CarPlay and Software Defined Vehicles

It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Jason and Andy are here. Both have some very big announcements. And filling in for Christina Warren, Shelley Brisbane will talk about the new accessibility features in iOS 27 and what they may portend for the future. We'll predict what's going to happen next Monday at WWDC. And we'll take a look at some of the new shows debuting on Apple TV this month, that and a whole lot more, plus the vaunted vision Pro segment. Coming up next on Back Fray Queekly . Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is Twit . This is Mac Break Weekly Episode 1027 recorded Tuesday June 2nd 2026. The Paris of the South Bay . It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you've joined the show that covers everything, including Vision Pro. It is the premier Vision Pro podcast in the world. Jason Snell is here. Soon to be in Cupertino, California. Yes, we cover other things when there's not Vision Pro news to talk about. Uh we sometimes we talk about it. So that's good. Yeah. Hello, Jason. Hi, Leo. Ready to go to the Paris of the South Bay? Paris of the South Bay, yes. Cupertino. Supertino, and if you will, yes. Uh always good to go to Apple Park. Um which I'm always reminded when I ste step set foot at Apple Park that I don't think they intended for the press to be inside at Apple Park. I think that that was always we were always intended to be elsewhere. But then COVID happened and they changed what they decided to do for WWDC and now they just let all of us commoners into the ring and it's just a thing that they do and it and it's a treat because that's such a uh really amazing, staggeringly uh built building. And uh so to be there is uh not just because it's Apple but cause the architecture and the money that's been spent on the No, I think they figured that they would be th events would happen elsewhere. You know, not at Cafe Max. But that's where they do it now, is they open up their Cafe Max area at the ring and we just then they give us folding chairs and we sit there and watch a video. So I'm looking forward to it. I'll bring my sunscreen. The press is like a vampire. Once you invite it over the threshold, that's it. We're in there. We want free food. Andy Anako also here. He's at the library in the Paris of New England, I think. Uh the the Venice of Southern New England. Yeah, you're near the water. Yeah. And we g and we get some floods. So we 're just like Venice. Exactly. And you don't want to be there in the summer. Now Christina has the day off because she's at Microsoft Build. She is a she does work for GitHub, so I guess it was part of the part of the deal. But good news, we've got the wonderful Shelley Brisbane here. Hi. Now I'm saying Brisbane. Do you like Brisbane or Brisb ane? Brisbane. Brisbane is like, you don't know me, do you? Because and you haven't read my name and you don't know how it's spelled. That's what it is. Also, I'd love to go to Australia. Thank you. Yeah. And by the way, Brisbane, which is spelled Brisbane in Australia. Yeah, isn't that funny? From the beautiful Texas Tribune. The Paris Texas Standard. Standard, Texas Tribune are our dear friends, but not me. Standard, Texas Standard . Portland of Texas here in Austin. That's right. Or sometimes the People's Republic of Austin, I've heard. Exactly. We answer to both. Yep. Yep. Uh I asked my uh chat bot to take a pulse check on W WDC 2026 and they say uh this is this is the Apple AI redemption keynote coming up. Lots of heat but still more rumor blog energy than Brog developer Social Consensus. Apple has to show that Siri is no longer an embarrassment. The major uh big expected headline, the major Siri rebuild skepticism is loud. People are still grumbling about liquid glass and the low contrast UI. I think Shelley would agree on that . Less translucency theater, more usable controls . Software heavy. Mac OS name leak, the WWDCX Hashmoji file name apparently references Project Big Bear twenty twenty six. So everybody's thinking that the next version of Mac OS is Big Bear. I think that's a good name for it, actually. Uh I wonder if it will be. Big Bear is is where is that, Jason? It's in California. LA? LA? LA ski ski area. Okay . Well, they like ski areas. Do you really do do they really want to invite like sarcastic people to like big be does the big bear blank in the woods? If they're if they're if the trend for Siri is the same, maybe so. Is it Big Bear ? a Just little cub. It's so easy. Well it's it's the the compromise between the cats and the California names, I suppose, or back to animals of some kind, even though that's not how it's meant. I you know, just because I miss the cats. I just have to say that because I missed the cats. Return to snow leopard. Yeah. Well, in the sense that it's gonna be you know a fix and a minor upgrade, but we shall see. Uh still had hundreds of features. I'll just say they talk they talked a big game, but it they did actually have like hundreds of changes and features in it. Yeah. And they can't just leave them in the basket. They have to empty the basket. No, I mean uh my AI's take Apple's Bar is no longer quote announce AI. It's quote show working personal privacy preserving agentix series without vaporware stink. Okay. We've been replaced by ettle down. I mean may i it's like it's like uh so long as so really so long as Apple like managed to manage manages to tell a coherent story with a beginning, middle, and an end about here is our new track for a for artificial intelligence, and also importantly, here is why you can actually sort of trust us, even though we were really, really, really, really misdirecting two years ago when we announced our previous strategy for AI. So it's they don't they don't have to ship everything that has to that turns uh turns uh iOS into an age into an agentic uh intelligent operating system. They don't have to do something as scary as what Google dared to announce with Android a couple weeks ago. Google really went to they they just they just have to say that by Cook John Turnus, AI, AI, AI supercut, like the with the Google thing. No. That would be funny. Well, let's see what an actual human says. Uh a guy named Jason Snow writing a Macworld. WWDC is the twenty twenty six, the year of the do over . Yeah. I mean, 2024, we all know what happened. Wasn't good. Twenty twenty-five was like, we're sorry, we'll pr we promise that everything we show you now we'll ship this fall. Did it? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. If they didn't if they weren't confident it was going to ship, they didn't ship it. I mean they didn't . And then they added stuff later. Right. But it doesn't really address what happened in 2024, right? It it was sort of like we want to show you that we what we promise we can deliver, but it didn't really answer the question about the AI stuff that got kicked. That can got kicked further and further down the road into this year, according to Mark German, out of this spring into this fall. So the question is, what do they what do they want to announce and what can they deliver this year in AI in terms of AI features? And that I you know, they they've got they had two years, if you want to count it that way, since the debacle of twenty twenty four to fit you know, figure out what to change. They got rid of a bunch of people. They reorged. New people are in charge. Okay, gre at. That we know they made a deal with Google. So now what? Like this is this is where they have to say what is our vision for what's coming with how AI integrates into Apple's platforms. And I I think what's fascinating about this, what's going to be worth watching next week is how aggressive do they push here? Because like they tend to be pretty conservative with product things, uh, but two years ago they felt the pressure to prove that they cared about ai and there's a that they're really threading a needle here because there's the like really careful version that they could announce which people will say oh it's kind of behind everybody else and it's kind of boring and it shows that Apple doesn't get it. But if Apple gets too aggressive, they're back in 2024 where they may be overpromising and they may not be able to deliver and they don't want to do that. So like how you thre ad that needle and get something that you can ship, but that is showing that you care and that you're on a path. And so in my piece on Macworld, what I said is what I really would like, and I know this is going, they have to step outside there's themselves a little bit is to say, announce features, sure, that you're gonna ship this year. Great. But also kind of give us a framework, give us a vision. Tell us how you think AI is going to fit in with your operating systems going forward in general. And that's not pre-announcing features necessarily, but like I think they need to go beyond here are eight things you'll see in the fall to say sort of like here's how we think AI works with our platforms. And if they could do that, even if they don't ship eighty AI features in the fall, it'll be okay because they will have explained what they're you know, not detail of what they're working on, but how they're choosing to view it. That's I think that's what the most important thing for them to do is like explain to me how you're actually net your new leadership, how you're thinking about AI and your platforms. Yeah. So so long as they just lay out the story that we understand we have a like we have a roadmap. Here is our plan. We don't have to tell you the specifics of the plans yet. We don't have to announce specific features, but we are going to make it very clear to you that our plan is to, for example, uh as much on device AI as possible 'cause we think that's fast, that's econom that's uh ecologically sound, it's pr it's private and it works w uh as it speaks to our expertise for uh for Apple Silicon and tying everything together. However, we're also going to be as open as possible for uh for cloud based stuff so that you can run the models that you want and the access the features that you want uh that you've been uh growing to uh to to rely on over the past year or two. And whatever happens after that, that happens after that. But that's basically the two prongs of our thing and we're also relying a lot on uh our our uh our outsourced partner for uh for foundation models that are that's accelerating our process uh our progress and we will continue to rely on that that fruitful relations hip over the coming years. Again, if they s if they say here is the brand new, they don't have to say here is the brand new Siri and everything that it has that it can has to do, that makes that gives them a whole bunch of stuff that they're going to have to actually deliver. If all they say is that by the way the dynamic island is now going to be basically your point of contact for Siri and most of these features. We will we will be showing off more of these features later, but basically get used to the idea that Siri lives inside the dynamic dynamic island , then again, that's telling the story, making sure that we understand that they have thought about this. They're not just simply allowing marketing to uh to to dictate what has to be in the keynote to make people happy and get people off their backs. But again , we figure right we've we don't know how we're gonna get to get to Pismo Beach in three years, but we have a plan for how to get there. So that instead of in 2024 when you promised a version of the moon and weren't able to deliver it, you have to be able to say in 2026, this is what we're going to give you as a general matter. This is our philosophy and all the features that come from it have to be consistent with that philosophy and some sort of acknowledgement that we're fixing Siri, whether they say it that way or whether they can present it as a better value proposition that doesn't have to admit fault, they have to acknowledge in some regard, we have to be able to parse out as pundits after the fact, yes, they acknowledge that Syria is a problem and they have a roadmap to fix it, and there are deliverables down the way that may not be as specific as we would like them, but that are going to be brought forward consistent with what we're what we're given next week. So uh a couple of weeks ago, Apple uh and I'm this is I kind of was glad we could get you on uh this week, Shelly, to talk about it. Announced new accessibility features and updates, which they uh headline said powered by Apple Intelligence. And a lot of us speculated this might be a preview of some of the things Apple Intelligence might bring Tell us what you think, first of all, of the new accessibility features. when I when I wrote about those features for Jason Six Colors, My headline included a reference to Apple Intelligence and a precursor to WWDC. And I think that was accurate in the sense that I think the theme for WWDC is definitely going to be Apple intelligence based, just as these announcements were but these accessibility announcements and they've been doing them for five years now pre-previewing before uh wwwc almost never have a direct thread between the accessibility part and the wwwc part it is not like a preview of the theme. So in 2024, we didn't get great promises about what Apple Intelligence is going to be. And in fact, I've I've actually had having had time to think about it, this is kind of a small bore release for accessibility. And it's really enhancements to things that are already there. For example, there 's a video where you have a blind user using their iPhone to navigate and to read signage and to do image description and to you know basically in describe the environment in an AI-based way, which is it gives good g demo and it's great. It's kind of like beam my eyes, right? Or new exactly it is very much like beam eyes. And that's actually the new part. What I was going to get to there is that the ability to describe your surroundings has existed for several years. They're just improving on it. And what BMIs gave you, and what Apple intelligence will theoretically give you based on the announcements is the ability to interro gate those descriptions, ask questions, and get further information. And that's the AI cool sauce. And I guess you could say some part of B My AI is uh B my I be my AI is what is part of B My AI is part of B My Eyes. Be my eyes is a larger thing. But you could say that that's being Sherlocked, but my my thought is that Apple's probably gonna find some ways to make that better and more interesting. But it doesn't feel like a re volutionary new thing from the point of view of accessibility. A lot of people have talked about the voice control features. So the way voice control has worked in the past is that if you can't touch the device and if you interact with it using your voice, you can either reference a grid that had a numbered grid. So you know act on number 14 over there, or a um you know, a specific labeled icon or item. And now with voice control is going to make it possible for you to just describe something you see on screen that doesn't necessarily have the precise label that voice control required. And people got excited about that because they're thinking, well, that means that AI will be able to interact with what you describe on screen, that with voice commands, you can make your phone do all sorts of things. That's potentially true and voice control as described here is potentially proof of concept. I don't feel like that's going to come this year as a direct result. I'll also say that that technology in smaller form has been available as something called screen recognition that's part of voice over for years. And what screen recognition's job was, if there was a voiceover item, was there an item that was not labeled on a voiceover screen? If the developer or even Apple itself had not labeled a back button, screen recognition would go in and say, I think that looks like a back button. And it would call it a back button and you could then act on it in that way. And so it's not like this is completely revolutionary or completely new. It's it's interesting that the AI connection is being made and that people are all excited about how you could agentically interact with your screen. I still divide it into two parts. First of all, there's the I know what's going on on the screen, I can identify it as something and I can issue a command. But the AI part of it, the actually interacting with it and saying, okay, I have this information, I'm going to combine it with this other information and do something agentically, that feels like an entirely separate thing. It doesn't mean it's not going to happen. It just means that voice control probably isn't, this voice control feature probably isn't as sort of immediately revolutionary as some people would like to think they show the blind woman uh putting in a pair of uh AirPods. Right. And uh I think some of us thought, oh, is is that going to be the AirPods with cameras? She still I don't know if it'll happen right away. I mean, whenever they're ready to do airpods with cameras or eventually when we get glasses. I mean I think glass is gonna is gonna be the real thing where that happens because people are already b people in the blind community are already using the meta AI glasses and a lot of people are sort of hold their nose and her like well it's not great but, it does provide me navig ational assistance. There's even a meta AI sort of app ecosystem. There's several apps out there that take advantage of the meta AI glasses and you can download them and have them do specific things. Some of them are navigation apps, some of them are image identification apps. The meta AI glasses will do that on their own, but for example, there's a BMI AIs integration and an IRA integration, both of which are designed to help describe your physical environment using the the glasses. And so that that app ecosystem is super interesting. And I would be watching to see whether that kind of thing happens when we get Apple smart glasses or when we get AirPods with cameras. One of the things I really like that Meta is going to announce at least uh two or three more pairs of meta glasses this year. So they're moving fast. Apple, you know, which want who wants to play in that space, uh is probably feeling the heat. Go ahead, Jason. Apple's moving now, right? Like Mark Erman's reported, like and and John Turnus is into this, and they are they are actively working now on on this and going down the glasses path. I just wanted to point out that, you know, a lot of what we're talking about here, and and Shelly knows this is, is the Apple trick, right? Where they're like, oh, there's this amazing thing that happens with your AirPods when you hold your iPhone out. It's like what they when they were working on the Vision Pro and they had all this AR stuff, and it was all like, Look, you can hold up your camera and then see AR, see AR on the iPhone screen. And you're like, Well, yeah, but that's not really AR, it's you looking at your iPhone screen. But it was their way of describing what they were working on without announcing a future product. And I feel like with the all of the sort of like look what you can do holding out your iPhone camera and getting descriptions, it's their way of saying obviously, we're gonna be doing this with some other cameras that you don't have to hold out like this, but we can't announce those yet. So just think about this now. And you know, we will we will get there. I we discussed here. I don't know what those cameras on the AirPods are going to be able to see and if they're going to be useful or not, but certainly John Turnus is driving them toward having something you can put on the on the front of your face. And Mark German this week, Mark German has he has some interesting takes, I will say, but I think he made a point this week, and I've seen it in a couple other places, which is you you discount Apple's ability to affect the glasses market at your peril. Because the example he gave was watches. He's like, you know, Rolex is fine . But on this sort of like he mentioned fossil, like this kind of mid-level of watches, it's been rough because a lot of people who used to buy those watches buy smartwatches now. And a lot of those smartwatches, most of them are Apple watches. And what he said was, you know, don't like he's not saying they will win, but like there is a possibility here that Apple rolling in here could potentially take this kind of mid-range of people who wear glasses and just convert the convert it all from regular glasses to Apple Glasses and the competitors. I don't I I wouldn't predict that it's going to be easy for them, but Apple's track record here is actually pretty good. So I wouldn't discount them either. And if John Turnus thinks this is a priority, I think that that shows you that Apple is making it a priority since he's he's the gonna be the boss. I I I agree with that. Just uh the only thing that I would add is that the United States has a Apple has a different kind of stranglehold on the US market than it does worldwide. And if Apple does what they're probably going to do, which is to say, no, there's no actual technical reason why you have to have an iPhone in order to use our glasses, but we're going to make sure that you absolutely have to have an iPhone to use our glasses. Even if you have an iPad, even if you have a MacBook, even if you have no matter what, we are not going to let you activate these unless you're activating them to an iPhone. And if you don't like that, then you should probably switch to iPhone. Uh so I it's and and it's but that that's just a factor. Again, I I do agree with the idea that uh uh discount Apple at your peril. I don't think it's exactly the same as as watches, but I do think that yeah, all all things are possible, including Apple becoming just like a just player amongst many players, uh, because other players are going to add more freedom and more flexibility. All the way to Apple's going to have to add way, way, way more styles of frames, way, way faster uh than Google is going to have to for Android X XR because more people are going to be using these. Uh even if the even just in the United States, uh if everyone who has an iPhone who wears glasses or sunglasses are going to want to have at least one pair of smart glasses. They're gonna absolutely gonna want them to be made by Apple. in the accessibility world and probably applies everywhere else as well, is just the lack of friction. I mean, the meta AI glasses work fine. You can use apps with them. I've been on some beta apps and I've had rough goes with those, as well as some shipping apps. But generally speaking, it's been possible to make them work to the extent that they can. But I feel like that's an advantage Apple's always going to have, as Andy says, especially when you have an iPhone, when you put those glasses on, they're just going to do a thing that you expect them to do, whether it's for accessibility, whether it's navigate or image identification or whether it's provide you information. And I I think now that we've meta has sort of to some extent paved the way, but like the modern kind of glasses that you have don't necessarily have a display in your eyeballs. The display is looking out from your eyes, you know, just through the glasses and your phone. I feel like that gives so much more opportunity than you had to have than back when you had the Google Glass where you had to rely on a display that was embedded in the glasses, which from an accessibility point of view just is, you know, kind of terrible. But I I I look forward to it both as a general Apple and So it's interesting because um Meta doesn't have a phone, but of course the MetaGlass is paired or your iPhone. Do you think that's not as good as Apple will be able to do. Just I right. Because Apple is Apple. I mean I can't tell you how and why. But I think friction is gonna be a huge win for Apple if they get this done. If if they get a product out there that is Apple like , they just being Apple is probably gonna get them a long, long way. That's what I was gonna say is I know we talk on this show a lot about like, oh, I don't know, meta's way ahead, but like historically , Apple is so big and their brand is so powerful that Apple tends to be a validator of markets. And this goes back to what Andy said is Apple may not end up dominating the glasses market or anything like that, right? Not even close. But if there is a sort of tech glasses uh category that takes over a lot of the glasses market eventually, what you may see is that Apple's entry into it becomes the kind of the validator of that market because it is such a powerful brand, because it's so got so much strength, especially in the US, to start the ball rolling. And being behind, it doesn't factor into that necessarily 'cause sometimes what you need, you've got the early adopters, the early people who are out there like Meta who are like, Let's try this, let's see. People are experimenting with that. But when Apple rolls in, I think a lot of people are like, Oh, I get it now uh because Apple's explained it to me and they might not all end up using the Apple products but I think it also just kind of primes the market and there are are plenty of examples. I keep thinking about how Apple was not even close to being first with a NFC payment system. But Apple entering and pushing hard on Apple Pay got a lot of of companies in the US to upgrade their equipment and start accepting NFC payments. And now it you know you don't have to use Apple Pay, but it helped push it. And I do think that I agree, Mark German may be going a little too far here, but I think there's something there about like, and also there's prescriptions involved, which makes this way more complicated than uh although retail glass sales now has made it less complicated than it used to be it's easier to to buy a pair of glasses than it used to be but like just that validation if Apple comes in hard they're gonna do a lot of effort and use their brand to prove why you might want a product like this. And the whole potential market for that product category does benefit from Apple being there. Yeah. Yeah. Mark Mark said Apple uh this is his um power on newsletter from Sunday. Apple to overhaul iOS twenty seven Siri AI features. Here's a first peek. Uh and he had images. Uh actually these were renders generated by Bloomberg from the descriptions uh that his uh sources this information is uh viewed by Bloomberg and people with knowledge of the company's plans who asked not to be identified, blah blah blah. Do you think this is pretty accurate? I mean we're c awfully close to the release date. It does line up with uh the teases that Apple's been making about uh and what's what's uh uh all systems glow. Uh it lines up with other rumors. Yeah, yeah. That basically the uh that that's going to be basically your cue that Siri is now up active and listening to you for uh for for a conversation for uh for uh an AI session. So you interpret that as this the glow signals that's Siri listening and that will be everywhere on the iPhone now. Yeah, the high that the halo is going to be like more specific and again high I like I do like the idea that that he's putting forward that uh that the dynamic island is going to be your point of contact for Siri, that this isn't just something where you hold on a button and your entire screen goes kerflee and turns into an AI thing, but that the conceptually that AI when you want AI, AI is out of the way, but when you reach for it, it's going to be right there. It seems like a very good paradigm, particularly. Can I just point out how brilliant it is that for Apple to take a to take a lemon and make lemonade. I mean I They've really turned that dynamic island, which was, you know, really a necessity uh uh but from hardware to have those cameras there, uh and made it actually a a virtue. It's it's genius. I would miss it. It's amazing. I would miss it it if the if went away. Like I and we we actually we haven't heard that much uh uh uh no no matter what the hardware maker about the idea of ha of getting rid of the the the notch uh getting rid of a notch getting rid of a good under yeah, there are there are a lot of under they they got rid of like under display fingerprint sensors. There's some other technology for under display cameras, whether or not Apple can make all of the all of those face ID emitters and sensors work uh through the screen is another thing entirely. I mean they could probably just create a dynamic island a virtual dynamic dynamic island in front of the sensors when they need to, I guess. But yeah, I I would I would actually miss it. I think that's one of the most brilliant things that Apple has come up with user interface wise. And again, it was a s it was a way to basically get people to stop complaining about how we paid for a six point four inch screen and you've stolen one hundred and ninety-six pixels of that display from us and how do you intend to compensate us for that? Like, okay, we can either cut you a check for 73 cents or we can give you this nice feature that where every time that you're looking up for s something that's in progress, such as a an Uber that's coming your way or a a song that you're playing or whatever, it will you know exactly where to go because that's what you associate that information with . Uh what else? Let's see. The Siri Revamp, the biggest in the assistance history, 15 year history will be released to consumers as early as September, obviously iOS 27 . Uh and this uh will be uh chief executiveer Offic Tim Cook's final major product launch. Actually really will look like John Turnus's in some ways. I think it will be Turnus that'll be announcing it on stage, but I guess. How much will we see of Tim Cook on Monday? This is one of those CEO. I think the question is is there a passing of the baton? Maybe even literally like a Wouldn't it be cool if both of them came out and said in unison, good morning. Yeah. Yeah. Or maybe uh maybe it's a I mean I would I would probably pitch that they do it as a bit where um they're backstage and and uh and you go You go, John. No, you go to the boy. Tim, it's your last one. Like you you wait, John, or whatever it is. That's it. Um but I think I think we'll see them both. I I do, but I think that this is Tim Cook having his last uh hurrah as well. I think no. I I want I want them to see if they could they could license a song from the Sonheim Est estate where they they come out and say start singing like s from from company side by side and then uh and then John Shiruji comes jumps in by side. Everything side by side and the hardware guy by side . The day after the Tony Awards, that would be good, Andy. I like it. Because I have an idyllic w idea of what the future can be, and I'm unsatisfied with the with the present that we have. Well and keep in mind, I I think the sort of handoff stuff for the bingo card is very interesting, but keep in mind that more and more of these keynotes are anchored by the CEO, but more and more of them are done by other people on the team. And so we'll probably see them at the beginning or the end, or the beginning and the end, but most of the rest of it is gonna be all of those guys and gals who run the departments. And then Google I.O. a couple of weeks ago where Sundar Pachai came out very Yeah, he didn't didn't even close the I I was surprised that the keynote ended because I'm I was you you're used to the CEO coming back to just wrap things up, but no ended with by the way, robots will take over the world. We think we think it's gonna happen in the next three years. Have a great time . We don't need a CEO, we have the robots. He's tired from counting the money. Uh but they I was actually the other day I was thinking that like of course when the the last time we had a CEO handoff, the pr the Steve of course was in no shape to be part of an event or part of a transition. Right. Uh what are they i it it would be interesting. I'm not predicting anything, but it would be interesting if uh they were to arrange for Tim to have some time in August to have his own not a not an event, but a video in which like he basically is well, this is the last time I'm gonna be speaking to this community and the world our products as CEO. Uh he did that as a letter uh uh a couple months ago. That might suffice . Uh, and it's kind of hard for those of us who've been watching Apple for so long to imagine a CEO doing something so personal, but it was also maybe 10 years ago tough to predict whether or not Apple was going to celebrate a 50th I don't think that anybody might have predicted that they were going to do something as spectacular as weeks of events culminating with Paul McCartney doing his full arena at Apple Park. So anything speculative from uh McGurman's newsletter of how the dynamic island interacts. He also says, which is interesting, yes, you'll still be able to say hey Shlomo . Uh well actually won't even have to say hey anymore or hold down the iPhone's power button. But there's also Apple plans to use let uh let users swipe down from the top center of the phone anywhere in the system to launch a new search or ask interface. So we already have that as search. Yeah. I was wondering if that was makes things more complicated because now the swipe down now has two different modes or excuse me two different actions. If you swipe from the corner . Exactly. You swipe down from the corner, you'll get like all those all those uh those settings. If you stripe swipe down from the middle, now you're gonna get uh Siri and uh uh also notifications or it's the sort of thing where we're either we'll get used to it before uh faster than we think or we'll think, oh God, do we re did we really want to start to make our this is this is like the multi-touch version of like corded keyboards where you have to start to remember right there's there's nothing instinctive that says notifications are a center, uh settings are upper left right hand corner. You just have to learn like what the difference is. This is the great UI challenge is to add features. One more swipe for voiceover users, which already exists, so it's like, oh no, another swipe permutation and weapons. Yeah. Okay. Is it as intuitive as it as it could be? Yeah. Well, get ready. So this is what German says, and again, this is just rumor, but this menu also shows the same interface in the current iOS that's displays Siri suggestions, right? That's this is I guess replacing that. Uh which includes eight frequently used app functions. There's also a panel for showing weather in the morning or evening from there users can launch apps, start text messages, ask about the weather, add calendar appointments, search through notes, trigger shortcuts within apps or search the web using Apple's new AI powered search systems, which competes with tools like perplexity. Results are displayed in a rich text card that pops out of the dynamic island. It's hard to do this in words. I guess maybe once we see it, it won't be so. complicated Users can then swipe down further to open a chatbot style conversation inside the Siri app. I think that's the most exciting thing, honestly, about this is the idea that you would have a Siri interaction that involves understanding the context of the conversation potentially, that you could refer back to earlier conversations, because that's part of this idea too, that basically everything that we are used to now from AI chatbots and have great value because you can have different conversations with different contexts and move among them. The imagine the ability to also have a back and forth with Siri where you could say, you know, I'm you know, I'm thinking of going to see this movie, what are the show times? And then like come back later and say, why don't we book that 830 and it knows what movie you're talking about and what showtime you're talking about instead of saying, I don't understand, because it's it has a memory that's, you know, ten minutes long or two minutes long. So having again table stakes for for chatbots these days, but Siri's never been able to do it. So I think that's really important for them to get there. And and more important to that, how do you build that in a nice way into the default iPhone interface, right? Because it's one thing to say, well, you know, if you care enough, download an app and then open the app and then have that conversation and all that. But like where do you put that to have it be globally available in your OS? Yeah. They they also need to make sure that they don't waste a lot of time securing people's f loyalty and faith in Siri as their point of contact for such things because already we're seeing uh uh Gemini Sparks are starting to people who people who pay the the most for the for the top tier Gemini subscription now have access to Sparks, and it turns out that the thing kind of works already. And so if people are you you want Apple to get into a position where people are excited to start using the brand new thing that Apple is providing them with as just a basic feature of the phone, you don't want them to, you don't want to approach them saying here is a thing that is not might not be as good as what you've been trusting for the past nine to eleven months, but we hope you'll give it a try. And then if you give it a try, we hope that you will find it an okay substitution and worth building a personal relationship with this one after spending so much time developing a personal relationship with the other one. And part of it is, you know, just to keep up on what's going on and try a lot of different interfaces and stuff And that is seems to me that's where uh uh everything is going uh with AI these days is this notion of an agent that has memory, has knowledge of context, that carries that with it. Because you know, up until recently, when you started a new chat in Perplexity or or Chat GPT, it would just be, hey, I know nothing. What do you want? It'd be start from scratch. Uh they they've slowly added memory, but the people who are working with open claw and uh I'm using Hermes really have elaborate memory systems that allow it to have a lot more context, and that makes it hugely more valuable. If they can manage that with Siri, manage it in a private way, manage it so that your phone now carries your context, carries information about who you are, what you need. That could be hugely valuable. That's what a personal assistant is. I mean and another thing that I guess is table stakes for chatbots if you use the same one on multiple devices, but the ability to sync your Siri conversations across devices so that I can be on my Mac one minute and my phone the next, I think that's going to be a win for a lot of people who may not have gotten into AI who have only done it sporadically if you say, well, no, you you can start a conversation on your Mac about going to that movie, but then later on when you're on the way, you can refer back to that on your phone. Hey, that's actually useful information that I can surface extremely quickly. Yeah. server that everything else connects to so that there is a single source of truth. And Apple must uh maybe use iCloud for that. They'll have to do something like that. So there's a single source of truth. It's got to be iCloud or it's got to be some other seamless way because if you most people don't run a server. That is those are not words that ninety nine percent of the people speak. And I wouldn't . Right, of course not. Yeah. Right. That's the cigar sauce that Apple could add, is trying to find a way to add that connectivity and a way to do it. They could do it. It's easy. To Andy's point that you know I think I I what I would like to see, I I think this is where they're headed, is a multi-tier strategy where they need to ship a good assistant in the box from Apple, even if it's powered ultimately by Gemini, they need to s because you can't ship it as an empty box. You can't say, well, plug in somebody's AI here. They have to do it and they have to have it be decent. They have to have it be that if you never download another AI app, you never sign up for another API, whatever whatever it is , that you can get some AI goodness out of your phone to solve problems that you have. But the other part of that strategy that they seem to be heading down, which is great, is if you are a fan of some other AI provider, you can, you know, link that provider and use that as a source for your uh for your you know requests. And I I like that idea. I think that that is, I don't think Apple needs to hide the competition, especially because nobody unless I mean, forget it, it's not hidden. Everybody knows that it's there. But if you work well with it and say, look, so many people, because this is kind of Apple's game, it's like why there's no such thinging as shirt lock in my mind which is like Apple's version is always for the masses it's always for the 70 80 90 percent and then they're the people who want more and that's why you know if you write an app and Apple completely replaces your feature set and you're completely hosed, you know, that's a problem because you did the obvious part and the edge cases are where there's power. And the same goes for this AI stuff is Apple needs to be good. And yes, there are gonna be people who say this is not enough. I want more. And whatever percentage that is, if they can say, great, you can do that too. Go over to Claude, go over to Chat GPT, we're all we're fine with that. You can add those in here too. It's all running on iPhone. And then and then they're good. That is phase two. Phase one, though, is table stakes. It's like, yeah, but the thing that comes out of the box can't be bad, right? It can't you can't be driving people away to other assistants and making them do the work, but also integrating with the the uh the other options. I think what we've said all along here is the great hand that Apple holds regarding AI is that they're the platform owner and all of their AI competitors that they have to beat are running apps on their platform, right? So it's like being a good host for those things is not losing. It's actually kind of a smart thing to do. So I hope we see both of those. It does Sherlock a lot of people in the uh in the uh images that Mark German put in his uh power on newsletter, there's an example that clearly Sherlocks Google's news. What happened in tech and world news today and what are the biggest stories I should know about, you don't go to Google News, Apple presents you with this very similar uh grid. It was Sherlocks. There are a number of apps that uh tell you what that plant is, what that flower is. Siri will do that now. In fact Siri is integrated tightly into the camera app according to German. Right. These are all a mat by the way, I sh these are all imagined renders from text descriptions that Mark got for people. Some of these renders might be influenced by what is out there in the world now or is so they may not they're not screenshots. They's theirre they their' illustrations. But yeah, although I again I'll say it, like Sherlock, like again, if you're Sherlocked by a feature that should be a base OS feature, you're not doing it right. If your app all it does is is the table stakes, then you're gonna get killed. Yeah, but what ends up happening is a lot of those apps end up being like, well, yeah, Apple does 80% of it, but like our users are the ones who wanna do the cool stuff that's on the edges. That's the other 20%. And that's that's great. But also as a platform owner, you can't sit there and say, well, you know, there's apps that do this, so we don't ever have to do it. Because most people, most users won't download those apps. But if they're in the camera app or, you know, some other system, then they will use them. And that's what, that's what Apple needs to try to do is please those people. That's while we're we're all tech nerds here and we get so focused on uh on the edges, and that's great because there's cool stuff happening on the edges, but one of the reasons Apple doesn't always do what we want them to do is because Apple isn't thinking about the edges. They're thinking about everybody that's kind of in the middle there and making, you know, it's a mainstream. It's like saying like a niche cable TV show versus a big network show that's number one. Like uh, you know, uh Chicago Fire is, that a show now or whatever, is like a lot less uh cutting edge, right? But lots of people watch it. The ch tracker, right? Like uh people watch it . It's got it's got big ratings, even though it's not, you know, an Apple TV sho I would say the Tim Hyper Dick Wolf of of Dick Wolf. Yeah. I mean but I mean I we could take it too far because Apple does try to do quality, but the the point is more that Apple is thinking about the ninety percent of the users of the iPhone, which is a lot of people who are not so technical that they're gonna do what we require. And that and this I firmly believe is the core problem with Siri that they have to address, which is yes, you can flee to a chat bot that's better. Yes, you can figure your action button to get it to work right. You can do all of those things, but how many people first off don't do it and are just frustrated or have been driven to do it because the Siri experience is so bad. And that reflects badly on Apple. So they gotta make that default experience good, even if they're also saying, yes, and you can add Claude if you want, because a lot of people won't don't want. So this is an interesting conversation actually going on in our YouTube chat. Gixer Scott says they can't compete with the foundation models. David says they don't need to . Uh especially and then says uh Ah Ahothabeth, if you can plug in someone else's models. Yeah. Their their foundation model is is is Gemini. Gemini. Yeah. And if you can as as the rumor uh has it, also use anthropic, also use open AI, uh you you you could do whatever you want. Um but, and first first table stakes is Siri has to not be a joke because the thing you talk about things that are mainstream, Siri being a joke is a mainstream thing. We may have very specific techno reasons that we think that we know that Siri has let us down. But if people on whether they're late night talk shows or YouTube channels or in comedy clubs or whatever, if they can say Siri, am I right? That's a big problem for Apple. And if Apple can somehow sort that out, whether it means compromising what we get on models or whether it means providing multiple models, whatever they have to do to make Siri not be a joke. Once they get that sorted out, I think that's only a win for them, but they have to get there first. And that's what this year seems like it's all about. You could argue that's what killed the Newton is joking about the n doonsbury joking about the Newton's handwriting. Everybody decided, yeah, it's no good. And that was that. Yeah. And Installed on the device cannot be overestimated. It is just people people are willing to use a rippingly subpar app if that's the one that just simply was pre-installed and they're not necessarily A, they're not necessarily aware that there are alternative uh email clients or alternative uh uh web browsers or alternative calendar apps. Uh even if they are particularly available that those exists, they're gonna have to find and they're gonna have to really hit their head hard on the ceiling of whatever the default app is, the pre-installed app is, before they're going to even start looking at alternatives to those sort of things. And if you if the alternative is something that costs them money, oh my God, that's strike three. So yeah, Apple does have an advantage that they are free to squander and I hope that they do not squander it. Well, we'll find out. It's only a week away. We will be covering Apple's keynote. Uh Micah Sargent and I will be uh signing on right at the beginning and uh we'll be we've got our bingo cards in front of us. I'm sure you too. Uh do you bring a bingo card to uh the Apple campus uh with you, uh Jason or do you just have an advantage? uh Mike Hurley and I just did our draft and I will look at the draft scorecard a little bit to see if I'm winning or losing so I can cheer on when you know somebody mentions agentic. I think that's one of Mike's picks is somebody says the word agenc, right? And it's like great, it's great. Say the secret word, uh, win a hundred dollars. So um I do a little bit of that, but um, but yeah, 10 a.m. Pacific on Monday. So uh what a way to start your week. We'll be uh I I should just as a program note, we won't be streaming that in public as we do with all of our other shows only because Apple has in the past taken us down and given us strikes on YouTube. So that'll be uh club members only if you're not in the club, YouTube.com sorry, twit.com slash club twit uh you can join the club and then just quit a month later if you want but it would be nice if you stayed we would like that actually I think we have a two-week trial so you can even do that uh for free twit.tv slash club twit. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. Christina Warren has the week off. She is at Microsoft Bill, but we are so thrilled to have uh Shelley Brisbane with us uh from the TechSuit Standard Radio. That's why she sounds so good. She's got a radio voice. I love it. Uh, also Andy Yanako and uh Jason Snell. Uh more from Mark German's Power On Newsletter. Uh Apple's going to be testing natur he said it may not arrive in the first version of iOS twenty seven in September, but they'll be testing natural language prompt-based editing of photos. So you can ask via voice or text for specific edits like cropping or changing colors. Can you do that now on the Pixel, uh Andy? Um I'm sorry, repeat that. It's text-based uh prompting of photo edits. Um yes. Uh that's built into that's built into the Photos app uh and it gets a little bit more sophisticated as you go. So maybe Gemini already has that and they're just gonna apply it. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah that lets people create automations using natural language that will be huge I think yeah I again the bit a uh the the sooner we get away from the word I the word agentic, where people associate with open claw, and we start to get into well, what if your chatbot can actually do stuff for you that you describe? Uh that's gonna be better because that's a that's a that's a feature that people are going to sort of trust, particularly if Apple spends a lot of time explaining here,'s what the guardrails are and here's why it's not going to be able to delete every single one of your emails and/or repeat to your boss the complaints that you've been making when you were having a therapy session uh with Siri uh and email that uh to as If you are creating your bingo card or your draft, Bloomberg also says there are AI created wallpapers, a system-wide grammar checker for text input, another Sherlocked app. Uh revamped image playground app that offers improved quality. Well couldn't be any worse. Yeah, yeah. And uh Genoji, uh custom emoji. Well, take one out of four of those. Three of the four sound pretty lame, but Yeah. Okay. Which one do you like? I like the grammar checker. I don't I don't get the point of the other one. I mean not that I desperately desire one, but if you're you know, that's the one that seems like it actually has some value. Yeah. You know why I pay for grammarly, so yes. Yeah, right. I mean, so it's bad news for superhuman, but uh uh which is a sponsor, by the way. Uh but uh it's funny what I think a lot of normal people are aware of is Genmoji and uh image playground. That's Apple . Yeah. But that's but pathetic. No. I mean that the built the the built in features in Google Photos is good, but especially with the latest version, it is literally the why why would you use Photoshop when you could just simply say increase the contrast of the sunset so that you can see the clouds more? Uh and also remove that the third guy from the left and scooch everybody over again and it just simply works. That's really that's not just congratulations. We are rebuilding, we are st we we we just relaunched all of our AI. That's not the stuff that you do when you first relaunch an AI. That's when you have been you've been launching stuff uh to the moon and now you're basically preparing to go to Mars because the moon stuff has been working so great, the technology is so mature. Yeah. All right. Well, uh it's gonna be an exciting WWDC. Definitely. Are the betas now? We're seeing some betas now. Uh 266. I just saw a very sh brief point zero zero one update that apparently fixed a charging issue or something like that with the iPhone. Um I haven't applied it yet and I don't know. Yeah. Also there's a problem there was a minor bug with uh M5 based uh machines uh that okay I I didn't get too deep into it but supposedly something that really only really affects people in enterprise so if you are if an effective an effective a affected party, you'd be very interested. Otherwise it's just you know good for the feel good. So we'll see twenty seven IOS twenty seven previewed uh on Monday, Mac OS twenty seven big bear. Like I don't think they're gonna call it Big Bear, but I wish they would. Big Bear. Oh, we're gonna hear we're gonna hear a million duh bears like names our bears. Uh all the other uh twenty -seven uh OS is uh now typically Jason there's a developer preview immediately, right? Yeah, there's usually a developer beta one um that will be that week, maybe even that day, maybe even Monday afternoon. Yeah. Um, which even the bravest among us should resist strongly unless you've got literally put it on your second iPhone, your testing iPhone. If you if you don't have a testing iPhone, don't do it. Like just don't do it because it will be broken. It will be busted. And then, you know, every three or four weeks thereafter through the summer they will do, you know, maybe two, three, four weeks, they'll do other ba developer beta releases and usually in July they do a public beta. Public beta is a signal that Apple is not going to destroy everybody's devices. And so the general public who's brave can install that. So be warned that that, you know, if you don't have like on a Mac, you could do it on like an external drive or something, but if it's like an iPad or an iPhone, just don't do it unless you have another device that is your test device, which you know, developers have those, journalists have those. That, yeah, because that that first developer beta is busted. And you get real excited. You're like, oh, but I want to use the thing. And it's like, yeah, that feature might be there. Or it might be there, but busted. And all the other things that you use your phone for might also be broken. And the saddest thing is when somebody has flown out to California And gotten real excited and they're at the developer conference and they install it on their phone and now their phone doesn't work and they're in California and they have to fly home and it's like it's not good. It shouldn't last I I know people who have been. I this is my job to express to people the dangers here. I you know I generally have a another computer, another device that I can do this on because I don't want to uh be bitten by it. Yeah. And and just to just to make sure that we're really clear here, we're not talking about, oh wow, uh they knew uh the new smart assistant sometimes screws things up or sends me to Wikipedia. No, we're talking about the phone doesn't work. We're talking about you cannot con you cannot connect to mobile broadband. That's how that's that's the fear that you should have. So I'm in danger. Yeah. I know it seems exciting, but like watch the screenshots and the screen recordings and stuff like that. Don't this is this don't do it. into the into the living room says son slash daughter, I need that iPhone 15 back because I need a second device to run this thing on. Enjoy enjoy the enjoy this Google Nexus 5 that with a swollen battery from the back of the drawer. We are uh not done with twenty-six though. The first betas of twenty-six six uh are out. Uh that this will be the last though. Or will it? Or I don't know. Will there be a 267? Sometimes there is an even later one after they ship it depends like they ship this and all that, but it's maintenance at this point. It's like little little bits, little maintenance um just to just to park it somewhere safe. Will there be any hardware announcements on Monday? Like something that's like a new MacBook or something? I think the time is right and the topic is right. And remember we, don't have M5 Mac minis and Mac Studios yet. So the time is right. And again, it's a developer. It's not a hardware show. They don't have to what I always say is like um WWC is not about hardware, but sometimes there's hardware there anyway. Um the case like hardware? They do they do, and having like a Mac Studio would be a fun thing to throw into the mix and they could boast about AI use with the Mac mini, but do they want to ship those products right now when they're struggling to get M5s into other things? I'm not sure they do. I that's the part that gives me pause because they totally given all the memory issues you're going to developers and you're saying hi buy a Mac Studio except you can't get the gigabyte of RAM that you want. Right, right. So they could do it. I I I I think it's non-zero, but I think it's more likely that they're just like, not now. Do not do this now. And they don't need to, right? They don't need to make hardware announcements at WWDC. They just don't. They they can do that later this summer or in the fall. And and if they're having supply issues with all of these chips, why stoke more demand right now if you can't even supply what you can what you're already unless you want to do a slick video about the M6 is coming. Not right now, but it's coming so you know something like that. I suppose no I don't think so either. But in theory, they've done that in the past when they've had a chip that is like in the lab that's about to be put into a Mac, but it seems unlikely that the other one is the M6 though. But but also Apple Silicon has always been like a big part of like the sort of like public state of the union, like flying the flag, uh trooping the colors sort of thing. And when they want given that they are definitely gonna want to underscore how great a platform the Mac is for AI, not just for Siri, but also for people who are working on AI or who want to build new models or who want to build agentix agentix stuff or use it simply as a platform for their own models, they're going to want to basically say, and by the way, here's a we we can we're introducing the new M five whatever , which ha which uh which uh has uh X times performance for this, X times performance for that, again, securing the idea that if you are working in AI, not just a user of AI, you don't wanna have to mess with a whole bunch of janky Windows or uh Intel stuff uh or uh AMD stuff. You want Apple Silicon uh powering your powering your jam. Should point out that uh NVIDIA was uh at Computex, Jensen Wong gave a keynote yesterday in Taiwan at which he announced a new chip for PCs. In fact, Microsoft today at Build will probably announce a new Surface laptop aimed directly at Apple um because the idea of these new chips, these will be designed by um MediaTech to incorporate much more uh AI capability. It's it's going to be an RTX Spark PC chip and uh Wong said it'll reinvent the PC for the AI era . Uh there will be uh devices from Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, that Microsoft Surface I mentioned, and MSI all coming this fall. So that is going to be somewhat of a challenge to I mean, Apple everybody agrees. The Apple uh silicon is fantastic for AI . Uh and and in fact, even the D JX uh Spark, the the desktops that uh NVIDIA's been offering don't really kind of come that close in some ways to the bandwidth of the uh of the Apple Silicon. So this will be interesting. This is gonna be a battle. It's a good thing for consumers. There'll be competition. Absolutely. I mean the it's we it's gonna be exciting to see how long like the MacBook Neo revolution lasts before other chipmakers figure out how to either accelerate their timetable or simply move ahead on the timetable they already had. Uh Dell released a new XPS 13 uh just I think it was just today using Intel's uh Wildcat uh wild wildcat lake structure uh uh cpus and again we'll have to wait and see whether or not they can have the same build quality but there's definitely we've also they've all uh the windows side has already sort of demonstrated that if there is one vulnerable vulner ability they can definitely exploit, it's that well, we can basically instead of giving you like one USB C port and a half, we can actually give you two very, very useful ports. We can give you or at least before before the world turned upside down, maybe we can give you more storage, but we can give you a backlit keyboard. Basically, whereas a couple months ago it felt like the Neo is just absolutely running the table, because it absolutely did, with these new CPUs that are actually designed for that. Uh, it's not a case of uh the Windows platform and the and the Linux platforms not being able to respond to it so much as because they have to get basically three or four cats running in the same direction. Eventually, once they do, yes, they can maybe they can compete with the NEO. Well don't confuse- Okay, so there is, you know, definitely a lot of movement in the PC marketplace to try to make Neo comparable cheap laptops, but this is probably not going to be a competitor for the this is going to be five thousand dollars this is a competitor for the m5 max the m5 pro the m5 ultra the m6 when that if that comes out this right we're talking about yeah the RTX Spark is going to be we don't we don't know what pricing is gonna be, but it is gonna be very presumably very expensive. And you know, the the device he showed had a hundred twenty eight gigs of RAM, so that by itself is g onna double the price. Um they're really aiming these though at he says it's gonna launch a new era of agen tic computers, agentic laptops. And I think that's very interesting. Um for those of us who cover AI, I think that that's going to be very interesting. And Will, I I believe they're looking at the sales of Mac minis and Mac Studios and saying, you know, we want some of that business. Yeah. Uh he held up a couple of laptops playing uh video g ames. Um, you know, they're they were definitely uh aiming, I think anyway, aiming directly at Apple uh with these and the and these new media tech uh processors. So uh traditional app centric PCs turned into agentic AI personal computers, is what uh what Jensen Wong said. I mean n never bet against NVIDIA, but I wonder how long how far off we are from people just simply trusting a voice to a computer with no interface if that's if that's if that's one of the directions that are very well unfortunately the interface seems to be Windows, which is definitely a deal breaker for me. I I don't care how great the surface is. I ain't running Windows. If I could run Linux, maybe. Uh so Apple does still have this advantage of Mac OS, which is a huge uh advantage. Apple, by the way, the stock market today reacted fairly poorly to this, although I don't know if you can trust the stock market as being an indicator to anything. Nvidia's stock is down. Microsoft stock is down a lot. And Apple stock is up a lot . I don't know. I think it's gonna be uh look this is good. You want competition. And if the RTX uh spark uh competes with the iPhone or the uh the Mac , that's great . Um we shall see. We shall see. Uh anything else uh w we're gonna be looking for? What was your draft what were your draft picks, Jason? Oh geez, what did I what did I pick here? Upgrade.cards is the website. Upgrade.cards. Um I picked Photos app gets an gets new AI editing tools, more third party AI support in the OS, not just open AI . Um shortcuts gets AI powered shortcuts creation. Now do you guys work it out so like Mike says, Well, are you gonna rec are you gonna talk about the photos app oh I won't say that? We have a list from which we pick, but uh you you don't we alternate our picks. So so yes, he's gonna have you know, John Turnus appears as one of his picks and and improved gen moji quality, right? Like every time one of these comes off, you're like, Yeah, somebody says a gentic. He's like, Yes, a gentic ding. 'Cause ding, ding, ding. Oh, I've got Mike Rockwell. I think Mike Rockwell will appear at some point in the he got put in charge of Siri, so I think he will appear. And I I am it's a Where's Waldo situation? I have picked that that little uh finder mascot that they have in all those TikTok videos will make a cameo appearance somewhere peeking over the keynote corner. And it's a keynote draft. So basically if it's if it's in developer state of the union or in a press release or anything like that, it doesn't count. It's what's in that streamed keynote, which is kind of fun. It it allows us, I mean, just like we're doing here, it's a framework the draft is for us to discuss what we think might happen and and and who has the California Bear Trophy now. I have the California Bear Trophy. We had a sad state of affairs last year where Mark German spoiled the name of Mac OS right before we were gonna draft. And so we had to do like a supplementary draft. But this year we've been able to do it where we both pick two California place names and whoever comes geographically closest will win the California Bear Trophy, which is a refrigerator magnet, a wooden of a bear. So but that is the official yes. Santa Barbara. I basically got Northern California and Southern California and Mike has Central California. Golden Gate. Ooh, I like Golden Gate. I love that name. Yeah. Golden Gate. So we'll see how that goes. But that's our little bonus. Nobody picked Big Bear. No, but I get Big Bear because it's in my You would get it. I try to use my knowledge of my my California. I was gonna say, is Mike gonna come back and say, you know, I only know what the map says. You have integrated life knowledge. Yeah, that's that's it. I mean I d I absolutely strategically pick things that would give me all of Northern and Southern California because I want to make it. Mike will be in much better shape when Apple starts using Great Britain uh jiggly. Oh yeah, then I I mean Wookiee Hole. Kings from the 17th century or something Mac OS Henry VIII. Now that Mac OS now that I watch Sure . Richard III . It's the humpback Mac OS. All right. Um Okay, so this is interesting. This will be interesting. And and I don't want to uh Andy turn my back on this idea of these NEO competitors. Do you think this XPS 13, which is 700 bucks, is a reasonable comp competitor to a NEO? Uh it's gonna depend on the thing is like there are people who I wouldn't say like Windows, but they the switching away from Windows is not as palatable as Mac users think everybody Mac users tend to think that every Windows user wants to uh be a Mac user, that's not really the case. But it does show that there is a long term roadmap that everybody is is issued. There is something called Stockholm syndrome and and Windows users are uh changes hard. Change is hard. Exactly. And it also bears thinking that they announced this back in, I think, January, W excuse me, WWTC, uh, at CES. And so if you think so, if anybody's thinking that, oh wow, look, it only took them about a month and a half to like suddenly roll out a a compet itor. I don't know, maybe maybe that meant uh maybe it it made them realize that we're gonna have to make sure that the price point doesn't assume that all the cheapest Mac book is going to be eleven hundred dollars anymore. But it does mean that this has been a concern for the Windows platform and chipmakers all along, that there has to be a way to make quality stuff that does not that that takes care of the uh economically the the the the the economy line and the low Well actually the XPS line is if you're gonna use Windows, probably the I mean that's my favorite. I love XPS. I've had old many of them. Yeah, and the but they're great, but um the the Apple still has the advantage where my God, like every time that every time I think that wow, that actually looks like a very, very attractive package, and then like I'll get one in for for test or like I'll happen to have experience with one and like it's like really like the screen has this you can you can bend the display this much and like I mean again I've got I've got a backpack like to the to the left of me right now that when I'm setting up here for for for live stream it's pretty well full but I don't worry one bit that my iPad or my my my MacBooks and get damaged by the fact that I'm I've got it in a fully loaded backpack on many of these machines it's like tell you what why don't I have a little like satchel in addition to the where that only this laptop comes in. So, but I'm glad that this is this is something that benefits everybody, uh accessibility and affordability. That I'm glad to see that they are feeling the pressure not just to make cheap Windows notebooks, but cheap and good Windows notebooks, and we're seeing the fruits of that. You're watching Mac Break Weekly, Andy Yanako, Jason Snell, and Shelley Brisbane filling in for uh Christina Warren. According to the information, Apple is going to this is a report from Aaron Tilley, renew its push for AI that runs on devices instead of the cloud. That is Apple's sweet spot, of course, but not easy to do. They're squeezing Gemini hard. Yeah, with Gemini in there. Yeah . And and Google actually has a pretty good uh small version of Gemini that uh that does fit in in a phone. Um it's also going to continue to run the Google Cloud in a licensed version in Apple's uh data centers. So that's key for Apple. I mean, it the privacy issue and also the fact of like in the future, it's hard to imagine. Apple silicon is an advantage for them. It's hard to imagine this is not going to continue to be a place where guess what? Chips are going to get better and better. That's going to happen, right? That's going to continue to happen. I don't think that's a big prediction on my part to say chips will get better and better. And so having more AI processing happen, even if it's pre-processing or judging where it should go and what model should be used, the more of that stuff that you can have happen on the phone, I think I think it's probably for the better. I know that there are issues where like it would be faster to go over the internet, deal with the latency, and have a very fast model act on the on the on the other side of the internet than running it on a slower model on a phone. But like it feels tactically for Apple like having really good models that run on device is an important part of what they're doing. It's not, it's probably not for a very long time going to be the only thing you're going to want to do, but I think it fits into their privacy conversation. And I think they also it fits into their uh ability to make really good chips that they should probably have It also fits into the uh the pattern that's going on right now in the AI world, which is that it's getting more and more expensive to run AI. And running locally is a lot cheaper than Well and I I wonder if as a practical matter, since you have multiple models available and since you're perhaps trying to prioritize or to encourage people to use one that runs more better on device, is there a way to give people choice either about the kinds of requests that are made or the scale of them? And so that you can say, well, you you could do this on this model that's built, you could do this on device, it's probably faster, it's certainly more private, or if you want to, you can go out and get information from this other source and that there's some way of grading those options for the user that is not complicated and nerdy. I don't know how that looks exactly, but it seems like, I mean, it's it's like the different the whole private pro cloud compute the thing versus just going out to the internet to to get access. Uh you it's also about speed as well as on device processing and privacy. Yeah. location uh the location tracking is on by the way the microphone is is on a it's just a dot I wonder I wonder if Apple would would decide that we're gonna have a little dot indicator that says that you are using it you you have an AI that's that's sending data to an AI compute facility that is not controlled by Apple, just so that they can be aware of when it's happening, when it's not happening. And also sort of like in a tiny, tiny like 98% user positive, 2%. We would really like to make people like not inherently trust any operation which is sending data outside of Apple. That's the positive stuff. Something that they control , which isn't ideal for a customer, but as AI gets more expensive and as Apple looks for more ways to ring services revenue out of those interac tions, uh, but that's what I always thought was going to happen right away with private cloud compute that they were going to set up a pricing structure. And yeah. So I wouldn't be surprised if something like that happened, especially if this catches fire and people are excited about it. It would ha it would probably have to be an Apple Intelligence Pro subscription as opposed to being charged for tokens. I mean all all already, Google's getting a lot of kickback for they didn't actually announce that they were uh putting new caps on uh on token usage uh for Gemini Pro subscribers and uh uh Gemini ultra subscribers, but nonetheless people started realize uh discovering that okay, well I'm cut off for the next five hours and also I've been using it for so heavily for the past three days I'm now cut off for the next week and that was not a thing that happened in the past. They certainly don't want to have a situation where the which is happening at the corporate level where, oh, we just spent $500 million on AI after telling all of our employees to use AI for literally everything as though it costs nothing. Whoops. That was a tactical error that we're going to have to explain to our shareholders. Oh well . Uh you mentioned this a little earlier, but I think it's might be worth uh digging a little bit more into it. When Apple released the Apple Watch, it it it really hurt the uh fancy watch market. Uh it really changed the watch, the wristwatch market dramatically. It it it introduced wristwatches to a bunch of people who haven't worn wristwatches in years, including me. Uh but it also hurt um companies like SWATS as well as the high high-end uh watch market. Will Apple's glasses do the same thing? Uh this is part of the power on newsletter this uh Sunday. Apple uh believes its strong brands, industrial design and iPhone integration will peop lead people seeking new regular glasses to spring for an Apple pair instead. And they want to do it at the low end. They don't and that's important because uh, you know uh, my glasses, man, the costs have skyrocketed for eyewear. Um it's almost a thousand bucks a pair now, including lenses. Um they're really expensive. If Apple could, you know, get in this market at a low cost, it might change everything. Uh he s he says mainstream eyewear companies should be bracing for impact. Just as fossil and swatch were upended by the Apple Watch, the company's entry into eyewear has a possibility uh the potential to fundamentally alter how consumers think about buying glasses. Uh Jason, you're a you're an eyeglasses wearer, as am I. Do you spend a lot of money on your eyewear? I mean, yeah. I mean it's prescription and it's got to be a center for high index. And I mean I have some I have some insurance coverage, but still it's not it's not cheap. Um yeah, it's a good one. I get one I get from from Kaiser, I get one three hundred dollar pair of glasses every two years. It is not covering my costs. Yeah, yeah. No kidding. No kidding. Same. So yeah, uh look, this would be an additional area where Apple could come in and eat other companies' lunch a little bit. And it was like I was saying earlier, like the Apple Watch isn't an ideal comparison, but like if you if you as Apple stake out ground saying, and and then for other tech companies too, saying actually glasses these days really need to be tech products because reasons. And that's the question. Right. Because reasons. But for fashion. Fashion is a big part of the fashion is a big one, yeah. But but because reasons, and and and I wanna say because reasons there because they the tech companies have to make the case. And I think they right, meta 's trying to make it, and Shelly talked about a lot of the great accessibility reasons. I think there probably are reasons where you would you're having your assistant see what you see could have some real value in terms of assistant. Yeah. And I think I think honestly, one of the things you're seeing now is a realization that having uh creepy glasses that peep at people and record things and stuff is not a selling point, but having it be a p uh a data source for feeding AI to help you might be a selling point that they're gonna try that. But if they do, you know, and you're Apple and you're looking at the eyeglasses market and you're like, you know, we we took how much of the of the watch market and now we're gonna take how much of the glasses market. And even more than that , if they really do become useful, maybe people start wearing glasses who don't even need glasses because they're useful. This is also why they're working on that little that little pin pended thing, right? It's like what if if you if you make this really great is glasses, but people don't need glasses, what do they do? And the answer is well, maybe they've got something they can just put on their shirt that that sees for them instead and and talking about it. I want the most offensive form. I want something that records audio and video constantly, feeds it to my AI for a complete record of the video. I think a strobing light. Years ago and I'm gonna be proved a visionary. Smart hats. Smart hats is where it's gonna be. I'll wear a smart hat. As a hat wearer, I I'm a fan of that. Yeah, yeah. There's room for a battery, honestly, up there. There's plenty of room. You can put a whole lot of lidar sensor up there so that you can nav igate. I think that's a great idea. You're a Waymo is what you are. Go around. Shelly, what a great idea. Put cameras in the ears. Absolutely. I'm gonna be a Waymo . I'm gonna describe my experience . I'm gonna nap . We'll put a propeller on it so people think it's one of those nerdy propeller beanies, but it's actually LIDAR . We you know, we we we joke, but I noticed that a lot of YouTubers have started ever since those little clip on uh clip on Bluetooth microphones have become popular, a lot of them like just will clip them onto their the the the the the bill of their the uh the bill of their uh their baseball cap or even like the side of their glasses. And that's why I think that that is I hope that that is a form factor for these kind of wearables that people pursue because the the there there are a lot of things that are uh there's uh that are applicable when you're comparing watches to glasses. A lot of things that are absolutely not applicable. And one of them is that I don't care what these glasses do. I don't care if Apple makes them. I don't care how private they are. If I don't like the design, there's no way I'm putting them on my face. Whereas an Apple Watch, it's under your you know it's under your wrist breast, the it's part A lot of people complain about the Apple Watch though that it's up to the big I mean I don't I don't love it. I don't love the design of it. Especially as a woman with small wrists. It's not my jam. I don't like a square watch. I wear it because it gives me some utility, but I don't wear it all the time . And I gave up a perfectly nice watch, which I probably don't need anymore, but I keep in my nightstand drawer because I really like it. And I gave that up to wear an Apple Watch. And glasses, I'm I'm much less of a design person than uh for on w on glasses than I am than a watch, but I think there are many more frames out there, many more styles of frames. I think for a lot of people that's gonna be a big and it seems like to me, I mean Apple doesn't necessarily work this way, but they never work this way. But it seems like the move would be what Meta has done is partnered with people who actually make glasses and put the technology inside of them. Same same thing with Google. They part they've partnered with like two different eye glass eyeglass, but established eyeglass designers. And yeah, they're they're gonna have they're gonna have to make a lot of people very, very happy. I mean the the uh one of the one of the reasons why I don't like the Apple Watch, I realize this is kind of lame, is that oh god, am I just gonna be like another nerd who has an Apple Watch? Like ever like we're s we're s like we're part of some sort of like a tribe or a cult, which is which is sometimes nice, but it's like when it's it's you if when it comes to glasses, you're reminded of like uh this if you've ha if you have friends who've been in the army that realize that they wear glasses like you have to wear the exact same style of glasses. Exactly and even and even when like you're even when it's the weekend you're just you're in your civilian clothes, you're still wearing the same army glasses that as identifies you. It's like I don't want my identity to be defined by this organization that provided me with this this eyeglass tech. I want to be able be able to jump . It could be an ironic statement, right? Your army glasses. Sure. Good. And even if you if you're not a prescription glasses where if you're like me, you have pr particular sunglasses that you like. A lot of people choose sunglasses specifically for design. People like me choose it for the particular uh lenses. They have to be a certain level of darkness. But that means everybody who has sunglasses has to have the equivalent of prescription glasses if they're going to have apple glasses. It's just like it's it's could potentially be a mess, and I don't know how they resolve it. I do think that the benefit of apple waiting or having to wait for technology reasons to release these to their version of glasses is that right now Meta is having a glass hole moment that they didn't have before when they weren't as popular. And now that they're popular, everybody's like they're terrible they're showing you know that's meta for one thing and it also has these cameras that are invasive but by the time Apple's glasses come out I wonder if either the moment is going to have moved on somewhat or if Apple's gonna find a way to disclose in ways that make those make glasses more acceptable out in the world. It just seems like for them, they've kind of dodged a kind of bullet by not having them out now when Meta is being pilloried for their invasive , you know, privacy invading glasses. I just found the Army Spectacle Request Trans mission System website . Where and this, and by the way, it says it's optimized for Internet Explorer version nine. So you got that going for ya. Uh the Spectacle Request Transmission System or S R T S is a web based application that provides the United States Department of Defense military ordering I'm surprised that's still up. I I would assume that Heggseth would have said, hey, if you're a four if you if you're we don't want any four eyes this organization, if you can't I was holding back on a Heg Seth joke. I had one threw up and I was like, you know, I'm not gonna do it. Thanks, Andy. I appreciate that. I'll take I am wearing the opposite of military uh eyewear. This is gonna be all the rage soon, the apple hat with the apple glasses. I mean eventually it's a culturally suit. The apple suit is next. It's like a jumpsuit containing all the taxes. I hope not. Honestly. I mean I I don't know what the solution is, but the idea that we normalize a device that's always recording that's not I think what we do maybe I mean society's part of it and I think regulation is a good thing You can't try to turn your back, Leo. Like indication, regulation about how that stuff can be used, regulation about how the indicators have to be uh, you know, you know, lights come on or whatever it is. Like there's there's a combination of things that we can do. The problem is, and we've seen this again and again, is it takes time , right? Like there's always the first thing that happens is the tech comes out and there's trouble and we all have to adapt. And then the culture adapts, and then maybe there's some regulation that comes in as well. And then we're in a better place, right? But the the dis ruptive period is not like that and i i also wonder how society is going to react to things like well i'm recording you but all i'm doing is using an ai summary that says that i saw you and that what and maybe a summary of what we talked about, but it's not actually re keeping your recording nor is it transcribing every word you said. Is that better or or is it still uh it is better. It is better, but is it on the side of okay, or is it still no, you're monitoring me without my consent? Uh I have in my doctor's office. I just went to my uh annual. There's a sign that says I am recording this. Yes. All doctors do that now. It's a whole new trend in medicine. And you just have to accept it, right? I mean you know So uh one of the big issues with the Meta Glasses is when they tried to roll out facial recognition and everybody instantly went, That's terrible, that's terrible right everybody who uses those meta glasses for accessibility went wait wait wait wait a minute i want that yeah and that is a sort of a microcosm of a kind of dissonance between these things are so amazing for accessibility, whether it's facial recognition or navigation assistance or image description, all the wonderful things they can do. I'm actually writing a story about this for an AI special we're doing on the show. Uh versus privacy versus I don't want to be recorded all the time. Versus no, you can't you don't have a right to recognize my face with technology. If your eyeballs can't do it, why should you be allowed to do it with technology that I have no control over? And it's a it's a real issue. And I and some of the accessibility disability community is reacting by going, too bad. This is something that we need to make our lives better tough. And others are going, I'm just gonna put my head in the sand and kind of pretend it doesn't exist because while I have these features, they're beneficial to me. And if I don't talk about it, maybe nobody will notice. And then there are other people like me who insist on interrogating it and who haven't exactly figured it out, but who recognize that there is a huge amount of dissonance between and this happens in AI and technology generally too, where even the even the tech companies will use the idea that something enhances accessibility to basically validate it and and and whitewash it basically. And it's it's an interesting situation and I've been writing a lot about it. Yeah, I bet. Don't be visionist about it. Even those of us who have eyesight. But it's you know, uh for instance, I'm you know, I'm I'm elderly. Uh at some point I'm not my memory is gonna start to fade. This could be a huge uh benefit to me. In fact, one of the reasons I'm really in intrigued in investigating it is you know the memory si point part of it will be huge and the sooner I start recording everything and keeping track of your names the better. By the way, I don't uh I have another disability which is invisible which is I my fa I don't have face recognition. I'm I'm uh I have something called aphantasia. I can't see people's faces. I'm face blind. So I you know I may meet you and have no idea who you are. I s I have I have essentially have that. I don't think it's that that that diagnosis but essentially because i'm as nearsighted as i am i don't recognize people it's the same thing but i i think like what you what we were saying before about about glasses uh prescriptions that affects older people because their glasses prescriptions are going to change more quickly than other people. So what does that mean in terms of wearables? Like if you're 20 and you have a glasses prescription and you get yourself a pair of Apple glasses, you're going to be great for X number of years. But if after you're 50, those prescriptions are gonna change often enough that it's gonna be a considerable expense to keep up to date with those smart glasses. Well that's mine as well. Well maybe not. I mean I've had the same fra I I do have eyeglasses. I don't tend to I a a while ago I decided that they trup uh I my vision is is better because I don't have to keep those lenses clean twenty four seven than just simply going without them. That's why I tend to I I only wear them when I drive or I'm s at the theater or something like that. Um but uh it's uh but it's always uh it's I've had the same phrase because you can always just have if it's lots of you can always get this prescription. But it but it is interesting that to think about uh there are laws that already prevent the use of these devices. They weren't put into place to prevent the use of smart glasses with cameras, but there are rules about no, you cannot bring a camera into a public bathroom if you are or if you're like California is a two-party consent state, so I can't record our conversation without your consent. Well there are cruise lines that have disallowed meta glasses specifically. But I know what Andy's saying. It's a broader thing than that. Yeah, but I mean there are and and like talking to like uh again if you're on the Little League game and you're just you're you're just like cheering on like your niece or your nephew, am I allowed to quote record unquote strange children with these things? In some territories, there is just basic there's guidance against that. It might be interesting, however, that there is also there are also laws against Well no but I'm saying that it's possible that Vuka. Look at me, I get to go to restaurants all the time. Well you wear your dog on your head, you sneak in, that's good. But but it's but but it's possible that one solution would be taking this off. These are actually service glasses. These aren't just, you know, me trying to be able to manipulate my Spotify playlists or my Instagram while I'm you know while I'm just skipping in the I was getting my labs done the other day and there was a woman with a chihuahua that had a service animal co at on it. And it's like this is a this is a medical facility. You're bringing a dog into it, but they can't stop it because it has this little nice little bit. And not to not to go too far down a tangent, but there have been laws in various states mostly, including an attempt to pass one in Texas. There are a couple of laws where a couple of states were actually passed where there is a service animal certificate that you can get, and there are specific requirements about the service animal and that you're supposed to include w on the service animal's harness so that if you go somewhere where dogs are not normally allowed, that you can you can check and then there's controversy over well, those service animal certificates can be basically ordered or printed from I'm all for service animals, obviously. But when it becomes a comfort animal and it's a snake or a peacock or a chicken. But but who is gonna arbitrate that? Like if you're in public spaces where service animals are allowed, the the advantage of a law or a certificate that can be made official in some way is that the restaurateur or the other patron or whatever can actually have a basis to say no you're not allowed here or yes you are. Here in Northern California, every restaurant now has a animals in it and no server wants to be put in the position of saying, well is that a legitimate service animal? They just say, okay, fine. Yeah. I think legally you only ask like what what uh is this a service animal and what specifically is the service animal trained to do? I mean I could be corrected if I'm wrong but No, that's right. Again, those are it's it it varies from state to state. Yeah, that might be the California rule, but yeah, that's what it is in California anyway. Uh so yeah, I mean this is th this is you see all these challenging issues. And you have to cover these, Shelley. The issue of, you know, uh look, I have a disability. I should be able to wear that kind of eyewear, uh, or I should be able to have a service animal with me. And then the issue of people like me going around with recording everything. Uh, but you don't know that I have aphantasia, so this helps me a lot with with face recognition. I just all I do is say , look, I I can't r I'm terrible with faces. What's your name? Who are you? Have I met you before? Do I know you? It's not a good idea. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Um and even the visible ones are often misunderstood by everybody else. And those of us who have them don't particularly want to spend our entire lives explaining them to you. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, good. You one of the reasons I love having you on, Shelly, you sensitized us to uh that and it's I appreciate it. Thank you. Um and I thank Lamine Yamal for wearing the new pink beats . Uh Lem I don't know who Lamin or is it Lamine or I don't know how you even pronounce it? Uh Lamine Lamine is an influencer who was caught in the wild with pink beats . Uh over the water. A footballer. Oh. Like uh soccer football. Yes. Okay. And there they are, the pink beats. You know what? It's nice. Uh is is okay. Is is is is this is just a landmine. Uh I I'm a minefield. Okay, it's a guy. Okay he plays for Barcelona. Okay, and he is carrying a Chanel uh purse with pink beats . Uh I don't know what his pronouns are, but he's a footballer. He actually is quite uh dashing in his Chanel uh jacket as well . So a fashion statement. Yeah. Okay. And this is this is apparently gonna be the next uh Beats Stioud Pro . Yeah, there there's there's no way that that was put up that he that he posted that without permission of Beats. This is almost an announcement. Obviously, Beats are different than an Apple product, even though it's technically not produ a product.ct It's fashion product. And that and that does tie in with like I think I think last week there was uh uh people someone had discovered that the FC that uh beats had filed an FCC uh got FCC approval for an for for a new like you know audio product indicating that there's gonna be something there was something else. And I'm gonna even go so far as to say uh Lamin might have been paid for this because if you look at the Instagram, his Instagram post, here he is. Go ahead, show this if you can. And uh and then you get a video of him sitting in a car. And what is the most prominent feature of the video? It's those pink beats around his neck. Uh I would say this was a good lighting choices for the accentuating those. Yeahah., ye Uh okay, so if you were curious, uh something else coming. Uh, everything coming for Apple TV in June. Oh, we you know what? Let's uh let's pause for uh the pause that refreshes. You're watching Mac Break Weekly with Andy Anako, who has a big announcement at the end of the show. Shelley Brisbane, who is of course a stalwart on Texas Standard Radio, which you can hear on the internet at Texas Standard.org. Texas Standard.org. Boom boom boom and uh and nick builton will not be running the next no i was i was uh okay this is completely oh and jason snell from six colors Oh in him in that guy too. Wait, I have an announcement. I need to come up with one. You guys have announced it. I was just shocked. I'm reading along about all the upset. In fact, I think I was watching the news. It's Scott Pelly, the CBS, 60es Minut anchor was yelling at the new head of 60 Minutes. And then shocked, I tell you, shocked to find out that was Nick Bilton, who used to be on our show all the time when he was the Times uh New York Times uh tech columnist. See, that's something I didn't know. I heard him identified as a tech journalist, and I was like, wait, so do I know somebody who knows him? And now I know I do. And they're saying he has no broadcast experience. And I just want to say he was a regular on Twitch so there. There you go. I don't know if that qualifies you to run sixty minutes, but uh that's another story for another day. I just it was like Nick, what ? He has risen far and fast since uh his appearances onit Tw. In fact, we got to the point where he became so successful he couldn't uh we couldn't get him on Twit anymore. So like Kara Swisher, he is he is ascended to the firmware. Yeah . Uh Apple TV. Have you been watching Widows Bay? Anybody see that? Yeah. What do you think? I think it's great. Yeah, I love it. I love it. It's so it's it's so it's Matthew Reese and it's uh you know it's uh an island that's kind of like a Martha's Vineyard kind of place, except it's except it's cursed, yeah. And and it's so it's like a horror comedy. I mean, really, I I what I love about it is that it is trying to do horror things and be scary, but it never forgets that it's funny, and the executive producer of it has a track record in doing comedy. And it's it's so weird because it's at points, laugh out loud, funny. Oh, yeah. And then at other points, terrifying. It's that kind of thing where it's like, yes, there is the ghost of a woman who is chasing you, and if she finds you, she's going to kill you. But but with a smile , and then it's also like, and then how will she do that? And it's like, well, she'll sit on your face and suffocate you. And he's like, what? And and and it's all from the perspective of the mayor. The other way I could sell this show to you is imagine if the mayor from Jaws was in a show and he's trying real hard, but there's a shark and it's gonna kill people. It's a little like that. Matthew Reese is the mayor, he's trying to make this town like more successful, but it is cursed in like every conceivable way and I don't know it it it is quirky and funny and uh and if you're not watching it because you're like well horror is not really for me it's like horror is not really for me either but it's just so funny that it's it's it's almost like it's it's not a parody of horror because it is it does have some legitimate scares in it but it is you know like, even the horror 'cause you know in some horror i it's so ridiculous that you laugh. This whole show is so ridiculous that you laugh in a good way. It's just it's really good. Steven Root is in it. I love Stephen. But he's so he's so serious here, but that's why he's so funny, because he's the expert on all the things you should not do on this haunted island. Oh man, it's so good. It's really so it's really a hoot.. Yeah Uh so that will wrap up uh this month. There's a couple more weeks of uh episodes and I just dying to see how it wraps up. Another very weird uh Apple TV show called Sugar, which starts off as just a di a great noir detective story, but then takes a really weird twist, a weird, weird turn. That's gonna come back, and I can't wait to see how they accommodate the weird twist, which I won't give you. Colin Farrell Sugar in that. Colin Farrell's a noir detective, except actually it's sort of sci-fi, and how does that happen? Did did we mention Star City? Star City started last week. I saw s I saw the uh promos for that. This is kind of a spin -off uh of the For All Mankind. For all mankind. But it's the Russian point of view. It is. It's the Soviet Union in the late sixties, early seventies in their space program, which in the for all mankind universe, they were the first ones to the moon. And it's inside this kind of hermetically sealed sort of city where all the cosmonauts are and all the engineers are and all the KGB people who spy on the cosmonauts and engineers are and so it's a drama that's got like s lots of 60s and 70s a lot of cold war spy vibes as well as this sort of early space race vibes and it's like you know if space doesn't kill you the, KGB might. It's good. I like it a lot. I've seen the first five of that. It's really good. Okay, good. Yeah, I haven't decided whether to watch it or not. So okay, that actually I've heard from people who are like kind of like got over for all mankind, um the last two seasons haven't been as strong, although I I I still think that show is fun. This is going back to you know it there are some characters that appear later in For All Mankind that are in it, but like it you don't really need to have even seen For All Mankind because it it explains the premise right up front when the you know first man on the moon uh dedicates it to you know the Marxist-Leninist way of life and you're like, oh, okay then and then you go from there. But it's uh it's really if you like especially if you like old Cold War spy stuff, like John Lacare kind of vibe. Love that stuff. That's what Star City has, because one of the main characters is basically working for the KGB uh and kind of rising within the ranks of spying on the people and discovers like there's a there's a question of like is is the US smuggling spy stuff into Star City and uh it's uh yeah, it's really the for all mankind stuff where it's like it's fictional timeline. So they're like, let's let's send cosmonauts to various places that you won't expect. It's yeah, it's really good. Uh there's something for Andy uh coming June twenty-sixth, Camp Snoopy season two . Uh do you like these these later versions of the peanuts uh shows? I know you like the originals of course. Um I don't I'm not a big fan because I do think that without turning this into like a 20-minute digression, I I don't think that they cap tured what made like Charles Scholz and penis characters special. I think they're pretty much they're pretty kind of generic kitty like sort of stuff. But on the other hand, like if you look at the entire the the entire history of penis It's like it's it's it's Flash Beagle Charlie Brown where it's about Snoopy become like doing doing flash dance and aerobics. Okay, maybe that wasn't peak peanuts either. I'm just I'm just glad that we have this entry point for like a new generation of kids to like hopefully hopefully this will be the entry point and then their parents will say, but here's hill let me let me let me show you how about nineteen seventy-five ? Uh oh the the the arc where peppermint patty is is entering a skating competition. Okay, read that. and that' You really cant appreciate peanuts unless you've seen the Ricky Gervais original, I think, personally. I am unfamiliar and I choose to acknowledge it. I'm just teasing. I'm just I'm just teasing you on that one. That's just a joke. Uh I am excited about Cape Fear. So excited that Elisa and I watched the original Cape Fear with Robert Mitchum, which is so good, and then we watched the more recent Cape Fear with Robert De Niro, which was so good. And now it's a series, it starts in a few days, um with it's uh directed uh it's inspired by the Martin Scorsese remake, produced by Steven Spielberg, Amy Adams, and uh Javier Bardem plays the scary Max Cady . He is that's good casting. I think Cape Fear will be uh will be good. That will be very good. There's a very tense kind of the the the the uh Scorsese version was basically a Hitchcock movie. Yeah uh a tribute to Hitchcock. So that should be uh a lot of fun. Uh oh and then finally we might see the Jessica Chastain show that was put off . Uh Variety says that July is the target date. Yeah. But some are saying well nine to five Mac is that it could premiere in June. The sav ant is the name. At le leastast it was was up up at it in thefronts. At least they it they there was a there was a time where you could be forgiven for thinking that no, they don't want to actually air this, they will never see this again because it was kind of unprecedented that uh that in the in the same year that this series was delayed an an actual like another a Snoopy summer special uh and another uh uh another program uh that was accused of uh got mixed up in a plagiarism scandal.oth B of those got like pulled like shortly before their premiere as well. But in both cases, if they very, very quickly said, Here is a new date in which these things are going to air. So when the Jessica Chasta in one was postponed, uh and then said, yeah , we don't know what we're gonna be doing with this. We we still own it, but we don't what we have no comment about when it's gonna be rescheduled. That is what you can safely say is that Apple's uh TV offerings have really dramatically improved over the last few years. They're already pretty high. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Microsoft is killing Office 2019. You know that so-called perpetual license? Not so much. Not so much . For Mac and iPhone, uh sorry. That's just It was perpetual. You should have bought the Eternal license. Sorry. Read the brochure. I do not think that word means what you think it means. Uh Apple uh which purchased a big stake in uh Global Star when it added Global Star as its uh satellite back end for that satellite calling, um, is now gonna have to sell that part off to uh Amazon. Gonna have to Amazon. Well get they get a few billion, don't they? Yeah I don't know. Um it's part of the Amazon purchase. Some money will be changing hands, I'm pretty sure. Apple has twenty percent. And uh apparently the FCC says uh the filing says Amazon is gonna acquire that twenty percent. Maybe they didn't have to. They could keep that. Maybe they didn't want to be in bed with Amazon, I don't know. No, but it's uh that's that's actually gonna be one of those things that's probably going to show up on one of Apple's financial statements is that that Global Star selling Global Star twenty percent of it back to Amazon is going to make them I don't know what the actual number is, some number of bil you know, billion or two that they're gonna probably have to report and say, Yeah, well we got that we made some money. It was a good investment. I'm I'm sure that Amazon didn't want Apple to have a have a a company like Apple to have a voice in the direction of the company. So if if they if they had the checkbook out uh and this was before they blew up a a launch pad and they realized they're gonna need some extra cash, uh then they may as well write that check. I think Jeff has a little bit of extra cash somewhere hidden away in his jeans pocket. Uh I'm in the market for a new car at the end of the year and immediately crossed off the list GM, although I love the Chevy Bolt, and Rivian, because neither will have CarPlay. Tesla too. CarPlay to me is a non-starter. Uh when asked about this, uh Ne i Patel interviewed him on Decoder. Uh Rivian's chief software officer said, You don't need CarPlay . What do you what do you want car play for? Customers, he said, will appreciate the lack of car play. Customers want to buy our stuff. Yeah. Car play. Appreciate that. You won't believe that the guy in child in charge of the software on the Rivi an doesn't want anyone else's software on the Rivian. Another reason why I deeply believe that RJ and Rivian made the right choice by investing in our own technology and software. Cars are moving from, as you said, the buzzword software-defined to AI-defined. Oh God. Possibilities now for such deep AI integration in the car the en maktiesre car play debate completely obsolete. And makes me gives me the opportunity to just cross Rivian ride. This is a classic thing where it's everybody thinks that they can make a computer interface and app platform better than the one that's in your pocket. Every every car maker has this delusion that the most important device in uh their customers' lives is their vehicle, and it's not, it's their phone. That's it. But but no, it's it's even simpler than that. Like they don't they uh the data that happen that transacts between the driver and and the car is so valuable that they don't want to give up any way. Right. It's all about it's it's about profit. It isn't about ego. Yeah. It's about making either direct profit from selling services like the here's an account that gives you more software stuff in your car, whether it's AI or whatever, as as as well as what Andy said, which is just the pure data transfer. That's a ton of money. Yeah. But do watch for this rhetoric because it's very similar to the rhetoric open AI has about their phone, which is no, you don't need apps anymore. Yeah. Uh you just need AI, and AI will do it for you. And so what do you need CarPlay for? AI is just gonna do what you want it to do. Um I don't know if that's true. I don't know if that's true either. That's that's a generational shift sort of thing. That's not a that that's that's not a we cracked it. We congratulations. Everybody's been striving for. If only we didn't have apps on the phone. If only we didn't have anything to interact with on the screen. It ignores interfaces. I mean, whatever you want to say, whether it's delivered through apps or web pages or through whatever means, ignores that people appreciate interfaces, that they understand what they're viewing, what they're interacting with based on some sort of interface. And I say that as somebody with visual disabilities, I believe in interfaces. Well, it's more than that too. I mean, uh I don't want to use the built-in maps function in my car when I could use Google or Apple Maps. And uh AI is not going to solve that . It's not gonna be a mapping tool. Also, I mean it you know language is has its place, but it can be d would you rather explain what you explain to us to an AI what you want it to do, or would you rather have a toggle switch on the dashboard that says AC high? Yeah, that's a really good point. My my car, you can say things like you can actually say, Hey BMW, I'm feeling cold. We'll turn on the steering wheel heat, it will turn the heat on and the seats and stuff like that. But that's you know, you don't there's no control at all over that. It's just what it's gonna do if you say I'm feeling cold. And that's that becomes worse as you disassociate things like physical buttons from people people already, including my husband and myself with our with our Kia uh already have complaints about having to use software for climate control s or in some case. I found it I read the other day that there are car I have no idea. I don't buy new cars all the time, but I read the other day that there are in fact cars where to get to the glove box you have to use software. You have to use the Tesla model I 'm not open the glove button. I'm surprised at Tesla. Pushing a button on the software. But I think there are others and that's just that would be a deal with the And as the navigator in the passenger seat. I'm like, no, that's not okay. I'm not a I'm not a challenge at all. Oh, it's cray cray. That doesn't yeah. Well car manufacturers will l learn. Uh I have to give a lot of credit to uh John Gruber and Daring Fireball for coining a new term that we will all be using from now on, the dickover . Uh what is a dick over? Go to his uh article about it and it says what is a dick over and then suddenly boom you get a dick over it modal panel popover or curtain presented by a website or app deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary mandatory interaction. For example, asking the user to accept cookies, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website's mobile app, agree to a terms of service, or anything else the user couldn't give two poops about . Yeah. Can I say that the most one of the most annoying interactions with it with websites every single day is wow this is actually very very useful it's so useful for a fact that I'm going to actually click my bookmark manager in order so I can remember it. And when I move that poison that that that pointer to the bookmark manager wait wait don't go away yet. Let me take a point. It's like by the way, the uh accept button on uh the dick over on John Gruber's Daring Fireball site is gross. Press the gross button and it goes away. I think it actually is random. There's a bunch of different things. Oh, there's show up, yeah. Oh, that's funny. Let me try it again. I'll let's see. Oh, this sucks is the is another one. Yeah. Oh, that's good. Good on you, John. Um he he coined the term and I have a feeling like many of the uh terms he has coined in the past this one will last. Well what's good about it is it's super insulting to the to the thing which was gonna make everybody embarrassed. There's so many of 'em now. It's it's universal. Yeah. The ones that I I hate the most are the ones where you've already they built it all. They built the infrastructure for it in order to get in the way of somebody who's like not a subscriber and you are a subscriber. And rather than turn it off , and I think the New York Times does this, there there's some sites that do this, rather than turn it off, they just make it a promo for something else. Yeah. Give it to your friends. It's very common in media sites. I I go to ten or twelve newspaper sites every day and it's it's everywhere. And yet people are having enough trouble getting print media attention. And then now we're covering the sites up in this way that makes it completely undesirable to go to them. And probably inaccessible too, right? And and we subscribe to them. I mean I'm I have yeah, I have ten newspaper subscriptions and I can't get to any of them without clicking. They still get in our way 'cause they just can't once they create that pattern, once they build that that weapon, they use it. And and there I do think it's a there's a laziness factor too where it's like, Well, let's not turn it off for our subscribers. We'll just make it a promo for something instead. It's like what are you even doing it. My favorite one is I I pay for the Houston Chronicle. All the the hearst all the papers in Texas are owned by the same people now, which is delightful anyway. So you have one login for all these papers and you get a link in Slack or in Blue Sky or somewhere and you click it and it gives you the popover that says, you know, and I'm I'm I I was logged in before. I don't know why I'm not logged in anymore. And it says go back home. So the only choice you have to get out of the dick over is to go back home and then you have to log in and then you have to navigate back to the article you wanted to read in the first place. Yeah. Yeah. It's super annoying. There's a there's a there's a uh uh an accessibility feature for Android that I've used for a long, long time. I think it's called reading mode, where I can just pull down the notification banner and put and touch a button and touch a button and it will take whatever's on the screen, particularly if it's a website, and simply strip away all the formatting, strip away all the graphics, strip away everything, and just turn it into simple unformatted text that's very, very readable. I use it not because I need the accessibility feature, but because it used to be able to simply say when there's when I only have this little like letterbox sort of slot on my phone where I can read the actual article, it will get rid of all that and just give me the article. And now they've they've within the last year they figured out how to like defeat that completely because now I tap the button and says can't read this content. It's like thank you for the iPhone has a meeting it's break. For other people it's like congratulations, you've just made your site totally inaccessible. Which is why I aggressively use a combination of RSS and instapaper and Speed. I have a whole workflow of stuff that I'm actually writing an article for you, Jason, right now that talks about all the RSS things I do that to defeat stuff like this. And and then the sites uh reasonably complain well we can't monetize because uh everybody's got ad blockers and and content blockers and blocking content blockers they they spend a lot of engineering to market their services by banking their sites terrible, which is a choice. But what they don't do is they don't spend a lot of time thinking about how do we make it not terrible for the people who give us money? Because once we give them the money, it's almost like they move on. And that's the that's the worst of it is like I pay for Bloomberg. Bloomberg wants me like Bloomberg thinks it's a bank. Bloomberg wants me to like answer a captcha every five days when I am trying to read a Mark German article, right? And it's like, what are you even doing? And actually, even if I am logged in on the first login, it it like 5050 will think I'm not logged in until I reload, and then it realizes that I'm actually already logged in and just again so hostile to paying customers. for non-paying customers, why would I ever become a Bloomberg or a Wall Street Journal subscriber? Because I get nothing. You know, give me, give me my my first taste is free . Make me want to buy your service. But they don't even do that. I'm gonna I'm gonna pile on uh the Washington Post as well. 'Cause this is a thing that I realized. The Washington Post would be like, Oh, just register and you can you can read an article for free and then we'll email you forever. You don't have to pay but eventually you will have to pay but you do that. But what I discovered is I subscribed to them a while ago and then I canceled. And after you cancel , you don't get to read it ever because they know who you are and they set it, they read it, and it's like, oh, did this person is this person a potential new customer? Well, yes, we'll give them this offer. Oh, is this somebody who used to pay and doesn't anymore? They don't get to come in. I'm like, what? Who decided that? Who made that decision? So I as a result, I I I mean, I never click on Washington Post links now because there's no point. Yeah. You hate just you hate to be punished for supporting them. New York New York Times is my pet peeve because number one, every time that I've I try to access one of those arc one of their articles on phone, it will not let me do it before it says, Hey, did you know that we have an app? It's better the app. Do you want us to download and install the app? Right. Like, no, if your app were better, I would be using it. I would have installed it. Actually, I installed it a while ago and then deleted it a while ago. And then the second thing is exactly what you were talking about, Jason, where it's like, gee, this person has paid for a subscription. Uh, why don't we fill this banner with a promo for hey, would you like to add family members to a subscription? And I can't read the article until I dismiss this every single damn time, as opposed to okay, you know what? The dudes clicked no on this so many times in a row. I feel as though we're jeopardizing jeopardizing his continued subscription to the New York Times. Perhaps we should lay off right now. It's like, don't punish me for help for for giving you money They're so easy and free . Um I I'm searching, I'm looking, I'm looking high and low for a story about Vision Pro. Don't think so. Not this time. I don't know. While you were searching, I will just quickly say that because of all these subscription foi bles, if ever a subscription lapses, because our our our corporate entity to forgive the to for lack of a better exphrase pays for our accounts if ever the subscription for the newsroom lapses to the Times or the Chronicle or anything it's a catastrophe because we can't do our jobs and we can't get around it in any way other than getting the credit card done right now. And even then you have to un you know cash ever re-reload everything. And it usually doesn't take until the second or third time and the entire newsroom comes to a grinding halt while we're waiting for the newspaper to subscription to work. Yeah, I think John uh John had a he touched a nerve there uh with his piece. Uh we'll group the phrase any better than I like in shidification, but still I'll accept it. I know but uh you know what? Sometimes when the shoe fits over your head. Um Um Gruber's talk show. Uh he does the annual uh thing at WWDC. Last year he couldn't Apple executives. Do we know if he's gonna have Apple executives? So they'll be guests. Uh it was a good show last year with uh with Joanna Stern and Neele Pat el. Yeah. I would be I would think that there would be um Apple execs, but who knows? They are they are counterprogramming it again, but I think that's reasonable that Apple wants to provide the developers who are coming all the way with something to do on Tuesday night. And so they're gonna show Mandalorian and Grogu at the Steve Jobs Theater with a special. Oh, are you gonna go? Yes, the big that's the counter programming is pretty good. I will I will almost certainly I've already seen that movie. I enjoyed it. I thought it was fun. I will almost certainly go visit my uh friend and watch his talk show instead. Yeah. There you go. You can look for me. I'll be there. If you're gonna be there, I'll be there. You're gonna give up the five thousand dollar Steve Jobs leather seats and uh I I would love to see a movie there, but you know , I I you know, I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna support independent tech journalism instead. There you go. Yeah, good. Remember that last last year there was an argument to be made there's there is reason to speculate that perhaps he was in the doghouse because of very pointed, very, very well structured arguments and very very critical posts that he had recently made about Apple uh about Apple at the time, which seems susp again, one possible interpretation was that this was coincidentally and suspiciously timed. Uh so it'd be if if yeah , it's more like Apple carries grudges for you It's not like they were smarting last year over promises they made the previous year that didn't come true and that the questions wouldn't been a little difficult. Yeah. Years. And years. Uh oh wait, I found a Vision Pro story. Quick, hit the Vision Pro theme. What do you know? It's on top of Vision Pro. Look, it's gonna get thinner and thinner on the ground. We've got to maintain our status as the America's number one Vision Pro Podcast. This is a single line from uh Mark uh German's Bloomberg Power on News. What do we do without Mark German? Thank God. Apple has been working on a slimmer and lighter headset to succeed the $3,500 Vision Pro, but I don't anticipate to that to launch before wait a minute, late 2028 or 2029. Yeah. Okay. Apple needs to fix the design and pricing problems that turned the verse first vision pro into a flop. Ooh. Ooh. John I mean, um Mark, you may not get an invite to the next Apple event. And that category will essentially be on ice until then. Yeah. Well I mean you you nobody can with the materials, nobody can make one cheaper that's at that level. And so uh and they've retasked all those people to work on this glasses initiative now. So that makes sense. So that's yes, great story for the Vision Pro segment. Although if Apple does glasses, I wonder if we're gonna have to recompose the Vision Pro theme and have a whole sort of like Vision Products theme and talk about glasses and stuff too, because that's what those people are. What do you see? What do you know? Let's talk about that apple hat. Yeah, that's right. Hat squad in color. I expect an invitation as soon as that happens. Man, love it. And that's your vision Pro segment for the week. You're watching Mac Break Weekly with Andy Anako, Jason Snell, and uh the wonderful Shelley Brisbane filling in for Christa Christina Warren. Christina's at uh build this week, but she will be back next week. Your picks of the week coming up. Actually, let's do them now. Pick of the week time . And Shelly, as our guest, I will allow you to begin the beginning. Oh, thank you. Uh MyPick is a wonderful app from develop independent developer Brett Terpstra. He makes wonderful things. His latest is Marked three. I've been using Marked for a long time. When I put together uh books in uh HTML and then uh Markdown, I use Marked as a previewer, is a preview for a markdown. And that's mainly what it does is it but it'll preview all sorts of other things you can also even export marked stuff out into docx format now you can edit within marked which is really fun brett is always pr always produces really clever stuff that does what you want it to do and does it well. It's really solid and sturdy. He switched to a subscription model for this. You can still buy the older version. You can pay a one-time fee for it, but I think mostly what he's counting on is a subscription model. I'm not gonna argue that case here because everybody who develops software these days has made the decision that unfortunately they need to to do that to survive. But I'm gonna buy Mark III because I think Brett is a really good example of an indie developer that gives you far more than you pay for. This is really quite nice. And we do love Brett. Very good. Marked three, the ultimate markdown preview and it is markedapp . com . Thank you, Shelly. I should mention another developer we love uh uh releasing an update to Halide, Halide Mark III, which uh includes film looks and an upgraded uh photo editor. Uh I know Sebastian DeWitt now is at Apple, right? But uh that doesn't mean Halide does not continue. So Halide Mark III, one-time purchase $59.99, or you can subscribe for $19.9 9 . And we always want to keep up on this one because this is a great alternative camera app for iOS. I'm gonna I'm actually gonna have some difficulty I think at the end of the year. Uh whether I want the folding iPhone with the lesser camera or the uh iPhone eighteen Pro Max with the better camera. It's gonna be that's gonna be a challenge. I don't know what I'm gonna do. Anyway. Andy and I well actually let me let Andy finish the show. And Jason Snell's pick of the week. I'm gonna be entirely self-serving here. I started a kick starter. Uh it started yesterday. It's for a new podcast called Design in California, which is about Apple History. It's a look at you go narrative storytelling podcast about the history of Apple across all fifty years. We'll be telling stories from all over those five decades. It's me and Mike Hurley. I'm gonna do the writing. Um we uh we funded yesterday in the first we actually funded in the first two hours. We're uh we're we're at $106,000 as we speak, but I'll tell you this there are a lot of great things you can get you can get a signed poster of art you can get a a pin and uh you can also just sign up and become a member in advance uh for a good price that will get you the first year, we're gonna do 50 episodes. P memblusers, are gonna get monthly bonus episodes with me and Mike. There are other bonuses coming. We haven't revealed the official show art, which we're commissioning a professional illustrator to do. We haven't revealed the theme song. We haven't revealed all sorts of other things. We've got more stretch goals that we're gonna do. Uh there's a lot of other stuff coming. Uh the the campaign runs the whole month. The show will start coming out um uh later this probably at the end of the summer. Although if you subscribe to upgrade, we're going to post preview episodes in the upgrade feed this month. So there'll be uh four sample episodes uh at least for people to listen to as well. Um, it's gonna be a lot of fun. It's also not yet another tech news podcast. You're already listening to or watching one and maybe more, uh, if you've gotten to this point in this show. So this is different. It's it's it's me telling stories about really interesting and I think in large part undercovered or not as well understood parts of Apple's history. So for the 50th anniversary, that was kind of the inspiration to do it. Um, we've got I I got we don't I we we funded the first year, we've got like three, four at least years of ideas and growing. So we could do this a long time. And oh, I should also say yes. So if you support it at the at the membership level, you get an ad-free feed. If we do a four-episode series about something, you get all four episodes at once. Uh whereas the there will be a feed with ads in it that will release weekly. You'll get everything as soon as we make it. And then there's a bonus episodes and some other benefits. So it's going great. Um the more money we make in this, the more other stuff we're gonna be able to do in terms of the quality of the show. Uh you know, I I'm gonna have, you know, more people looking at my scripts to make sure that they match the the historically accurate details and like there's lots of other stuff we can do and there's some stretch goals that maybe we'll do some events or meetups or something. Like we're we're still working out the details, but really happy to have funded it, but also really still we have the whole month uh to get other people on board to to get you know get listening to design in california and I'm really excited about the project. I'm so happy that it's gonna happen now because we did this all sort of like is it gonna happen? And now you know it is gonna happen so we can get going and get the the rest of the work. And it it is independent media. The other thing is so much on Kickstarter these days, it feels to me as like a product that's ready to go, and all they're really doing is using it for marketing. We did this because we really needed to know that there was gonna be an audience for it, because it's going to be so much work to do it. And we didn't feel like we could just do it and hope that people showed up because that was too it's too much work for that. So now we've gotten that support from people and uh could use more. So designed dot fm to check out designed in California. Is this the first time you've done a Kickstarter for a podcast? It is the first time I've done a Kickstarter, period. Mike has done a few for the pen addict with Brad, but those are more more, you know, they're pen related and a little less uh more about Brad's website than about their podcast. It's my uh complete first time for me. Uh we use Glenn Fleischman as our consultant 'cause Glenn has done about approximately nine thousand Kickstarters uh as a as a person who does them and also as a consultant for other people who do them. So uh Glenn's been a lot of help in getting it going. But And what is clear is this is a non trivi al effort. This is not like this show, you know, this takes this takes no effort whatsoever. Talking about the news is what we do here, it's what I do on upgrade. Like you get a list of stories I'm not doing that. I'm sound effects. My hands are clean. Um this is different, right? This is me. I have like every book that's ever been written about Apple on every mega read. And a lot of it, you're telling me stories, and there's like different accounts in six different books and you're trying to square them all together and you know David Pogue's book is is really great but there are there are he it's six hundred and fifty pages and he has to um you know, kind of boil down some of the stories because he's gotta get on to the next story. And with this, these are we're gonna do in the first year we're gonna do fifty, thirty to forty five minute long episodes where we're gonna I get to tell these stories with the details, like that time that Steve Wozniak's dad said to Steve Wozniak's brother, Steve Jobs is gonna come over and I'm gonna make that guy cry. And he didn't call him a guy, he called him a bad word. And he and he did make him cry, and he said a bunch of mean stuff to Steve Jobs and what happened next. Like I'd never even heard that story before. I never heard it. So it's just it's there's some yeah, yeah, there's great stuff. So I'm looking forward to taking the plunge. And oh I wanted to say, I mean, Shell y knows this because Shelly and I worked together back at MacUser. It's like I realized the other day that I've been writing about Apple for about two thirds of its existence, which is what um but so that'll be fun because there are parts of it where I I was there and I'm at least a you know, I I have some eyewitness accounts of what we were what was happening as a as a user or as a writer then. But even the ancient history stuff, like there's there's some so many good books, so many of which are out of print. So like yeah, the the short version is like I love the rest is history podcast, but that's two trained historians. And what they do is they read the dry academic history book uh that's nine hundred pages long with really small type. And then they boil it down into like the most interesting stories and they tell those stories. And that's kind of the role that I'm taking here. Is I'm the one who's got the 15 different out-of-print Apple history books, and I'm digging through them, and then I'm trying to translate that into fun stories about uh the one of the most, if not the most influential uh corporation of the last fifty years. So yeah. It it's uh So you're gonna you're the writer, you're the storyteller, and then uh Mike's just there for color? Mike is Mike is my partner in a lot of stuff in terms of production and marketing. And then while we're doing it, not only we do we have a good rapport for upgrade, but like he's doing a lot of asking good questions about um, you know, what I think of this or what I'm he is. He's reacting in real time. And sometimes he asks me a question. I'm like, oh, that's really interesting. He said, what do you think about this? There's some of that. Or, or he'll give it I this gives the me impression it's a good back and forth. I think people will hear it. It's a good dynamic and we've been doing upgrade for so long now that we we really do fit find a rhythm there. And we're gonna have some guests too about certain episodes, so I'm not gonna give anything away yet, but like you might bring in like a one of our colleagues who's also a particular subject matter expert and have them kind of have some opinions as I tell the story, which is also a lot of fun. So yeah, I think it's going to be good. This is very interesting. A new way to uh kind of create podcast uh content. I'm I'm we're thrilled to see how quickly you uh you funded and uh wish you the best. I think it's very exciting. Of course, we'll talk about it more as the uh as the weeks and months go by. Now, ladies and gentlemen, the final pick of the week. A long awaited pick for Mr. Andy and I Uh yeah. My my my blog is now open. My site is now open. Go to another .com. Yeah. And the th and the the weird and the fun thing is the reason why I've been like I th I thought like a week away, a couple weeks away for like a couple months now is because like uh people people were at there was a point in October where I had to take it live so I could test it and people found it. So hey as long as I don't tell people about that's okay. And then I was when I hooked up like the stuff for membership memberships and member supported stuff. I thought I had hid all the controls for like sign up so I could test to see and people found it. And to my shock and surprise and gratitude, the next morning, like lots of people had signed up for paid memberships. Okay, so that was accidental too. All that was left was that uh I wanted to as I as I kept telling myself, I want to make sure that like the the dinner table is set. Like all the stuff that I've been writing for when I didn't think any didn't think anybody was watching. They're still in my draft folder. I want to make sure those are finished and polished. And every single week I'm like, oh come on, just you know, just push the button, just do it. And something was resisting. And this morning, like I actually I love the I love how this is so typical. I actually put out a post to members saying, Okay, you know what, I think I'm just gonna be another week 'cause I do want to finish A, B, and C and then like after a couple of different members messages saying, Oh, you know, I think you're good, I think you're ready. And they were very, very compelling and people that I trust and respect. I'm like, you know what? I'm I'm sick and tired of like having to make that call every Monday night, whether I stay up until 6 a.m. and do some more work or whether I simply declare it, you know, open enough. And so literally like an hour before the show, I sat down and wrote like five to eight hundred words. Okay, you know what? We're done. It's open. Go ahead. Uh so uh I will say that uh it's like a new restaurant where uh the the the cooks are still learning the menu, uh but I think you'll get a good idea of what's going on if there's some there's gonna be some very, very high profile news from the past two or three weeks that are not present because they are completed in my drafts folder and I need to continue to edit it. But rather than keep waiting another week, another week, another week to edit down all this stuff, it's open. Uh it's uh basically the point is that it's things that I think are interesting, things that I think are fun, things I think that are important, all three of those things. I would like it to be a balance of things that are just fun and impulsive on my part, as well as things that took me a couple of weeks, if not a month or two, to really nail down what I want to say and how I want to say it, uh, a whole bunch of those things. Uh the reason one of the reasons why as soon as I clicked post on that announcement uh a couple hours ago, the thing that reminded me that got me thinking that okay, you know what, this is the hand of divine providence behind my back. This is the right thing to do. This was post number 100 on the blog, exactly number 100. You have 100 before you even open the doors. That's pretty good. Yeah. This is why we've been telling him to turn the lights on for the I'm great so I'm grateful to everybody who's particularly to people who signed up for it like a month and a half ago. Again, I could not you cannot I cannot explain how shocked I was when at two AM I'm like I finally got the uh I'll I'll I'll write a blog post in the future about everything that I go through to get the the site built and all the decisions I made. But it's like okay, so I wrote all the CSS and all the stuff I need hooking up like all the membership stuff. Okay, I've got the new bank account for the stripe payments and I've got this. I think this got this connected. Okay, great. So all I gotta do now with this all I gotta do now is like I'll do uh uh uh tomorrow morning. I I I'm too tired right now. Tomorrow morning I'll just like make a paym uh sign up for my own membership and see if that goes through. And like that was at two a.m. And when I woke up, oh my God, there are a whole bunch of there's a whole bunch of money in my Stripe account because people found the link, even though I thought I hid it. So even without promoting it, even without like explaining like what this was going to be about, I'm very, very flattered and gratif and grateful that there are people that's like, you know what? Here you go. So thank you very much to all that. Uh for the rest of you, I hope that you see there's gonna be free stuff as well as memberships. Membership stuff, there's gonna be a lot of stuff right now that seems as though it's only for members. That is not the correct balance of what's going to be. Obviously, for the past month, it's been, oh, I've got to make sure I have some member exclusive stuff because I've got members that I'm very, very grateful for. So there's going to be a whole bunch more free stuff. And it's going to be a balance of stuff for all visitors and a balance of stuff uh who are supporting through uh through their cash. Nice. So I'm very, very happy with it. Uh again, later on sometime later on, once I've got this thing up and running, I will tell the story about how long what why it took me so long and how many dead ends I went through. There was a lot of investigation. I hadn't either desire and probably not the money to hire like an actual designer or a coder. So I had to do like all the design and coding myself. And that was uh a hey that was a bobsled ride of an adventure. But I'm very, very happy with uh what I've got. I I'm glad I didn't just launch it in October when it was good enough. I'm glad that it's at a state where it's good. And after we've got it uh on its feet in five or six months, I've got some things I'd like to add. But right now, I can just simply enjoy this space where I can write stuff and publish stuff uh and enjoy my time behind the keyboard because I've been having a lot of fun writing stuff for it. Congratulations. Thank you. I-H-N-A-T-K-O dot com. And you remember how to spell it by the mnemonic. Yes. I have no IHN. And the rest, you know, at co it's easy. I will I will I will tease like the right the the the pinned and promoted sp highlight of the of the current uh site is uh I did right about the time when David Letterman licked my iPad to uh to to celebrate the end of the late show on CBS. I thought I would never wash this iPad again. Yes. Thank you, Andrew. Congratulations. Yay. It has launched . It has launched as has uh the new design show uh with Jason Snell. So you both you two are making uh making me look like a slacker. Uh I don't think so. You're only you're only you're only behind a microphone nine hours a day, six days a week, I know. I also while we're while we're all on the four shot uh on the video version, I want to point out that I recently acquired this Mac user uh mug , um, which is important because Leo, you're surrounded by the Mac user mafia right now. That's true. Shelly and Andy and I all had our words in MacUser back in the 90s on a regular base. I had some MacUser shape. Prior to your tenure, I actually wrote some stuff for MacUser. Yeah, this is I it's actually a great story of the one of the um past editors in chief of the. Nice bad. Shelly Shelly, did you work did you work with John Zilber? Yeah, a little bit, not much. Okay. So he he passed away. I I started right after he left. He passed a way recently and I got to um help his family with some like old Macs trying to figure out how functional they were and all of that. I got to y you know, brought the brought down the ADB keyboard, brought down the blue SCSI, did a bunch of stuff to see if I could do that And one of the things that uh I got to walk away with was a uh a Mac user mug. I was like, How many people are gonna get this? But I got it. So um I'm but I know Andy and Shelly would get it too, so that's great. I have an Apple AUX mug. That's my claim to nineties fame. Uh but no Mac User mug. I have an Apple Linux mousepad. I have a Z D net Mac uh coffee mug. I've got a Mac Week. Uh yeah, exactly. It's like stuff that stuff that like I could have thrown away fifteen years ago, but now no way. See, I threw away a lot of stuff and every time I would I threw away the quick mail mugs and various other sh sh you know, Trotsky's and stuff. But whenever I would get to the AUX mug, I just couldn't bear to part with it. It is in my utility room right now. It's right next to my podcast studio, but it's it's not in use, but it does exist . Very nice. Yeah, and I did I I know I've written articles for MacUser. I mean I'm it probably it was before you must uh your time. There's a vintage Apple uh Mac User February 1987. Were you were you at MacUser in 1987? I wasn't even using a Mac in 1987 . I was, but I wasn't working there. I was I was actually that was the age when I was probably staring at the magazine cover, going, I'd really like to work there one day. It's probably a review. I I the early on uh I realized the only ways I'm gonna get free software is by by writing reviews for that magazines. So it's undoubtedly uh, you know, uh uh four hundred word review. But that counts. That counts, right? Yeah. Not a feature or anything like that. Well, thank you all of you. Especially thank you, uh, Shelley Brisbane, for uh spending some time with us. We always love having you on the show. You'll find her at Texas Standard Radio, Texas Standard. Texas Standard dot org dot org. And she's also on blue sky as Shelly. Blue Sky, Mastodon, Six Colors, all the places. Everywhere. Thank you, Shelly. So great to see you. Thank you for being here. Appreciate it. Andy Inako , he is the uh man in charge of Inatco.com. I can finally say that. I-H-N-A-T-K-O.com. You'll also find him on Blue Sky at Inotco.. And Mr Jason Snell, sixcolors.com, does many, many podcasts, including that new one. When are you going to launch? What what what date will that launch? Well, the the samples will the samples will be out in the upgrade feed this month, the full-on podcast, which we'll have a free version with ads that people can get if they don't want to uh pay it by I'd say by the end of the summer. Um we don't have a date yet that is you know official and we're gonna give ourselves flexibility. The weird thing about Kickstarter, right, is that you we're Mike and I are both like, How are we launching? We don't have the theme song and all it's like we're not launching the podcast, we're launching the Kickstarter. Right. So the the the podcast is still coming together. Um, but I would say I'd be shocked if it isn't out by the end of the summer. Exciting. Very exciting. Thank you. Thank you, Jason. Thank you, Andy. Thank you, Shelly. A special thanks to all our Club Twit members who make this show uh ad free versions of all the shows available at uh twit.tv slash club twit. You also get some other benefits including access to the club twit discord and all the special programming we do in the club. I should check. Do we have anything uh coming up this week? I feel like we we probably do. Let me see here. Uh the AI user group. Ah, yes. Friday, June 5th at 2 p.m. Pacific. We also uh have the photo segment coming up. And don't forget Monday we're going to cover WWDC and that will only be for club members uh not because we want to put up a paywall but just you know frankly because we don't uh want Apple to take us off of YouTube. So uh join the club and you can get all of that, but most importantly support, as uh Jason said, independent podcasting. Not owned by a big company, not beholden to anybody except you, our wonderful uh listeners and and viewers. Uh we do this show, and everybody can watch it uh when we do it live every Tuesday, eleven AM Pacific, two PM Eastern, eighteen hundred UTC. There is a live stream for the club twit discord, uh, but there's also a live stream on YouTube , x .com, Facebook, Twitch, Linked, in uh kick .com. So watch where you feel like it. Um, after the fact, you can also uh get copies of the show at our website, twit.tv slash mbw. There is a um uh YouTube channel dedicated to MacBreak Weekly so you can always watch there and that's useful too for sharing clips of things like if you want to tell your friends and family about anako .com or the new design podcast, you could just share that little clip with them and everybody can see YouTube. Good way to help promote the show. And the best way to get the show, probably subscribe, audio or video or both in your favorite podcast client. And by the way, that is another benefit for club members I always forget to mention. Uh we can't do chapter markers uh on the ad-supported downloads because unfortunately those have uh variable lengths due to the ad insertions after the fact. But we can do it in the ad free versions. So club members also get chapter markers in all of our shows. Um so it makes it easy to s skip around and uh and listen to the stuff you care about. Thank you everybody for being here, but I am sad to say, as been my duty for the last twenty some years, I must tell you that you have to get back to work now because break time is over . Bye bye .