MacBook Neo and Ecosystem Growth

It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Jason and Andy and Christina are here. We will talk about all of the uh rumors and stories about John Turnus, Apple's next CEO, who's gonna get to announce some pretty nice products. We'll talk about those. We'll also talk about a smarter Siri, maybe, and a big award for Pleurabus. All of that and more coming up next on Mac Break Weekly. Podcasts you love. From people you trust . This is Twit . This is Mac Break Weekly, episode 1022, recorded Tuesday, April 28th, 2026. Ultra expensive . It's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show we cover the latest Apple News. Say hello to Christina Warren from the fabulous GitHub where she's at developer relations. Hi, Christina. Hello, Leo. You'll be glad to know that the uh founder and uh CEO of uh framework joins us tomorrow. Oh fantastic. Should I ask him about your thirteen? You You should should. know. You shouldn't. You shouldn't ask about that. You should ask him about the keyboard, about all the the the pro and all the new stuff they announced, because that's super exciting. I think that's why he wants to come on is talk about the pro, but I want to talk about the framework desktop, which everybody still says it' probabsly the best choice for a local inference. I mean it's it's one of the few I mean even with the price increase like that that Strix Halo that AMD came out with is a very good machine. If if you I mean especially and it's interesting as like the studio, Mac Studio is obviously great, but you know it's uh almost impossible to get and you can't get one because everybody's buying them. Actually, they're all buying um the minis. Yeah, the minis, everything's sold out. And I I guess I should consider myself lucky to have an M4 Pro 64 gig mini. Not that I use it for but I could if I wanted to. Also here, Andy Yanako . He's in the library where nothing is mini. It's all giant. The ideas are big. The hope is big. The budget is small. It's a wonderful day in New England, Leo. Hello, Andy. Is it is spring here? Uh it keeps wavering, it keeps flip-flopping back and forth. I know. Uh so but I mean again I'm dressed perfectly but only because I brought like two light layers in my backpack because in four hours time it might be back to forty three degrees. Everything's fine. The planet is doing great. I'm sure everything's fine. Never know in New England what you're gonna get. And here's Jason Snell who's celebrating the triumph of the nerd. Hello. It's uh always good to be here. Happy to be with my selection of my close personal friends, the old computers behind me and the young people in front of me. The young young people . Uh I guess really the big story still this week lingers about uh is John Turnus. A lot of articles. I I put a a sampling of them in uh our uh show notes. John Turnus first big problem is AI, says The Verge. Who is John Turnus? says Nine to Five Mac. Uh uh John Turnus says Apple's about to change the world, says 9 to 5 Mac. TechCrunch says John Turnus will run one of the most powerful companies in the world. The job is a minefield. Uh, fast company says Apple stock is having a surprisely muted reaction to Tim Cook's exit. Here are three reasons why. But my favorite is John Gruber . Take it a little uh he calls it uh claim chowder. Yeah taking a little uh run at uh Mark uh yeah uh I did we I don't think we we we might have mentioned this we briefly touched on it. But the idea here is the financial look the, this is this is sequence. The Financial Times came out broke a story that said Cook's gonna leave soon. Actually before that, Gurman had been saying all last year Cook will leave at some point and Turnus is his likely some of the things , and he's the one who said Turnus is going to be the replacement almost certainly. Absolutely. Mark German deserves all the credit for that. But then in December, there was this very well sourced, like four different reporters in the byline, detailed story in the in the Fincialan Times that said Cook is going to leave and Turnus is going to be the CEO and they're working on it and it's going to happen next year. First half next year. One of the authors of that story is kind of uh the chief rival to Mark German for uh Apple Rumors. They're on the Apple beat, right? At the at the F T for sure. So look, at the time I think we all said this feels like a a leak from the board, right? Because T you mentioned in passing that headline that was Apple stock uh muted at this. Well, the reason the Apple stock's muted at this is because there was a big fat leak in the Financial Times in December that prepped everybody for Tim Cook leaving and like the whole market got to be ready emotionally for what was gonna happen. So the Financial Times got this amazing scoop months in advance. Nobody said beforehand that , hey, we we got we have we just got some hot rumors that Tim Cook is definitely going to be announcing sometime in the next couple of weeks. That was an actual secret. Yeah, that was. But it was like a time frame. And then German's response, and I remember saying this at the time, German's response was interesting because it was strangely kind of catty. But what he didn't do is say they were wrong. He sort of said, That's not what I have heard, which was really suspicious to me because it's like past tense and he's not really reporting right. He's reporting on what people had previously told him. And if if the board had decided to do a disc a disclosure to the FT , he wouldn't have heard about it, because it would have been a more recent decision to do that. But he came out a little too aggressive and he was like, No, no, no, no, no. It's not gonna happen in the first half. That's not gonna happen. And you know, that was wrong. So like German, uh it it's it's funny. I think it was just that German got beat on a story because it got leaked on purpose to someone who was not Mark German, because he is Mark German and he's so good at this. They weren't gonna come to him with this. He had already kind of spoiled it. So they went to the FT instead. It also sounds like Mark might have gone to his sources at Apple who told him no. Or yeah, well, I mean, in that initial report, it it was more like that's not what I've heard which, was past tense. Like he uh he had already done that reporting previously and if it had changed he didn't know. But like uh so it's fair. Uh like he I think he overreacted to the FT thing 'cause I think he got caught a little flat-footed because they didn't a controlled leak uh directly from people at Apple, which is absolutely what that FT story was, is always going to beat uh a a very slow leak through the grapevine all the way to one of Mark Kerman's sources. But but we gotta give Mark credit. Mark German is why we all knew who John Turnis was when the FT story broke. Correct. Also, also, I don't know if we'll we talk about this later, but he had some uh reportage like a couple days later about like here's what was going on behind the scenes. Apparently he talked to some new people to find out that well maybe one of the in one of them the touch points for this was Suru ji saying, look, telling Tim, look, I'm burned out. I'm sick of managing all this apple Silicon stuff. I'm really thinking of leaving. And Tim either directly or indirectly saying, we've got to keep this guy at all costs. How can we reorganize the company to make that happen? And the implication being that although that certainly discussion started with, okay, we'll elevate you to a C C suite position. It might have figured out into Tim as he said in another at the this big town hall meeting last week. There are three things that had to happen for me to decide to retire. One of them is we had to have an awesome company had to be in great shape. We have we had to have a really awesome roadmap ahead of us for hardware. And John Turner's needed to be ready. And one, two, three things were ready. So I decided to go. But it does it so he he does have his sources. It must I I'm not gonna I'm I'm not gonna editorialize on like how he must have felt or how he might might have felt because that's like again, th there's there's a point which becomes like real housewives of Macintosh tech press and nobody looks good in that They beat they beat him up over the Johnny Shroogee news too, where he reported that Shroogee was thinking of leaving and then two days later Shroogi said, No, no, no, I'm staying. It's very clear that what was happening is that he was negotiating right what he was gonna do and if they were gonna retain him by giving him more responsibility in a new title, which is what they did. Absolutely. I mean if i I mean and and I I I don't pretend to know who his sources were and any of that, but I would not be surprised if they came to close you know people close to the situation in terms of knowledge that that Suruji basically said I have other options, right? And and I I promise you that that reporting helped his case when it came to that. What kind of leakage have happened under uh jobs because it it does feel like there there was a lot of back and forth thing. I mean, some of this was placed and we know jobs used to do that with Walt Mossberg in the journal and and other places. But I mean I think I I don't know I don't know if we can comment if it would have happened or not. I mean the the the the Yeah, but the man but it's not leaky compared to a lot of other companies, first of all. And and I also and I think that it's it's difficult to to say well what would have happened fifteen years into a company's evolution, you know, since fifteen years since since jobs was CEO companies change, culture's change. I I I don't know. I don't I I don't think that this is in any way an indictment of Apple, which is still I think one of the more locked down, you know, companies out there comparatively to to others. And and this thing, I mean, as as Jason and Andy pointed out, was very clearly leaked early because they wanted the the you know financial community to be able to kind of weigh in on what their choice was going to be. And when they saw that it was, you know, the reaction was basically like, Okay, if that's your guy, that's your guy, then you're like, okay, well then we don't we're not getting any sort of massive backlash. Then we can feel confident going forward with this. And and also the in not uh beyond the tech press, the word leak has assumed a broader meaning that it was never that isn't always applicable. Sometimes it's just good reporting. It's the case of someone developing year-long relationships with people you have never heard of who nonetheless ha have their ear to the ground. And when you're trying to, gee, A, B, and C, it makes sense that D E N F. How do I, how would I confirm D ENF and spending many weeks or months trying to confirm that with again these very, very deeply seated, very, very long relationships. So it's it's bothersome when uh the word leak is used as though Harry's it it impli it implies an irresponsible or disgruntled person handing a story to somebody who simply writes it down and then clicks publish. So credit we're credited. You think it's more subtle than that? You think it I mean it is leakage. Well, yeah, but uh oh so there's different ways. I mean German, for example, like he's cultivating sources and having conversations and checking things out. He's not a it's not a passive thing, right? Which I feel like leaking sometimes you sit there with a bucket and wait for the leaks to drop in your bucket. And that is not what Mark Gurman does. He is far more active at that. I I also think uh it's a little rose-colored glasses. It's like Apple has always leaked. There have always been leaks all the way back to the very beginning. That has always been the case. And Apple has never been uh not only larger in terms of people who could leak, but more scrutinized than it has been over the last 15 years. Like there is no company that is that is tried to you know be scrutinized about the secrets that are in there. Um, and even so, you know, they do occasionally surprise us, but then you also get resporter like Mark German. I think it's more impressive that Mark German has no competition. Like he has competition, but there's nobody like who's the Salieri to his Mozart, who's like also breaking Apple news a lot? The information is maybe the closest, but even then, it's not. It's like almost all of the leaks that come out are from Mark Gurman. You get some supply chain leaks, Ming Chi Kuo, there are some leakers in China. The information has some stories that they do, but like German is way ahead, and that's actually a little surprising because there is so much focus on Apple because it's so huge and people want to know. Yeah. Well, anyway, uh it's exciting. It's an exciting time. It's an exciting time. Again, what's the transition? John uh it is getting the uh as we mentioned last week, the September 1st start date because that's just in the nick of time to announce for the iPhone. The iPhone. And apparently uh the fold is kind of his pro oh, by the way, we got a name for it. We'll talk about that in a second. Oh, yeah. Is uh is kind of his uh project, right? This was he he shepherd this according to the stories I've read, shepherded this along. The the the back the the story the I mean not that I'm an this is I'm I'm a guesser, not an analyst, and I but I would have guessed that they would have had a longer period transition transition. But the story that's being reported is that in quite intentionally, uh Tim is out on September 1st so that uh so that uh turners can hit the ground running with a very, very flashy, very, very hardware-focused thing that he's been intimately involved in. So the coverage and the reportage, excuse me, the messaging could be no, this was something that exists largely because of his stewardship as the head of hardware. And also to get put like a very, very high-ticket uh expensive item uh in the quarterly results so that whatever happens, he will have a really really good first quarter. And in retrospect, yeah, that does make a lot of sense. Although I do hope that they give Tim a really good victory lap because he definitely deserves one. Yeah. Well, I think he'll get one. I think he's leaving on a high note Apple stock price is very high. Uh all the everything's firing on all cylinders. Well, and AI is the only question mark. And I guess next month is when we're gonna figure out what the plans are there . Right? Yeah, well in June. It's not it's still April. This is the longest April of all time. In June, I know. I know. It's still not. It's May on Friday. We'll know in like six weeks. Yeah. We'll know in six weeks. Thank you. Uh all right. We can s we can say the name now. Ultra. Ultra. Macworld magazine has this scoop . Uh Apple's Ultra Roadmap confirm ed. Felipe Esposito writing iPhone, MacBook, and more on the way they're going to call the fold the iPhone Ultra without a number, according to Philippe , uh, which makes sense because like the air, this is going to be a perennial. Uh there's also the MacBook Ultra, uh, which is that M6 OLED we've been talking about, and that will be Ultra because it's going to be so much more expensive than the other Mac box . Um and maybe there'll be other ultras. I don't know, but it's it sounds like Apple. I mean, they own the trademark. They've had ultra chips, they have an ultra watch so it won't be too much of a surprise, right ? You did you say did you say uh Andy? Oh only only because like I I I I was I was thinking about this the other the other day. I'm thinking I I mean I was I was like how many cleaning products and shaving products and other pro like consumer house cleaners and like I do believe I have that are called the ultra right you're right it's like it's one of those meaningless terms you attach to something to make it sound special. And in the in the end, they can call it you know the the the history of m product marketing is we will make up a word because we know what trademark something. It's it is meaningless. We shouldn't really fuss about it, but it's like it gets us back to where we've been for many years of okay, does the word pro actually mean anything, or is it just a synonym for it's gonna cost you, brother? So according to the OED, Ultra was first used in eighteen fifteen by Byron, Southey, and Bentham from the French politics ultra royaliste, extreme royalist, of course it has a Latin origin. And OED says in very common and steadily increasing use from about eighteen thirty. So it is not a new word. Ultraviolet, right? Ultra Don ultra Don Ultra is a hell of a cleaner. Don't anything you're trying to clean, Don Ultra, the R slash cleaning subreddit, every solution is Don Ultra. Yeah, he's pretty good, but he's very busy these days. Don Ultra. Don Ultra is a uh Latin advert ising . That means beyond on the other side, on the far side, past over and across. I mean, look, there's a long tradition of us hearing Apple product name tags and being like, eh, I don't know. And then you know what? They use them and they market them and they make it clear, and then everybody gets used to them and they can mean like press pro doesn't mean what it it literally professional right like there's an apple watch you know ultra right we've got that now we've got all sorts of pro there's a phone pro, how is it a professional phone? And the fact is like that's not what it means. It it it means something, but it's got a very specific kind of like tag money in Apple's universe. Exactly right. And we all get over it. So like I think an UG today is perfectly reasonable, knowing that you know, six months or six weeks or six days after it gets announced, we'll all just shrug and be like, Yeah, of course. Uh of course. And as Posito says in Macworld, there'll probably be an i Pad Ultra and uh AirPods Ultra as well. There might be a whole luxury line , maybe a leather covered line of Apple stuff. Look, I like the ide a because I think Apple , I don't mind the idea that Apple pushes, like with the iPhone 10, pushes the cutting edge and releases a product. Like if Apple is going to be restrained and has some features that they're like, we can't do that this year because it's gonna be too expensive. I actually kind of don't mind if they have the ability to put that out at a higher end while also making all their other products available. I I'm I'm kinda okay with that. The idea that it gives them an out, a place where they can experiment with brand new stuff that will come down over time, but it gives them because the alternative is they just don't release that product. And I don't like that. No, I don't like that either. I will go back to go back to the name for a second. The only thing I kind of take um bridge with a little bit, because you're exactly right, Jason. We will get used to the name. Umbridge from the Latin for shadow. But but you know, it's gonna or but how is this gonna be? Are we gonna have a a MacBook Ultra, you know, M6 Max , you know, whatever? Like th this is where the the the naming becomes clunky because you we've we've added all these suffixes to the chip names and to the other things. And you're right, like MacBook Pro is cease to have any sort of meaning, right? Because you have the like the 14 inch MacBook Pro, you've got like the the base model, and then you've got the one that actually is the good one. And then you have like, you know, um the the the the max, you know, uh chip versions and whatnot. And so that's where I I I do like roll my eyes a little bit because I'm like, okay, we're now adding all these, you know, various, you know, like things to the name and it's just it doesn't roll off the tongue uh easily, but we will get used to it, I'm sure. Yeah. I but I I agree with you 100%, Jason. Like if the I I feel as though it'll j legitimize itself if it means that no, this isn't the same unit but with more storage and more memory and a better camera. It's no, this is a almost completely revisualized. It is almost it would be prohibitive for us to make this at scale. We can only probably make a couple of million of these max, but we are going to make the maximal uh version of the iPhone, the maximal version of the iPad, the maximal version of an Apple Watch and we will call it the Ultra. We're not expecting this to be a reasonable purchase for most people. Again, it'll just be if it does become like the pro, uh, that will kind of bore me. I'm kind of more interested in the idea of uh in the iPad line using the Neo tag as here is the one where we are going to expect you to be uh we we are making something we're maximizing economy and this is targeted at people that are willing to forego the ultranus of this device in order to be able to afford this thing. Because the the iPad absolutely needs some pruning and house cleaning. Because I have to I have to remind myself, wait, is the iPad nothing the intro one or is it the iPad Air because Air is smaller? Or I mean they that would that would be a line where adding Neo to the end of here is the $329 iPad works great. It's not gonna be your it's not gonna be a replacement for your main device but you can buy one for each of your kids and they can have your own private experience and it's built to the spec of an Apple quality product so I would love to see an infestation of of of Neo I'd love to see the I the Apple Watch Neo , for instance, the AirPods Neo. So you know when you walk into the store that I don't really have three hundred dollars, just I don't know how much the the really, really good AirPods are. I but I know that I don't have that kind of need for it. Show me the Neo first. And if that doesn't work, then I'll think I'll consider an upgrade. The iPod is also or sorry, the iPad, not the iPod. like having the the ultra line is like the iPad Pro . And we've talked about it here. It costs a lot of money. But it's got that tandem OLED display and like it has so much amazing tech in it that you know, most people probably don't need if they're buying an iPad. iPad Air is a better fit, probably than than the Pro . But I'm glad the Pro exists. Right. And and people buy it because they want the very best of it, you know, of whatever iPad they're happening to be buying. But I like the idea of getting these uh product names like they're never gonna be perfect. People who read about uh this and talk about it like us are always obsessed with sort of getting everything in a perfect line where every product lines up and all makes sense and like they they don't release all the products at once it's always in flux it's always a little bit of a mess but i do like the idea of maybe saying you know these adjective lists tag list product names are a little confusing it's like if they had called the MacBook Neo the MacBook, we would have been like the Mac, you know, a MacBook. Well, no, no, no, not the MacBook, just a MacBook like the MacBook or the MacBook Pro or the MacBook Air. And instead we can say a MacBook like the Neo or the Pro or the Air. And it's clearer , I kinda like that better. Maybe they need to uh get those tags on everything. I think that might be a better thing. Yeah, I mean I think I think that's true. I think at this point, I think that originally, like when we the first MacBook, going back to 2006, like that fit exactly where it needed to be. And then I think the the first kind of original Sin was the 2015 MacBook, reintroducing that name when it was a different class of product, right? And kind of repurposing the air into what had been the MacBook role . And so yeah, I'm with you. I think that if if if you're going to go down that kind of sequential line, that's kind of how I feel about the the the pro lineup with the MacBook Pro right now, where it's like, okay, it gets a little bit confusing. So yeah, I mean I don't mind. Look, as long as and I I'm I'm even okay with them having like super high-end or uh very expensive you know machines um that are not set to appeal to the mass populace. What I do hope, and I and I I'm not overly concerned about this, especially not on the phone at first, laptop maybe a little bit, is that it won't become an excuse for Apple to try to, you know, push up you know average selling price and and you know, uh not bringing things back down, you know, over time and trickling down. Like that, that's the only thing I don't want to see. Is be like, oh, we used to have these features. I've seen a lot in the financial press is how well orchestrated this hando ff is. Uh the timing, the way they've handled it. Uh Tim's gonna get a farewell at WWDC. Turnus is gonna get an introduction in September for the big, you know, the most important launch he'll also get the most important quarter as his first quarter for financial results. Uh and uh there's a you know, according to Bloomberg's uh power on newsletter, German's uh Sunday newsletter, there's a pretty strong lineup. Just as there was, it turns out for Tim Cook when he took over, there's a pretty strong lineup of products about to hit the pipeline. Turnus uh at the town hall, in which he was introduced to uh Apple employees last week, said Apple's about to change the world and describe the company's pipeline as the most exciting of his career, according uh to Ger man. They've got the smart home hub, which is that home pod with a screen. Yeah, I know. It always is. The tabletop robot, which is the uh home hub with an arm. So there's one with a screen and one with a limb. Uh it's not a limb. It can move the screen around. I don't know why they call it a limb. It's it's like the iMac G4 Shibo. Yeah, it moves itself. Security device. I wonder about that. Seems like a long shot. Smart glasses. We we do know that Tim was very excited about that and has been for a while, and that's a hot category. AirPods with A I and perhaps low resolution cameras and a pendant uh Ger man says Apple's working in a small circular device with a computer vision camera system that can capture data and feed it to an iPhone's AI, and Siri features. You know, people have tried this before. This is something Gordon Bell was pushing with his uh, what did he call it? The meme. Can't remember he had a name for it. I remember talking to Gordon about it. Uh, and I love always loved this idea, but this really is gonna take a society that is just suddenly so used to being on camera at all times that they can tolerate it. I mean people didn't like the ray bands, the meta ray bands. Yeah. If you got a tie around your neck R.ight. I mean if if if if anybody can pull it off it would be Apple, but I don't expect the reception to be like people to be falling all over themselves for it because you you have other pendant other AI pendants like and I mean especially the microphones though, not cameras. Totally. But but but you know, having that idea. Well didn't um what was the the the the humane? Didn't the humane pen didn't that have the camera? Yeah, there was a projector. There was a camera uh that came out a few years ago and it didn't do well because they realized that the pictures it was taking were not at eye level, but was this part of the problem too. I mean I don't know if any of you remember, but Casey Neistat had like a a thing like like this um ten years ago it was called Beam that CNN then bought for some reason and I remember having a conversation with with with with Casey at like one of the launch events and I was like I totally understand what your idea is. Have you realized that where this is placed for 50% of the population is in a really inopportune spot and doesn't fit well like on your chest? You know , so here's so I found the story about Gordon Bell. This goes back 20 years. His wife, Gwen Bell, uh had Alzheimer's and he wanted to help her remember stuff. So he created uh something called My Life Bits when he was at Microsoft. It came out of Microsoft Research in England. The sense cam that was part of my life bits took a picture every 30 seconds. If you walk up to a person, it senses a change in infrared, triggers it, says, oh, you're see you're standing in front of somebody, captures that , and then remembers it in a database so that every 30 seconds, every there's a picture, every keystroke uh on your computer, every mouse click, basically all of your life. He was motivated uh to help uh Gwen , but uh I think he also had the idea that someday people will want this. And I've wanted this ever since I interviewed Gordon about this 20 years ago. Yeah. And and Goo Google also had a project that was kind of similar to uh the V one. Just like they r did something legitimately kind of revolutionary by having a cardboard VR set up for a phone . Basically their idea is well, what if we just have a holder for the phone so you could so people who re who can benefit from a phone camera as an assist assistive device to explain here's what's in front of you, here's where the traffic is. H'eres the the product that you're holding right now. Just simply wear it like around your ch around your chest so that you can basically you know where the camera is. You can you know that you can give presence to that. It's but it's we've talked we've talked about this in different ways before, but I I do think that I love the idea of Apple doing a pendant , possibly mostly because they are the people who can do two things extremely right. They can get the privacy right and they can get the hardware right. The man the manufacturing of this idea of trying to do a pin that is not going to simple not is going to get over hot. It's not going to last only like two hours on battery. It's not going to cons it's not going to be wireless happy. It's actually going to be practical and i do love the idea of a pin format because the idea of a camera in front of you is super super useful in so many situations and in every situation in which it is not appropriate to be wearing a camera you take it you unclip it from the magnet, you flip it over, you clip it back on the magnet with the camera facing towards your chest, and now it's just simply a microphone. If there's a company that can do this correctly, I think it's April. I don't, but I'm not 100% sure that it can actually be done But can they do the software? Yeah. I I the thing about the thing. This is the problem. This is all incumbent on Siri, right? I mean, that's what the rumor is. And I'm just gonna be totally candid . Right now, like unless like even if you shove Gemini into it, like I I I don't know if if if they if they have that part of it. I 'cause I agree with you. I think they can make the privacy argument whether that's a cope or not, think that they can definitely make the hardware not terrible, but uh but can you have a good software experience? They can I think they you know they have enough time to I I I keep saying this and I don't know um they have enough time to try to pull that off because uh for reasons that are kind of hard to hard for me to ex explain my thinking. I I do I do think they have plenty of time to figure that out if that's where they want to go. Also all very every time that they publish AI papers, uh uh they uh and like there's an AI conference going on which you see like the they the the AI group or the machine learning group published, hey, here are all the papers that we're publishing uh for this conference. Almost all of them have to do with, you know what, you don't need a large model to do this or uh this is uh uh there you can do inference without having to have an incr uh a huge amount of compute basically this the standard way of doing things and you you'd probably know better than I how valid these arguments are, but everything that they're that they're focusing their research on, or at least their published research on, seems to be on we can do things on a tiny little power uh power sipping device without many resources that are not gonna re have the same sort of requirements as the larger models and the larger plans that uh other people are doing. So uh it's something they're very, very interested in. Again, I don't know how you're you're right, they do have to get the software exactly right. Um, I the problem is that I don't know you have to I I I still don't know how the average consumer balances the difference between I want privacy versus I want this to be as functional as possible. Where is the middle ground that they're willing to accept? And I don't know what that is. German also says that uh Turnus had a high priority for a foldable iPad, a roughly 20-inch foldable iPad . He says it may end up being a wacky experiment that doesn't see the light of day, according to several people who have worked on it. But it was a turnest priority. I mean, I actually feel this way we were talking about the pendant too, or the pen or whatever it is. First off, like soci ally, is that gonna work? Um , I think Apple doesn't here here's the thing. Apple has let things go like the glasses and then regretted it. Yeah. Because they got behind. I think something like a pennant, like either they'll do it right and people will accept it, or people will learn to accept it because everybody else is doing it, or they'll put it out and nobody accepts it, in which case they're not behind, right? Because they didn't they didn't mess it up. It up for to do this. You can't you can't sit on the sideline with something that might be a thing. So I think that's important. And this folding iPad weird, like this is the thing that's like it's like a laptop, but it's an iPad, which I I don't I all the reports about this that Mark German has done, I don't understand what this product is. It doesn't make sense. But you know what ? Why not? In first off, they investigate stuff like this all the time. It's surprising that this got reported on, but like obviously they're experimenting with it, and that John Turnus is intrigued by the possibility. And like , why wouldn't you explore that? The question is like either do they figure it out and go, oh, I see why why people would want this, or they go, and you know, nah, they had the discipline to just walk away and say, nah, this didn't work out. But like they it's this is their job, right? Like we we don't usually see into this part, but they they need to try this stuff. They need to be planning for like what what does this new bit of technology enable us to do? And is that a thing that makes sense? And sometimes you can only do that by trying it and learning, oh no, this this doesn't make sense. Let's not that's okay. That's I think it's okay for them to to walk away if if it seemed like a cool idea, but in the end, they can't figure out why anyone would buy it. Yeah, I mean I think I agree with you. The only thing I would kind of push back on that a little bit is like you look at the Vision Pro, which is not a success at all. Um, which, you know, I I don't know why they're continuing down that that realm. And I think that I think all of us would agree that they probably would have been better suited pivoting from that into some other areas um earlier. Um so on the one hand, like I totally agree with you, I would love to see them be able to experiment more, even if it doesn't work. I think the problem is, is like when we look at things like the Vision Pro, when that's released, and and I go back to I think the failure of the Vision Pro was completely in how it was was positioned, and that was completely Apple's fault. I think if Apple had positioned it as a dev kit that everyone can buy and kind of an experiment, I think that the reception would have been better. I think we probably would have had more adoption. We might even have more apps. The level set would have been correct. But the problem is because Apple doesn't typically experiment, even though I agree with you, I think they should do more of that. When their products come out, they have to sell us this vision of this holistic ecosystem and all of these use cases. And then if it doesn't live up to that people have a hard time kind of you know being like well that was a flop or that didn't work or that wasn't that like there there is this expectation that if Apple is going to release something it's gonna they're gonna kind of be in it for the long haul. And I don't know how they change that perception. Maybe the way they do that is just by experimenting more and maybe getting people used to being like, okay, you know, um the the you know home pod is not going to be long for this world until we bring it back randomly, you know, a few years later. I don't know. Mr. Pose is an interesting point just because like it's a developer kit and an experiment. And I I firmly believe that I firmly believe that Apple should have the ability to launch something publicly that is not meant to be marketed as the next huge thing. I agree, but they need to market that way. But they can't. I like yeah, they seem to have failed at that. And yeah, in hindsight, uh what I would say about the Vision Pro is first off, I think it was a misguided product direction and that some of that goes back to Johnny Ive, um and that if if you can only sell it for thirty five hundred dollars, you probably shouldn't sell it and you should wait. Like what was the rush? And I think the rush was they were looking at meta and they're like, oh man, we got to catch meta. And now you look at meta and you're like, oh no, you did not need to do that. And and you'd be better off holding this technology another five or 10 years and using it then. But I think that that I mean, this is an opportunity for a new leadership to say, you know, when we when we evaluate products like this, we either need to find different ways to launch them, like should Vision OS have just been a developer kit only available to developers and you know everybody would talk about it, but like it wouldn't be judged as a product because it doesn't make sense as a product, or you know, or trying things out and killing them. I don't know. I it is an opportunity for Turnus , the hardware guy, to maybe have a different take on um what they say yes to. And it could be like more strict of like say no to more things, or it could be can we find a way to say yes to some weird things yeah and see what happens it's a it to to uh to uh to the point of the of the vision pro apple apple stepped on its own uh on a rake by they they did not position it as this is a development kit, this is an experiment. They said this is the you want to be first in line for the next huge platform and that was the problem. Huge mistake. But but the thing the uh the the the idea of a of like a a laptop with two screens. This this is the one of the very few things that I really, really do envy about the Windows world that there are so there's so much competition that someone there's several companies are saying, you know what, what if we do put a a two screen laptop in the in in the lineup? And it's actually a ver the ones that I've seen are actually very, very compelling if you need like a mobile two uh two screen display. It's it's wonderful. But the the the Apple's problem is that they they have to make this laptop for the entire world of Apple, like desktop Mac OS users. And they can't, if they have a slot available for another model of MacBook, they have to make sure they can sell it to as many people as possible. So they're kind of hamstrung there because if they only sell a million of these, even if they say overtly, hey, this is a boutique, this is a boutique product. We really, really want to see this exist. Uh, and also this is a good test of technologies that we might be able to put into future more main stream devices, everyone's gonna say, yeah, but wow, what a huge flop that was, what a stupid idea. Uh it's it's very, very difficult to be in John Turner's position where even uh even I'm guilty of this, of saying I really want to see them take more chances, but nonetheless, if they take a chance in a way that I'm uh I my my I didn't have a cookie that day, my my I'm I'm a little I'm a little sleep deprived. And so rather than saying, wow, that was actually some interesting ideas impl.ement Theation was off, but it's a very, very interesting idea. Saying, oh my God, why is Apple wasting their time on this? And uh John Turnus is gonna the a test of his bravery is going to be, I think this is a great idea and I think we should do this. And I know that in the next year, every single, not even misstep, but even half step that I take is going to be criticized 10 times worse than anything I did. But I'm going to do it anyway because I think that's what's good for Apple's story, Apple's product line and Apple's users . All right. Well, it's going to get interesting because there is some competition, which we're going to talk about in just a little bit, but we got to take a break first. You're talking, you're watching uh Mac Break Weekly. Andy Anako, Christina Warren, smart people here, Jason Snell with a great conversation. But first, a word from our sponsor. Then we'll talk about Mr. Ming Chi Kuo. This episode of MacBreak Weekly brought to you by Scri be. You know, teams don't usually hit scaling problems because of headcount or budget. 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Now, first thing I should say, open AI, which had been on a tear right up till about yesterday , is now people are starting to look at them like you guys are gonna run out of money, aren't you? You we' notre the there's gonna be some problems there. We got some problems coming up. There's an IPO coming up. I you know, people are starting to look askance a little bit, uh, especially with anthropic success. However, uh, they are working and, maybe I don't know if this is the Johnny I product that they paid three billion dollars for, or if this is something else. They're working on a smartphone . Ming Chiquo says OpenAI is set to re define smartphones, media tech , which by the way, I want to say I was talking to Jeff Atwood the other day. He said, you know, this media tech processor is amazing. I said, I know. Terrible name, but but they actually have uh they have a processor that's on a Chromebook, which I actually purchased, so has he, and it's amazing. It's a really good ARM implementation, very impressive. So MediaTech, uh while that may sound like you know second-tier processor manufacturer, it is, I guess, pretty good. Qualcomm's involved, and Luxhare, which is a contract uh uh builder, contract, manufacturer, are key to the AI agent phone. Uh so qualcom and media technology to the processor, Luxhare will do this. KISS system co-design and manufacture. Quo says mass production expected in 2028 . And I have a feeling that whether Apple knew about this or not, this is why they're working so hard and fast, because they know the competition's breathing down their neck. And their number one product, the one that keeps them alive right now is the iPhone. AI agent redefines the smartphone says, quote, users are not trying to use a pile of apps. No apps. They're trying to get tasks done and fulfill needs to the phone. So they so I don't know it says I made a smartphone interface concept design shown at the end of this post in comparison with today's model using the iPhone as an example. So you basically talk to the phone, you tell it what you want to do. This is what was wasn't this the idea behind the rabbit R1 which had a a very early uh Android you know old Android operating system I have one and you taught the idea was you talk to it you don't need an app it will it will figure out what to do and now the technology is actually at that point where you can do more of that. Whereas when the R1 came out, uh agents weren't even a thing and and they were really running VMs um in the back end that were like running like playwright um scripts. Um it's pretty good now. In fact you can run open claw. Yeah no I know I know. Now now now it's like several years later it's it's finally okay. And look I paid a hundred dollars for it. I don't care. I'm just always their their marketing wasn't it 's cute. Yeah it is it is cute. But they're the the I mean honestly I've been expecting this I I don't know what it will look like, but I've been expecting this for the Somebody was gonna do it, if not OpenAI. Yeah, because b I mean it I've been expecting a phone, I've been expecting like a operating system because you can just kind of see the direction things go in where if I think most of us agree that AI, for better or worse, is the next big computing paradigm and it is transformative in the same way that smartphones were. And that doesn't mean that all the changes will be good and that doesn't mean that it that everything old goes away, but it does mean I think like a very clear rethinking of what the old way of using your phone of getting things done was. And now you could potentially put things into a new perspective and whether this is task-based, what is this about, but being about, okay, I want to get this done. I don't need to worry about rather than there's an app for that. No, I can just, you know, tell the the machine what I want it to do and it will figure it out for me. There's something compelling there. And I think that you know like Apple, Google, all the the incumbents have to be aware of this because certainly the whether it's open AI or Anthropic or some startup that we've never heard of who's gonna come in and try to own this space, this this is an area that I think is right for disruption and and will be because if we look at the last 20 years of kind of the modern smartphone era, right? Okay, well what what do we look like? What does the next twenty years look like? And and I don't think that it is a a a grid of apps on, you know, a a vertical screen. I just don't think that it is. Yeah. I think you know what it I I was reading I was reading this with the his post on X, and I actually was like, Oh, really? You really think that's really? And after a little bit more thought though, I kind of put myself in the mode of everybody who could not imagine a smartphone that does not have a physical keyboard on it. And but as soon as you showed them one, okay, that now makes sense. And then all of a sudden, all the companies that had built all of their software based on the idea of having a physical keyboard and physical control buttons, they were not in a position to throw away everything they've done and rebuild it based on multi-touch. And um if if AI represents that kind of threat to Apple and to Android and to all these other platforms. It is because we can imagine a layer of AI that interacts with the user and the user interface and exists alongside it. It is hard for us to imagine one that replaces it entirely, and it would seem to be almost impossible for a legacy operating system to to be re rewi red to be an AI first user interface as opposed to a secondary interface. So yeah, I'd love to see it happen. I'd but I and I admit that I'm not going to fully understand how well that experience would be until I actually see one. Unfortunately I I lack that kind of imagination. I mean I still think about all the different things that I use for my uh uh that I you know that we use smartphones for and not all of them is I'm going to give you a task which I would like you to perform. It's hey, I just want to listen to some music, or gee, uh I wonder like if my friends have posted anything on their blogs today. I just want to check a take a look at that. I don't understand how that interaction would work without a standard user inter face. And I don't understand uh a scenario in which I would prefer to ask an AI assistant to please show me Jason's latest blog post on Macworld or six colors. I would more appreciate that, hey, look, I've got a shortcut here that I simply tap this button and now I see this as RSS. So lack of imagination is is the killer for almost every industry. It's not that things can't be done. It's just people can't imagine how well it would how it would work. And it would take a company like OpenAI or Anthropic to basically create the revolution because they have no baggage. I think the the danger is that it's also it's not just lack of um imagination that's involved here, but it's also sort of like overestimation is a problem. Because I I am also intrigued by this. I like on the one hand, the the you know, there are lots of the streets are littered with the bodies of companies that thought they could build their own smartphones. Yeah. But at the same time, one of my arguments about why Apple has a good chance of surviving an AI transition is because they're so good at making smartphone hardware. And that's an argument for the smartphone as a piece of hardware, which is what the counterargument would be is like, yeah, maybe OpenA does need to make a smartphone because a pin is not gonna do it. And the you're gonna either have to if you don't make your own smartphone, you're gonna have to play ball with Apple or Google, whereas you if you make your own, you can do whatever. I I just something you said there, Andy, this is what I keep coming back to is it's so easy in a way to say, well, in the future we just won't have what we have now. We'll have a new thing and everybody will use the new thing and that'll be all it is. And it's more complicated than that, right? Like I I I the one that I always get is like, well in the future we'll just talk and things will, you know, we'll talk to something and it'll talk back to us. And it's like, I don't, I don't like I have so many devices in my life that I can talk to. I do not talk to them. I don't want to talk to them. I don't want them to make noise. I want to look at a screen. Now, I would also say with AI, here's a good example of this. We don't know how good it's gonna get, but what I would say is AI has proven to be amazing, especially at coding, right? And you can build your own apps, and that's true. And I could see a level where you're like, look, this is what I want you to do, and your phone kind of like just does it and makes a an interface for you. That said, I am skeptical that most people are going to want to have to convince their phones to make things in a way that ple ases them, as opposed to having somebody, perhaps a developer or what we think of now as a developer who might not be using traditional tools, to have some thought into like, here's a way you could do this thing and you build an interface that I might prefer to use. So like I I feel like there's complexity here and it's not like we're gonna toss it all out and replace it with something new. Because I think we I think we're a little over sometimes the hype gets people excited. It's like in the future there'll be nothing and you can just talk and things will happen. It's like I'm not sure people actually want to be that rootless. I think it's change, but not necessarily wholesale. I I do think it does it, you know. If I was open AI, I'd be interested in making a smartphone because I would think I don't want to be under Apple's thumb. I don't want to be under Google's thumb. And and I personally, Jason, am super bullish on the fact that the smartphone is a great object that people are going to want to keep in their pockets for lots of reasons. So if that's all true and I can't work with Apple, I gotta make this thing myself. I get it. I get it. Yeah. You need you needed to you need a display , I think, because again, I I'm I'm totally with you. I d I'm not going to be simply speaking to do everything I want. Uh I I like the idea of AI generated interfaces that are custom to the task where again if I do if I do tap the button to read your read your feeds, it will generate a uh a user interface that's appropriate to that moment and that task and it'll learn how to make that interface better and better and better. But to your to your point, I mean that is an excellent point. You think about it, the design of a laptop has not really changed fundamentally in 35 years. The controls, the controller, if if someone from 1930 were to jump into a car made in 2026, they would understand how to operate that car because that control interface and user interface has not substantially changed in a hundred years. The difference becomes we get to we keep the things that continue to work. We throw away the the things that are no longer relevant. We don't give that industry five years of advance. Oh, by the way, in five years time, nobody's gonna want that keyboard on your on your iPhones on your phone so so trying to figure that out. It's it's a it's a trial by fire and I I don't I that's the the thing that I didn't like about that tweet was the idea of this being a huge like disruptive sort of device as opposed to an interesting alternative that people are going to take a look at. But again, the if someone does crack the idea of a completely AI interface forward phone, it is it's it's harder to imagine Google cracking it or Apple cracking it than a company like OpenAI or Anthropic again, only because they don't have they don't have their investment things. Well i exactly I mean I was just gonna say, I mean, that's why Apple le was ab to disrupt the smartphone industry is they didn't have the existing, you know, baggage of of mobile devices, the the way that you know you had you had Palm and you'd blackgun, you had Windows Mobile, and you had these things built on certain paradigms. And so they were kind of locked into what those things were. And now the the the two people that really kind of the two players that really pushed it forward were Android, which Google acquired, and and you know what Apple was doing with iOS. Now I don't think that, and I think a smart, I don't think smartphones are going away and I don't think that user interfaces are going away but I do think the way that we interact with our devices are already changing and you already see this just in the last couple of years the way that people use agents interact with agents interact with with chatbots is very demonstrably different. The way that the people go about seeking out information is very different now than it was three years ago. Um and and people who are coming up on these these tools now don't have that baggage, you know, of okay, well I',m gonna go to Google for these things and I'm going to go to my RSS feeds and go to my blogs for this, right? They're much more used to asking questions or interfacing directly. I don't know what the future will look like, but I do feel strongly that it will be different ? And I also feel strongly that the people who will be best primed to be able to do the disruption are people who are not, to your point, encumbered by the baggage that they have. Moreover, the only way this really works, and in this is whether it's with Google or or Apple or anyone else, is if you own the entire stack. And so you need all that information, you need all that context, you need to own the entire stack. This can't just be a layer that you license. This is this has got to be something where me as the user, I agree that I have my very personal relationship with my device and I'm willing to give it all of my info. And in return, it's going to give me what it gives me. Um, but it's not something that you can just slap on, which I think was the problem of like the the littered bodies of smartphones past, the the the Amazon devices, the Facebook phones, all those things. They didn't work because they didn't own the whole thing. They didn't the whole relationship. And and I I I think that AI assistance, again, for good or bad, I'm not saying it's a positive thing. People have very strong relationships with those tools already where they're already sharing their information with them. And so if you can take that and then m you know modify that it into like what a you know smartphone of of twenty thirty or twenty thirty five looks like. I think it's interesting. And to take the Apple angle here, what I would say is if I if I were at Apple, I just said what I would do if I was an open AI. If I were at Apple, I mean, I would be looking really heavily. And there were some rumors. Mark German talked about that they were actually looking into this in a Vision Pro context. And I wonder if they're looking more broadly now, which is you own the full sta ck, including the development tools. Now, your LLM, you know, you got Gemini now. Great. But like if I were at Apple thinking about this, that's what I would be thinking is I want, since I've got all the APIs, they've got app intents, they've got Xcode , start thinking or continue thinking, please have already started about ways in which your AI agents can build interface elements , build things that are like apps but aren't apps, that that allow us ers to use AI tools to build elements and add them to the collection. Maybe it's to add app intents so that then when you ask your device to do something, you've already taught it what that means and now it can just execute it. Because they do have the advantage of having their development environment, their API set all the way down to their chips. And if they embrace the idea that one of the new paradigms going forward is going to be something that's not just a pre-baked app from a developer, but might be things that are kind of generated on the fly, or are presets created in a process and then executed when the user wants, they could do this. It's not impossible for Apple to embrace this idea because they've got all the ingredients. It just breaks the app store paradigm, and they have to be willing to do that. And what we've seen in other areas that granted are not technical areas, they're more financial power-based areas. They've been very reluctant to do literally anything that breaks the app store paradigm. But I think this might be the one. Yeah. And when you put it that way, Google is probably the only company on the in the pl on the playing field that has even more s more of the stack than Apple does because they built they designed their own tensor chips, they've got the operating system, they've got the they've got the cloud compute everywhere. They're already and basically they've already built their business. Same agent. Yeah. Yeah. I mean and they and they've basically built their business around like we so long as more people use our thing, we win. So let's help everyone use our thing. We will will help we would be great if they you if they use our AI based phone it'll be great if they use our ai agent on whatever phone they want to bring it's uh again it's uh it's a lovely it's always fun to to live in these times of transition where you can imagine anything happening or none of that being or being everything you can imagine being insufficient for what the landscape is going to be five years from now. I'm humbled at trying to figure again. That's why I say I'm a guesser, not an analyst. I can I will stand by my guess. I will not stand by uh my analysis. Being humble, it's a good time it's a good time to be humble. But I I find it funny that like we we ended a kind of smartphone malaise because the smartphone is just b it's so revolutionary as a product and it's gone everywhere and it's changed the culture and society and all of that. But like then there was a period where it was like, okay, and now we're starting to see like, well, maybe this will change. I I I think it's very funny though that I still it it's the app paradigm that I think I'm wondering about more than it is the uh the fact that you want a device with a really nice screen and a big battery and a great network connection that's on your person, right? I think that I I I am kind of a believer. But uh the rest of it it,'s kind of up for grabs. It's exciting. No, yeah, I I fully agree. I think the app paradigm is what is up for disruption. But no, I don't think that at this point anybody is going to be, and I think that if you ask somebody in the early mid-1990s when cell phones were s first starting to kind of gain popularity. I think even then people would have been like, yes, this is going to be a thing we will have for a very long time. Um I I I don't think that that's like I don't see it becoming glasses. I don't see becoming pennants. You know, it it's gonna be a phone, but what we do in the phone and and how the the you know there's an app for that, I do think that that is going to change. And I think it's already changed. I will say I will say go ahead, Andy. I will say I will say one thing that's that's kind of relevant. I was I was actually thinking about this the other day that this is defin uh uh I I bought uh every time I buy a new phone, it really is I uh very, very close between sticking with Android and switching to iPhone because they are very they're both excellent phones. The operating systems are both excellent. They have some nuances that are a matter of largely a matter of taste and what you what you want out of a phone. The last time, uh the last time I spent like $1,100 on a smartphone, it was for the Pixel 6 Pro. And the reason why was because of that tensorship. Because I was intrigued by Google thinking we are actually going to be put making AI part of the hardware because we think AI is going to be really, really big in the future. And then subsequently, again, things got closer and closer. And again, if I'd bought a phone last year, it would have been very, very close between the two. This year, however, where I really am kind of urgently saying, okay, look, I'm going to lose support for this phone by probably this year. This is probably the last version of Android I'm going to get for the Pixel 6. So I should really buy a really, really good phone sometime this year. I have to say that I'm more intrigued by what Google's game plan is going to be in terms of maximizing AI on the hardware with the services, with the operating system, than I am with Apple. I think this, I think with Apple's going to be certainly a lot more relevant by the time I buy my next phone after this. But I have to say that Apple is really going to have to pull the damnedest rabbit out of their hat with the iPhone eighteen or the iPhone nineteen to get me to switch back to iPhone at this point. What's really clear is that open AI wants to be an operating system, a platform. So so everybody wants to be a platform. Sure, sure. It's just easier said than done. I I think that's very difficult. From their perspective, is they they have to they have to start from kind of nothing and like saying, well, we've got an LLM and some stuff. I mean, they've got a lot of stuff, but it's not a it's not a piece of hardware and it's not an operating system. Here's my in my opinion, what they're betting on is that people want to be able to talk to their devices and have them do stuff. What they miss is there are stakeholders, the app makers, who want to own the data more closely. I mean, there's already a fight over AI ingesting content, uh, AI stealing traffic from web pages. Um, they're dis they're disintermediating all of this stuff and they're suddenly saying, no, no, come to us and we'll handle it. But that is not what the content creators, it's not what the app makers, not what the businesses they're dealing with want because they lose access to their customers. It's also not a moat because every smartphone you can talk to and execute. And that's the other side of it is what is going to stop Apple from doing this? Nothing . And Apple can do it in a more graceful way by having an AI and Google, right, on Android. They still have the apps, but you have an AI agent layer that manipulates the apps. You don't need to get out rid of Also probably will d debut that this fall, I'm guessing. Yeah. And also if people already have relationships with the with open AI, uh open AI as uh as a uh as a chat bot, with Gemini as a chatbot, with Claude as a chatbot. It's going to take some doing to convince them. By the way, you should fire this personal assistant that, yeah, the training period was really, really horrible, but now that they've been in this job for two, for a couple of years, they really know you very, very well. They you you know how to interact with it. It's gonna take a lot for to to convince somebody, please fire that person. And here's someone who just came out of college who has no job experience from a company that really isn't very good at at training these people yet and please develop a relationship with this one too. It's a there there are a lot of variables for Apple to navig ate so I what we're you know, I understand why openai would do this. I just think this is more in their interest than any than its users than users. They gotta pull the lever of every single slot machine that can possibly get their hands on at this point. Yeah, I completely understand why they're doing this. Uh I am a little skeptical about their ability to uh to kick Apple off the king of the off the top of the hill on this one. Yeah it would also be, I mean you have to think about like other parts of like for a smartphone for lock in. And again, I fully understand why they're doing this. I'm sure they're also looking at desktop operating systems. You need to have kind of this this whole stack. It's true on the desktop too, right? You just want to talk to it. But I will as somebody who has been developing my own agent to do that. Uh and I I love the idea. In fact, one of the things I'm really working hard on is getting it so that it can listen to me everywhere. And I can say, hey, Kenobi, uh, book a Uber for us on Friday. And it just do it. Uh I wonder, I mean, first of all, most people don't have the technical skills to do that, but I wonder if people really want that. I mean, uh Amazon's trying to do that with the Echo . Uh you know, I wonder, do people really want that? Is that a is that something people understand and want? You think? I don't know. I mean, I think it depends. Because I I go back and forth about it myself. Like I personally could automate a whole lot more of my life than I do, and then I'm just too much of a control freak and I don't necessarily trust it. Home automation. Yes. Yeah. Everybody thought everybody wants home automation. Oh man , this is going to be huge. And then only the geekyest people did it. And even they are going, oh, what a pain in the ass. But if you can set it up easily, give me a button. But if you can set it up easily, and if it actually works, which is the big thing . That's the big thing. If it works, it can be really, really powerful. It'll work eventually. It'll work at first. This is the dream, right? The dream is you teach an agent to this is, I mean, we all do this if you're using like cloud code or whatever, you do this thing right. You say I want to do this thing and it tries it and you're like no no no no you need it and you become like a product manager and you say it needs to do this, it needs to do this, it needs to do this, and then you're gonna run this or you or you it builds a script that runs. It's an interesting thing and and you and you get it you get it to do the way uh that you want. And then the next step is in all of these device interfaces we've got, it's like, okay, I've now taught you how to do X. When I ask you to do X, you now know how to do it. Remember that forever and have it go, Yep, got it, Jason. No problem. And then the next time, the next thousand times I need to do it. I say, hey, do X. And it's like got it, and it right. But but what happens a lot now is that most people are not comfortable spending cycles in clawed code or whatever to get to be a product manager, and that's why I think there's still going to be a place for programmers or developers or what you ever want to call it. Because those are the people who are going to have to hold in their minds the structure and know how to talk to other databases and all of that to to have it be friendly. Now, maybe it'll be more like app intense, where it'll be less about the UI and more about like structuring all the all the data and and thinking about how people want to interact. But like that's the that's the big leap for me is that not everybody's going to want to do that, but also I think it would be pretty cool to get to the point where all I have to do is describe what I want to happen to an agent, to a voice agent, or whatever. And once we both agree that it works. It now just does that every time I ask it. That would be very nice. There's there are three levels here. Uh, level one is that I ask it to make me a coffee and it remembers how I like my coffee. We're nearly at level two, where it understands that, oh, it's 9:04 a.m. And he usually wants coffee at 9.04 a.m. And so when I get to my desk, there's a hot coffee waiting for me. Level three, which is what everyone wants, is that gee, it's 2:12 in the afternoon and he rarely has coffee now, but I sense that he will really want a coffee right now. So I'm at least going to ask him, or at least I'm gonna have it that waiting for him. That's what the desire is to again have have a have an assistant that's so well trained that I don't even have to ask anymore. It knows what its job is and it gets to be a little bit proactive. Although uh that is such a big leap between level two and level three because I ba made your coffee and I also deleted our entire customer database in a way that it's impossible to ever recover. Is there anything else I could do for you today, Andy ? We're gonna take a break and uh come back. We have lots more to talk about. You're watching Mac Break Weekly, Andy and Nako , uh Jason Snell, Christina Warren. It's nice to have smart people here discussing this. I hope Apple's listening and open AI too. I think we brought up some interesting uh interesting points. Available. I don't know. We are actually available. A low consultation fee. We're giving away all our great ideas on a podcast. I know. What is wrong with you guys? Consult with us. We will we will we will we will be consultants . I want to show you this is so cool. Our sponsor uh for this portion of the program is the mill , which Lisa and I got in November, long before the advertising. I want to show you since it's been running in November, we have diverted over 3 72 pounds of food scraps from the landfill. Is that is that awesome? To be fair, I didn't expect that a kitchen appliance would be the thing that changed how I feel about food scraps for my house in general. But the mill food recycler uh is something Lisa and I just can't live without. We love it. And funny, because Lisa will say, well uh uh uh uh how much food have we uh recycled so far? 372 pounds, honey. Love it. The food waste is gone, the smell is gone. Mill just took care of it. Mill. It's the odorless, effortless, f ully automated food recycler. Everything goes in there, potato peels, avocado pits , chicken bones, even dairy. On the app, they'll tell you what you can put in there, and it's pretty much everything. I think big meaty rib bones don't go in there, but almost everything else can go in the mill. And then what we have it do, and you set this up, we have it at 9 p.m. I know because I hear the click. At nine PM , while you sleep, the mill quietly transforms those food scraps into nutrient rich shelf stable grounds. No mess, no smells, no fruit flies. Milk and process up to 10 pounds overnight. By the way, that's a lot. It's easily, you know, more than we would ever create in a day. Even when Lisa is making a big salad, we get a lot of chopped up stuff. It just it can it goes right in there. And then the thing is it sque it it it gets it down to such a small size you can go for weeks before you even have to think about emptying it. You can use the grounds in your garden, add them to your curbside compost, or mill can even pick them up and get them to a small farm for you. Think in in the earliest days mill they were using as chicken feed. Chickens love it. Mill turns a huge climate problem into a simple daily habit you can actually stick with. And it really makes a difference in the kitchen. And you can see your impact. You saw mine. The Mill app tracks how much food you're keeping out of landfills. And Mill has already helped its customers put over 15 million pounds of food to good use. The mill's sleek, it's beautiful, looks great in any kitchen. We have it actually looks just like that picture right there by the island. So whenever we're chopping and working on the island there, we just sli de you know the leftovers right into the mill. Uh when we're done with dinner, we scrape it right into the mill. Mill offers a 90-day risk-free trial. So there's no yeah if you don't absolutely love it, you can just send it back. right now Try mill risk-free for 90 days and get 75 off at mill .com/slash mbw and use code mbw. That's 75 off at mill.com slash mb w and use code mbw. I I will say that it I'm the one who has the mill and I and I really love it. Lisa and I both really love it. Mill dot com slash M B W. Actually, we love it so much. We said you gotta advertise because I want to talk about it. I love this thing. 372 pounds of trash diverted from the land, Phil. Thank you, Mill. Let's see. What else? Well, we can talk about the rumor mill if you want. Uh, we talked a little bit about the uh iPhone 18's camera . Um, it's interesting story in 9 to 5 Mac Ryan Christoffel. iPhone 18's new specs might bring subtle regressions to cut costs. We've been talking a lot about the supply chain issues uh caused by a variety of things, AI data centers, uh tariffs. So Apple, he says, this is speculation, might make the display and chip downgrades to cut costs. And actually, uh inspired by a Wibo leaker fixed focus digital , who said the 18 will be late launching later than usual. We've heard that also. The 1818E will debut simultaneously, the leaker said. Now normally the eighteen would come first in the fall and the eighteen E would come later, right? In the middle of the year and the following year, is that right? Am I thinking of Google's uh No it's it's yeah, it's it's the same thing. It's like six months later. So it's what we're six months later. Okay . Um but that I don't know if that means the 18E moves to the fall or the 18. I can't imagine. No, no, I think they they put it at the both of them in March if I think both of them. Yeah, spring. Ah. You think this is gonna happen? Yeah . Yeah, this is the they've been planning this for a while now, the to separate the iPhone into two launches. Okay. So the Samsung does it. It's there's something to be said for in the fall as well as the Ultra. The per and the ultra in the fall. And then the regular, then the eighteen nothing and the e would come out in the spring . Okay. I do wonder I mean that does make sense and and you know um maybe it doesn't matter as much for the e versions because they're probably just gonna continue to keep the hardware largely the same and then just swap the chip out. Um but but it is interesting I think to kind of position it that way because like the the E being behind the the full you know eighteen or or 17 as it was uh uh but we're this year I guess we 18, 17 this year and the the the 16 before um I think there's it's been like enough time so you can kind of see the value differentiation but I do wonder if that lessens the value prop a bit on the E series if you're gonna launch that alongside, you know, the the main phone, which is $200 more, uh, but but usually a lot more, you know, featured. I I do wonder how that will work out. Yeah. We're it's also uh I I think a lot of people are also wondering like uh do supply constraints and the rising cost of RAM and storage, are they going to affect like what their baseline models are going to be like? Um there was actually a a uh a a analyst in uh uh uh and a financial analyst based in Taipei uh had a tweet uh just the other day, uh sorry, just last week , uh basically co-signing on something that was reported last week that the iPhone 18 is going to be based on uh TSMC's two nanometer uh fab, but also adding we he also thinks it's gonna be actually have 12 gigabytes of RAM. Yeah, I saw that. Which is interesting. Which is yeah, exactly. I don't know if Leo was talking about the same stories that were making the rounds a week ago or the uh or the week before, but there were some rumors that said, well, actually the apple the apple is either going to hold the line with memory and storage or try to figure out how it can basically make the same phone at the same price without killing its without having to absorb too much of its profit margin with supply s shortages. Uh part of that story was basically about actually was that some of the approaches that they have won't affect the price or won't affect usability at all because they are simply m getting much, much more adept at manufacturing, particularly at fabricating these aluminum uh aluminum cases, and that basically they're saving a lot of money in the manufacturing and the in the assembly, and that might offset these cuts things. I have to say that it's a very, very positive rumor that the idea of uh RAM still creeping upward, upward, upward. Um, it's a it's a bad canard uh about how oh gosh, you Apple the iPhone only has eight gigabytes of store uh eight gigabytes of RAM, then he only has eight gigabytes of RAM. That's not nearly enough for modern computing, particularly with AI, uh not taking into a not taking into account that Apple manages its its system memory extremely, extremely well. Nonetheless, that's the sort of thing that keeps that's that's the sort of reason why you might be able to still use a phone in five, six, or seven years instead of around three or four years thinking, gosh, it really would be nice to be able to use these great new features of iOS 28, 29, 30 that aren't accessible MacBook Pro. I'm excited about them M6 MacBook Pro. I know it's going to be an ultra expensive year for me. Ultra is right . Uh I want to get the folding phone and I think this M six Max. It may it may not be because Mark German says I mean he look he was already on the fence from the beginning and saying they want to ship it at the end of twenty six, but it may not make it. And it sounds like maybe the uh the ram shortages and all these other things have conspired to push it into early 27, which is fine. Like they just did a MacBook Pro refresh, I think um so Leo, I don't know how you rejigger your taxes to make that capital hit in twenty seven instead of twenty six when you buy the your MacBook Pro Pro Pro Ultra Pro, whatever it's called. I don't know. I'll give my uh piggy bank time to recover from the ultra phone. Exactly. We're all we're all gonna have the ultra phone. And I mean and and I think are you are you gonna do it? Is everybody gonna do it? I think so. I think people are s uh some people are very skeptical. They like this. People should wait for the reviews. They should. But some of us it's our job. We won't. Right. I mean and you'll be writing the review. You writing a review. I I will probably look it it'll depend up like the price. Like if if if it does come in at $3,000, I'm gonna be honest, I don't know. Um just because uh a gen one product, I think that will be hard. If it's you know $2,500 and less, again, I will be reading Jason's review for sure, but um I I I can make that argument more uh but in terms of if if the the Pro gets pushed into next year, the touch screen, whatnot, like I think that's okay. I don't know how many people are actually really clamoring for a major redesign of the MacBook Pro, like uh it it is that's the thing it's like it was redesigned to give us back what they took away from us when they did the touch bar unit so part of me is is like I I don't want you to I mean if you have a better screen, if you have test screen stuff if you have some other things that screen my ports away. Yeah, I want the OLED screen. I I think I think the biggest advantage of whatever the next generation hardware is going to be, is that more power for the exact same price, even more storage and more RAM for the exact same price, because like we were saying earlier, Apple just keeps getting better at better at how to design these things for manufacturer and how to basically optimize for to make this as cheap to build as possible while still maintaining one hundred percent of the quality you're expecting from an Apple device. So if it's not flashy at all and we don't figure out what's so innovative about it until iFix it does their teardown, I think I'm perfectly okay with that. Yeah, that one I can wait for the reviews. Yeah, I I'm I'm worried to see the thing is like don't never the the classic maxim is always like when uh whenever a company has a 100% new top to bottom design of something , don't be first in line to buy it. Wait until wait until the revision B comes out of the same hardware. Because they're not going to figure out how to make this efficiently until they've run about a million or two or three a million of these through the through the line. Oh, without a doubt. Like I want to be clear, like I'm almost certainly buying the foldable, but I'm also on I under no illusions that this is going to be like a great gen one product. Don't be like us. Right. And I wouldn't other people do it either. And and and the certainly like the like my mom who I did she did buy a MacBook Air or uh sorry, i iPhone Air um uh uh this year uh to replace her I guess it was a thing. Was it your mom that didn't give up the the note that was exploding? Yes. No no it wasn't but she she she she did have an older phone, but no but she she didn't a note. It wasn't my mom would not give up the phone even though it was you know, the one that was exploding. Oh, what's life without a little bit of adventure? I've bought every fold, every single fold. And then I even bought the flip. Um, and I know use them. Right. You could see the crease on this. I will be very interested to see what Apple does about the crease. They say they they don't have a crease on theirs. Yeah, I mean I I think that it'll probably I think if anybody's gonna be able to nail it, they will nail it as good as anyone. But I'm sure that the the second generation will be like the iPad 2, which was leaps and bounds better than the origin al iPad, right? It'll be like the you know, the the the the subsequent iPhone releases. Like they they get better every single time. And so twenty you think it'd be twenty five hundred bucks? I think it's gonna start at two thousand is my guess. I agree. They're basically making sure that no, let's hold the line of 2000. But 2200 would be the maximum they could do for a base model one. If they were to say to to to to even come within breathing distance of $2,500 , they would have to give you a list of compromises that is maybe a fortune cookie long. Right. They would have to, they would have to say that the battery life is the best of any phone you will ever use. It uses the exact same camera array as the as the as the iPhone uh eighteen pro or even better, they would have to basically say we are you don't have to give up a single darn thing. For me, I'm just as excited about the idea of a foldable. I'm more excited about a foldable iPhone than I am about any foldable Android phone, at least until Google finishes getting its act together about multi about multi multi multiple apps. But the thing is I'm not willing to give have a subpar camera experience. I'm not sure that's that's going to be the thing is is what what other trade-offs going to be because I think that they can make the case and I I have a m this is obviously not based on anything, just my gut. I'm thinking nineteen ninety nine would be the base price and then they're gonna you know cycle up two hundred dollars plus for storage More storage, right. But but I feel like the in and the way that Apple will justify it part of it will be assuming that they they do this will be okay it's like you're getting an iPad and a phone in one right so so it if that's what it winds up doing. I think that you could make that and I think you could make that argument. You could say hey I love my mini. I love it. Right. Right. So you're saying instead of spending six hundred dollars, five hundred dollars on an iPad mini, you're getting the mini and you're getting the phone. Right. But to Andy's point, what are we going to be giving up on battery? What are we going to be giving up on on on camera? And and that I don't know. I don't think you'll give up anything on battery. I think you actually have more uh real estate for battery, but camera, because it needs to be thin. Right. I pretty convinced unless there's a massive camera bump, you're gonna give up a lot on the camera. Yeah. And d and durability is gonna be another thing where I I I'm I'm happy sp happy, but at least I'm I'm content spending eleven or twelve hundred dollars for a phone supposedly because I've had that I uh I've had that iPhone I had that iPhone six pro for six years. Okay. And the thing is like ever until and the thing is it got laid low by a manufacturing defect that existed on day one. And even with a manufacturing defect, it it lasted six whole years. I really do expect at this point five years of use out of a phone. And it's still unknown how how well a foldable phone is going to handle all of the little accidents that accrue year to year to year. It's not the first drop that takes out a phone. It's the sixth, seventh, and eighth drop when those little micro fractures in an adhesive or in a display start to add up. And I would be as bummed as I was when even my six-year-old phone died. I would be super b bummed if in three years time I broke my $2,000 phone. That's going to cost at least $1,100 to repair. So I mean repair is going to be another another thing that they're going to have to address too. This unfortunately for Apple, this is no longer 2017, where they can just basically say whatever costs to repair tough darts is going to cost that much to repair. They are now going to have to deal with a lot of new issues, particul i including some new regulations at uh at the EU . The EU has a new battery replacement uh regulation that's coming to effect next year. It doesn't affect meaning that it has to be easy to repair, doesn't it doesn't have to be like pop out like a like a like a like a legal right. It basically has to be you don't have to you shouldn't have to disassemble the entire phone. It should not be prohibited prohibitively expensive to replace a battery in a phone. That's basically what the regulation says. The current generations of iPhones probably are not going to be affected because it also says, but if you design the battery and the power system such that uh for the for the legitimate life of the phone, the battery will not lose more than twenty percent of capacity, you're exempt. Will that also apply to a foldable? I don't know. Can they assemble this in such a way that they can be easily disassembled? Or are they going to be able to figure out how to make these super flat batteries in a way that will be exempt from this thing? There are so many questions that are not going to be answered until again iFixit does that teardown . Uh enough of this September. What of next September, the 20th anniversary iPhone, according to another WIBO leaker digital chat station. Apple has tapped Samsung to produce curved displays for the 20th anniversary iPhone, a four-micro curve OLED panel. I don't know what that means. Four micro curves. I assume they mean something similar to what I've got like on my pixel phone. It's just a gentle curve that wraps around the corner. Yeah, Samsung does this on some of their devices too, I think. Yeah. And the and the effect, uh at least according to some of the rumors I've seen, is that not so much to basically make it look like the the top of an Apple Watch, but so much but more to basically make the bezels disappear completely. Um, which is cool, and Apple could do extremely well. Uh as usual, I'm just concerned that if it if it makes it one per if it makes if it makes a phone at least a a tiny percent less durable and resistance to a drop, it's probably not worth it, but I figure that Apple can knows this and they've they they spend enough they spend enough time having to fix broken phones to not want phones to break if they can possibly make that not happen. Yeah, but then they also love to sell their app le care, right? Like I mean that that's a thing too, is that this all kind of comes as a service thing. I will say like regardless, like if I've get wind up getting the foldable anybody who does get the apple care to your point about it. Like that's one of those like But there's never been a product in existence more that you have to buy the Apple Carry than with the foldable phone. And I would say that with anyone. The aspect ratio of the front too. I like the little pocket square. I do too. If if if that's what it's actually gonna look like, I actually quite like that a lot. It's like 'cause to me it's like, oh, this is kind of like my Game Boy, you know, like mini and uh you know and that would be like kind of the perfect kind of thing. Like I'm well apps have to be adapted, they will, won't they? Yeah that's that's to me I I wonder now the if the bigger question about the iPhone Ultra or whatever it is is how's it gonna be to use it as a phone in folded up mode? Because that's a weird shape and size for an iPhone these days. And when I used an iPhone mini , there were apps where very clearly the developer was not aware that the iPhone Mini existed, right? And so that that's what I wonder is like well let's look let's look at WWDC how much emphasis Apple puts on making sure your that your apps follow all these size class restrictions so that So that they can get bigger and they can get much smaller. Just no reason, just what if they did get much smaller? Screen turns into a full screen thing on a on a static display and then two seconds later is supposed to be an iPad mini. What does that transition look like? Should it be real should it be really, really subtle, or should it be really, really explicit? This is part of the the human interface that Apple does so well that makes me keen to see what Apple's thought of for this . Yep. Should be fun. Something to spend our money on . Cases will be challenging. Cases are really challenging for folding phones. Yeah, cases are gonna be I mean and and that's such a huge like accessory market driver. But yeah, I don't even that's the skins here. I usually have in fact I have on my iPhone or I had on my iPhone uh a wallet, but I went back to a regular case and got and bought a wallet. So I would be ready. I got a little wallet so I can carry my stuff in the wallet. Uh there won't be a wallet case for this thing. I don't think I'm not so terrified of using a phone without a case on it. I know. fight of using any phone without some sort of a case on it to basically get I feel as though that would would give me the final like nine to eleven months out of this phone. There are a lot of people though that don't use cases. Yeah, I'm usually a case free person, but like this year weirdly like I it be just because I think they made the size of the phone bigger and thicker and then like they changed like from like the ceramic to the aluminum or whatever I went back to a case because I was like I'm gonna drop this thing and and now it and and it's gonna scratch and my my beautiful orange color will be will be dinged up. But I don't know. I I usually kind of go back and forth. I don't I don't even know how you will do a case on on a foldable though. You know, well the ones I've had aren't even really cases. They're like a little layer that goes on one side, a little layer that goes on the other side that doesn't protect any skins. Yeah. Yeah. They're more like skins. Um so And you can't put a screen protector on it either because it folds and you' know like there theres so there's gonna be and then the the the the things are are softer yeah look i i i i'm excited about this new device but i'm also very like opening myself up to being like this is not gonna be durable this is not gonna be the best design this is gonna be one that you are hopefully gonna trade in in a year and then get the better version or two years or however long they do it. I'm hopeful because they've learned from Samsung. It's not like the first time. Well, Samsung learned from Samsung and they're making the display. Samsung in a lot. Samsung is a good one as I learned you don't put a screen protector on there, it already has one because I removed it Well a lot of people did when this first came out. Everybody because they weren't at carefully. The Motorola's ones had that issue too, where people when they first got those you know foldable phones like were like don't remove this this this let this layer, you know. It's it's it's interesting you mentioned Motorola. They're so they're having their big media event tomorrow and Motorola is unexpectedly tur ned into the king of foldables. Yeah. So it'd be I'm really the thing is they I I'm not really concerned about competition with Samsung. I'm but I'm concerned about competition with Motorola because they are really, really good at putting an immense amount of value uh into a affordable for whatever class of phone they're making. It is just mind-boggling when you look at the specs of what they can do for $500 . It is baffling to see what they can do for $150. Like they're not great phones, but they are not subpar devices for what you're doing. So what then I'm I'm keen to see what they're going to do for the next their next generation of foldables if that's what one of the things they're announcing tomorrow. Interestingly their invite says intelligence meets art. Oh, I hope it's AI. I hope it's AI. I hope they're putting AI into a phone. Come on, stop it. Slash this . The Edge 50 Neo, the Moto G355 G , and the Moto G5 5 5G. I used to be a big Moto fan, I have to say. Um but you know, it's the Google sold them and you know Lunovo's just a different company. Um but but but but to Andy's point, like they they do make very good value devices. Um yeah, they're good phones. Actually, my daughter, I get I usually get my daughter a Motorola because they're less expensive and they're good. Anyway, we'll see. We'll see we'll see tomorrow. We'll report back to you. Let's take a break. Uh then we will talk about uh Google had its event or an event last week, Cloud Next. And they did mention uh Siri. We'll talk a little bit about that. Just a second . Also, there's a big day coming up Thursday. Jason Snell's getting the ink ready. More to come. Charts. Charts charts. Charts. Money, money, money. But first a word from our sponsor this sho,w brought to you by, and I mean literally brought to you by Cashfly. Cashfly is our content delivery network. They've kept our content moving, well, practically since the beginning, almost 20 years now. Every stream, every download, every on-demand episode, they, Cash Fly, quietly do the heavy lifting behind the scenes. And you know what? Not once have they dropped the ball? If there's a problem, it's on our side. Cash fly has been so reliable. Around for more than 20 years, Cash Fly is anything but static. They really try to be on the cutting edge and they have got some amazing things. For instance, here are a few things to know if you're evaluating CDN options for your infrastructure. Uh and we knew about this. That's one of the reasons we went with cash fly. 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We have listeners all over the world, and we love it that they get their content from us through Cashfly faster because they're getting it from a local server. Cashfly has over 5,000 users like us, a 100% uptide in SLA, not 49s, 59s, 100% . How many nines is that? All the nines . And 24-7 engineer-to-engineer support . And this was actually probably the number one thing for us because we were just starting out. We enjoyed, and you will enjoy flexible billing, no strong arm contracts, very flexible. They'll work with you to make it work. Cashfly is the C D N built for our business, built for your business. Learn how you can get your first month free at cashfly.com slash twit. That's c a-c-h-e-f-l-y.com slash twit. Thank you, Cashfly . So uh Google was talking a little bit about uh their partnership with Apple at uh Google Next. They confirm a content aware Siri built with Gemini at its heart, their LLM model, will debut this year . Uh Google's cloud CEO Thomas Curry and talked about Apple as a key customer of the company. Yeah. He literally didn't say anything that wasn't in the press release. Like literally, it's like he read the press release. It was like it was like one line loaded into the teleprompter. He read the same phrase that they used in characterizing the relationship and then they moved on. But but they put the logo up. They were obviously very proud about this deal. They wanted to mention it in the Google Google Cloud Conerenfce. Like it it matters, even though it's very funny, where Apple is like, not a word. Nothing. Not a word that we didn't approve. Okay. But they cared enough to say so. They let Google do it. And obviously Google's not doing without uh their permission. So exactly. And and it is part the I mean, I was surprised, like I wasn't even I was it was it was a two hour long presentation and oh my god, the money that was on that stage because they're selling they're basically selling Google AI and Google Cloud Services to people who are writing billion dollar checks. Yes. And so the the difference between this event and hey, well this is let's have Jimmy Fallon do a fake talk show to roll out the new phone. It's like, no, it was so much money there. Even the podium looked expensive. It was fancy. It was a it was amazing. Oh and and the Apple logo, it was it was the the dramatic picture of him like in front of just the stark Apple logo, which looked amazing. But it like if it seemed as though like every 10 minutes they'd have another like wallpaper of and here are all the different Fortune 500 companies that are using our services and here's all the uh here's uh testimonials from these wallpaper companies that have been using our new Agenic uh AI services. It was such a battleship, it was such a May Day parade of firepower to basically make the case that like every single one of you jerks a few years ago who said, ooh, ooh, you didn't do a chatbot, you're so far behind, it's so embarrassing. Well, I've got a hat here, and you're gonna eat every damn stitch of it. Um yeah, I mean it's pretty impressive. It it really is interesting. The the distinction between this and WWDC, which is aimed at the geeks, and this is aimed at the money guy. This this this is this is IO will be, you know, the actual developer uh thing and that will be, I'm sure, just like last year, very AI focused. But yeah, this is this is the enterprise show and it's all about the cloud and it's all about showing, oh, our cloud also includes our AI cloud. And and look at all these people, including, you know, our biggest competitor, also has to use us uh at the end of the day because the the implicit message being they couldn't do it themselves, they had to to partner with us, which is fair. One one thing that was a little bit interesting. And again, this was a demo. And of course, this is designed to impress and to get people to write a billion dollar check. But it was interesting where they're trying to give practical examples of here is what an agenic workflow will be like at a marketing company for a furniture for a big like international furniture like showroom store, using not just having developers at that company write workflows for them, but having just a per a marketing person be able to essentially construct a work agenic workflow. And here's how quickly they can turn things around. Again, this is a constructed demo to sell a very, very expensive service, but it is a peek into what one vision of an agenic future is it's not just simply hey schedule but schedule this appointment and make sure you loop in uh jim steve and and and and dorothy it's here's 11 people we can fire right now because now just like just like in the uh uh from for 50 years of business l until the nineteen eighties people uh uh workers used to uh executives used to type their own letters now we don't need to pay dozens of people to type things because now the executives will type things ours themselves. And now they're building a future which now you don't have to hire analysts. You don't have to have the staff of people to do these research reports because now the executives who are supposed to be doing that will now do that themselves. That's that's another thing that they'll be able to have to do for themselves. It's interesting, powerful, and very, very scary. Day after tomorrow, Q2 2026 financial results from Apple. You'll be prepared with your , I think you have like a sleeve garters, a little uh vibe Control thing where like all kinds of people in like ties and short sleeve white shirts smoking and just looking at displays. Christina, do you get uh PTSD when you th think about the quarterly results uh time? Oh no, I mean not really. I mean like I'm just glad I don't have to cover them anymore. I'm glad that that Jason is is is is is doing that. He does the most amazing job. No, I I I used to always go on TV usually to talk about the earnings and the only stressful thing with that was that oftentimes the earnings would not be out and I would already be like mic'd up on set and so they would be reading them into my ear right before they would cut to me. So it'd have to do all the math in my head. But like, okay, what was the analyst prediction? What is this? Was the EPS? What's this? Do all the math. And then and then and then they'd come to you and you and you know you have like 45 seconds max to basically get your your analysis across and they cut off. So I'm glad to avoid that. Um I am curious, I'm Jason, since you're like the the the expert here, do we think that John Turnus will will make an appearance on tomorrow's call? Oh, good question. Yeah, it's a good question. It would not surprise me if he did . It would also be to talk about it. Yeah, I mean they will undoubtedly talk about it. But it might I mean it it would be something like, hey, let's introduce John Turnus and he's gonna say something about it. Maybe the other alternative is right that they'll wait and let him introduce himself, you know, i in when he takes over and and they won't have him on. I they could do it either way. I think one of the questions I've got going forward is how, and this maybe matters only to those of us who have to cover this closely, but like Steve Jobs didn't come to every call. Tim Cook is there for every financial analyst call because it's Tim Cook. He's that kind of guy. But Steve Jobs would just kind of like pop in from time to time and and then he'd leave and Tim would have to do the call or the s or the or the CFO would have to do the call. So I I do wonder if uh if Turnus is gonna be there every time. I think he'll probably be there at the beginning. Um they make m they may put Kevin Peric, who's the CFO, they may have him do more and more. I mean, even now, what Tim Cook really does is read a statement. Then Peric reads a long . Yeah, he reads a longer statement, the CFO does, and then they answer some questions and then they're done. So it's not nearly as um as much of a back and forth. It's a lot more pre cooked than it used to be. So he might he might come, but if not, he'll be there um probably, you know, the next one and certainly the one after that. So yeah. the uh the the puns you did on an upgrade for with his name you had the cookbook and now you're talking pre cooked and yeah I mean you gotta you gotta cook you gotta cook the books. If it's a financial results they cook the books they've they've been cooking the books for fifteen years, folks. And so now based on their estimate, which is that they think the w three months ago they said they estimated cup company revenue to grow between 13 and 16% . I believe this will be the first uh corporate second quarter Apple has ever done over 100 billion. They did the fourth quarter was over a hundred billion. That's what the analysts are expecting. And so I I think what yeah, because they did ninety five point four last time. And so if we 're saying a low of a Yahoo's saying a low of a hundred seven and a high of a hundred fifteen. Yeah, I I think think, 110, 1 12, 115 is probably what we're talking about here. And I I mentioned this. I mean, you know, 100 is meaningful in some ways because we got, you know, 10 fingers, 10 toes, whatever. But the idea that a routine non-holiday quarter for Apple generates more than 100 billion dollars of revenue would have seemed madness like three years ago, it would have seemed like madness, four years ago. Like in in 2021, fiscal , those quarters were like 89, 81, and 83. And that that is a like the numbers are so big and you lose track of it, but the ratcheting up of Apple's quarterly revenue, it just keeps happening. And there was a big jump last fiscal to 95, 94, and 102. And it feels like this year it's gonna start at 110. So like it's a it they are a machine that generates cash. Like that is the truth of modern Apple is that they throw off enormous amounts of cash. Yeah. I wonder that's another p another brick that's in John Turner's backpack in terms of pressure. Like can that that that's like it's almost an unfair amount of growth to basically to say, oh, by the way, and now here's the ball. You're expected to set the same amount of records that Tim uh Tim has. That said, he does have enormous an enormous amount of cash at his disposal, which means that like Apple doesn't spend a lot on capital and RD. They spend I mean they spend a lot compared to like what I spend on it. But more than than you and I. Yeah, I mean I'm in my garage here for Pete's sake. But but relatively to some of the tech companies that are out there. Oh, they're not right. So they if they're wanting to buy something, if they want to build something, if they want to create a whole crash program, they want to throw away ten billion dollars on a car that they never ship, for example, just saying, uh, they can do that. They have the power, and that gives Turnus a lot of flexibility. But Andy's absolutely right. It it also is pressure because it doesn't matter how big that number is. The next year, Wall Street will say, why is it not even bigger? Right . Yeah. Yeah. And and and and and that's gonna be, I think, the the thing that you'll you'll see um just to see how much things change or don't change is do they continue to take the same, you know, uh tactic towards acquisitions and and other types of things, right? What do you think the product winner will be this quarter? Will it be the NEO ? I think they're gonna call out the NEO, and I think uh that is one of the on the top of my list of things because you got the tea leaf reading when when they come out with their statements. And and obviously they don't break out max sales by by units, so they will need to add some what they say, some add some color there. And I think they will. And what will that be? I like how will they characterize MacBook Neo sales? Because I betcha they're gonna have some real good words that they picked out of the dictionary to use to characterize that for Wall Street and everybody else who's listening to them there. So I think that'll be a question. I think ongoing iPhone sales continue to be a question as well. And then everybody's gonna wanna know what the forecast for next is and what they say about about like RAM, right? Because they they've they've been pretty uh over it up to now. And then but there may be a time where they're like, yeah, okay, this is gonna actually impact us. But I yeah, I think MacBook Neo, we we can all like speculate on it, but but since they don't break it out per per product, the only way you'll get a sense straight from the horse's mouth about how it's doing is if they decide to characterize it, which given that it's probably really good news, they probably will. Yeah, I fe I figure that it's a oh if I can bet on one thing, it's going to be that they will at least say, here's how many percentage of Neo buyers are first time Mac button or or or even better, f new to the Apple ecosystem. Yeah, or they'll say sixty percent of new Mac sales were to brand new users and that's a number driven by MacBook Neo. Something like that. But they'll they will not rest if they've got a stat like that, Andy, you are a hundred percent right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what I think they'll do is they'll they'll really highlight how many new uh users they're they're bringing into the ecosystem. Right. And even if they w did break out the number, which they don't do, I have a feeling the revenue number just because the ASP is so low, wouldn't be as impressive. So it's gonna be much better for them to manipulate the key saying aver age average selling pri Yeah, Neos aren't gonna throw off a lot of revenue or or profit because they are a even if they're a middling margin profit or product and they're they're very cheap, the so they may not move the Mac revenue number that much, but they'll move the new to Mac number. And probably the yeah, the the ideal Christina is that stat that is like m you know, eighty percent of MacBook Neo buyers had never used a MacBook. Exactly. So they might even be and if they could even say new to the Apple ecosystem , that's even better, right? Because then there's like, okay, if you buy a Neo, then maybe you'll buy a a phone and you know you'll buy services and all that. CIR CIRP has been doing I don't know if this is the theme of April, but it seems like every week they do a new report on essentially the Apple e the behavior of Apple owners and Apple buyers about the the meaning how meaningful it is that look, only 45% of uh I think last week's, or was it this report basically saying that only forty something percent of people in the people have like uh smartwatches, but of those people, like 85% uh eighty of of those people uh eighty-eight percent of iPhone users have bought Apple Watches as opposed to anything that competes with it. And in previous weeks they've done breakouts like that about how many I think s something in the mid forties of people own both a MacBook and an iPad and an iPhone . Uh basically the halo effect of if you buy one Apple item, you are probably going to be buying a lot more Apple hardware in the future. So that's another thing that analysts are gonna just sip up like a cat to cream. The idea of if if we're building the people who are new to the Apple Apple ecosystem are people that are next going to buy an iPhone, next going to buy an Apple Watch, next going to buy an iPad. It's just nothing. It's it's hard to know the end of the good, the good news regarding the the the MacBook Neo. It's just nothing but good news. The old uh stock market adage is uh buy on the rumors, sell on the news. So both Apple and Microsoft, Microsoft's earnings are tomorrow, Apple's are on Thursday, uh going up in a very bleak market in general, even Google and Meta is suffering. Google's uh call is tomorrow too. Oh is it? Yeah, tomorrow. Nobody's buying on the rumor for Google has Christina, what was it like a hundred and uh twenty s I I I want to say a hundred twenty seven billion dollars they said they might be outlaying in capital expenditures this year alone? I think they said a hundred and eighty, wasn't it? It was huge. Maybe a hundred and fifty, I mean and and then they just you know, also made uh get in another agreement, you know, for uh something yeah, I mean it's a lot of that's that's the thing they're they're they're making money and and every analyst money on advertising not on the but the thing too is that every analyst looks at the companies differently, right? So a company like Apple, you expect to c kind of have like a a hoard of cash because that's how they've always operated, whereas Google, as long as they bring the revenues in, like their cap their their capital expenditures are are usually judged differently. But go Google Cloud is actually very profitable. We used to joke at we used to so at uh uh on the material podcast I do with Florence Ion, of course we talk about the quarterlies and the running joke used to be and Google Cloud posted a record uh uh a wonderful record quarter . They only lost six hundred and fifty million dollars this quarter. That's that's champagne pop and now saying no here is how much it is now basically it's now all that all that investment is now paying off and it's just dwarfed by AWS and Azure, but still but it's but they they've done a really good job coming around. Yeah, Azure Azure and AWS are still way higher. Meta's earnings are tomorrow too. So tomorrow's the the trifecta of Google, Meta and uh Microsoft. Very big. We've stepped up our abuse of the society in many ways that have profit us, but evil is its own reward, but we're also doing stock buybacks, so there's also that. thousand people. That's a tragedy. Geez. Um all right, let's take a break. Uh we've got a few more stories before we wrap things up and of course our picks of the week uh coming up uh two, but I do wanna mention our club? If you believe in independent qual ity journalism, this is the best way to support it. Support what we do here at Twit. Twit.tv/slash club. Twit gets you 10 bucks a month, gets you ad-free versions of all the shows, special programming we don't and do anywhere else. And the and the nice feeling that you're supporting something uh that is uh I think making a difference and I hope bringing some uh quality and entertainment to your life. You get access to the club twit discord. That's always a lot of fun. Great people to hang out with. And uh and you know, we just love to hang out with you. So twit.tv slash club twit. Join the club. The cool kids who support TWIT. At Hills Pet Nutrition, we know that pet parent guilt is real. That's why we make science-led nutrition to help you give more love than humanly possible. Because you're only human , there's Hills. Find the right food at Hillspet.com/slash science doesmore. If you're living with wet age-related macular degeneration or diabetic macular edema, you know the importance of eye injections to preserve your vision, but keeping up with frequent injections can feel overwhelming. What if there was a different way to maintain your vision, while potentially reducing the burden of your treatment schedule, giving you more time to do what you love. If you're looking for an alternative to your eye injections, visit Tiredofshots.com to learn more. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at USAA.com/slash bundle. Restrictions apply. Uh Apple did fix that bug that allowed the FBI to extract signal messages from iPhones. Turned out if you had uh left notifications on for signal . Those notifications got stored in plain text. Even if you deleted Signal, they would persist. That's what the FBI used to get the deleted chat messages from iPhones, Apple, uh Chief uh update in twenty four twenty six point four point two, which came out a couple of days ago, was to fix that flaw. So um Apple did not like that. Uh nor did Signal for that matter. No, Signal is very upset. Understandably. But uh you know, and of course our advice at the time was well just why do you have notifications in plain text turned on for signal anyway? But uh I guess people do. Um there is a new uh form of Mac malware that is uh going. This will be the new thing to go after, going after developers tokens and keys. This is uh was discovered April 22nd. It's called the Phoenix Worm and Shade Stager. Two unknown malware, zero days, undetected by antivirus uh engines as recently as a few days ago. Uh and the whole idea is uh to get on your system and look for tokens . And if they can find tokens, they can spend them. SSH keys, Cloud Credentials from Azure, AWS, oh, and Google Cloud. Kubernetes conf iguration files, and authentication uh data tied to Git and Docker. Also browser profiles. They're just getting everything . Everything. User privileges, hardware, data, network configuration, environment variables. That's where those tokens live. Anyway, uh, you know, uh , I don't I don't know what you should do. Be careful, I guess. Um, and Apple will un undoubted ly uh fix whatever it is that they're using uh to get in. Um Apple does a pretty good job with gatekeeper and so forth, but still it's important to remember malware still can affect you. Uh NASA has published more videos from the iPhone, including Earthshine from the Orion. Really amazing iPhone uh video . Um, I'm glad they brought the iPhones. I have we f have we figured out like I was trying to f I was trying to figure out like when the all the pictures that come out of those Nikons are belong to the public because the they're public cameras on a public mission. Who owns the copyright to the iPhone pictures? Are they also public domain? Like can Apple. I think they are not just use them. Okay. I think they I think they're probably NASA owned. Anything NASA produces is spacebar. And by the way, it's good it could see in the window the reflection of the iPhone. So that's how we know it was done on the iPhone. That's one of the benefits of the orange. It's like Yeah, it stands out. It stands out. That's uh that's Christina Koch's capture uh capture uh of uh the earth 54000 kilometers away. Shining through the that's beautiful, shining through the window. Everything that's ever happened in human history is just on that little dot in the midst of all that blackness out there. I'll say I mean one of the things about them bringing the iPhones on, even though obviously their you know Nikon camera is gonna do a better job, is we live in a world where so much of our context is the videos and photos we take on our phones. And so to have just a phone shot of whether it's a selfie or just right out the window, I mean, I whenever I fly transatlantic. we I gof over Green land, I take a bunch of pictures out the window of Greenland, because like it's Greenland, that's cool, right? And so something about being on a spaceship looking at the Earth from your phone camera, I think in a 21st century context, I think it hits different, which I think is great. It's more accessible than a hustle blot. Well not not only that, but the thinking that goes into it. Like uh like even with a pocket camera like this, it's like there's something very, very deliberate about okay, here's the lens, here's the focus, here's the settings, here's this, here's that. Whereas it's very, very thoughtful and methodical, whereas when you take a picture with a camera's like, oh my God, that looks great. Click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click right this those the shots that are not being covered by those hassle blaz and by those Nikons it's the that's just such a cool view out of the window I gotta take a picture of that right now or oh my god Steve uh like hold hold my hold hold hold up that bag because this I I definitely want to remember this. There's a whole bunch of the story that's not b hasn't been told and it really is super exciting. Yeah. And uh you know it's funny, I uh I was taking a walk with my daughter in the uh Japanese tea garden in San Fran cisco yesterday and I was so beautiful. I thought, oh shoot, I forgot my good camera. And then I remembered, well, actually I might have my good camera with me. I have my iPhone. Uh and I it did a it did a great job. I mean it really is a it's an amaz ing uh camera and you get such great shots with it. So yeah. But it is more you're right, it's more personal. It's less fuss y uh to see those shots from the astronauts and you could see the phone and the reflection and stuff. It's and it's familiar to our context of life on Earth, right? So I feel it adds something to have it just be those are people. They got a phone like my phone, they're pointing out the window and it's not Greenland down there. It's like all of planet Earth. Yeah. Finally, uh a couple of Peabody Awards for Apple TV, Plurib us and Come See Me in the Good Light, both winning uh Peabody Awards in the 86th Peabody Awards uh two wins. Pluribus in the entertainment category, uh come see me in the good light in the documentary category. So uh good on Apple. And uh and the Tetlasso uh uh teaser was released today. Yeah. Ted Lasso's come out in August. Yeah, August 5th, I think. Teaser, yeah. Uh did you did you watch it? Are we excited? Appropriately scored with a Marcus Mumford song. Why is that appropriate? Tell me. Because he does the theme song. Oh , Ted Lasso. So it was another Marcus Mumford. So the the the t you know, the vibe of it and the singing of it is exactly the same as the Ted Lasso theme song. So yeah. I always loved uh Mumford and Sons. So I guess I maybe I'll watch that show. This is the fourth and fifth. Well we don't know because they they ended it after season three or so we thought. Like the the the kind of the the arc was concluded. Um and then I guess Apple and Warner Brothers and whoever else kinda came back together and they were like, we want to do more. Not everyone will be back, but most of the main leads will and and and now uh Jason Dick is I guess will be uh Ted Lasso will be coaching a a woman's team. Um I think I saw Tracy Ullman in the teaser. Yeah, she is in the teaser. Yeah. So there's a bunch of interest ing new actors. I the way that they framed it is that they had a three season story. They told it. Obviously it was a global phenomenon. Apple got the money, backed it up to I guess to Warner Brothers and then a smaller b truck of money backed up to Jason Sedecas's house. There's like a whole chain of money trucks out there. But um this is so this is like there are I think they haven't said, but I assume that they've got a another little story they want to tell, and they they figure that they've got two or three seasons to tell it. That's my guess. Is that that this is like what's the next chapter? They wanted to tell the story of Ted running away from his divorce and being sad and finding a place in the world and kind of coming to cope with the changes in his life and then stopping stop running and go back to Kansas City, right? That was the story they wanted to tell in that three-season arc. And presumably they now have a new thing which is going-I don't know what it's going to be, but it's about Ted, you know, in a different place in his life and what that means going forward. As long as Hannah Waddingham is in it, I think. And she's in it. She's in it. She's absolutely in it. She's I mean I mean yeah, the bulk of things are there. And yeah, um so Bill Lawrence who created um uh uh Ted Lasso, he also is the the creator of um Shrinking , which has done kind of a similar thing where it had a three-season arc. They told the story. They have said they're coming back, but have made it clear it's not gonna be like a continuation of like where we were before. It will be setting up like another kind of era of story. So it's not like, oh, this will be, you know, five weeks later. It'll it'll be, you know, kind of at a different moment, which I I like. I like that type of storytelling. And so I was initially kind of hesitant. I was like, I'm not really sure if we need another Ted Lasso season because they ended it the way they ended it. But if they are going to kind of tell a whole new kind of net story, then I like the characters. I'm happy to be a fact that he's coming back to Richmond, but it's not to coach the men's team. It's to coach the women's team. I like that, right? Because it's not the same story. It would have been disappointing if it was like, oh, never mind, I'm back doing the same thing that I did before. build up that we'd had the previous three seasons were for nothing, but for him to come back in a different capacity, tell a different thing, but still have those same characters that we liked a lot, which is kind of what the teaser indicated, right? Which was kind of him refamiliar um familiarizing himself with some of the townsfolk who are now mad at him for different reasons. And that was cute and and it was it was a nice thing. So it's it's a great show. I'm I'm I I was glad to see that teaser this morning. And uh to have it be supportive of women's soccer, which is really kind of having a moment, and and uh was a very US thing for a long time, and now European women's soccer is becoming a thing. I went last fall, I went to a Chelsea Arsenal match, women's match, and it was awesome, and it was a such great environment with families there, like just moms and dads and kids all having a great time. Um, it's a it's a real kind of cultural moment. And so for Ted Lasso to put the stake in the ground and say, yeah, we're gonna tell a story about women's football. I'm also really excited that they chose that. Pick of the week coming up. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. I'll kick I like to kick things off. I will kick something off because I like Patrick Wardle. I think Objective C does amazing tools, a whole bunch of them. They're free, they're open source to secure your Mac. And I just thought I'd mention one that anybody who's interested in privacy might want to know about called Overs ight, which will let you know if your Mac's mic or webcam has been turned on and will allow you to block it if uh if you don't want it to be turned on . Just in case something else is running. Objective C stuff is nice. It's free. It runs in the background. Uh they have, you know, Lulu's they're probably one of their best known uh but they have so many little tools you should have probably go there and and look at them all and uh see he just made a version uh of his um uh firewall for uh the Linux which was very kind of cool . I I don't like it. I don't use it. But I think was it knock knock? I think it was knock knock. Anyway , I will just mention oversight at objective C. And their website is objective- se e dot org. Christina Warren, your pick of the week. Yeah, so um there were a couple of blog posts uh uh in the past week. Um I think Nick here was was the one who I saw primarily and kind of started a discussion about how iCloud photos, like you know, um iPhoto libraries are not necessarily uh reliable and kind of getting off of that train can be really difficult and really expensive, especially if you fill up your, you know, um Apple, you know, your iCloud a account amount. Like if you hit that two terabytes, the price they want you to pay beyond that can be really excessive. And um there's also difficulty in like okay how good of a download am i really getting and and how much of the state is really protected there are lots of issues with that and what that made me think about was um I'm really glad that I have an app called Power Photos , which is by uh fatcat software. So it's fatcatsoftware.com or just Google Power Photos. And it's it's uh $39.99. So it's you know not inexpensive, but it's a really really good app if you deal with a lot of um like uh large um uh iCloud, iPhoto libraries, um, where basically um you can manage multiple libraries, it can help you find duplicate items, it helps you merge libraries, a hand le a lot of the metadata information, extracting and exporting photos from various things. It's really, really good. So if you have a big photo collection or if you're somebody who's maybe hesitant having reading those things, like maybe I want to have a a dual backup strategy or not have all of my things in one basket. Um this was an app I I thought about it because I was like, Oh, I have this app and I've used this and this has been really useful for me. So this is this is just one that I I figured I would uh I would recommend how many I have sixty two thousand photos in my photos library. How many photos do you have in your photo? What are you laughing at? I bet you have more than that, Andy. I just actually I just offloaded uh I did it I just did an extraction of all the my data from uh Flickr and that was in its in itself was like ten to eleven thousand and i ha I haven't put anything on it in the past three or four or five years so yeah everything goes in because uh even on my fancy cameras, because I don't want to use Lightroom, everything goes into Apple's photos. So it's basically it's ten years. Well, how when did I start using? That's fifteen years. Go Google Photos is my central truth for photos. I have my Google Photos and Amazon photos and I even have it on my uh NAS. Yeah, I was gonna say I have like multiple photos photos and it can be difficult. Again, like but the but the Apple's pothos app, which is my source of truth too, like it can be difficult to like deal with multiple libraries and getting all that stuff off. And so yeah, this is it's it's a it's a good um it's a good app. As long as I'm in the Apple ecosystem, I'm just gonna use photos. You know, when I take good pictures in my life uh they still goes into photos. I can edit it with anything else later. Uh because Lightroom, I just don't want to pay for Lightroom anymore. I'm just done with that. I will take a look at power photos. It looks very cool. The ultimate toolbox for photos on the Mac. Andy and Ocko pick of the week. I have two related picks. Uh the first May of uh every year is uh free comic book day. That's a special sort of like celebratory day in the comic book retail industry where they basically it's a it was it started off like the first w when the first spider uh uh Fox uh Spider Man movie came out as a way of hey, maybe we can like use all the attention that this the movie is getting to like get people to come to comic book stores and buy and maybe become comic book uh readers. And so basically it's an open house sort of thing. I know that their stores are open all the time anyway, but uh the the stores that are pre that uh participate will have like free comics for basically anybody who wants to come by. A lot of these are like actually specially printed comics that the uh that DC comics and other publishers produce just specifically for free comic book day. But they usually also have like sales, they have events, they might have one of them have one of my local st ores had pancakes. They just basically for some reason they just set up an electric skillet and was making pancakes for everybody on top of everything else. I I don't know if like maple syrup on fingers is good for a browsing uh sort of experience for for retail. But it's a it's a it's a fun day depending on like how into it your local comic book shop is. If you go to freecomicbookday dot com, uh you can basically look up and find a local comic book store in your neighborhood uh that is actually hosting it. That was basically the whole point of this is to basically make people aware that, hey, look, there's actually a comic book store within eight miles of your place. And speaking of comic book stores, I need to recommend my platonic ideal of a comic book store is a store called The Million Year Picnic in Waltham, Massachusetts. Uh it is every single thing you want in a comic book store and none of the things you do not want. It is it it's a it's a store that's packed full of like new comics trade paperbacks used paperbacks used comics statues toys games all kinds of things and yet it's not cluttered the aisles are Everything is really, really wonderfully well lit. The proprietor, Steve Higgins, is an amazing retailer. He's been in this business since the 80s. Uh uh there is a certain time limit on this visit because uh after 40 years he is retiring uh and closing the store on july 31st. Uh and I really, really encourage you to this used to be my regular comic book store and it kind of killed me when I moved like a whole like a a prohibitive distance away. Even s even then I was still coming in uh once a month because of such a good thing you took me there. You took me there when you came up to see me in Boston and we went out to Waltham . Yeah. Absolutely. It's a it's amazing. And also Waltham where the big prison is also . I think I on Ray Donovan 's talking about it. Yeah, he's up at Waltham. I I I like books. You know, that that's not how I would describe Brandeis University. But you know, if you had a bad experience in college, but what what is there is on Moody Street? It's it's it's worth a trip because it's also on this street that is packed full of like restaurants. There's a doza hut right across the street, like uh there's an Italian bakery. Doza hut. Whoa. That that was that that was actually the running joke for years because someone rented it and like put all these like steel like trays on the front of it and it was vacant, but with the signage up for like a decade, re leading to people rumoring that it must be a front for something because they've been a week away from but they actually did open it. Uh so there's ice, there's ice cream, there's a thrift store. Th'eres it's a great place to just hang for a day for Saturday afternoon. It's probably because of the Brandeis uh community supporting it, right? Certainly partly because of the students are always a great yeah, it's always great to be. I've been I've been going there since like the 1990s, and it's one of the rare places where you know, like Newbury Street certainly changed since I started going there in Boston. Uh the uh uh uh uh the uh Davis Square in Somerville 100 changed in the years since I start going there. But Moody Street and Waltham is still the same really fun, accessible, charming. What's the h what's the million year picnic? Because it says this is called the Outer Limits, this comic book store. Oh I'm s I'm sorry. It's the outer limits. I'm I'm so sorry. Uh millionaire Pictons is another very, very famous very, very, good store. Okay. You could see my confusion. I had the correct URL. I'm so, so sorry. You did. I went to the URL and it's the Outer Limits comic book store from Matt.'s o It it's the only comic book store on Moody Street in Mr. Moody Street. It's the only one. Yeah. Basically I'm gonna be in Kona on Saturday and then there's no comic book stores in Kona, unfortunately. So Yeah. I just have to drink more coffee, I guess. And find something else to do in Hawaii. I don't know. Is there anything else to do? Uh the Outer Limits. The Outer Limits, basically. I love their website. It's got an Outer Limits uh TV and it's got some fun uh hasn't updated since like early teens. It's a it's Steve Steve updates regularly on Facebook. That's where he like posts most of his stuff. And also the store is the outer limits is legendary enough that he doesn't necessarily need to like it. Really, I was I was surprised when I when I did a Google to make sure I had the right URL uh for uh for the outer limits, eouterlimits.com, like all that was turned up was like testimonial after testimonial after testimonial in every regional paper about oh my god this this stallwort of this this legendary landmark of Waltham stores is closing. I can't believe it. Uh what's Meister going to be like without uh uh without the outer limits. Uh personnel. I like this. This is great. Do they all have uh Massachusetts accents when you go in there? Some of them do. Feels like they should. Steve is Steve is uh again, he he is the anti-corti er, so he's not yeah. I again ever,ything everything that you might that that people parody about comic book shops is not applicable here. Uh he does he does uh although his Facebook you can I think you can link uh you can find that link from the from the e from e outer limits.com. He does uh occasionally post a Facebook about like his experience with certain regular customers over the past 40 years that are interesting uh interesting customers that because he has to stay behind the counter and run his store. If they drop in and they're not being disruptive and they have weird questions that are not impolite and require him to eject them, he just simply has to tolerate them. And fortunately he plugs he he writes Facebook posts about them. So at least he did not have to suffer through those six minutes of people asking is this a chandelier store even though it's clearly not a chandelier store uh he you we at least the he benefited we benefit from entertainment where the chandeliers I heard there was a chandelier store. Try the doser store across the street. Did this used to be a chandelier store? Thank you, Andy. Leo, I think all your Boston accents are from Brooklyn. I know. I don't have a good Boston. I have to work on it. Uh to you, Jason. Do you have a good Boston accent? I don't. I don't. It's a wicked piss-up. There you go. I'm gonna pick uh another like just a nice Mac utility. I was doing some work, uh some research work on uh the Apple 50 uh episode that we did on upgrade where I had to dig into a lot of old Apple media, like books and magazines and stuff, and I wanted to have quotes from these things. And I thought, okay , I could like get a PDF. And sometimes you get a PDF and the system will OCR it for you automatically and put that and it's selectable text and you can paste it. But the thing is, sometimes you get the PDF and it was a PDF generated so long ago based on a scan, that the uh the text is bad. It's really bad. And I thought, you know, the system, there's so many modern ways of doing OCR that are better. And I ended up going all the way down the rabbit hole to a utility called Text Sniper, which is amazing. And if you're ever grabbing text off of your Mac screen in some form, I highly recommend it. You can get it in set app or there's a relatively small price to buy it in the Mac App Store. And it sets Command Shift 2, so just to the left of the screenshot command. Uh, if you're somebody who grew up on old Max, don't worry. There is no longer a second floppy drive that will eject if you hit command shift two. I forgot about that's why we don't if that's that's why it's three and sidebar. That's why it's command shift three for a screenshot, is because one was to eject disc one and two was to eject disc two. True story. Anyway, Tech Sniper gives you a little target like you're taking a screenshot, except It works with video. It works with YouTube video. So you go command shift two and you mark key tool over the text on your screen . And that's all you do. You let go and the full editable text is on your clipboard to paste wherever you want. And the and the and the OCR is good. Even if you're grabbing, let's say, a scan of an old out-of-print book, just saying that that I I could retype it, but like surely there's a better way here. And this is the answer text sniper so if you ever find yourself frequently in that thing where you just are trying to grab some text out of an image um or a or a or a bad PDF scan or whatever it is like you just set this up and forget about it until you need it. And then you do command shift two. And the workflow, I mean, there's really nothing to it. I was literally like this paragraph is really fun and I want to quote it. Command shift two, marquee, switch to my text editor, command V. Done. And it was a good OCR of it. So um really it's got some settings. It's it's very nice. So I know it's a very specific kind of utility, but like if you're ever and and more to the point, if you ever find yourself where you're like, oh hmm, I need to you'll be like, oh, Jason recommended something, right? And you can go to mbwpicks.com or whatever and search for it. It's tech sniper. Try check it out. It's very, very good. Yeah. I mean I can do this by screenshotting and giving it to Claude and Yeah, or open a preview and you can do Apple's text thing and that will work pretty well. But like to not have an intermediary, it literally goes from you like you're taking a screenshot and then there's text on your clipboard and there 's no step in between. Yeah. It's really good. Now you you guys always mention said app. Is that worth the 10 bucks a month to get all those apps, including Text Sniper? I think so. It depends, but like they have a lot, a lot of these picks, I'm like, oh, this is a good one. And then I realize it's also in setup. So if you're especially I mean, I wanna say it also because if you are a setup subscriber and back in the day, I it's been a long time they they they were a sponsor of my site, but like not for ages now, but like if you're already in there, then this other utility is just like you already have it. You can just run it and then you've got that one too. And that's really nice. So depends on you know you're uses. The set app's got a lot of stuff. This is not a set app pick, but they do have a lot of stuff that if you use even two or three of those apps, it's probably worth it. But um you can also just buy the stuff. Yeah. No, it's about to buy really nice text. Highly recommended. Yeah. Yeah, very nice. Love a Mac utility that lives in the menu bar and is super unobtrusive and does a very focused thing, right? Like that's this is like I love these kind of utilities. It's like it's really good at what it does. What it does is very nice and that's all it does. Nice. That was a Wolverine reference there. But anyway, for the the comic book nerds out there at uh at at the outer limits in Waltham Mass. That was a Wolverine. Check his adamantium clause, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, Mr. Jason Snell. You will find him with his uh colorful charts at six colors.com. He's gonna be doing the charts in two days. Uh sixcolors.com and all his podcast, six colors.com, Jason slash Jason. You can get all the Tim Cook puns in upgrade with Mike Hurley, the cookbook, and all that. Yep. Thank you, Jason. Thank you, Leo. Thank you, Andy and Atko. For spending time with us and sharing your Watham finds. I'm glad we've had this time together. Why don't you have a Massachusetts accent? Um, funny story: my mom is from outer Boston, so she packs the cat and have it. Yeah, my dad is from western mass western uh Pennsylvania, so he parks the corn. He parked the corn in Horford Yard. Oh, he does his Washington in Washington, doesn't he? The two accents. The two accents like uh conflict each other. Yeah. It was it was kind of funny because my uh I don't know if it's still true, but my name is actually hard coded into Apple speech synthesis to pronounce it correctly. Like an engineer actually like called me and said, can you could give you and so I was very I visit when as soon as it was active, like I went to my hey look, hey, your your boy's doing okay. He's he's he's like I thought he I thought I'd be impressed with it and he's like, oh wow, that's really great, until he realized that, well, you know that like you you pr you pr I he was like he he he pointed out that like everybody in his family pronounces it differently. Like so basically like he uh he uh I pronounced it like someone who grew up like in the Boston area and he said, Well, I'm sorry, Dad, it's now fifty million max versus you and your four brothers. How does how does dad pronounce Anatko? Uh he used to go Enatco. Enatco Enatco. Enatco. Yeah. But wow. I used to not go like aunt. Another call, yourself aunt, say. I do not know. Thank you, Josh Schnell. I have no idea. Christina Warren, thank you so much, Senior Developer Relations at GitHub. She's FilmGirl. Thank you so much for being here. We appreciate it. Anything you want to plug? Not right now, but uh but I'll I'll I'll I'll hopefully something. Oh, you know what? I found it tomorrow I'm going to be on clock on a clockwise. So I I'll'll I'll plug uh our plug that I'll be on. Clockwise is fun. It is fun. Because you it's fifteen minutes. Right, exactly. It's thirty minutes. It's thirty minutes. It's thirty minutes. But yeah, but it's never more than that. Yes. We we uh as the as the I'm the uh co-creator of Clockwise it's a great podcast I love it I I I don't do it anymore except many many I'm the fill in post now basically I I they call me when Dan's out of town for the many man,y people who say , uh, why is your show so damn long? I tell them listen to clockwise if you don't want. That's why we did it. It's like it's just an alternative. You want you want four tech tech topics in thirty minutes on on relay. There it is. When I I did it, thought it was fifteen, but it's just that's because it goes so fast. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody takes turns, so there's not really any interrupting. It's like it's very structured. That's why we're structured it like a game show, basically, except it's not a game sho Right. I think it was a good idea. Have fun with it tomorrow, Christina. Thank you all for joining us. Uh we do this show every uh Tuesday, eleven AM Pacific 2 p.m. Eastern, eighteen hundred UTC. You can join us