Shooting Professional Sports on iPhone

It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Andy's here. Jason's here. We will talk about what we expect at WWDC. Apple has some tantalizing tidbits, including in the things they mentioned about accessibility, plus what the Pope had to say about AI and what that means for Siri, that and a whole lot more coming up next on Mac Break Weekly . Podcasts you love from people you trust . This is Twit . This is Mac Break Weekly, episode 1026, recorded Tuesday, May 26th, 2026. Double wide mod e . It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Yes. Hello, everybody. Another Tuesday and another fabulous day of Apple News shared with us by our peerless panel of pom de procrastination. You can just say pundits. Peerless panel of pundits works. Pom pom pundits. I mixed some French in there just to get another P. That's Jason. Pomegranate pundits. Pundits. Hello. That's Jason Snell6 Colors dot com. The last time he'll be with us No, no, you'll be with us next week. Oh next week and then I I have two weeks where I'm gone 'cause I will be in the wilds of Cupertino and then I will be in the wilds of Oregon uh watching my son graduate from college. So two weeks off. Tuesdays. You know, we do the show whether there are people here or not at eleven Pacific on Tuesday, so I will not. So I hope fill the city. We'll find somebody to fill the seat. Who knows? Maybe Alex Lindsay will be able to part. That's a good point . Christina Warren is here. Now she won't be here next week. I will not. I will not. Develop relations at GitHub. Are you doing a GitHub thing? Well, um, it is Microsoft Build, so I will be at Microsoft Build next uh next week. That's right. It's build. It's a big deal. Build's a big deal. Um Christina will be uh I'm hoping, I don't know, John Ashley, were we able to get uh Shelley Brisbane to fill in? Oh yes. Oh good. There's a whole accessibility story with the next uh IOS, and I wanted to kind of talk about uh that and Shelley is our accessibility expert. But but we will miss you, Christina. Well thank you. Thank you. But but I I look forward to tuning into the show as a as a listener. So that'll be fun. Well and we'll think of you uh yeah. In the enemy camp as, it were. In the enemy camp, as it were. Sure, sure, sure. Being in the enemy camp in this case is its own punishment. Now they're they're I I feel like they're frenemies at this point more than I was going to say I was going to say I definitely feel like there's it's it's you know, yeah, it's frenemy. Come on. Well I won't say anything then about the uh Microsoft update they pushed out that bricked high-end HP and uh Let me be clear. As a Mac user since the nineties, um my wife was issued a a Windows laptop and occasionally it's hanging around the house and whenever I see it I put it in its case and put it in another room because I don't want that thing out in my vision. I don't like it. But reasonable people can say Microsoft and Apple are fine. It's true. It's true. I just don't want that stuff in my house. It's also with us Andy Anako, who you know, he uses Android, so I guess he's a postate in other ways. Hello Andrew. Microsoft from within, but Microsoft is already doing that. So no need to take the effort. You we're just so mean. Uh really I'm watching all the real housewives. I'm sorry. No, it's good. It's good, but yeah, you're not the one who's paid in their stock., So yeah tell me about it. Yeah, I sorry. I should warn well the stock is fine. That's a good thing to be paid in these stuff It's completely fine. It's completely fine. I think it's hysterical actually. Genuinely. I think it's fantastic.. Please do more And they you know, look, uh Microsoft has a thick skin, let's put it that way. And come on. Yeah. We know many people from Microsoft listen to the show are you are in fact a lot of people of Microsoft use Macs, so I don't I don' t I have nothing against the wonderful people who work at Microsoft, including those who work at GitHub who are faboo . But enough of that. I guess I'm a I'm a little bit I have a a religious mind set because the Pope weighed in. Oh yeah, big Pope News. Big Pope News. Uh and at first, you know, I'm thinking he did this encyclical on uh on AI, Pope Leo the Fourteenth. And uh at first I'm thinking , what do I care with what a medieval religion leader thinks about uh artificial intelligence? But then I I read I didn't words, but I read part of the magnifica humanitas . And I thought actually it was quite sensible. It's very it's very to the point about what lots of people have already been saying about AI. Uh AI ethicists basically saying that look we can't build this thing that only benefits rich people. This has technology has the power to help all people of all kinds. But if we just simply make sure that it's that the people who need it the most are being are are paying the cost of it but, aren't getting the benefits for of it. That's really not what we're put here to do. Um I've only re I've only read like the first like four to five thousand words, but I did uh I did download it. I intended to just skim it, but the damn thing is just very It's good. It's really good. He said uh among other things, and uh by the way, Jeff Jarvis has an excellent uh analysis on his Buzz Machine uh blog, BuzzMachine.com, and of course we'll talk about this uh tomorrow on intelligent machines. He said the Pope, Leo, by name, love that name, said technology has the power to heal, connect, educate, and protect our common home. True, right? But it can also divide, exclude, and generate new forms of injustice, also true . In the abstract, technology in and of itself is not a solution to humanity's problems, just as it is not inherently evil . However, in practice, technology is never neutral because it takes on the character s, characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it . Yes. I think this, I think this is exactly uh our attitude here, right? It's got I'm sorry, I'll Ill' I'm I'm excited about this, but I'll I'll try to wind myself up. It's just it's just there's so many of like the common sense greatest hits in this encyclical, including there's a famous uh uh famous uh uh slide deck I think was IBM from like thirty, 4 years a0 go, when computers were uh steady enough and accessible enough that uh to automate processes. And so they basically came up with a bunch of their own encyclicals uh about how this technology should be used , including because uh uh a computer cannot have does not have a sense of responsibility, cannot be blamed, cannot be burdened, cannot be punished. That that means that no computer should ever be uh allowed to make a management style decision. And in the encyclical, he say he says something very, very similar about how look, we can't allow AI to basically take the do the do the work of humans because it doesn't have the responsibility of humans, it doesn't have the ethical grounding of humans, and that to think otherwise or pretend otherwise is going to lead to very, very, very bad things. He doesn't even say it in Latin. He says it in ver he says it in clean English. There was some Latin hope. Okay, but it wasn't all Latin. Yes demondeus for abundance, am I right? Uh in tribo uh whatever. Um yeah, I mean I thought it was it was actually pretty uh reasonable. It was also not uh fire and brimstone uh you know I mean he literally had somebody from Anthropic there advising to talk about this which is I think fitting because Anthropic has always been the most kind of philosophical of the AI companies. They spent a lot of time and people can be cynical about it and say that it's part of their marketing. I think that it may be, but I think they also do believe it. I think uh Dario Amote actually does think lots of deep thoughts about what it means to do AI while also pressing on his foot on the gas to go full speed ahead. I think both of those things can be true. I thought the part that struck me of that, I can't believe it, but you know, again, there's a first time for everything. Let's talk about a papal encyclical on a tech podcast. Why not? Was I thought, and this this goes to the heart of a lot of debates that I see in our communities these days, which is he said , just because you can use a tool for good or for ill, I'm paraphrasing the Pope here because I don't uh I love saying stuff like that. Do it in Latin if you're just because just because a tool can be used for good or ill if the tool is fundamentally ill if it the if the tool is fundamentally poisoned or evil , doing good with it may not be morally acceptable. And I think that a lot of us are grappling with this idea of like , you can have like I feel very much like I am uneasy about the resources being spent on data centers and on the power that is used to power all of these AI uh setups. And I worry about what it might do for our society in a whole bunch of different ways. And I also recognize that there are lots of ways that people use AI that I am not in favor of, that I think are kind of anti-humanity, as the Pope points out. But I also see the benefits in lots of ways. I think like computers writing computer code is an amazing benefit for people. And it does, you know, give me pause when the Pope says, look, morally, and who who better to talk about this than the Pope, I suppose. Morally , are you okay only using it for good if it's fundamentally not good? And I mean, you gotta think about it. I think that goes to the root of a lot of our conversations about it. It's something I grapple with all the time because uh as a technology journalist, I think we're all in the same boat, we cover uh my whole life, we've been covering things like uh smartphones and gadgets and things that are filling up the landfill and destroying our environment. And uh we're encouraging people to buy more uh just in our very reviews without even saying it. Uh so I think there is a a moral struggle that all uh people who uh deal with technology, especially those of us who cover technology, uh have to think about. So I think it's a good thing to think about. I just watched last night, I watched a very weird movie, uh, Gore Verbinski's latest, which is called Good Luck, Don't Die, Have Good Luck, Don't Have Fun, Don't Die . Which is really about this. Uh a guy Sam Rockwell comes back from the future to save the world, he's got on a USB stick uh AI safety software that the future folks have designed. And he says, in a in an hour, a nine-year-old is about to set off an AI bomb that will destroy the future. I have come back from the future to save it. It's a little terminatory. Uh and we've got to install this software on the kids on the kid's computer before he presses the go button , which is hysterical. And this that's the whole the whole movie is them, you know, the the them trying to get there. It's a little bit of an Apple power product and it forbids side loading, so we're doomed. Yeah. Well and the other thing though that's great in it is that the kids uh two of the characters are high school teachers, and the kids are literally glued to their phone the whole time in class. And the teacher's saying, Is this isn't this against the rules? Are you sp are shouldn't you have your phones put away? So it's a commentary, the movie is a commentary both on AI and uh on uh smartphones. And honestly, I don't know why the Pope hasn't done an encyclical on uh smartphones and social media, because I think in many ways it's just as destructi ve . Um and yet, you know, here we are we constantly talk about it. I on my shows promote in many ways promote it. We all use it. So I think I don't know, do we should I feel guilty, Christina? I mean, I don't know because I I I go thro I grapple with the same things that everyone else on this panel grapples with, right? And and I I from an additional perspective of someone who's been actively working on some of these technologies for the last six years or so. And so uh there is you're embedded in AI. You're absolutely I'm I'm embedded with it. I know that like you know my my last job was very I mean my my next job will be with AI. My last job was with AI. My current job is with AI. Like I I know that that's how that is going to work. Um and then yet you you hear the stories, you see the the layoffs that happen because whether it is directly because of artificial intelligence or people are just blaming it as you know a reason, which I think is more than likely the case so far, but you can also see very real places where people's budgets become different for different things because they're prioritizing one type of of of spend over anot her. And there's there's guilt that's associated with that. And I think there's also thought about okay, well, how do we ensure that this is being used the right way? And I don't think that we can ensure that, right? I think that's actually kind of one of the the the scariest aspects of of any sort new technology is that you can't really control how every party is going to to use those things. And the best thing that you can do is you can try to inform the the people that are that are using it. You can try to have good conversations with world lead ers and um in in this case even you know clerics um uh about um you know what the moral and ethical um uh you know uh things should be and then we should all you know, as as humanity, be taking steps to make sure that we're not losing ourselves in these things. Because what bothers me more, I think, than than some of like the doomsday prophecy stuff is just when you see and you hear anecdotally from folks, how much people are more willing to turn aspects of their brain off because these technologies are so much more accessible and are so much um easier to use. And and when you see that like, you know, test scores are going down and that, you know, even in my own just kind of like day-to-day life, I can think, oh, I can just, you know, do that with with with AI versus asking the question, okay, I can, but should I? Right. And and these are all the things I think that we all have to grapple with. And so it is sort of a a I was not expecting a 43,000, 42,000, whatever it is, you know, missive from the Pope on this. But um I I also can't necessarily say that whether it will have any impact or not, and I I tend to be cynical there and remember there are more than a billion Catholics in the world who but I but I think that even like putting aside like my own cynicism it's it's nice to see this sort of weigh in coming in from from um from different you know leaders from from that worlds these are important questions yeah uh maybe we don't agree with the answers I mean I don't I I disagree with him when he says you shouldn't use AI even yeah for its for good uh I think I'm more of the opinion to all technology is agnostic is uh neutral. Yeah, but he hates that. He hates agnostics. I know. I believe technology is neutral and the humans are put the stamp of good or bad on it and uh it's the humans that we have to watch out for. I am more inclined to believe that, although I I do think that that there is a larger point there, which is I don't think all AI fundamentally has to be the fruit of the poison tree, right? Bring in my biblical references. I I well he's suggesting that if it is, you you can't use i immoral technology morally, but I think part of the question there is also how do we navigate? I because I don't think the Pope is like, look, hey, everybody, put your computers in the water. Let's just walk away. Right. Um, I think he's saying , build to the people who are building this stuff, think about the consequences of what you're doing and try to approach it. Yeah, well, I agree with that. You're not absol ved from making something, if it's useful but also dangerous, that you need to think about the consequences of the act of creation. Boy, wow, the biblical references are fast and furious here. But um, right? Like, like, and I think that's worth saying. I I and I also suspect that that's anthropics influence a little bit because that sounds very much like them, which is how do how do we do what we do, but also not be you know evil and not bring about the destruction of society and and while also not I think what anthropics point has always been is if if we can think that it's gonna happen it's probably going to happen and if we stop, everybody else won't. So what we need to do is keep rushing headlong into it, but also figure out how to do it in the right way. And like, I don't know, maybe, but uh worth, you know, I I think it's worth reminding everybody who's building this stuff. Like like, think about the decisions you're making and the assumptions you make about this, because you should try to create what you're doing in an ethical and moral way. Agreed. I wasn't gonna bring this up, but I'm glad I did. Thanks for watch.ing It's not every week that the Pope steps on our turf. Yeah. That's true. It's not every week that like I come across a papal encyclo encyclical and have to say, damn it, okay, I need to put this down. I gotta get some work done, but I'll set aside, I'll get back to it tomorrow because this is really, really a good read. It's uh it's the sort of thing where you just keep putting it down and thinking and then reading more and then putting it down and thinking. I'm gonna have uh eleven labs read it to me in Father Guido Sarducci's voice. That way I will both be entertained and learn educated. Uh the reason we're spending so much time on this isn't really this is the drought before the storm. Uh Apples uh we're we're less than two weeks away from Apple's WWDC in which, Apple will announce how much AI exactly they're going to put in the phone. And by Apple doing that, by the way, they will probably be the single biggest purveyor of AI going forward, right? With a billion phones in people's pockets, that's going to be the number one way people access AI. The real normal people access AI. I mean , right? Yeah. I mean I you could say Google uh with Google search. You could and they certainly uh last week really doubled down on AI. I mean basically they're changing the search page for the first time in twenty five years to be uh uh an AI chat window as opposed to blue links. Yeah. Uh that in response of course to companies like Perplexity uh uh kind of stealing their thunder with AI search. Well also they also they keep saying every quarter that they have data saying that look when we put IF AI features in search, people were using, were interacting with search more. Actually we went up if the usage went up about 10, 11%. And that trend keeps seeing they keep saying that this trend keeps continuing, whether or not that's actually applicable to making Google search into a uh continually relevant product as opposed to uh uh sandboxing the AI into a separate product or a separate environment, who knows , but uh they've they've demonstrated to themselves and their shareholders that they don't feel as though AI is going to kill the search business and consequently uh the their advertising business. Yeah. So it's it it it's uh I I won't I won't jump back to what we were talking about earlier, but sometimes we have to that there's there's an are there's also an argument to be made that I think that uh search is not as interest uh classic search is not as interesting as AI search because I I turned on I I had a switch to turned off uh in my in my Chrome browser so that it would automatically every time I did a Google search, it would just give me the classic search, none of the AI stuff. I had to turn it back on so I could test to all this stuff. And the thing is, like it is more engaging. Uh it you could have the follow-up question that would have been, okay, alt uh uh ult and alt T for new tab, do a separate Google search for a follow up question or for a side question. I can act basically say, oh well okay, that information was mostly what I was looking for, but it lacks a nuance. Uh I uh am I right in saying that this A, B, and C are actually true based on this information that you're providing me and these sources that you're that I'm gonna follow up on? Yes, it is. Great. Uh and it's also gonna be adding uh uh a generative user interface and generative interfaces, it's again according to the keynote. We'll have to see how well this works, to make it even more interactive and basically to give you the information you were looking for ideally in a way that is easier to consume based on the type of uh uh content that you are looking for . But the thing is, like sometimes that's not you can't you can't sugar you can't uh dump sugar onto something, you can't add carbohydrates to something. That's how you make junk food. Okay. It's more palatable and it's more it's you can eat it all day long. But the thing is, Google search classic Google searches. Here is a resource, here is a reference to it to that we think is relevant to the terms that you gave us. It is now on you to follow through to this link, read what is provided there, consider the source, and then decide for yourself whether or not this is relevant, as opposed to having the AI digest all this for you and then create a highly processed form of that information. Well there's also the larger issue of if you're the company , your former publication, mashable Christina or The Verge, and all of your content is now pre-digested, pre-chew Charlie and uh and spit out by Google without any traffic to your page, you may not be too happy. This is what Miley Patel at the Verge has been calling for years Google Zero and where, you know, i he has never been wrong . The uh references to from Google to websites go keep going down and down and down. And the problem with that is that the websites are also the source of the information that they're chewing on. So they they are. They are. But I will say this, and and this is not in any way to try to like victim blame, but a lot of a lot of publications, publications that Jason and Andy and I have all worked for purposely made their bed and got into bed with the social media companies, with the search engines, and took the money. They took a lot of money. They took a an enormous amount of money. And they took it even though they knew that this was going to not be a thing that would last forever. Deal with the death It was. But it and it wasn't as if like I I can look at like the late 90s, the early 2000s, and I can say, okay, you know what? You didn't know what was going to happen. When we go into the 2010s, you absolutely knew what was going to happen because you'd already seen it happen multiple times. And in many cases, it had already happened multiple times to you. So at a certain point, I look at this and I have to go, okay, I'm so sorry, but if you're continuing to adjust your content, adjust your algorithm, adjust your output, adjust your hiring to please, you know, the people at Google, the people at Facebook, the people at what at TikTok, at whatever algorithm you want to be at. You cannot be upset when that changes and when you lose everything you've invested in because you you chose to be party to that. Now is it is it impossible to completely detangle yourself from that? Yeah, it is, but you don't have to go as far in as many publications went in and got into bed and purposefully created content not just to be serviced by the algorithm, but to be served by the algorithm and and to drive traffic directly given to them by the search engines or the social media sites. And it was very hard it's very hard to completely stand on the sidelines in that. So I understand how trying to focus on search traffic you know, and I I having worked at a publishing company during this period, you know, there there are there's a line to be drawn where you're like, okay, there's a lot of tr people searching. We want to reach those people. But what I would say is that over time, uh th the the companies that I don't have a lot of sympathy for are the ones who basically gave up on actual content and everything they started to do was just SEO garbage. They no longer were writing for people. They were just writing to capture views that were coming from search. And and and you're right, Christina, in a way, this is just a long playing version of the that Facebook pivot to video where everybody said do video and they did it. And like two years later it was all over. This took uh more like two decades, but yes you're right in in in a way that you end up with these media companies that have just become completely dependent some of them on on uh search traffic and they've also forgotten they they no longer cultivate an audience because search traffic doesn't come from an audience, it just comes from Google. So that you have no loyal audience. And why would you have a loyal audience? Because everything you post now is SEO. Uh, and for people who don't know, like if you ever read an article and you're like, why are there subheads all the way through it asking questions with very simple answers? And the headline is only answered at the end of the article. And it's like, because a consultant said that is the most effective way to rank in search. It's not an article for people, it's an article for Google to get you to click through and see some ads that you also aren't paying attention to. And so, yeah, my my sympathy to somebody like uh The Verge, which has tried to do a lot of stuff right and has seen this coming, is a lot greater than some of these sites that that you and I could name but won't, where they no longer care and have not cared for a decade about their readers, just about SEO. Correct. And and that's what I'm talking about. Obviously there are people who've been hurt by this, you know, and you know, who are have tried to do the right things to your point. But there have been lots lots of the big media companies have not. And and so I have sympathy for the people who work there. My sympathy goes away for the executives who again, it's been more than a decade where they've they've chosen to get into these financial relationships and and to your point to not build an audience. And that doesn't mean that it's not incredibly difficult to build an audience harder than ever and to get found like at all. Like it it's a not a good business. It's it's a difficult place. But it, you know, I there's a certain point where I look at this and I'm but but you did this you did this to yourself, especially the larger companies. You know, I look at the the you know some of the bigger newspaper conglomerates and I go, no, you you you had leverage at one point and you chose to give that up. Well there's a certain irony in the fact that the verge was just sold to James Murdoch. It was not It was not. It was n't Vox was The Verge The Verge remains at the company that was there before. Oh, they're not gonna spin out a new company with No. No But the podcasts were is very confusing. But it's a podcast network. So the podcast in New York magazine. The podcast in New York Magazine were what were those were the ones that were those were and Vox, which became as part of the podcast, were deemed as the ones that are. So the Verge is staying with its existing ownership. Yes. Yeah. And then the the the last I read was that they Penske will either buy all of it or none of it. Um Penske is the the the biggest outside investor. They do um uh the Hollywood reporter and variety and and a bunch of other things Rolling Stone a bunch of other things is that they potentially could buy all of the existing publications but it'll either be an all or nothing. These are kind of fire sales though, right? These are uh being sold It depends. It depends. I mean look, clearly the one who got out a lot of money was the the the Murdoch James Murdoch's thing buying Vox, the the podcasting arm in New York magazine. It's a little bit like a page out of the succession TV show because completely is. He's he's Kendall Roy saying, Well, this old style media of my father's is dying, so we gotta go digital. But maybe picking the kind of the wrong time to jump ship. I mean from one dying medium to another. I I mean I I I don't know I I think that the the James Murdoch mean he's been you know, he's the he's the liberal Murdoch. He was cast out. Right, and it we he left and and and he's like Kendall. I'm telling you it's yeah, uh it's uh succession is a is a is is a mix of paramount and uh and and Fox in terms of those those two families. But the um you know but he's made investments in other media companies too. And so I think it'll be interesting to see what happens with that. Is his strategy forward thinking or is he I mean he might just want to save New York magazine, which I'm not upset about at all. No, I'm glad. I mean I don't I don't care. That's kind of old school Medici patronage where you got a billion bucks and you can afford to lose a hundred million keeping a a a kind of mainstream it's what Larie and Powell Jobs and Emerson Collective is doing with the Atlantic Thank you . Anyway, where are we? Let's take a break and then we'll talk about Apple. Apple. There's not much to say, but we will talk. We'll talk a little bit about uh Apple. It is Mac Break Weekly after all. And guess what? We have a Vision Pro story. So there's that to look forward to. You are well, I'm glad you're here. I you know what, this is the thing. When you get smart people together, you shouldn't be tied down to any one thing. If there's an important topic, and I think this was a good conversation. It's not how thin you slice the melon, it's how you serve it . Uh yeah. Do you prefer the melon ball or do you prefer the the kind of the crescent of the melon? Ooh, I like the crescent . Our show thank you, Andy Yanako, Jason, Snell and Christina Warren for that conversation. You see on a slow week we can talk about and mangoes. Do you like to do the thing where you slice it, then you turn it inside out and you wind up with these cubes on a little little serving curve. No. Fancy, fancy. Yeah. I like to put a little lime on the uh on the old mango. I've ever euphemism in any way. Our show today brought to you by Cash Fly . Literally brought to you by Cashfly because Cashfly is our content delivery network. They've been keeping our content moving for years, almost two decades now. Every stream, every download, every on-demand episode, Cashfly quietly does the heavy lifting behind the scenes with no drama, no fuss. And I love that. If there's ever an issue with our feeds, it's never cash fly. It's, you know, they are absolutely reliable. They've been around for more than two decades and they are anything but static. I like that about them too. They're always innovating. 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All of that kind of also points to AI uh helping you with the management with more than seventy-five points of presence across six continents, and I betcha they're working on Antarctica. Over five thousand customers were one of 'em. And get this 100% uptime SLA. 100% uptime SLA. And the best support. 24-7, engineer to engine er. Enjoy flexible billing. That was important to us and no strong armed contracts. They were very flexible with us and have been all along. Cashfly is the CDN built for your business. Learn how you can get your first month free at Cashfly.com slash twit. How many years have I been saying this? Bandwidth for Mac Break Weekly is brought to you by Cashfly at C A C H E F L Y dot com slash twit. Thank you, Cashfly. Thank you. Uh Mark German, just as uh stymied for stuff to talk about as we were . He did say though some interesting things. Due to EU requirements, the Digital Markets Act , supposedly App,le will build support into the new iOS, iOS 27 for third-party airplay streaming alternatives like Google Cast . You could use, I mean, I've been I've been able to use Google Cast in Google Cast enabled apps, but now it'll be in the operating system. In fact, says German, it could be the default if you want to instead of uh AirPlay, if you want to beam video, photos, and audio from an Apple device to a speaker or TV . Uh thank you, EU, right? Yeah. That's that's kind of overdue. I'm I'm glad to see just in the past year, year and a half, just because the EU has not ordered Apple to include support for X, Y, and Z inside your software, but simply support an open standard that already exists within, say, a Wi-Fi standard. All of these things are now kind of possible, all these things like uh uh like airplay uh uh or or uh or or or airdrop from uh from uh yeah google does airdrop yeah all these things that that really should have been uh able to do uh years ago because it is such a bone of contention and it's it feels like such an unnecessary source of friction that like uh again, my my Google smart speakers uh my uh that uh don't work as well as Apple smart speakers, that uh transferring files between two machines depends on what machine what operating system they're running. And yeah, I mean, I not that I'm not that I would say that the EU's uh DMA is always great for every single application, but it's things like this that make me give uh the EU the benefit of the doubt when it comes to regulatory stuff because it is making things materially different. And it's not and I will I will also say that it's not a case of them dragging Apple by the ear. Inside Apple there's always arguments. There are always people saying look,, wouldn't it be great if we did make this easier to do? Wouldn't this be a great benefit for our users? And it would be such a simple thing for us to do. And that didn't get shouted down. They just simply lost the argument. Now they're winning those arguments. And we're seeing how quickly you can make these changes happen. Speaking of losing arguments, we're still waiting for Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers to tell us and Apple how much they can charge in the App Store. That'll be interesting for companies that don't use the uh Apple App Store. Right? It would only be for companies that don't use the App Store that use a third party app store. Or would it be for all App Store customers? Uh that's that's part of what Apple's arguing. There's they're basic there there there are a whole bunch of different balls in the air. Last week they uh Apple and Epic filed like basically a joint thing with a with a court saying that okay, we have basically agreed on a timetable for Apple to at least propose a a percentage that they can charge for uh for uh uh uh out of uh out of uh app store purchases. Uh that means that they're gonna be out of the yeah. Instead of twenty seven percent. Exactly. Basically say Apple's gonna come up with a number within seventy five days. They're also gonna give us the data that they use to calculate to to justify that data and we're gonna have time to basically respond to this uh but it's movement. But there's the second thing in which they're basically trying to get the Supreme Court and other courts to basically say that this order uh forces us to uh create changes to the Apple store worldwide when actually the judgment only should apply to our dealings with Epic. We should we should maybe be able to just make changes within the United States or within one principality , it is beyond the scope of this court to order us what we have to do in a worldwide market. So wait a minute, dude. Yeah, but they're they're back again. The court keeps saying, no, no. Ask Judge R Gonzalez Rogers. What are you bothering us for? We're busy here. Uh anyway, yeah, Apple has refil ed uh to reverse the lower court ruling on the App Store uh injunction. Uh we'll see what no no the response to the last time was almost instant. Uh no response yet. Yeah. On the shadow docket, the rocket docket. Epic uh gave a response to a nine to five Mac on all of this. The Supreme Court has already rejected Apple's attempt to overturn the injunction this case. This challenge to the contempt order is one last hail mary to delay a conclusion to this case and avoid opening up the gates to payment competition for the benefit of consumers. The court's proceedings and Apple's own documents made it clear that Apple intentionally designed its sham compliance with the District Court's order to prevent competition clearly violat ing the District Court's injunction. And in fact, Judge Gonzalez Rogers said Apple lied to her. Mm-hmm. That was the bit yeah, I mean, that was the biggest thing. That was one of the biggest smackdowns I've ever read in any court filing ever. That was literally when that came through. I was like, okay, this is the popcorn gif that everybody always shares because this that was wow. Wow. Yeah. Uh well anyway, we'll watch uh with interest to see uh what uh the Supremes say. You can't hurry, love, and you can't hurry the If we you know, if we have a theme for for for V the Vision Pro segment, I almost think like we should have a theme for the Epic versus Apple thing. Hey Andy, are you wearing that new Google Fitbit watch band there? Is that what you're showing off? Indeed I am. You're like one of those Formula One drivers who right after the race immediately straps on the watch, the watch they get an endorsement money for. And holds the is it Red Bull? It's gotta be. Uh tell us about that. This is um actually this is the other thing Mark German said is that Apple is perhaps sitting a little bit back on its laurels with the Apple Watch, uh in the face of competition from Google's new Fitbit band, which is competition itself for the whoop band from Amazon, or the Aura Ring, which uh I wear and I know a number of you uh also wear. Um uh tell us about this Fitbit band. Should uh is it now you you don't wear an Apple Watch, so you don't have anything to compare it with. Well, but the thing is uh that's true, but on the other hand, it's possible that this band is made for somebody like me who has tried Pixel who has a Pixel Watch, has an Apple Watch. I don't like wearing either of them day to day because number one, I don't like having to keep them charged every couple of days. I don't like all the distractions that come through the displa the the display. I don't think they're as good a watch as like my favorite little Casio watches. I like being able to switch things up several times a day. The hell even the health stuff, which I'm very, very interested in , doesn't really hit me because it's giving me numbers, but no insight and no real information. Uh and it's also a $300 thing, typically. This is really interesting because it really is there's no screen on it. It really is just the sensors, okay? Which means that it gives you most of the stuff that uh three like a one of the cheaper Apple Watches give you. So I get blood oxygen, I get heart rate, I get uh uh I get low heart rate warnings, I will get uh I think it even has aphid. Don't don't uh don't uh quote me on that. Uh but basically a very, very l wide range of stuff just from sensors. It's also very, very small. It's very, very uh you can wear it and you don't feel like you've got uh you've you've you've uh your your your tech techno joe with a million different uh gasters on your wrist. Uh it's lightweight, it's more comfortable to to use. Uh I this arrived uh last Monday. I have not charged it since and it hasn't been off my wrist really since. And the battery is still at 26%. Uh and what I really but the interesting thing I've uh that I'm really, really enjoying about it so far, and this has only been a week, so I've been I'm not gonna write about it for another two or three weeks, is that uh I'm gonna use that horrible word, but uh uh Google Gemini is part of the new Google Health app. So it doesn't simply say you made your you you make your step go beat your step goal by 10%. This is your third day of seven days in which you intended to increase your heart rate by no, it will actually like take the data and then exp have say, wow, you really uh you you uh you really made up for the lack of sleep you had you had earlier today. Uh because it's going to be raining later today, I suggest that maybe you should take your walk early today, try to get your heart rate up because let yesterday's walk you were kinda s you were kinda slow. Well, no. I have a wife for that, you know. I don't. Well, I don't. Aren't you the king of king of happiness? Some of us have to simply row our rowboat with only one oar. And it's not a lot of fun, Leo. Okay, okay. Let me have this. Anyway, but the the the basic the basics is that uh it gives me information in a way that I feel is useful and actionable and I can actually ask questions back such as that well I uh it might ask uh i I I based on your sleep last night you, didn't get a lot of deep you slept for six hours, you didn't deep sleep. Uh how are you feeling? Are you feeling kinda up or down right now? I was like, Well, actually I moved a little bit, you know okay, well great. Maybe you can get take a twenty minute nap around two or three o'clock. That might sound like a it sounds like it's very AI advice uh focused. It is and it's not again, it's not it's not gabbly and it's not like more information that I it it's basically saying instead of this stack of numbers, instead of these dials, it is basically helping me make sense of the data that it collec ted. It's helping me with health and fitness thing and basically awareness stuff that I never really got from previous watches. Also, it's 99 bucks, which is easy to afford. You can get, of course, a range of fashion uh but there's a subscription, right? Um it gives you most of it for free. That's that's the difference between this and the and the whoop band or whatever. The whoop band's like $300 and the band is free, and that's a every year. Um, the because I pay $20 a month to subscribe to Gemini Pro, the advanced fe atures are basically I get for free because I'm already subscribing for to that. Um but I'm very, very positive on it for now. Uh because again, I will say this is the first time I've had a fitness ban on my wrist every single day for a week on end. It's the first time I've been actually really kind of paying attention to what it's been saying and trying to get information from it. I'm also really keen to see uh when you set it up, it basically wants to interview have a conversation with you about what your goals are, why you're wearing this, what you're hoping to what your current s energy level is. And I literally I I didn't want any part of that because I was just too busy. So I s I literally just type, well, how about you just like watch my data for a few weeks and then come to some conclusions that we can talk later? And they said, Great, that sounds like a great plan. We'll just simply we'll simply play it by day by day. And I'm like, All right. This is this is this is something that I can actually work with. I don't know. I I've been reading reviews. You can't do that with a wife, by the way, Andy. I just want to mention that. All the things you can do with a wife you can't do with a fitness fan. You're you're still you had me there. Yeah. Um I will say I will say that I uh again, I'm obviously not someone who's doing fitness training. I'm not training for a half marathon, I'm not doing a million reps. Uh uh it will it will detect the kind of exercise you're doing and log it correctly, or you can actually go into the app and actually specify, oh, this is what I was doing during that time of day. Um, I've been reading other reviews and other people who are, again, in training, and they uh unsurprisingly are saying that the $99 band that doesn't have a display on it uh is not great at like helping you f uh get through these s kind of serious training goals. Yeah, I look at my watch for my heart rate, which zone I'm in, how long I've been going. The watch is giving you a read out all the time.. Yeah The other advantage the Apple Watch has is Apple Fitness Plus. Uh so you can have that on the screen and tie it to that. Again yeah uh with the it is through the it is through the app. You can like get instant read uh of a if if you you fe feelel like like your pulse is going wacky you can open up the app and it will show you what you're what you're stuck with and later on you can you can simply go through like each of the little tabs of the app to see like the data that it collected at the conclusions that it drew like throughout the day. Uh but I do I don't believe this is going to be a general appeal device. I think it's going to be for people like I said, I don't like having uh I don't like uh this the sol the solution to just the answer to distractions on uh the screens that I have in my life is not adding another screen on my wrist. Right. And I've pretty much defined that for myself. I I cannot get myself into I I I there it's a fun it's a it's a useful thing to have if I'm having a really, really busy travel day. Uh when I do really do need to have a notification on my wrist about a gate change or something like that. Day to day to day, however, it's just a nuisance. And again, eventually the battery will run down because I left it on the next to the keyboard. Also, because it's so big and so chonky, I took it off because I was riding for three or four hours and it was kind of irritating my wrists. So I put it, I put my Apple Watch or my Pixel Watch next to the keyboard, and then forgot I left it there, and then it's two days later and the battery's down. And then I just got out of the habit of wearing it. Whereas this, it's comfortable enough that I really haven't had a need to take it off. Uh and again, I probably won't absolutely need to charge it for another two or three days. Nice. Where will your review appear? Uh on a site that will be opening very, very soon. That might be a good time to to uh to uh take the the sheets off of it and yeah that that's a fore . Agree. I think it's ready to go now. I keep telling Andy that he's like, No no no not quite, not quite. He's a perfectionist, we like that. I wanted to say I'm just want to make sure this the this this the shelves are fully stocked before I invite the first visitors in. They're stocked. I I just wanted to say, you know, the Apple Watch 11 years ago was conceived of as an app platform because Apple sort of thought of everything as an app platform back then. And then they sort of found out that fitness was a major part of what it did. And, you know, I I do wonder sometimes, and I use the app platform, I I am listening to podcasts when I walk my dog with my Apple Watch. Like I I use it for things that are not fitness tracking But I I wonder if they made some mistakes that they continue to make in terms of focusing not enough on making it easy to see all of your fitness stuff on the Apple Watch that maybe watch OS needs a little bit of a a rethink there. And then the other part of it, yeah, I think I know that they are really excited by how many people love the Apple Watch, but I'm a little bit baffled that they don't think they' s another market of people who don't want an Apple Watch that it's overkill. Yeah. Where a simplified fitness band that sinks to your that is still an iPhone accessory, because the iPhone is the most important product here and sinks to Apple Health and does all the health things but is and has Apple Pay. And has uh and maybe I mean you have to you have to decide how you want to do it and does it have a little tiny screen like some of the Fitbits did or does it have no screen at all ? Um but I feel like there's a product there for somebody who doesn't want to wear a watch or has a watch and doesn't want to wear two watches or change their watch, but they just want a little add-on thing that does the monitoring and it continues their story. It continues the whole kind of Apple Health, y you know, you saved my life kind of stuff, but in a different format. And and I find it a little bit weird that 11 years later they haven't considered that like they haven't changed the Apple Watch or Bust approach to this feature because it feels to me like there's another product in there somewhere that goes on the wrist and does all of the nice stuff with Apple Health that you want, but isn't a full scale computer on your wrist, like the Apple Watches. No, I I I agree. And I would go one step further. I mean I would say either on your wrist or look at the smart ring market, right? Like I honestly feel like a ring would be a fantastic accessory here if you didn't cannibalize, you know, your potential Apple Watch sales because you say, oh, we already want one thing that's going on the wrist. Great. Okay. So have a smart ring that can be something that people can wear when they're sleeping, right ? Because no matter how much money I spend on an Apple Watch and I buy a new one every couple of years, um, I can't sleep in it because I don't, you know, a I have to switch the bands and whatnot, but because I have a smaller wrist and I'm not gonna buy the gigantic ultra, no matter what anybody tried, like, no, it looks terrible on my wrist. You know, like the battery life is such that it's like, you know, you'd have to take it off and charge it every day and whatnot. And so I even went through the process for a while where I had an older Apple Watch that I would sleep in and then I'd have like my my newer one that I would put on during the day. And that's annoying to try to kind of even have multiple watches, you know, synced with with your phone. And um but i there are these passive experiences to your point jason where people either have a watch they want or they don't want all those features but they still want to be in the ecosystem, you have other modalities you could have um that I think that would would really kind of reinforce things and and I don't know i feel like a ring would be a great device because in that case you know it it's not gonna have a screen on it it's not going to be one of those things that you're going to have to be more connected to your phone and so if you want to go to that next level where you want to be able to really, you know, see the the alerts in the moment or or have a be have an opportunity to go on a workout without your phone, then that's the device that that you buy. Um so yeah, I I agree with that. I it's it's odd that they've just gone in with the all we're doing is the watch and that's it. At the same time, I I do think that we have to all kind of concede that with the exception of like the very specialized smart watches, you know, from the garments of the world and whatnot, no one else has managed to make a dent in this this market. You know, the the Fitbit, you know, kind of world, it's great that like Google released this this new device. And it seems like from what you're saying, Andy, like it's really spectacular and that's awesome. But like a decade ago, we had a million fitness trackers and all those companies went bust and all those things went away. And nobody ever talks about the Pixel watches and nobody talks about the Samsung watches. And it's not that big of a deal. Um, but you know, the Apple Watch continues to sell very well. So they've done something right. But I I do agree that I feel like there's this additive area where they could, you know, get either a a a broader piece of the pie or something else if they looked at a different modality. So you're watching uh Mac Break Weekly. I'm glad we brought this up because this was uh the kind of the point of uh Mark German's uh power on newsletter on Sunday. We'll talk some more about that in a second. Mac Break Weekly with uh um Christina Warren, who wears the watch, but not a big one. Uh Andy Anako, who wears the band and the Casio. And the Casio. And Jason Snell, who's wearing his watch. Uh, you're having Ultra, as do I. Nope. Mine's just a regular series. Oh, just a re I'm the only one with the big one, huh? Regular series, yeah. Mine's bigger than all of yours. And uh and I love it. I really love it. Uh I talk to my AI through it. I press the action button, I can have a conversation with my AI. I uh the only thing I don't, and the reason I wear the aura, somebody's saying, Well, do you why do you wear the aura? Is because I don't want to wear it to bed. I don't want to sleep with a watch on. So the aura does my sleep tracking. Yeah, that's why I I would say that, you know, Apple make a if Apple makes a band, one of the use cases is gonna be that you wear the band all the time and you take the watch off at night and then you still get all of that sleep tracking stuff. I mean then you sell another another product to people put a sleep tracker in your mattress though. I mean there's all sorts of ways to they bought a company that did that and then they disconnected I do I do Andy, Christina, Jason, sorry, you're watching Mac break quickly. Some days self-care starts with nature-made gummy vitamins, a deep breath , and a little encouragement. Mom, I'm really nervous. Me too, honey. But we've got this. Repeat after me. I'm gonna have a good day. I'm going to have a good day. I choose joy no matter what comes my way. I bring joy wherever I go. Quality gummy vitamins from Nature Made, the number one pharmacist recommended vitamin and supplement brand. Based on a survey of pharmacists who recommend branded vitamins and supplements. Experience a membership that backs what you're building with American Express Business Platinum. Get two times membership rewards points per dollar on eligible purchases and key business categories, as well as on each eligible purchase of $5,000 or more, on up to $2 million in eligible purchases per calendar year. American Express Business Platinum. There's nothing like it. Terms apply. Learn more at AmericanExpress.com slash business dash platinum all right andy I I made you hold that thought no no you're right continue on uh I it's uh uh rings I wonder why Apple hasn't we haven't heard good rumors about like an Apple ring because it does seem like a natural for them to do style plus technology plus manufacturing at scale. Um the only but the I I do have a little bit of a problem with rings in that they are just does by their very nature, they have to be e waste in about two and a half to three years. It kinda bugs me. But because the the the you the way to a good thing. There isn't even like a third-party cowboy operation that can replace the batteries and that sort of thing once they they lose their power. And so they you have this uh you have this $300 thing that has to count cost $300 because it is such an exceptional piece of manufactur ing that can't be repaired because it's such an exceptional piece of manufacturing, but is going to be disposed of in two and a half to three years. That kind of buzzed me out. And I wonder if Apple, I wonder if part of the argument or excuse me, the the conversations that Apple is having is that how does that fit in with we we don't make plastic phones for a very good reason. Is are we compromised if we make such a difficult to recycle item as a ring? Would we have to actually make sure that as part of the marketing when we launch it, here's the machine that we have built that will tear it apart and separate into recyclable components so that at least it's not going to be landfilled. I I think I think you've thought of that more than than anyone uh involved with Apple has you. I mean like AirPods are also not in any way recyclable or or anything. Um Our sin that I was talking about as tech journalists is that we were we we talk about and recommend, or at least uh you know, in our uh effusive descriptions of these things, push these things in and we f I've I feel like I feel guilty . Because we can't recycle this stuff. The Pope agrees with you. The Pope agrees with me. Well no, this is yeah. The wanting to move forward but also coping with reality and thinking about the long term. And I think you see it in places. An example I always like to bring up is the iPhone, where if you look at the repairability, it started out not being particularly repairable, got worse, and then has gotten a lot better. And it's because at some point to make cutting edge technology, which is what people want, you end up doing things like gluing stuff in and things that you wouldn't normally do, but it's like because people want it smaller. They want it lighter. They want the and so you've got reasons for it. I think the question is, do you realize that in the long run that is a compromise and you need to step back from it and you need to do, you need to change your, your uh ways over time, or do you just not care about it? And I think that goes for a lot of categories where if you're on the cutting edge, there's going to be more disposability, uh, but that the goal is not dispos ability. The goal is to get to a place where you can be more sustainable while not giving up the thing that happens when you're out on the cutting edge. Because I think I do think that that's kind of the the the give and take. If you look at what Apple does now with a lot of their products is they are, you know, they have built those machines to tear all of the metals out of there. And they are building more and more of the things in their products out of material extracted, you know, they're recycled metals and recycled materials and a lot of that stuff is recycled from Apple devices that have been that have been uh captured and they've picked it all apart. And they're doing more of that. But but uh at the same time , you know, I I I think if you said you can't make AirPods unless they are, you know, that the batteries in them are replaceable or something like that, I don't think they would have made AirPods. And that's so that's the challenge. I think at at the uh at the uh at the other end though, um a company of the scale of Apple or Samsung or any of these other huge, huge, huge manufacturing concerns, there is an argument that they can do anything that they think is important for them to achieve. And yeah, the iPhone bec has become incrementally more repair more rep repairable, or uh you might more accurately less impossible to repair uh over the past two or three cycles. But a lot of that has become again r once again response to EU regulation saying that this battery has to you don't have to have a replaceable battery, but it has to be basic conceivable that this is this battery can be replaced during the useful life of the device. And that's the reason why we suddenly have an iPhone where you literally do not have to excavate from the screen all the way to the back of the device before you can get at this uh consumable uh uh uh uh object. So oftentimes it is uh government uh uh consumers and and corporations kind of interlocking their own power and their own expressions of what is important for us to make things happen. Because I again I I would love conceivably a uh uh God, my favorite laptop uh in the world that if it's not uh if it's not a MacBook is the framework laptop just the idea of the this company saying okay well all these manufacturers including Apple saying that oh look if we may if we believe me if we built an app uh a laptop that any user could upgrade re,place, repair using just simple tools, you wouldn't wanna use it. It would be so big and it would be ungainly. Like, well, no, here's basically a MacBook that you do are paying a price premium, but everything is upgradable and replaceable again using, only one tool, which one or two tools which we include inside the box. These things are possible if you think this is important. Uh, the shift is that uh we consumers got something that was uh maybe more valuable than easy repairability or easy swappable batteries. And uh they made choices that are uh arguably as important for the environment as easy repairability. What they did was they make a foam that is sealed up so tight that it's probably going to live for five or six years. It's not going to die because you got caught in a rainstorm. It's probably going to survive if you fell into a pool and you forgot you threw it it in's your pocket, but you jumped out of the way. All this because it's glued up so tightly it means that it's seal sealed against dust and against water and it's not going to be replaced by after an accident in two or three years. It's a complicated thing, but the thing is sometimes these companies need to be pushed and that,'s why consumers need to say, here's what we want. And sometimes government governments have to say, we don't care if there's no market for this. We don't care if you're saying it's impractical. We're saying that it is very, very important that you make machines with replaceable batteries. So you can either continue what you're doing and not sell in the EU, or you can figure it out with your four and a half trillion dollars. You're it's up to you. Yep. I don't I don't disagree. I I I think it's just interesting uh on how you everybody's gonna have some different measurements there, but yeah, it is a push and pull. And I I just I was more saying I think even it within the company there is a push and pull where they make even if people are in ideally, you've got a culture that is inclined to m have it be more repairable and more recyclable. Um that that you know that culture can also be affected by the outside world, but that there are times when you compromise on it and there are times that you don't. And I what what I I've seen is that Apple and making new product is not going to make it uh what they perceive of as worse, uh, or not be able to ship it based on something like uh battery replacement, but they also have this culture of clearly, and I think to Andy's point, it's also a business strategy point, which is it's a lot better if they use recycled materials than if they have to go to some country that has those materials, which is increasingly fraught. So it's it's a little bit of both. But that's that's look, we to say it on this podcast all the time, which is Apple is so huge and their scale is so huge now that everything they do has an enormous impact. And it's a global impact. And every little teeny deviation decision about what component they use or what percentage of recycled material they can put into a product has huge uh ramifications. So they might otherwise not go. It's it's I mean, again, I'm this is why they pay the executives the big bucks. Yeah. Well, we get a lot of mileage out of the watch discussion. I'm very happy and proud. Let me see what else I can drag up to keep us going for another couple of hours here. Uh, you're watching very quickly. The traditional uh dry spell before WWDC. We will cover WWDC's keynote January, uh June 8th. I'm sorry, June 8th, uh 10 a.m. Pacific. Micah Sargent and I will uh do that on a Tuesday. Uh and then immediately following it'll be Mac Break weekly. I do have to tell you though that the coverage of uh keynotes now is exclusively inside the club, and the reason for that is just simply that Apple will take us down if we put it on YouTube and we just don't want any more strikes on our YouTube account. It's too important to us. So uh if you're not a member of the club you won't be able to follow our keynote coverage. We did this last week with the Google IO keynote. We will be doing it in two weeks with the WWDC keynote. Most of the stuff we do in the club is public, but this will not be. So I just want to let you know. And if you're not a member of the club and you do want to watch our coverage, twit.tv slash club twit and of course MacBreak Weekly will be available to all on Sundry and uh that will um do our analysis. We'll have to wait a couple of weeks for Jason Snell's opinion on the whole tomorrow morning is knocking. Stock your fridge now. How about a creamy mocha frappuccino drink? Or a sweet vanilla? Smooth caramel maybe. Or a white chocolate mocha. Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks Frapuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries. I'm very excited about this. I think WWDC is gonna be the debut of the new Siri. I'm really curious given what Google announced at Google I.O. and we talked about this last week, uh, how that's gonna change what Apple uh announces uh in uh a week from uh Monday. It's a the it's uh I honest to God, I've I've rarely been more excited about uh WWDC keynote and it's not not like last year where it was make the popcorn and watch them watch them grovel and apologize. It was no, this is legitimately a great year of opportunity. Uh I'm really, really keen to see what they do with Xcode. Because some of the most exciting stuff came out of that come out of came out of Google I.O. last week was simply pivoting a lot of their developer tools from hey, we've got this IDE that you can do sort of agentic coding and a little bit of vibe c oding with two, no, we are basically making that a core thing because we recognize that this is a core competency that the software engineering industry is going towards. I'm interested to see if some of the newest and l least reported AI features that debut at WWWC is simply Xcode is now a lot easier to manage because we have an agent or we have an AI that's helping you through it. Uh, I don't think it'll be as ambitious as what Google was trying But it's going to be interesting to see if for one thing, uh if uh if uh uh Swift programming uh Swift UI apps become a lot more accessible, where it's no it',s no , it's not going to be as easy as simply vibe coding a Python script, but maybe it'll be as uh uh as difficult as doing uh a good Apple script as opposed to doing a full X code project. I know to see Apple do do something that Google did last week, which is make it make it somehow an agen tic Siri . Um Christina, do you use uh agents uh in in your day to give help me out. How would I characterize an agentics series versus Siri versus what we have today? Well I mean I think you like I mean, I think that you would have a Siri who would be set to either be set up for a specific task, like maybe you have a health Siri who could be similar to, you know, kind of like with the thing that's built into to Andy's Fitbit where I can talk to it and say, hey, I'm wanna talk to Siri right now. Like I I think the way I I would kind of foresee this working would be that you wouldn't go into different modes, but Siri would be able to ascertain which agent am I speaking to. Say, okay, I'm talking about my health data right now. And so it's going to say, Hey, yeah, that this is um these are what your latest stats are and this is what you need to do if you want to close your circles today. And um, you know, this is like I've noticed like your your your your sleep patterns um going up. Maybe try going to bed at, you know, this time tonight or or whatnot. Um versus you know uh right now I think Siria is just kind of uh it's it's theoretically task based but it's not really it's just kind of more of a general, you know, either set an alarm or or you know look up this thing for me or send this test. It doesn't have memory. It doesn't have memory. It doesn't have memory. And I think that would be the biggest thing that would be great about kind of an agentic Siri would be if it has a memory of the previous conversations you've had, the previous things you've asked about. That's what personalizes it, right? Yeah, I mean I think so. I mean that that's what would make it stand out, right? Like if it knows okay, every single day, you know, Christina is setting an alarm for a certain period of time because you know it it it's 6 45 a.m even though she actually you know wakes up at 7 15 a.m or or whatever the case may be, you know, if it's automatically gonna go ahead and and res et that alarm for me, you know, just just knowing, okay, hey, do you want me to set your alarms for tomorrow? Uh it's a challenge for Apple though, isn't it? Because memory implies some sort of privacy invasion. Like it um, oh I know you, Christina, you wake up at seven fifteen. Yes. Some people would say, Well, I I don't want Apple to know that much about it. But they just say it's on device and then Apple never sees it, it's encrypted and might maybe it syncs with i with iCloud, maybe it doesn't even do that. I think that's the same thing. So there are ways for them to dodge that privacy bullet. And and you know, one of the things that at least we've been thinking for the last two years as a core of Apple Strategy here is App Intense, the idea that the every app is going to be able to kind of like break up its individual features and have them accessible via shortcuts, but also presumably via Siri. And that is how you get to a gen tech features in Siri, right? And the question is, does that happen now or is the is the state of the art as is rumored uh not necessarily that's state of the art but one of the features is like build a a shortcut with uh you know with text basically well you're not that far from saying ask Siri to do a task hat and have Siri be able to understand all of the app intents that are available to it and be able to perform that task and potentially even remember to do that task, automate that task or whatever. I'm not sure they're going to get all the way there, but I think app intent suggests that Apple has actually been thinking about thing doing things that are more agentic for a while. Typical for Apple doing it through the lens of sort of app functionality. But you know, you you would get there if you went to the phone tense kind of maps nicely to uh what uh agentic uh uh harnesses call skills. And and I also notice that uh a lot of the things that I have my agent doing over and over again b have actually become services uh on my Linux box. But Apple has launched D it could ha it could have um s so what ends up happening is that the agent isn't always run ning periodically these services run? Like, oh, it's 7 o'clock, it's time to open the curtains and and shake the bed so that Christina gets up for her 8 o'clock meeting. Um, but that could run not continuously but as a service. Yeah. Apple can do that now, right? I mean I well. Siri can't. Siri can't. I mean yeah, you wouldn't you would need to have it running some sort of a skill, like you said, some sort of kind of cron job self-running thing. Right. It's a sort of cron job, essentially. Right. And and and you would need to have that running someplace. Could it run in their cloud? Yeah, of course it could, right? And and and your your phone or your laptop or anything else would just be the client for that. Um I think uh they have not done that, but there's there's nothing that would stop them from being able to do that. Um uh uh you know what they what they would charge for it and what they would make available would be up to them. But yeah, there there'd be zero reason why you couldn't do something like that now. They just haven't. And when we talk about the privacy questions, I mean I think that that's a a fairly easy one for them to kind of get around and that this is opt-in. It's not like you have to use these things , right? So if you're uncomfortable with, you know, um uh Apple or anybody else having this information about you, then don't use these these tools. It's not as to run entirely locally. The models don't, because they're frontier models. In fact, I've been using deep seek lately because it's really cheap. It's so cheap. I was gonna say they just cut the pricing permanently. Bucks for ChatGPT. So deep seek is running. So I guess China is getting the prompts, but all the stuff that's running is running like all the skills, everything, all the memory, it all lives locally on a machine locally. So I guess Apple could do it in a kind of local first. Yeah. But this see the this is why um the idea of privacy there's good enough privacy and then there's Apple's policy of no no private no level of privacy is good enough. We want to give our users the most privacy that we can possibly give them while not compromising on features. And that is something that uh most people want uh as an abstract concept. If you say, hey, the they've got this uh Google announced this uh this agentic thing uh but it doesn't run exclusively locally on your phone, it actually operates uh in their own cloud. And that's when people will raise the red banner and say, oh God, no, no, no, no. I'm not gonna entrust uh Google servers to like all this information about but my workflow and my email inbox. But if you say, okay, but what if you were able to simply in English say, I want you to keep an eye on my mailbox . And every time I get if I get emails from these two people uh in within the 20 minutes of each other, I want you to pull the following series of reports, summarize it, send me a link to it so I can verify what you've come done on my watch. Uh and then I'll when I click a verify button, it means that these two people who were coming in to ask me for a report got the timely report that moment just by my touching a button on my watch. And it can do that for you whether you've got a Mac Mini running 24-7 at home or not, because it's running an instance in a virtual server and it's always running 24-7. You don't have to do anything after you've asked made this request , it will simply run at infinitum so long as you keep paying 20 bucks a month uh for for uh for Gemini Pro. I worry, I worry about it. That's when people will say, I'm willing to I'm willing to make an open-eyed, well-informed deal of I'm willing to give up maximum privacy, if that means that I can be out walking my dog and suddenly I simply have to tap a button on my watch to get this done and make sure that my co-workers get the information they want immediately instead of 20 minutes from now that is to me worth the trade-off in privacy. So that's what I that's what I've built by by hand though. And I think that that that is hugely I'm sure Christina you're doing something similar. Yeah. I think that would be hugely valuable for the vast majority of iPhone users who don't know how or ha or have the desire to do that by hand. And and Sparks is coming to uh the Gemini app on iOS, I think . Spark is their agent. Yeah. That's kind of their their version of Open Claw, basically. Right. Yeah. I think in a way, uh Google could just kind of bypass Apple. It just ends up on your phone and then you don't have to use Apple at all. There is a the the proof is going to be in the pudding. No, uh obviously the fun part of these developer keynotes is that they expla uh Google and Apple and Microsoft and everyone they explain what's possible and what they've got planned. Exactly. It's gonna take it's gonna take month to find out how much of this delivers. But you can't there's so they put together Google put together such a great presentation and story about how they see what what Gemini 3.5 is capable of doing and all of the other uh things that they've added to it that made me think that in some circumstances what they've got going could be a challenge to part of the app store because the idea of just just on the phone being able to say create me a widget that does this function and you don't just simply get like oh it'll a Python script that looks something up from a JSON table and then puts markdown text for uh inside a inside of viewport. It's like, no, it will actually create a user, uh, a modern looking user interface, a very modern looking widget that does all the networking for you, that does all the validation for you. And now is a very, very useful thing that can live on your home screen that you might have not found on the app store. And if you found it, it might be like a dollar fifty a month, but you've got something that is specific to your needs and you have no need to go looking on the app store for this sort of thing. Now it's not it's not a broad thing where suddenly you don't need an app store at all, but this is the little this is the first the first sign of the T-Rex testing the testing the electric fence and seeing oh there's a gap right there uh this is um there's there's there's a there's a hole right there that maybe could be exploited later on or is maybe the first sign of something that could be much, much bigger in two or three years. Uh I don't think that the app store is under real threat, but I this is another instance of a certain type of use case that I would normally go to the app store to find a solution now gets me thinking perhaps I should just see if this tool can create a widget for me, or this one can call the uh can create a shortcut for me automatically, or this one can call can create uh a Linux desktop app uh based on Python with a modern U I for me. That was it can't be done with all types of apps, but this is the first year in which that is actually not an insane way to go about finding an app to solve a problem for you now. I think there's something interesting going on. Unfortunately, Christina won't be here next week because of Microsoft Bill, but we are going to take advantage of that, getting Shelly Brisbane on to talk about these new accessibility features Apple revealed. And I think some are saying that what these really are are previews of features that will be available through Apple Intelligence to all of us at some point. So this is the Apple uh press release from May 19th. With Apple Intelligence, detailed descriptions and natural language navigation are coming to features such as voiceover, magnifier, voice control, and accessibility reader. They're they're pitching these as accessibility features. But if you have AirPods with a camera, if you have an iPhone, if you have an i Apple Watch, many of these features could reasonably be applied to Apple intelligence generally, right? Is this a preview of what we might expect? Aaron Ross Powell There's a long history of accessibility features making their way. For instance, if if you if you use a mouse uh or trackpad on your iPad, you are using essentially what was use originally an accessible accessibility feature for for iOS and i iPad OS. And yeah, there's a lot of again, I'm looking forward to talking to Shelly about it because I'm not qualified to really f it it all looks very, very impressive, the the the Apple Newsroom piece that they posted last week, but I don't know what the true meaning of it is. Uh I do recognize features that like for instance live captions on any audio coming through the iPhone . Um, this came out for uh the Pixel like uh two or three years ago. And obvious it's obviously a really good accessibility feature, meaning that you don't have to count on if they're not captions burned in on whatever media that you're watching, there will be an AI approximation that's at least better than nothing, hopefully. But I use that all the time for uh for for like for live streams where I do uh the audio the audio is not really that good uh in uh in the place where I'm listening to it, but I want to read something while I'm watching it, I just keep activating that time and time again. These are features that are that affect the usability across the board, not just for uh people who uh who uh benefit from the uh specifically from accessibility features. Voice control gets natural language. So that's really interesting. Of course voice control is how uh people uh control the screen when they can't use touch or a mouse. Um but having that natural language control of the screen, the iPhone and the iP ad can easily be extended to natural language Siri. Keep in mind, I mean, what Andy said is 100% true that a lot of features begin as accessibility features. One of the great things about accessibility, and addition the fact that you'll if you don't use accessibility features now, you probably will at some point in your life, is that some of them really are like trying to solve a uh specific issue involving accessibility, but there's a broader issue there and it ends up being something that reaches everybody in the user base. But the other part about announcing these features in advance is that sometimes they tip their hand a little bit and you look and you say, oh, well natural language access may suggest something about natural language access to other parts of the operating system. And you know, Apple's not going to give too much away, but they will sometimes tip their hand a little bit about what might be in the main OS release. Because remember, this is all pre-announced of what's going to be in the OS is this fall. Um and that's what I thought of, you know, the moment that I heard the words natural language control, I was like, this could be broader, couldn't you? And it can be very interesting. And last year the the machine language group at Apple published a couple of papers about uh uh uh an AI model that can look at the user interface of uh a phone screen and figure out what the what the controls are and what the what the interface is. And that's a again, seems like a very dry subject , but that A is good for again we if you're trying to create an accessibility feature so that someone can simply describe what they're looking at and say, yeah, click the okay button or uh cli create an create an email and then send it uh with that with that kind of verbiage. But it also means that if you have an app that or a website that is not wired up uh for for app intents, for instance, it can still figure out how to send a message through a messaging app. It can still figure out how to operate a fitness app. Uh it basically is the gateway to making any surface on your iPhone or iPad or Mac into an agent oper able uh resource. Accessibility reader adapts even more. This is all from the quote accessibility press release. Accessibility reader is a customized reading experience for users with a wide range of disabilities from dyslexia, low vision. And with Appleelli Ingentce , the reading experience is more accessible than ever. Accessibility Reader works on more complex source material, like scientific articles, handling text with multiple columns, images, and tables, on-demand summaries, provide readers the option to get an over view of the article, built-in translation . Uh it can generate subtitles for video, all of this, of course, uh immediately applicable to accessibility, but uh maybe to all of us. And I really am intrigued by do you think they'll uh talk about airpods with cameras uh on the eighth? No. No. No. No, if that's a thing, that that that that's a September announcement, I think. I should have done that in harmony. No,, no no, no . No. You always announcements that are where you have suspicion, like, well, I mean, it's nice that this is a feature that you can do on your iPhone camera. Right. But it would and then you think it would be better if you that was on a camera that was always looking everywhere around you. And like that, that stuff does happen sometimes. But they're not that you know they don't they very rarely will pin a hardware announc ement on I if there's a hard hardware announcement at WWDC at all, they usually try to make it sort of plausibly developer related, which is why I think like if we have any chance of any hardware, and I don't think we do, it would probably be like the Mac Studio. But given the chip shortages now, I think that's less likely that we would see something like Mac Mini or Mac Studio being announced. Because they don't need to do hardware announcements to WWDC. They just don't know Yeah. That's what I mean, but this will be uh there there's two parts to WWDC. Obviously the keynote gets the most scrutiny. The developer keynote gets the second most scrutiny . And then there are like a hundred specific developer videos the rest of the week. And you're it'll be two weeks later. You finally got around to something with this totally nondescript title that seems so boring. And that's the reason why you waited to the very last uh group of views to see it. And then he says, and so like uh if you were to have like a holographic display on a fitness watch, this would be how you would wire up what wait wait back ten, back ten, back ten. What did he say? All the graphic what if you had an app on an iOS device, let's say an iPad, and you resized it to be wider. You should probably if you're an iPhone developer, you should probably do that. And everybody's like, okay, holding iPhone. Got it. But they won't say that. That's that is so we have to read between the lines as we uh as we listen. Absolutely. The first time they went to um flexible size classes, instead of every iPhone app being hard coded pixel perfect, they spent two years actually saying, It's not always gonna be this way. You ' bed really wise if you did this this way . I actually wonder if they might do something like offer a almost like a Potemkin feature like uh wide iPhone app mode on the iPad. Yeah. Where it's like, you know, we're going to add this nice new feature where you can run an iPhone app and it have it be resizable on the iPad. And by default, what it's going to do is it's going to, if you're in landscape, it's going to go to double wide. And you uh yeah, I like that double wide mode. And everybody else would be like, or if you have a folding iPhone that unfolds, I see. But um, you know, you could do that. You could say, Well, no, this is really just I mean, 'cause first off, the iPhone or iPhone apps on the iPad still kinda suck and they should do a better job there. But but this would be a great way to lean into iPhone app developers and say, No, really, really your apps need to to be able expand and you'll get this benefit on the iPad and anything else we release. Great article uh from uh a website I'm not familiar with called Gadget Hacks. Uh iOS 27 AI voice control , what it tells us about the Siri revamp. Uh, and it talks about the notion that, well, what this tells you is that Siri can read the screen, can see the screen, knows what's happening on the screen. And that is a very key AI capability for a lot of things. There's also this issue or capability of Siri as a router. Routing requests to external models when Apple's own falls short. And that's something uh I think a lot of people are playing with the idea that you might have multiple models. You might have Siri on device. I mean, Apple's already doing this, right? And then you might have Gemini or OpenAI available to you. Sure. Uh right now that's in the chat interface, but that could go beyond simple chat. No, the way Apple has their infrastructure. They're not doing this now , but you could absolutely have a cascade of start on device and have a model on device that quickly determines if it can be done on device. And if it can't, send it to private cloud compute, right? Like that there there's a whole space there to have a an efficient kind of like cascade of models and have it the right apply the right model. And, you know, who knows, maybe that's even like Apple's private cloud computer, maybe it goes to Google's private cloud for a more Gemini kind of task, and they can make that seem fairly seamless. And that's a smart way to do it for sure. says watch closely on the eighth whether Apple identifies the model powering voice control, whether it confirms that model is the same architecture going into the new Siri. Third, whether on screen awareness ships at IOS twenty seven launcher gets staged across subsequent updates worth how broadly App Intense is expanded. We talked about that a little bit earlier. Yeah. Think about on-screen awareness is like on-screen awareness means you don't need app developers to do all that extra work. This is a thing that like Mac users, if you've never used Keyboard Maestro, I'm just gonna say this is not my pick of the week because I've done it before, but like keyboard maestro is incredible, or if you've used computer use mode in Claude or anything like that. Because what it means is if if you can't script something, if you can't use shortcuts to do something , you can literally say, open this app and just click this button. Or even like if you see this thing on screen, click this button. If you don't, click the tab and then click the button and it'll just do it. And that it's using accessibility features that are built into the OS, that you can do this sort of thing. And it's yes, it is the last resort, but it's amazing. And like once once the the LLM can or or whatever assistant you've got wants to like if it can see what's on your screen, then it doesn't matter if that app doesn't support whatever. Like if if it can if it if can know or you can tell it, I want you to tap on this and then tap on that and then share it and put it on the clipboard and then we'll take it from there or whatever. That's a I mean it's a big deal because while you would want it to be a more integrated approach using App Intense or something like that, wow, it is really amazing to for the app to see the context. There's a there's a utility right now and the name escapes me, I'll look it up. Um, that is a an auto complet er for Mac that just came out a couple weeks ago. And one of its features is it uses accessibility to look at your screen. But that means that if like you're writing an email about something that's on a web page, it also knows that that web page is open and it knows all the wording on the webpage. And so as you type, if you're typing things that are on the webpage, it will suggest those as autocompletes because it knows what that text is. Like it really, yeah, the more your system knows what you're seeing, the more powerful it can be. So I love it. More of it, please. Well, so this all makes it uh very exciting. Do you think um Christina , Apple will have what it takes to become a peer with the existing agentic solutions from anthropic and open AI. I mean uh and Spark, of course, from from Google . Do you think that they will go that far or are they going to take smaller baby steps? Aaron Powell I think it depends on what they want to do. And and I and I think it depends on, you know, kind of so far, all of their experiments and and kind of entreats into AI have been more limited or have not worked super well if if we go back on the the last two years. So I don't expect them to come out this year and be going head to head on the highest end kind of features and capabilities that the frontier labs have. A because they don't have their own frontier model. They're obviously paying for someone else's, um, although they might be doing a lot of, you know, um like um uh training and and and and other sorts of customization data to really make it refined and and do things that will make it very different from a a stock Gemini model. But B I think that it 's they have to kind of prove themselves. And so this is not the moment where I don't want to see Apple come out and bite off more than they can chew when the last time they did that it was a disaster for everyone involved. I really want to have a good Siri and to have them kind of meet us where the table stake things are. And I don't necessarily know if I need them to do the full-on agentic uh stuff that you're seeing from the other frontier labs. Um I also don't know, I mean the thing is is that because like people like you and I, Leo, like we're so embedded in the developer tooling space and all the changes that are happening in that area that for us, some of the stuff that we'll see come out on the consumer end will be like, oh, okay, but that's so however many months ago or however many years ago. It's so last January. Right, right. Whereas I think we have to kind of remind ourselves that, you know, Apple is like, granted, they they do make developer tools and people use their products to to build many of the things that we have, but like they're still kind of a a general consumer company. So they don't have to be as cutting edge on all those other things. It just has to work really, really well when it does come out. So kind of reminds me of the early days of uh MP three players. The first MP three players were big and clunky and hard to use and had terrible user interfaces. Uh Apple was able to this is what Apple's that's what they're faces. Thimb3 play is a great example. I mean they were expensive. They didn't work for a lot of reasons. It wasn't just the clunkiness and the, you know, the interface. It was that to get a card, you know, which is what people were using at the time, to get an hour's worth of music, it was a hundred dollars to get uh, you know, an an SD card or a compact flashcard for sixty-four megabytes or something. And there wasn't, you know a great software solution to it and so you know first they they have iTunes you know which they they bought from someone else and kind of rebadged and then they were able to kind of you know build in a way of okay we'll make it very easy to sync to our device. But beyond that, they were the smart ones who said, no, rather than you know, messing with people having to put removable cards in, we're just gonna give you a ton of storage and you're not gonna think about it. Uh and and that completely changed what everyone else was doing. Um I was in high school at the time and I had a a mini disc player um and and I had MP3s that I stored on un mini disc because that was a hack to do it less expensively. But when the iPod came out it was like, no, who's who's gonna be doing anything other than then what the iPod does. So I think that they have the benefit to your point of doing that. And and I also just don't think I mean I think that they will be doing some agency stuff, but at it doesn't they don't need to own it end to end. As long as you can have those agentic experiences within the Apple ecosystem, I think for now that's enough. Now if we're going to be talking a couple years from now, maybe that changes. But I think that that all they need to do now is still make sure that the platform where you know everybody 's using their devices, which really is is iPhone, is still a good place to be able to run those agen tic experiences from others. What will be interesting, I think, is when we talk about things like you know, OpenClaw and Gemini Spark and these other types of kind of always-on things. It will be interesting to see if they add anything to iMessage to make that easier in terms of treating that like okay, hey, maybe here's a protocol or developer tool where you could use this to have a a a completely you know Apple federated way of communicating with and securely communicating with your devices. That I would love to see that telegram right now what are you using yeah I mean I'm kind of using a mix of things and like I have blue bubbles installed and because I have enough devices that I could do that but like yeah I'm using Telegram because that's it works everywhere that it works everywhere and and and I don't need to worry about it. But I would love and and this wouldn't even require them opening, you know, iTunes up, although I would love that. But if they had a federated way of saying, okay, this is like a, you know, a a a bot that we're verifying that we're saying has a direct connection with you know your machine and that that you can create like that you know kind of like secure interface between the two, like that would be fantastic. I would love to see something like that. I use a um on my watch, I use a telegram. The nice about thing Telegram is an open standard. So uh there's a there's an app on my watch called Pigeon that is kind of a better telegram, and that I can use to talk to my agent, dictate to my agent. Um, even when I was in Hawaii, I was able to talk to my agent through my watch. That that's pretty cool. And I think Apple, you because they have messages, they really they could make that a lot better. I don't I didn't do the blue bubbles thing because it's just just clunky. It's clunky and it's not like the most ideal thing. A third party . Exactly. you might not always be in a situation where you can always access iMessage for one reason or another. And so again, like that would be a really great thing if they open up APIs for developers to be able to say, okay, we're going to recognize that this activity that's taking place is with a bot on your account that you've federated and that you've verified and have, you know, authorized and approved, um, versus having to have people use, you know, third-party um chat software which might not be secure and and might, you know, potentially open up other uh problems. So uh you said you wanted your Steve Jobs uh American innovation coin. We're all very jealous of Scooter X and our club Twit. He says my Steve Jobs $1 American Innovation Coins arrived. The roll I received has the front of the coin facing out at both ends. So you can't see the Steve Jobs picture on it. The mint says the direction of the coins in each roll is random and I'm guessing that you don't want to open that uh roll because that will reduce the value. I don't know. Uh I would want to see what's on the other side. I don't know. I ordered mine. Did you? I bought a roll. I look I know enough people that I'm gonna give those out. That's gonna be awesome. It's gonna be a big Oh that'd be a good thing. Yeah. You got t how many like a challenge coin. I don't know what how many are in a roll, whatever. That was that was my limit. I wasn't gonna buy like a sack or whatever they sell. I thought I thought a roll. There'll be enough there for me to keep one and I'll give you a little bit. That's a great challenge coin friends. Right? Yeah, but don't take them to uh WWDC. You'll you'll be double be. I'll set off the alarms, right? Don't put them in a sock and whirl it over your head either. That'd be a bad thing. Christina did not order them. So not well I I I I didn't uh we they were sold out and I didn't bother to put in the you know O Burton . What you have to do 'cause I got an alert on email the next morning and it was they were already gone and then I said text me and then I I it was early in the morning and I woke up and I'm like reading things and I get a text that says they're available now and I It's the mint. Make more. Well they did make I don't know what's going on like with their shipping and and what they've got and all that, but I did manage to get some. So they're careful. The technology. They have the technology. They they can do it. There's like limited to ninety six hundred. I'm like d give us more. I I'm I'm now like they're more valuable the fewer that you make, right? I who cares? Come on. I'm the the these are these are collector coins. I'm like now I'm I'm looking at eBay and there is someone who's selling one for three dollars and thirty cents or best offer. I might pay I'm I might pay three dollars and thirty cents. That's fine. That's fine. That's fine. That that's like that's like squished penny money you have to do. No, I I my whole thing is I'm just not gonna I like and I and I'm saying this to hold myself accountable, let's be very clear on that. I don't wanna spend an exorbitant amount of money for stupid dollar coins for like the novelty of it right now. Because they're not face value, right? They're they're right. Yeah. I mean it's a dollar. Right. You can put it in a you can put it for a dollar Yeah. Well yeah, but you'll never see it in a vending machine. So the one that's like you're going to scooter X. The uh the twenty-five coin roll, which is the face value is twenty five bucks, costs sixty-one dollars Exactly. So that's yeah, and I love the challenge coin idea. Now I have to get some. I was gonna say, like I I I I would spend like the four time multiple, right? Like that's fine, but I don't want to spend like like the fifty time multiple. Like I'm not doing that. And that's they have a subscribe. You can subscribe and then you'll get them no so remember how they they have to they have to defeat that's that that really really wonderful like trick that they that uh happened about what was it fifteen or twenty years ago where they used to sell coin uh cunning money at face value and you could charge it. So there are people who are like basically I'm gonna buy a hundred dollars, I got a thousand dollars worth of worth of dollar dollar bills, basically get a thousand dollars worth of points on my card, and then basically I've basically just traded a thousand dollars for a thousand dollars cash and now I have a thousand dollars for the points, but I still have the money to spend. So I that's I I like to think that there's probably a a a a profit margin in involved there, but it closes off a very nice little loophole. I guess it ass you subcribe you'd you'd get each state in succession because I almost almost made an order and then I realized no no that's the Minnesota one that commemorates mobile refrigerant refrigeration. I don't really want that one. So uh you yeah, I might have to find the Steve Jobs uh American Innovation They they still gotta compete against like the commemorative like uh uh Apollo eleven lunar landing Eisenhower solution. Ooh. Ooh, look at that. That's cool. That one you've been used. Yeah, well that's I've my it's n uh my grandparents there's a story behind it. My grandparents used to go to uh Las Vegas like every few years and this is how cool they were as for for for Italian for an Italian immigrant and the child of an Italian immigr ant. We we went to the house for Sunday dinner, like all of all my my family and the my cousins, whatever, and the the long, long table was set with the second table for all the children. And at some point in the dinner, like who said, everybody, like lift up your plates. And they my my grandmother had put like an Eisenhower, like the Apollo like silver dollar underneath every single plate. And so it's like, oh so I keep this in this is like that is that's kind of a nice that's more than just a silver dollar, that's a memory. That's really cool. Yeah. Yeah. And also it's a nice, I mean God, this is this is this is why they had so much trouble like getting people to under to get get behind these like tiny, tiny new like dollar coins because these things used to be like you could put someone's eye out with this thing so big. So I just put a little I gave it my phone number and I said, Text me if there are any more of those mobile refrigeration coins. No, wait a minute. No . Text me if there are any more of those Steve Jobs uh coins. Um Utah, birthplace of twine . I guess it's a annual uh release. So California is in that annual release, but uh so is Minnesota, so is uh Arkansas , uh Iowa. You wanna you want to make sure you get the right state, I guess is what I'm what I'm saying. California it is a cool coin. But it's also a cool looking coin. They're not they're not all is it golden? It's it's clad uh like all it's not actual solid. Like all dollar no no, like all s uh like all dollar coins are . It's like the Trump phone. It's a a thin veneer on top of a uh cheap zinc stamp. Was anybody else surprised that that thing had five hundred twelve gigs of storage? Like that's okay for five hundred bucks. That's not a bad thing. I should point out it's the same phone that T Mobile gives you for free if you sign up. But it's not gold. That's the difference. Yeah, but that's but it's one of those like like Jejusune phones that puts the correct number of stripes on the American flag. This eleven stripes is can you believe that? Special. Can you freaking believe that? Yeah. They didn't even get the flag correct. Of course the question is, which of the two colonies did they specifically exclude? You know that there were the blue colonies, right? Mm-hmm. Or I guess in those days they were what are they, Tories or Whigs? That was the the district attorney that uh that got the felony conviction Letitia James immediately removed from the American flag. Uh I enough of that. Let's talk about the Vision Pro . Oh, let's What do you see? What do you know? It's time to talk to Vision Pro. Yes, from America's number one Vision Pro Podcast, it's time for the Vision Pro segment. It is. I only have one story, but maybe Andy has found more. Real Marie you say Real . Real Madrid. Madrid. Yep. You saw it? The documentary is out. I watched it. Yeah, it came out Friday. Is it good? The weight of greatness. Okay. Yeah, I mean The Weight of the Vision Pro. It is the ponderous uh like is it a sports doc with the music where they've got some really great sports footage and then a lot of it is like uplifting music as athletes say platitudes while you see them practicing or walking grimly into the stadium. Yes. Because all of these are like that. But I will say this the big highlight of this, I'm gonna be Alex here for a minute. Is they say that they shot this with more than 30 black magic sinning immersive cameras, and it shows. And that this is the difference between the immersive stuff that is being made now and the immersive stuff that was being made when the Vision Pro first came out. And you could see the evolution here is blackmagic, which uh we've talked about before. I think they did not believe there was much of a market for immersive cameras and they were very surprised by the amount of market and and it's been hard to get them. Um they have produced a bunch of them now and this movie so many of those early immersive movies you, could feel that they only had one or two cameras. So like they could capture an event, but they could really only capture it from one angle or maybe two angles. And this one has many, many cameras positioned in various places around the stadium. So you can actually see that exciting goal from multiple perspectives, which is really nice. They've got one high up so you can like see the players right beneath you, which is a an amazing perspective about soccer tactics that is like nothing I've ever seen before. They had him in the goal. They had them all over the place. And they had one with the ninety-four odd-year-old uh oldest member of the supporter group as he watched it in his home. They had one with the president of the supporters group who was a bartender and it was at the bar, so there was a bar. Was this all at the same time? Like they were doing this simultaneously. Same time, the same match. And a taxi driver who was watching it on his phone in his cab pulled off to the side of the road. Um and all of the same reactions to the same things happening. Again, in the early ones, you would have different shots, but they would from be from different times because we only have two cameras and we've got to move them if we wanna uh and so yeah it',s it's just maturing. Uh once again, it's a 20-minute doc that only shows you tantalizing bits of sports footage. And they've you know, instead of it being like a year plus after the event, this was like six months ago, so seven months ago. So that's better, I guess. It's the same old story. But so for me, like are there amazing shots in it? Of course there are. There are amazing shots in every immersive movie that's made. But what I really got out of it now is the feeling like this is actually shot by people who can get the shots they want because they've got cameras that they didn't used to have, because it used to be you can have one or maybe two and that's it. And now they can they can get two dozen of these things and put them everywhere and that makes a difference. So it's a it's an incremental step in this totally experimental format. Nice. But it's fine. And that's the Vision Pro segment. Thank you. But speaking of football, the what is it, the most beautiful sport? What do they call it the beautiful game the beautiful game Apple uh TV will broadcast the first major professional live sporting event shot entirely on iPhone 17 Pro. He did in fact it was Saturda y. That's awesome. Um okay . No, I mean look, it it it looked fine. They had they had cameras everywhere too, including in the goal and all of that. And this is just like the conversation about how Apple shoots its events on iPhone. The point here is to create a little bit of a marketing halo around the iPhone that fundamentally the camera that you have in your pocket is so good that you could attach it to a professional rig and shoot a movie with it, or shoot an Apple event with it, or in this case, shoot a soccer match with it. And it's true. And then, you know, then the internet posts a thing that says, oh my God, look, they had to put it in this whole rig and they had to put a giant lens that cost twenty thousand dollars in front of it in order to get it to shoot it. And it's like, well yeah. Well yeah of course. That's what they use when they shoot a soccer match. It's not the point is not that you can just pull one stock out of your pocket and just hang hold it out there and go like, oh, I'm shooting the soccer match. But the point is like that that inside the phone are the optics and the quality to make it uh possible. So they did baseball, they had a camera at some baseball games on a rig with a black magic uh breakout box and they did it with all the cameras at this one match and you know it looked fine it looked normal but it yeah you know it's proving the same point as the shot on iPhone on the Apple event. It's like it's not shot on a stock iPhone with nothing. What's amazing is the point is just that it can do it. Yeah. But but even but even so, like the Apple Insider had a nice roundup of like they they if they're following commentary like that was happening live like about the show uh about the uh about the game like on Reddit and elsewhere. And the consensus was that every time that there's like a close-up, it's really, really great. Every time there's like a wide shot of the field, uh, like it quote f being at the match, felt like being at the match and also watching through an iPhone 17. The graph check textures look smeared or muddy during pans and transitions. Others noted the issues were more noticeable, not larger televisions where compression artifacts and sharpening were easier to spot. So it was like people are looking I I'm gonna just be honest, people are looking for it and so they see it, but that's not representative, especially during a live stream where your bandwidth is gonna be the biggest impact. I watched a replay. It looked normal. It's just you're look you're you're also looking for like looking for when the hardware that was designed and optimized specifically for this type of use is in use and you don't tend to be a big No when when the story is who sh what camera is shooting the show you are looking at the for you are looking for changes in what it looks like and if you're just watching the sport you're not and it's a human observer issue more than anything else. This is like no of course no sense no sensible broadcaster would use a consumer grade phone, even a an Apple top of the line phone for anything like this. Isn't it great that, hey, wow, look, we can this is even like conceivably possible, even get even if we add uh add uh put it in a put it in a harness and put all this other stuff on it. I'm just saying that it's not I just feel like it's kind of weak sauce. It's like this is it's being used for stuff that no buyer of this phone is ever going to use it for. If they are trying to tell it it's a great cont it's it's the best content creator tool that there is . There are more effective ways of demonstrating it. I think again it's a it's a nice little gimmick, but to me it just it's like a stun. It's it's like over the weekend where they decided, hey Oscar Meyer, why don't we like do like a NASCAR race, but with wiener mobiles? It's like again, we you you got us to think about the wiener mobile. It is a stunt. It's it is a st it is definitely a stunt, but I don't think I mean I'll I'll defend it a little bit just because I do think that it is notable, even if a consumer is never going to use this in this way, the fact that a $2,000 camera, granted you're putting $20,000 of equipment around it, is still able to get you broadcast quality. I think that's actually pretty incredible, especially when the other cameras that you be buying to put in that twenty thousand dollar rig, let's be very clear, no matter what you're going to be doing, you're gonna be spending that much money on lenses on breakout boxes and other stuff, would cost in most cases many, many times more than that, and be much larger. So I fully agree it's a gimmick. Um, but I also I'm not mad at it because at the very least, if if you're an individual, let's say you have you run your own business and you're thinking, okay, do I need to rent out a big bunch of of you know studio gear to shoot you know the commercial my my my my my local ad that I'm gonna put on Facebook or whatever. No, actually you don't. You your your iPhone, even if it yous you don know' a seventeen, your you know last generation iPhone is probably gonna do a really good job. I think that that message maybe is it maybe it's not as elegant as it could be, but that does eventually kind of trickle down. I think it's a I think it's a gimmick, but I think it's branding gimmick a where point the is to say yeah, the iPhone camera is this good that that you could use it in a professional context with the accoutrements and you could still do it, uh because it's that good. That the core of it, the core camera part of it is good enough to do that. But it is no it is absolutely a gimmick. Uh, it's one that they have it's not the only thing they do, but it is a thing they do. They especially since they have sports rights. I will, I I want to take issue with one thing you said, which is no, no self-respecting broadcaster would do this. I would say if somebody does the math and finds out that it's actually a lot cheaper to use iPhones to shoot with the rigs and everything, they would do it, but I'm not sure that's actually true. But what they would uh I I was referring to like a uh uh uh professional sports at this highest level. I think that I think that that's a good it's I think that you're gonna find uh I wouldn't be surprised if there are all kinds of consultants out there that's just basically for uh uh minor league like triple A ball, for like college ball. They basically say we basically I've I can come I can come to your field to your event with like two pelican cases and basically be live broadcasting like your game uh and giving you feeds that your that the people in the booths can uh could then br uh can then uh call the should call the show from and it will be more than good enough for fa Facebook live for Instagram for any streaming plat for YouTube for any streaming platform you want. If you've got uh if you've got like a a high def uh uh college cable station, it's good enough for that too. I'm just saying that uh I mean I I think uh I don't I'm I think I'm arguing . You're making a quality argument and I guess I would say because I'm not an expert we would have to listen to the broadcast experts about this but if it's the same quality and it's cheaper, they would be interested. My guess is they wouldn't do it with everything. They would do it with ones that need to be roving or lighter or easier and all that. But like if it's cheaper and just as good, that would be the argument. I'm not con f convinced that either of those is actually true. But there is a point at which they would be like, look, you know, we we like this. I I will also say, I don't know if this was true about the MLS game, but the major league baseball games that they did last fall, they weren't even using most of the features of the iPhone, right? Like it was up, I think it was 1080. Not uh it might have been HDR, it might not have been, but like I'm not sure these image playground. Come on. I'm not I'm not sure if these papers stunning suck. Sorry I'm not sure these stunts are even actually pushing the iPhone's camera that highlights. They have massive drones, which granted are gonna be better than what you get for the consumer , but they're it it's not like their their leaps and bounds better. Like the sensors are not demonstrably that different from what's in an iPhone. And that's a very common thing that you have in professional sports. And they can all do four K HDR wireless at this point. Exactly. Exactly. So yeah, I mean like I I I I'm I'm with you, Jason. I don't think this actually would turn out to be cheaper um for for a lot of people, especially if you've already invested in the equipment. But the fact that it it it's it's a nice thing for them to to to brag on. Um it's a gimmick for sure, but I'm not mad at it. Marketing yeah, I I'm with you. It's a marketing gimmick. What does it mean? I mean, anybody who's trying to do a gotcha out there is sort of like missing the point of it anyway, just like with the made it you know, made with an iPhone for all the Apple events. It's like it like it yeah, it's a gimmick. I'm not too mad at it. I think it's fun that they're good. The whole point I take away from it is isn't it interesting that you did a stunt where you shot a whole match with iPhones and it was okay. And then I take nothing further away from it. Nothing broke down. Yeah, that's that's impressive. Yeah. Well there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. See Leo, we're like your own little gentic model. You just throw it at throw scrap at us and we can't. And we also often hallucinate some of the stuff that we're talking uh Mac Bakre weekly with Jason, Andy, and uh Christina. And it's always a pleasure to have all three of you on our microphones. Next on Mac Break Weekly are pic ks of the week . Marvel Tele vision's Wonder Man, an eight episode series. Now streaming on Disney Plus. A superhero remake. Not exactly what we'd expect from an Oscar winning director. Excellent. Simon Williams, audition for Wonderman. I'm gonna need you to sign this, assuming you don't have superpowers. I'll never work again if anyone found up. My lips are sealed . Marvel television's wonder mad. All eight episodes now streaming only on Disney Plus. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com I uh I I admit I got suckered . I saw a microphone. So one of the things I did when I was in Hawaii, I really started thinking about, and actually, this applies to our previous conversation: what would be the minimum kit I could take with me on the road to do a a podcast. And after using uh you know the insta three sixty camera and uh lights and a bunch of stuff I thought this is overkill it's not giving me a great picture on the final show I did there, which was a twit, I ended up using my iPhone with camo and it was better. And then one of the things I I struggled with a little bit was uh the microphone, and you saw me kind of at one point holding it in my hand. I really couldn't get a good um microphone . Obviously, these are going to be the best, these kinds of studio mics, like the high LPR 40 we use with dynamic coils and all of that stuff. But what I'm really intrigued by is wouldn't be cool if I could just have some sort of little lapel mic that I could wear like this that I wouldn't have to hold up, that could go directly into my iPhone , provide uh audio into the iPhone, and sound it wouldn't be as good, but maybe 90% as good as a HIL. And then I saw these Insta360 mics and I said, I gotta have them because they have an e-ink screen on them and I put the little twit look at this on my lapel. I'm wearing it. It's got the little twit logo. In fact, I I have two of them. So to distinguish them, uh one of them has the twit logo facing left and one of them has the twit logo facing right. So I know uh which is which . And uh you can actually put text on here. You put anything on here. It's an e-ink screen, but it's like a mic flag. Oh my god. And the sound quality is really good. I actually don't know if I can get you the sound quality uh now during the show. I'd have to kind of I don't know what I'd have to do. I'd have to guess please tell me that the phone that the phone app that it comes with has a feature where you can take a picture of your shirt and it will camouflage the it'll it'll camouflage the the the the microphone so it blends in with the short with a page. Oh, wouldn't that be clever? Yes. It would be very clever. Honestly, I feel like this is this is a a really good alternative for me. You see, I have the transmitter, it just uh it plugs into the uh it has a little USB C adapter plugs into the bottom of it, but it also comes with uh analog cables you can plug into your uh SLR and so forth. Um I feel like this is a a pretty good solution , certainly for somebody who wanted to walk around with a camera and and you know uh do social media and that kind of thing. Uh I've been listening to some samples uh from this. I've recorded some samples. I think it's a pretty good sounding uh quality on this and it does pretty good noise reduction as well. I'm very happy. The Insta360 uh mic pro and I really like it that you can uh you can put your logo on it. Um also a gimmick, but a great one. It's a gimmick. I bought the one with two mics and a receiver, and it has a little char the receiver has uh and the uh comes with a little charging case that you could put it in so you can charge it up all all three of them charge them up and and it's very compact. Does the receiver record or do you have to re have the receiver does the mics record. So you can rec get a local recording on the mic. Nice. But the receiver so you can also send by a blue. So so so so it'll do both. It'll be both local and and then just connect and download the side. So if there's any wireless glitches , you have a recording on the mic. That's awesome. Three twenty nine ninety nine for the two transmitters, the one receiver, and that includes the battery case. This is a sound nerdy thing, but you didn't it does thirty two bit float, which means you don't overmodulate. is This for people who don't know, the the latest generation of audio gear, all does thirty-two bit float, which means you no longer like if you have the volume used to be you had the volume up too high and you would just overmodulate and blow everything out and it would be unusable recordings. And with 32-bit float, it doesn't happen. Doesn't matter what volume you set it to, basically, it will just get it right and you can fix it later if you need to. It's awesome. Right. So much better. So um I'm I I think the next time I'm in Hawaii or remotely buy more stuff aren't you? I was gonna say uh Leo have you have you used the 'cause Road has like the pocket series that also has similar features and then I have the instant DJI has those too. How have you used the the things? I have DJI ones. And uh I would say this is marginally better than the DJI ones. The noise cancellation on the DJI gets a little thin, and I think it does a bet this these uh instas do better than the DJI. So yeah, that was the only reason I shouldn't have bought this is I had just recently purchased the DJI for extra. Yeah, because I I I I I have the mic two. I don't the mic three. Um I because I uh one of them came with uh the the the pocket three and then I got extra ones. Right. And and I I like those a lot because similar to what Jason said, it does the the the float stuff, it will record locally as well as on the um receiver itself, which is nice. And then I've got the receiver, you know, so I can use it with the n This comes with all the same accessories that the DJI does, the the analog thing. It has the uh kitty. And the nice thing about, you know, the little Eric Kitty the nice thing about That's cool. And how and have a little ink thing. Like that's that's sweet. I like it. So that's not mad at it. My biggest con thing about the uh DJIs is it looks like a little ugly blob on on your uh on your shirt. But this and I'm using the magnetic clip which I just dropped somewhere, but I'll find it. Uh this um because it has a logo on it, it kind of looks cool. Yeah. And it identifies who you are. It's a it's a built-in mic flag. So anyway, I just thought, I mean, I'm a nerd. I'm a mic nerd. But I can get this with the magnet. I get this pretty close to my mouth and I can aim. It's the top address , so I can aim it kind of my my mouth. I think that's one of the reasons it sounds pretty good. I think from now on, I think this is uh my remote kit is gonna be uh basically an iPhone and the Insta360 micro. I mean, I think that's awesome. I mean, especially since since um, you know, like DJI isn't in the US right now. We don't know when they will. They can't sell the mics either. No, they can't sell anything. Oh, that's calling. I I think we can sell the existing stuff. Sorry, they can't sell new things. Sorry. If if it's already been released, then you can buy them. And they can continue to do it. But like the whenever the the the four comes out, they're probably gonna have to r release it under a different name. That's um but the the upside is the means that some of us, Leo, you and I, we could save money and not buy things we don't need and just use our existing iPhones. If only like cameras, right? If only imagine, right? See look how this goes right. All of this goes uh very conveniently right into the charging case, which is like an AirPods case, you know, it has its own battery. So it's all charged up. Uh so it's very convenient. You're carrying this around with everything you need, uh, and it's all charging up uh for you and everything. I think this is just a really And if you've got your Mac uh using Zoom for Twit, will you can you get it in to your Mac as an input? Yeah, with camo, right? 'Cause I'll be using it with the camera as well as the um Oh, okay right so camo I think actually you know I haven't tested that part but I believe Camo will let me choose the uh because the the iPhone thinks that's the it's mic like it up immediately says, oh that's the mic. I'll have to check. We'll we'll see. That's right. just use it as my oh I see what you're on my Mac. Oh. Right. Oh I see. I just don't . It has like a USB It's a USB C Okay, so probably if you plug it into the Mac via USB C it'll show up as an input device. Yeah. I've done that with my other ones, Jason. So Yeah, it just thinks it's a mic. It just thinks it's a microphone. And it's actually nice in that regard because I've actually used it that way to report things. Yeah. Like for for social videos where like the audio quality is gonna be better using like a a k a mic like that rather than onboard. I completely didn't think of that. Yeah, I was just connecting to the iPhone and using camo. But um That works too. That would work. Or a continu ity cam probably would do the same thing. Yeah. 'Cause it thinks it's the iPhone's camera. So I mean microphone. So anyway, that's my pick. Jason, what's yours? Well, I I'm gonna defer the inevitable BBS . This was a tricky one because I had to diplomatically decide who I referenced another app earlier today and so I will mention it now. I haven't used it a lot, but I think it's very clever. And if you're somebody who really likes autocomplete, this is called Co-Typist. It runs on the Mac. It's free to try and do I think it's 10 completions a day and, then you can subscribe and get more. And it is using local models, nothing leaves your Mac, and it ties into the accessibility settings to look at your Mac screen. I think this is the most clever thing. And like I said earlier, if you're looking at a web page and referring to it while you're writing an email, it can see the webpage, it knows the text on the webpage, and it will use that as part of its auto complet ion. So it gets really smart, really fast because it knows your computing context when it's offering autocomplete, which is so smart. So really clever app. Um, and and again, for people who are really concerned about privacy is sues. The nice thing about having Mac power is you can run these models locally, and nothing ever leaves your Mac and it's going to predict what you type. And if you're somebody who really likes having good auto-complete and obviously it'll like you can say not in this app and yes in this app and all of that, but it it works a little magically. Like you're typing an email while that web page is open and it knows what app you're talking about or what context is on that webpage and that you might want to talk about it and like super smart so co-type is just the name and you can try it out for free uh which i really like and and like i said i think it's 10 completions a day in the trial mode, the free mode. Um, and you know, ca uh autocomplete is not for everybody, but for some people it's it's really helpful because you are not a fast typist and if it knows what you're gonna say, just hit tab and move on with your life. So cotypus dot app is the name or the URL. Oh I've just installed it. Very cool. How much is it if uh you want to pay for unlimited? There are a couple of different levels. Um there's like a seventy-t awo a year, hundred and eight a year, or you can pay monthly, but the free will give you you'll find out whether it has that value for you or not. Nice. And you just hit tab and it completes it one word at a time. Oh. Nice. Or or it'll do multi-word and there are a bunch of settings too. I like how they call it dancing with the AI. Yeah . Nice. Okay . All right. Very cool. Cotypist. Cotypist. Thank you for not stepping on Andy's pick of the week. Andy, you go ahead. I'm looking forward to Jason jumping in on my pick of the week. Good. Um nineteen ninety one was a banner year. It had notable for two major world shattering events. Uh it would mark the fall of the Soviet Soviet Union, and in a small office in New England, a plucky young developer by the name of Rich Siegel created a text editor for Macintosh and he called it BB Edit. That was BB Edit 1.0. Uh and he it might, if this is not the oldest still-in-operation commercial piece of Mac software, I don't know what it is , uh, because they just released BB Ed at 16. Uh, and it just keeps getting incrementally better and better and better without having to ever do a full revolution uh that disorients everybody. Rich inadvertently bet on a very, very winning horse. So nobody nobody could pr have predicted that uh text editors would be very, very important for developing software, and then they would be critical for developing like HTML uh websites, and then they would be critical for like markdown text editing, and then they would be critical still for development, but also for AI and all kinds of stuff. So as a result, this is the text editor that can truly do it all without looking like it's had 18 different skin graphs holding it together uh year after year after year. It's still a cohesive tool that will do anything you need a text editor to do. Uh it's uh I mean uh both Jason and I at one point were using BB Edit as our primary word processor. I wrote like probably six years worth of Chicago Sun Times columns just with BB Edit because it will give you a simple, plain, it's a lovely environment for for for writing in. And it will give you a text file that you can then just give to your editors and will just plonk into any CMS that you're that you're that you're using it with. Um uh bb 16 as always again it's never a big revolution it's just uh rich is very very attentive to like what his users are asking of the uh asking of the of the tool what they actually need and also what makes sense for BB Edit. He doesn't just simply wave a magic wand and grant every single request. It has to make sense. That's why BB Edit 16 is still as cohesive as BB Edit11 was. Uh but some big, big uh additions and enhancements . I think the marquee feature is that uh Grit has greatly expanded uh support of shortcuts in the app. App Intense. App Intense, very tool. Exactly. With App with App Intense. So now automation is a big, big bump. It's always been scriptable, scriptable from top to bottom, left to right, uh, but now it really is ambitious uh and comprehensive in supporting every single scripting and automation environment uh that the that the Mac has uh it's always been notable for being a killer tool for just for search uh because it it has the most muscular set of regular expression search tools and grep tools out there. So if you have us, there are times where I've I've again had a web server that has had like 800, 900 files on it that I need to change the header on it because this is back in the day when everything was hard-coded HTML, you didn't use a database. I could just simply essentially point that file on the the that folder on the FTP server uh uh at uh at BB edit and do a grep search and simply have that whole block of text changed on every single file that's out there. Uh so this one this uh 16 gives it a big bump now uh it could also search through images for text that's inside images and just like with text files if you point it at uh if you point it at a a a a folder that has like a thousand files of license plate photos and you say, give me a list of all uh grant me a list of all of license plates that come from Minnesota, it will return a list of all of the files that have a Minnesota that where it can uh discern the word Minnesota in the license plate or in the bumper stickers or anywhere else. And a whole bunch of other little things. One of the things that's that's that's uh big for me is that uh obviously it's it's still a killer app for if you're if you're coding HTML, I do a lot of scripting in which the output is uh HTML5 and I use BB Edit as the output bin that receives like the results of the script, and I will do some more modifications myself. Uh so it's always had a really good HTML5 checking. He's decided with this release to now use the industry standard W3C HTML5 checker, a syntax checker, so to make sure that the syntax checking is always completely up to date and pretty canonical. You can still use the built-in checker if you want, if you don't have access to uh the internet while you're doing this check. But those that that's an example one of the little things that there's about 100 different changes , lots of little things that with all the diversity of uses to which people use BB Edit and has fans that like me have been using it for more than more than a couple of decades, one or two of these things will be, oh my god that' thats changes everything wonderful and it won't disrupt my workflow through uh through editing text wonderful wonderful stuff and the good news is that the there's a very very uh attractive uh price structure it is as cheap as free. If you've never used it before, you get all features for 30 days. After 30 days, it will revert to the free version of BB Edit, which is still a probably the one of the best uh text editors that you can find anywhere. And it is free, and it is free for life . Uh, if you have never bought it before, it's 60 bucks. If you bought it uh a couple of years ago, uh the upgrade is like 40 bucks. If you bought it more than a year ago, it's 30. Yeah, it's basically the the the longer ago you paid for you you bought it at full price, uh the more you have to spend for the upgrade. But if you bought it like as of like November if you bought uh if you pay for fifteen uh it's still a free upgrade. A year before that's thirty bucks, another year after that. But again, it's the sort of stuff where after 30 days of using this, if you live in text at any part of your life whatsoever, you'll be like, you know, it's fifty-nine dollars, but I'm gonna give Rich sixty dollars. I want him to get that pack of gum on me 'cause I'm so grateful for it. One of my favorite apps. I think every every Mac user should have B V edit because it's free at this point. You should have it 'cause it's just useful to have as a text editor and and it's free. And then if you want the extra features, it's there. I think that free is a big feature. I I I talked to Richard about this, and he one of the things he told me is that there are places where he was literally using BB Edit and thought, why is that not instantaneous? Why is that taking time? And he said they're actually you get an app this old and sometimes you look in the code and you're like, oh, and it's not like oh I wrote really bad code 15 years ago. It's more like I wrote this 15 years ago when Apple said the right way to do this was X. And then later they changed it so the right way was Y. And we're still doing X, which works, but Y is, as it turns out, in some cases an order of magnitude faster. And so there are a bunch of speed ups in here where he's I I always get the impression it's like a little part of the code where he opens it up and like a moth flies out and he's like, ah uh and then he and then he does some work on it. So there's a lot of uh there's speed ups. The emoji support is really good. This was not an app created when emoji were a thing. And I always used to delight in accidentally pasting emojis into BB Edit with text. And it would um often break them up into like you could you could see the constituent parts 'cause a lot of emoji are multiple parts where they' s like an astronaut and then a zero whip join and then like the female s symbol and that's the female astronaut, but it's made of two symbols. Um and uh and that's uh it you'll actually get your emoji now , which is i you know, the he just keeps rolling it. But um it's worth trying out because it is free and and the app intense thing, I think it's great because like the whole point of app intense, there's so many things that I use BBETF for as a utility. So it's like sorting l ines, processing duplicate lines, counting lines, um, matching a regular expression and pulling those lines out of a document that I use all the time. A lot of that stuff is in an app intent now, and that means you can use it in shortcuts. And it's not like Apple Script where you would be like open a document, put in the text, do your BB edit thing, and then give me the result. You can actually use those features in a shortcut with BB Edit not running, and they will run and work and give you the output that you want. And what's happening in the background is the app intent is actually secretly invisibly launching BB Edit, handing it data, getting the data back, and then quitting BB Edit. But like essentially what it does with App Intense is add all of these BB Edit text utilities just to your tool palette of shortcuts, which is pretty awesome too. It's a good, it's a nice modern example of what App Intense are actually supposed to do that I think is exciting because I've always thought of BB Edit is not just a writing tool but a text utility. And it is both actually free to try. So say we all Christina, your pick of the week. Well mine was going to be BB Edit. Um so we just say one to everything. We were all gonna Andy said, we're all gonna pick BB Edit. So we did. So we love Rich. Uh we love Rich, but it's also a security application. So just you know plus one on on everything that uh that that Andy and and Jason said. Um if you haven't used it, it's it should be part of at least the free version should be part of your your your Mac tool belt. Like it just in my opinion, it's just one of those applications. I don't use it as my primary text editor, but I use it still, you know, multiple times a week for so many different things, and it's just a great application. Um, but my pick is is not software related at all. Um, probably my favorite TV show of the last, I don't know, five or six years um has been uh hacks, which uh uh was uh uh on HBO. Well first was on Max, then it was first I think it was HBO Max, then it was Max, now it's HBO Max again. Um but the series finale is going to be on Thursday and uh I just uh five or yeah, five I think. And and uh and it's uh it's Gene Smart has won the Emmy every single year she's been nominated for it for Best Actr ess in a comedy series. And and Hannah Einbender won um Best Supporting Actress uh last year. Meg Stalter's amazing in it. TikTok star who really made it. Who really blew up. Um uh Paul W. Downs, uh um uh Luci ano, uh his w uh uh wife and the the other creator the three creators are great. Um thank you, thank you. Um it's just it's it's it's a fantastic show. And I would say as it ends, and I don't know how it ends yet because I don't have screeners, but I'm sure that they will nail the the ending the same way that they were able to nail the ending of Broad City, which was a a show that the creators of this uh the acts also worked on. Yeah. So they didn't Broad City but they worked on it and they were EPs on it. And and so a lot of the it's from the Mike Shure so like Good Place and Brooklyn Nine Nine kind of group as well. Exactly. Maybe working on this. Yeah. Yeah. And and so it's it's a lot of good stuff. I was gonna say, yeah. This is one of those shows as it ends, if you haven't watched it, um, it's a really, really good show. The it's kind of um you know two different generations of of women who kind of you know form kind of a a friendship and kind of relationship as the as the series evolves. But it's very funny. It's heartwarming. It's one of those rare shows that I I always try to explain it to people. I'm like, it's very, very funny and it's um not rooted in reality at all, but in some ways it feels like it is, and yet it has heart to it, which is something I don't think that you see enough on on shows that are as as funny as as it is. And so hacks as it ends is is gonna be my pick because I I just think it's fantastic. And if you haven't watched it, give it a shot. It's great. And a brilliant Lori Metcalf cameo. Yes. Oh my gosh, yes. So great. Such a good show. I love it. Killed it. Weed. Weed just fantastic. Weed the roadie. So funny. So funny. Uh good picks all around. It's uh been a great show given that there was absolutely nothing to say. You managed to find something. Thank you. As always, I count on you. Christina, we'll miss you next week. Have fun at build. Thank you so much. Christina Warren is uh in developer relations at GitHub. We're so glad to have you on this show. We really appreciate it. Uh Andy Anako is still working on filling up his content pin. Uh, but someday you'll find it on the web. It's exciting. It is exciting. I'm I've I had had a very exciting work day yesterday and the day before. And before just some more exciting one. It's not it's not drudgery. It's like, oh my god, this it's it's almost there. Great. Nice. Very good. I h-n- A T K O