that it would be a very good use of like a 3D race course and a dashboard with a bunch of different screens. Not to be on the sidelines because your head would move. Right. F1, what you want is an immersive dashboard full of different views instead. and there was that app that demoed that, right? So you would assume that Apple is working on something like that. But anyway, it has begun because now there's F1 stuff everywhere. This is my question. Was I wasting my time making my F1 TV app work? I don't know. Did you enjoy it when you did it? No. The best day to do it is the day you want to do it. Let's just find a computer. I can tell you, you didn't miss it because what's going to be in Apple's stuff is what was on ESPN, basically. It's a subset. Okay, so that's a subset of the nerd. It's going to be video you can watch, and maybe they'll have some different options. But if you want the complete F1 TV experience that everybody in the world can get by subscribing, as an American who has Apple TV, you just get it for free. Right. You need to use that app. I use F1 Multi Viewer, which, if you have an F1 TV app, allows you. I mean, these are example setups, so this is kind of what my setup looks like, where I just have, you know, these are the driver cameras, the race. You can also have data about what's going on, and you can even see the track, and that's so cool, and all this data is available through F1 TV. Yeah. So I'm hoping that they will do something, and I'm glad to know that they're not going to kill the F1 TV app. No, because it's still everywhere else in the world. It's just in the U.S. Oh, that's true. You get access to it with your Apple TV subscription. You don't need something else. Good, and they're going to keep the original F1 TV announcers and all that stuff. Yeah, I think that product isn't changing at all. It's just what goes in the TV app in the U.S. I mean, because a lot of people love David Crofty. They haven't said. I wouldn't be surprised if there's an option, whether there's another video or not, but they haven't really said what their video plans are yet for the Apple TV version. Yeah. I'm excited. It's going to be a whole new era of F1. It'll be interesting to see what their take on it is. I know that evolve. Yeah, yeah. Apple purchased Severance. It did. That's weird. Yeah, it sounds like... $70 million. It sounds like it's so expensive to make that show that fifth season, the producer of that show, was having cash flow problems, that they had a bunch of reshoots and a bunch of delays, and they went to Apple and said, could you take an IOU, or could you loan us money, or how can we do this? And Apple said, tell you what. And apparently Apple had already done this with Silo, which I wasn't aware of. but I've seen a bunch of stories reference that. So that may be true too. Apple basically said, tell you what, why don't we buy it? Why don't we buy it kit and caboodle? We'll have the copyrights. We'll have all the intellectual property rights. You will still be on as a producer. You can still produce the show along with Apple studios, but we'll, we'll give you, we'll write you a check for what? $70 million did you say? And then in exchange, we will be the owner going forward of severance. And this is important because a lot of the shows that Apple, you think of as Apple shows are not owned by Apple. They're licensed by Apple, but they're not owned by Apple. So, like, Ted Lasso is a Warner Brothers show. Apple has a deal with Warner Brothers. They produce that show for them. For All Mankind is a Sony entertainment show that is made for Apple by Sony. But Sony ultimately is the owner of that show. So, with this, Apple is taking one of its landmark TV series. And, I mean, normally you would not sign the rights away to a hit, But this company is obviously an enormous amount of financial trouble. And so Apple saw an opportunity to say, I'll have that. Right. And just say that now we own it. So now Apple decides where it goes, when it goes, how many, you know, what the budget is. Apple decides the spinoffs, the prequels, whatever they want to do. It's just Apple who gets to decide that they don't have a they have a producing partner, but they don't have a partner who is the owner of the intellectual property that they have to renegotiate a new a new deal if they want to do more stuff with severance. Apple Insider says it costs $20 million an episode. So the $70 million doesn't cover production at all. It's just the license. You know, it's just the IP. Yeah, I mean, Apple was paying them to make the show, right? Oh, so were they paying them $20 million? I guess they were. Yeah, I mean, they were getting a bill from... The problem is they may not have been paying them the full amount, right? Because one of the things you do when you're a TV producer is you kind of like, you get your partner is going to license it, but you also get, like, you have the future ownership down the road. You can sell it to Netflix down the road. You can sell it somewhere else or put out DVDs or whatever, and there's, like, a – but they, I think, because of the escalating costs, especially when they had to delay season two, I think they reached a point where they were having – that's a small company. They're not Sony, where they have, like, this all the way across the board. They had these limited properties, and they were running out of money, and asked Apple for help, and Apple basically said, well, why don't we just buy you out on the intellectual property? They're remaining as a producer, but we'll buy you out on that, and I'll give you a shot in the arm in terms of keeping your business going. And I'm sure there's probably a first-look deal where, like, they couldn't go to Sony and sell it to them because probably Apple had first look at it. I haven't seen that reported, but I would imagine that Apple got first chance to buy it out. So in the end, I don't think viewers will see a lot of a difference, but it does mean Apple kind of controls the destiny of severance going forward. It can do what it wants with that property. It's not like Superman, which is from Warner Brothers, right? And like Warner Brothers has all the intellectual property for Superman. Now, severance is just owned by Apple. Apple has it all. Anybody who wants to do anything with severance, Apple is the one who will decide what happens. Apparently, severance is getting so expensive, according to Apple Insider, that they might have to move from New York to Canada to produce the show. So this is one of the precipitating events is that the producer of this show that's such a hallmark for Apple came to them and said, we're having so much money trouble, we may need to relocate from the northeast of the U.S. to up in Canada just to save costs. And I think Apple was probably horrified because they're like, wait a second, are you going to make the show look cheap? We want it to be expensive. That's the whole point. That's the brand promise of this. That's Apple. That's what we do. It's expensive. It's just a lot of corridors and hallways. How expensive could that be? Well, no, but they do a bunch of location shooting, and they're using their existing crew. I think there was a fear that they were kind of cheaping out on them. There are a bunch of great shows that are made in Canada, but I think they were afraid that this was just a bad sign that fifth season was having a lot of trouble, and that apparently was the precipitating event that led to Apple saying, why don't we just write you a check and buy it from you, and that solves all of these problems. Sounds like Apple made them a deal they couldn't refuse. Yeah, I think so. I think so. Seven million, yeah. I think so. Wow. I mean, I think in other circumstances, obviously, you'd want to keep that intellectual property for yourself. But if you're if you're in danger of like running out, literally running out of money. And Apple probably said it's not acceptable for us for you to save money like that. Right. We might have put them between a rock and a hard place where they're like, all right, OK, you can buy it then. That is exactly what what Michael Coglione said to to Mo Green. You think you think I've been I've been cheating? Like, we think you've been unlucky. We think maybe we can have more luck than you're having. That's right. Well, what they didn't realize is there were two games being played, the one that the Severance people thought was being played and the one Apple was actually playing. And by doing the Jason squeeze on this, it all comes out roses on Apple's end in the end. Yeah, I think that's it. Yeah. My guess is this is – well, like you said, it happened with Silo. These aren't going to be the only two folks. No, I think – I mean, it's Apple, right? They want to control their own destiny. I think that if Warner Brothers would sell them Ted Lasso, they would buy it, right? And probably would have bought it after season one. But Warner Brothers has lots of money right now, sort of. Yeah, you've got two gorillas. One might weigh more than the other. The point is, yeah, if you're an entertainment conglomerate, you have the resources to spread out your money and keep your intellectual property. If you're a small outfit, you might have a very expensive thing and not have some other revenue stream to solve the problem. You don't have an instant capital juicer. Right. But Warners is in the business of owning and maintaining intellectual property. So they're not going to let Ted Lasso go to Apple, right? Because they're like, no, no, no. Why would we ever do that? Because we own it. You pay us a fee for it, and we get to own it. Well, yeah. Their library is very important to them, too. And it is. I mean, it's a very viable way to do it. Apple is now producing and owning more of its shows than it did before. But when they got started, you know, they didn't know what they wanted to do. And everybody, it's not like it used to be, but everybody still has properties that are owned and produced by somebody else. TV networks and streamers, they all do it. Sony's entire business is working for other people's platforms and generating content for them. So it's all fine. But this is the case where you had, I think, a weak producer who was, you know, who Apple could just come and say, well, just take it. Let's just give it to us. Weak in resources, not weak in talent. No, yeah, entirely just in a position of corporate weakness that meant they had to basically trade some intellectual property for cash for a lifetime. Which was the end game they had anyway. They just didn't realize how close that end game was. And you may have realized this by now, but Jason does a show about this stuff. I do. It's on downstream. It's on relay. He has some interest in general on this topic. Actually got two new hosts with you now. Yeah. I mean, so Will Carroll, who is a sports writer, he was one of the founders of Baseball Perspectives. He comes on and we talk about the business of sports in streaming, which is really interesting right now. And then Joe Adalian, who is the West Coast editor at Vulture and New York Magazine, has been a TV writer for a zillion years. And I get to talk to Joe basically every month. And he's super smart, too. So, I mean, I started the podcast with Julia Alexander. She's now podcasting at – she's full-time at Puck and podcasting over there. But Joe and Will are great to talk to, and then I have some other guests from time to time about it. So it's been a fun thing to talk about the business of streaming because it continues. You know, we ended – the peak streaming wars thing kind of passed, but now we're in this very weird aftermath where lots of strange things are happening. So there's still a lot to talk about. Yeah. Every other week we do it. Another story, and thank you, Scooter X, for putting this into the Discord. but Apple has decided to make MLS soccer free. Free to Apple TV subscribers. If you already subscribed to Apple TV. So when F1, yeah, this was a little while ago, but like when F1 was announced as being just on Apple TV, no package that you have to buy on top of it, I think that was the moment we all knew the jig was up, that instead of trying to treat the MLS season pass as a premium upsell product, they're just rolling it into Apple TV. And I think maybe that product made more sense when Apple TV was like $5 or $6 a month. But now that it's more expensive, having it include all the sports is probably the way to go. So that's what they did. I might start watching some soccer. I wasn't going to pay for a subscription. Exactly. Yeah, good. Exactly. And I think MLS, they changed the terms of their deal with MLS as a part of that. They extended it a couple of years. And I think it's going to be good for everybody because MLS may or – I don't know if MLS is getting as much money as they were before, but certainly they've got access to a bigger audience now that there's no paywall beyond the Apple TV paywall. That if you've got Apple TV, you've got MLS every game. So I think that's good for them. That's messy, right? Yeah, in Miami. Sure. Good. All right. Let's pause. You're watching MacBreak Weekly with Dave Hamilton, Jason Snell, and Andy Anako. and now it's time for our picks of the week. Let's let our special guest, Dave. Dave, you're like me. Normally I don't even do a pick. I put in 10 or 11 picks this week. You put in a few too. Save them for next time, Leo. Save them for next time. I will. I'll save it. Pick one or two if you want. I was just going to pick one. I mean, I can pick two if you want. I'll pick two. They're both free. I got yelled at last time for having a really nice, attractive, expensive thing. So these are free. Well, you are in the Alex Lindsay chair of expensive picks. Well, you know, I can, like, adjust the chair a little bit. I like to tilt it back a little. Remember network utility that we used to have, the graphical interface that let us do pings and trace routes and all that stuff, and it was taken away? The folks at Devon Technologies, I think they're the ones who make ChronoSync, if my brain is working right, even after three hours. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they have a bunch of free utilities, and within the last couple of months, they released actually an update. They had been doing this for a while, version 2.0 of Neo Network Utility. So that is – it will look very familiar to anyone who remembered Apple's utility. And it's all of that stuff. So if you're not somebody who likes to go to the terminal to do trace routes and pings and all those things, just download it, put it on your Mac, and now you've got it, and it's in a safe little box that you're not going to type, you know, rm-rf-slash. So don't type that. Econ does Chrono Think. Thank you. I had it. Big brain database thing. That's right. I had that wrong. I paid for Devon Think. I used to use it, but my brain isn't as big as it used to be. All right. Well, that's why we need Devon Think. We need more. Yeah. Devon Think was like a massive database. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very cool. Yeah. It's free. and available from their website, which is devontechnologies.com. Mr. Andy and Otco, you've got a free one for us, it looks like, too. Yeah. Now, as a professional writer, I spend a lot of my time trying to not write, and one of the ways I can justify that is by looking at different text editors and different work environments. and I came across I mentioned earlier that I updated my old ThinkPad Chromebook for the new Pop OS and I came across this really nice text editor that works in the terminal it's called Word Grinder, it's been around for a while and it is the most bare bones but not painfully bare bones. It's a twoie. It works entirely inside a terminal window So you can install it on Homebrew in the terminal app in Mac. And the thing is, like, I'm used to, like, you mentioned, like, Emacs and other, like, classic, like, terminal tech setters. They mostly have, like, this neck beardy sort of legacy. Oh, very neck beardy. Well, why wouldn't I have key bindings to Control-Shift-Option-8 and 2 to create a new line? You know, like, it's easy to remember. No, it isn't. No, it isn't. Word Grinder really impressed me because the magic that they did in making it, it is a completely bare bones user interface looking sort of thing. You just type, type, type, type, type, type, type. It's just like plain text. You basically have an 80 by 24 window, just like classic 1980s, 1970s. But the thing is, you hit the escape key and it adds a menu box that has, like, in text, a really sophisticated interface where, like, if you try to save a file with there, it means to, like, okay, so the cursor is not going to be, like, at this little, like, text box at the bottom, like, at the indicator that lets me type a path name. No, it actually basically reproduces in text like a familiar Mac OS file picker. So you can just navigate up, down through the hierarchy and save it wherever you want. And it's not just saving and opening text files. Like it can export in pretty much any format you want, mark down HTML, a couple other forms, like a doc, I think, format is included. If you want to do it, if you want to use it kind of the way that Ulysses or Scripner works where, yes, you have a master document, but that document has sub-documents inside it, like you've got chapters of a book going on or notes for a different project, you can do that as well. But if all you want to do is sit and write completely focused without any distractions for a good hour or two, all of that stays out of your way until you hit the escape key and this beautiful little, like, text interface comes in. It is free. It made its debut something like 10 years old. 13 years old and it's still in beta. That'll tell you something. Yeah. Are you good Google products? Yeah. But it's very, very polished. I'm going to check it out. Howlark.com slash Word Grinder. Again, I think it's just Brew, Word Grinder, and it will just simply, if you've got Homebrook Brew installed, it will just simply install everything for you. And like I said, I don't know if I will use this on the regular or not, but, boy, I'm just so impressed. The only graphical GUI sort of like superfluousness is kind of cool where they have like a top row and a bottom row that just sort of like indicates you're at the top of the page. you're at the top of the document, you're at the bottom of the document. It took me a while to figure out that, oh, no, those aren't tab stops. Those are just, oh, by the way, you're at the bottom right now. And the fit and finish and function of this, like, I also thought about, gee, do I have the terminal set up incorrectly? It's like I'm typing, typing, typing, but it's only, like, all the new – the cursor, just the editable line is always, like, in the middle of the window before I realized that, no, if I, like, use a page up, page down, like, arrow keys, it will scroll up and it will, like, fill the entire window. but it is sophisticated to understand that if I'm typing, I probably want the editable, whatever line is, we probably want the cursor, the edit point to be in the middle of the window where my eyes are rather than at the bottom. Anyway, just beautifully, beautifully put together. It's worth looking at just to see as an oddity to see how beautifully this works. And once you have it installed, maybe you're going to wind up using it. You never know. I shall check it out. Word Grinder, Unicode Aware as well, which is very nice. And, of course, it's not just Mac. is pretty much the next term. Cowlark, C-O-W-L-A-R-K dot com. Thank you, Andrew. Jason Snell, your pick of the week. This is a software that I have been using. It is not publicly available yet, but you can go and sign up for updates about when it will be available, and presumably they'll do a broader test flight at some point. This is by Aaron Vey and Ben Rice McCarthy. It's called Indigo. You can go to indigosocial.app. What is it? it's a Blue Sky and Mastodon in a single timeline client. I like it. It's really good. I've been using a very early beta, and it's already by far the best client that I've got for those services. And they're all in one, which is really nice. They previously collaborated on an app that let you do cross-posting called Croissant. but this is a full-on client where you can just scroll. It's smart enough to spot cross posts and only show you one and mark it as a cross post. It's got indicators to tell you which service it's coming from. You can view and favorite and reply and look at your list and all of those things. So it's going to be really good. In fact, like I said, it's already very good. iPhone, iPad, and it'll run on my Mac too. so I recommend if you're somebody who uses Blue Sky and Mastodon and are like tired of, either haven't found a client that you like or are tired of switching between them, this can unify your timeline and I think it's really nice, so IndigoSocial.app the app will be called Indigo and you can sign up now for updates and I really like it so if you're intrigued check it out, I wish I could say you could go download it now but I've been using this last week, and it's really good. Do they have a time frame for... I mean, I think it's in really good shape now. I think they're still adding some features to it, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a broader test flight relatively soon. Can't wait to try it. Yeah, it's good. You know, it's sad, because if Twitter still had an API, it would be masked on Blue Sky and Twitter. I know, right? But I guess Elon just doesn't... A lot of people quit Twitter because of Elon. I never got there, because I quit Twitter earlier, because when he got there, first thing they did was they killed the API, and they killed all the third-party clients. At that point, I just stopped using it because I used Twitterific and loved it, and I know a lot of people use TweetBot. And, like, for me, I was out at that point. I didn't need to wait around to see Twitter X get worse. You were right. Without a good client, I was not interested in being there. You know, I have to check X all the time now because, I mean, I don't ever post there, but because, unfortunately, all the AI bros live on X still. Well, maybe. I mean, this weekend they announced that they were going to crack down on any sort of agentic browsing, even just what they call scraping, so not even agentic posting for you. Forget it. But it's like, well, like, you don't have an API. You don't, like, how are we supposed to, like, digest this content? Oh, my gosh. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. I got to point out, Net Newswire is still around. It's still free. It's 23 years old. We were talking about how great we love, how much we love RSS. If you need an RSS reader for your Mac. Free, open source. It's fantastic. Recent updates for Mac and for iOS, the new 26 Liquid Glass version for iOS. Always free, always open source. Brent Simmons running it, a lot of people contributing to it. And Brent retired from his job at Audible. So Brent is a man of leisure and also of NetNewsWire, which I think is pretty awesome. I didn't realize that. Pleasure and NetNewsWire. And you have mentioned a number of times a bunch of OpenWhisper dictation stuff. I just want to mention FreeFlow, which is an open and I think cloud-coded version of SuperWhisper. But because you download the Whisper LLM to your machine, it's fast and it's absolutely free. And it's very easy to install. and I have been using it to dictate to Claude Code because I feel like Claude Code, see, it puts a little thing up there when you press the button so you know you're recording, and it does a really nice job. So it's very fast. Whisper is amazing as far as models go. It is. I don't think it's, as I'm reading about this, Leo, is it using Whisper? It says that it uses the Grok API key, so it's using Grok not Whisper, right? Yeah, I had to put a Grok, but it's a free API key. I guess it is using Grok. Yeah, it's not doing it locally. It's using the Grok thing. That's what I'm reading. I didn't use Grok. Yeah, you're right. Never mind. Forget because, well, it does a good job of transcribing. I use Whisper on my Linux boxes, but I wanted to have something on my Mac that was the equivalent where you press a button, you dictate, and it goes into quad. Yeah, you're right. Never mind. I paid for Super Whisper, which Jason recommended a while ago. So you're still using that? I'm not currently using it because it's just not. Dictation, you guys were talking earlier about, oh, maybe just talking or typing into a blank text box at the future of interfaces is like talking into a text box doesn't work for me. So, no, it's a really great idea for an app, and I think we'll see more. I'm a moderate on this AI interface thing. I think there will be more interfaces that are doing a good job of understanding context and taking input from you. And Super Whisperer is interesting because it lets you, based on the context of your Mac, it lets you have different instructions for the processing of your text, which I think is really interesting. Yeah, yeah. Automate all the things, I guess. Yes. Jason Snell, SixColors.com. Look for his podcast at SixColors.com slash podcast. Thank you, Jason. Yeah, thank you. Lovely to see you. We'll see you next week. Christina Warren will be here in the Alex Lindsay chair. Maybe we'll get her her own chair. Mr. Andy Anotko. This chair is nice, but it's not, you know, it's not fit for Christina. She needs a new chair. No, she needs her own. Yes. We've taken Alex's chair out back. We hosed it down. And we shipped it to Christina. Great to see you. Always my joy. Thank you very much. Mr. Anotko. And Dave, thank you so much for being here. a couple of times now in the interim. MacEatGab.com. That's the best place to go. You're getting better at saying that. It's hard, but I am getting better. And I think after about 21 years, I might be able to master it. Yeah. Well, I'll let you know. MacEatGab.com. Thank you, David. Thanks, Bob. It's really great to see you. Thank you all for joining us. We do MacBreak Weekly of a Tuesday, 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern. Yes, I've given up the 24-hour clock. I couldn't do it. 2 p.m. Eastern. But, well, it is 1900 UTC. I guess when you say UTC, you've got to do the 24-hour clock. You can watch us do it live. We stream it on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick. We also stream into the Discord for our club members. If you can't watch live and maybe you've got, I don't know, a job or something, you could always download a copy of the show. It is a podcast. We make copies available on our website, audio or video. Not both yet. Well, I guess the video has audio, so maybe that's the both. That's at twit.tv slash mbw. There is a YouTube channel with both video and audio and one convenient file. That's a good way to share clips if you want. And, of course, the best way to get the show. Subscribe in your favorite podcast client. Yes, you can even use Apple Podcasts, and you'll get it automatically as soon as we're done. Thanks to our producer and editor, John Ashley. Appreciate your help, John. thanks to all of you for joining us thanks to our club twit members but now I am sad to say it is my solemn duty to tell you get back to work because break time is over bye bye