MBW 1044: Live, Love, Re-Org - The Strength of the M5 Mac Studio Running Local Agents

[SPEAKER_03] It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy Anaco is here, Christina Warren's here, Jason has the week off, but that's given us a chance to invite Federico Vittici. He's the editor in chief of Mac Stories. He's going to join us from his home in Rome and talk about the new Mac M5 Ultra. He's using it for local AI. What's it take? How much is it? And is it worth the purchase? That and a whole lot of Mac news, including a John Ternus Re-Org. Coming up next on MacBreak Weekly. [SPEAKER_03] Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWIT. This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 1044, recorded Tuesday, September 29th, 2026. Live, Love, Re-Org. [SPEAKER_03] It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Yes, time to talk Apple and we've got a great show planned for you. First, let me introduce Christina Warren, Developer Relations at GitHub. Hello, Christina. I love you. Wearing a six color shirt. I like that. All the apples. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, yeah. This one is one of the new additions. I guess they added it a couple months back to the company store. And so that was courtesy of Mr. David Murphy. So thank you, David, for that. Thank you, David. And Zarf in the chat got me a water bottle. So between the two of them, I got- [SPEAKER_03] From the event? Yeah. Or from WWDC? [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, I think, yeah, from the company store. I guess when they released the new stuff there. So yeah. But this is the first time I've had a chance to wear this crew neck on the pod. And yes, it's quite good. Yeah. [SPEAKER_03] I love you. Also here from the library, Andy Ihnatko of anotko.com. Hello, Andrew. Hello. Hello. [SPEAKER_01] I'm only wearing- Well, like, the thing is, like, if black is the absence of color, I might be making up for the other color. So I'm sorry. I'm sort of like the black hole of joy. The hat. There's none darker. I've been described that way before, though. Yes. I'm used to it. [SPEAKER_03] Mr. Jason Snell is in Memphis, Tennessee right now for the Relay FM Marathon for St. Jude. They've already raised millions of dollars and their event is coming up. Was that Wednesday? I think it is. [SPEAKER_05] Uh, Friday. [SPEAKER_03] I don't- Friday? Sometime this week. If you go to Relay.fm, you'll find out all the information. And that's where Jason is. So we brought in a ringer. And I'm pretty excited about this. Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to Editor-in-Chief of Mac Stories, Federico Vittici from Roma. [SPEAKER_05] Hello. Hello. Thank you for having me on. I hope I will not disappoint all the Jason fans. [SPEAKER_03] Oh, the Jason fans. Well, they'll get more Jason next week. But I'm actually thrilled to talk to you because, of course, you were really the first out of the block with a review of the M5 Ultra with regard to local AI. [SPEAKER_03] And I think there's a lot of people, myself included, who are sitting with our fingers poised on the buy button trying to decide. Micah Sargent did buy an M5 Ultra, but he used our credit card. So he was a little- I wouldn't have been so circumspect. I think you only got 96 gigs of RAM, which is nuts. Nuts. So you could go all the way up to 256 gig if you were willing to spend $15,000 of Leo's money. [SPEAKER_03] That's what, well, Federico, I doubt you, you got Apple to give you one, I'm sure. [SPEAKER_05] No, there was a review unit. It's not mine. [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. But what I love about it is you wasted no time. You didn't do what Marquez Brownlee did and, you know, try Final Cut on it. No. No. You jumped right into local AI. And your story at Mac Stories is subtitled, The Dream Mac for Local AI Agents. Look at that beautiful little Mac studio sitting on your desk right there. [SPEAKER_05] My desk is usually not that minimal, but, you know, I had to take a good picture. [SPEAKER_03] So you have the top of the line, right? The top of the line processing? [SPEAKER_05] Currently, yes. It's the 80 core GPU 256 gigs of RAM. There's going to be a 512 gig version of RAM, but it's coming out in late October. And that was not available to reviewers at the moment. So they just sent out a few of these 256. [SPEAKER_03] Ironically, it'll be probably faster for me to get the 512 now than to order the 256 because I think it's pushed to February. [SPEAKER_05] Oh, okay. [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. So, well, God only knows if the 512 does. We don't know. They didn't say a date, but late October, if it comes out, you may press the buy button and they'll say, good, yours is coming in June. We don't know. Well, Ramageddon is hitting everybody pretty hard, Apple, no less. So you got it. You open it up. And now had you done a lot with local AI yet or? [SPEAKER_05] Yes. So I came prepared. So I had a whole plan ready to go because I knew that I was going to be under a, you know, in a bit of a time crunch. The review unit arrived on Thursday and the embargo was on Monday. And I knew that- [SPEAKER_04] Shit, that's not a lot of time. [SPEAKER_05] That's not a lot of time, especially with the weekend in the middle and we had weekend plans. I was like, what am I going to do? So I was prepared in, I guess, in two different ways. The first one is that I had done throughout the entire summer, a lot of work with local AI. And maybe we can talk about that later. Yeah. On what? On, on, uh, Macs or? [SPEAKER_05] On, so I, uh, still have the previous review unit from Apple, the M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 512 gigs of RAM. [SPEAKER_03] Very, very up till a couple of weeks ago. Very nice. [SPEAKER_05] Very nice machine for local AI. Not the fastest, especially with the latest models, but I have been running, um, this Mac Studio in my storage unit. Um, [SPEAKER_01] Wait a minute. Why in your storage unit? [SPEAKER_05] Well, uh, Is it hot? [SPEAKER_01] You know, it's, you know, people use it to, to, to, to, to, to run their meth empires from. If it can't run AI. What were you cooking? [SPEAKER_05] These computers get really hot, especially when you load a big model and you have it run, which is what I did 24 seven. [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. [SPEAKER_05] For three months. Whoa. So for, so for 99 days. So every year, uh, I publish my annual iOS and iPadOS review on Mac stories. And it's a big project. Uh, you start testing the new version of iOS in June at WWDC. And in September I publish a review. [SPEAKER_05] And this, uh, this story requires a lot of notes, a lot of research, screenshots, lots of notes coming together in September in a single article on the site. And this year I did something else. I created the entire thing in notion. [SPEAKER_05] So I was using notion as my database, but on the M3 ultra Mac studio, I had a local model that every 10 minutes would wake up and take a look at my notion database for new PDFs, new articles that I clipped from my web browser, new notes, new screenshots, new beta releases from the apple.com servers. And it would sort of make sense of all of that. [SPEAKER_05] And it would automatically cross reference a feature to a chapter of the review or a session from WWDC to a feature of, I don't know, the calendar app. And this model ran for 99 days, 24 seven. I guess I had a couple of power outages when there were a couple of thunderstorms in the summer. Uh, but that's why I brought it down to the storage unit because it was impossible to keep it in my bedroom. [SPEAKER_05] My girlfriend got really upset that it was getting really, really hot. [SPEAKER_03] See, Max, you're not known for getting hot. I'm kind of surprised. [SPEAKER_05] When you load up deep seek 4.1 flash and you run it 24 seven, you run it 24 seven for 99 days. That's hot. [SPEAKER_03] So, so you put it in the storage, but, and then what you had a long table. [SPEAKER_05] See, there's a whole story. [SPEAKER_01] Don't say anything that's going to get you kicked out of your storage unit. I'm just asking you. [SPEAKER_03] What's that blue wire hanging out of the garage? [SPEAKER_05] The story goes much deeper than you may initially think. So good question, right? How do you actually get the internet five stories down, right? [SPEAKER_03] Oh, it's in the same building. That's a good start. [SPEAKER_05] It's in the same building. So I asked for some advice to some of the neighbors and I was talking to this guy who had an internet cable run from the sixth floor. I'm on the fourth floor. This guy's on the sixth floor. So remember, this is Rome. [SPEAKER_03] And so you, if you walk down any street in Rome, there's antennas, there's laundry, there's wires. It really, it probably is invisible in that environment. [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. Well, I'm more in a modern neighborhood. It's a modern building. [SPEAKER_03] So people would notice is what you're saying. [SPEAKER_05] So here's what I did. I had to get an electrician involved. We purchased 100 meters of ethernet cable. [SPEAKER_00] Yep. [SPEAKER_05] And we ran it from an ethernet switch in my apartment, five stories down to the storage unit. [SPEAKER_03] Did you drill holes in the floors? How did you? [SPEAKER_05] No, we had conduits, thankfully. [SPEAKER_03] Oh. [SPEAKER_00] Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. [SPEAKER_03] So there was already a hole and a tube. [SPEAKER_00] Yes. [SPEAKER_01] Okay. [SPEAKER_05] It was a really long tube. [SPEAKER_01] I'm just going to say that 100 meters is the distance from like my house to like the coffee shop. It's a football field. I think that I sometimes work in like, okay, I'm just trying to picture this. [SPEAKER_05] It was a day long process. It was a day long process. [SPEAKER_03] Fishing it through the conduit. Yes. [SPEAKER_05] These two guys come to my apartment with like this giant spool of ethernet cable. They're like, we're going to run it down. And so we installed this ethernet switch. [SPEAKER_03] Did they attach a small rodent to the one end? This is like a bank heist in the 70s. [SPEAKER_05] They have what they call a pilot cable. [SPEAKER_01] I was disguised as a flower delivery man. A pilot cable. Okay. [SPEAKER_05] They have a pilot cable that has like an iron head of sorts. And that allows the cable to go into the conduit and act as a pilot. And so they attach the ethernet cable to the pilot cable. Makes sense. And they basically push it down. [SPEAKER_03] Nobody makes a 100 meter wire hanger. So you have to have some sort of device like a wire hanger. [SPEAKER_01] So that's what tipped off the cups when the huge wire hanger showed up at the delivery station. [SPEAKER_05] So eight hours later, and meanwhile, I'm trying to be a good host, right? So I'm making the guys coffee. Of course. You guys do anything. So eight hours later, it's 8 p.m. They're finally done. But I have the internet downstairs. And it's my same connection, right? It's technically, it's my local network. So I had another, I have a TP-Link deco mesh system. So I had another satellite unit downstairs. [SPEAKER_05] It appears as it's another room of my house. Nice. Technically, it's outside, but it's my local network. And so I brought the Mac Studio down, and that's where it's been running. [SPEAKER_03] Importantly, you're running it headless because you can't, you're not going to have macOS on a screen. There's no keyboard or mouse down there, or maybe there is, but you know. [SPEAKER_05] Well, there's a keyboard that I use every once in a while. Just in case. Just in case for authentication. Yeah. [SPEAKER_03] If the Mac reboot. Oh, I would hate that. Every once in a while, I have to run upstairs and, you know, put my UV key into the port. It's terrible. You gotta go find flights. Honey, I'll be back in the morning. Make me a lunch. [SPEAKER_05] At the very least, the apartment is much cooler now because there's not computers anymore. So that's the computer that's been run. And this was just one part of the story. I was familiar with local AI because I've been doing this. I had this entire system work 24-7, and I just wanted to have something practical to show for local AI because a bunch of people talk about local AI, and it's always like, [SPEAKER_05] oh, I made this cool SVG of a Pelican riding a bicycle with local AI. Like, great. [SPEAKER_03] Simon Willison's famous Pelican benchmark. Obviously. Benchmark. Yeah. [SPEAKER_05] Shout out to Simon. But like, I wanted to have something real practical. And there was a second reason. [SPEAKER_03] So you were using, actually, DeepSeq V4 Flash was pretty good. We're using 0731, the July. That's actually a pretty good model. I used that for a while myself. [SPEAKER_05] Pretty good model. Not the fastest on the M3 Ultra. So, for example, I would clip an article about iOS 27 in Google Chrome, save it to Notion. Five minutes later, the local agent wakes up, and it takes five or six minutes to process that [SPEAKER_03] But you don't care because you're not sitting in front of it. But I don't care. Exactly. [SPEAKER_05] Because it's working in the background. And I also started doing this because I wanted to save money. The very first version of this system in June was based on Notion AI and Notion Custom Agents. Oh, that could help. I depleted my quota of Notion Agents in two days. [SPEAKER_03] I thought you were an Obsidian guy. Because, by the way, I subscribed to Mac Stories for your Obsidian series. I thought that was really good. [SPEAKER_05] Like many people, we all have a problem with switching apps and trying things. [SPEAKER_03] I went from Notion to Obsidian as well, by the way. I'm very sympathetic. I love Notion, actually. [SPEAKER_05] Notion's great. And so that's why I also realized it could be a cool experiment for local AI. And it's also a way to save money because I guess all that I'm paying is my electricity bill. But I'm not paying hundreds of dollars for these custom agents. Yeah. My electricity bill? No. No, no, no. Not really. [SPEAKER_03] That's the good thing about Macs. They're not super power hungry. I'm surprised that they're so hot. But I guess if you're running it 24-7. Well, look. [SPEAKER_05] It gets warm. It doesn't have a big exhaust. It doesn't have a big exhaust. If you place your hand above it. You could feel it. You can feel it. But obviously, it's not as hot as my PC with the 5090. No. [SPEAKER_03] Exactly. [SPEAKER_05] When I was testing the M5 Ultra last week, which brings me to the second part of this story, I came prepared. So I knew what I was doing because I've been playing around with the M3 Ultra. But since I knew that I was going to be under time pressure to get this article done in time, I pre-designed with Codex my own testing harness for the M5 Ultra. [SPEAKER_05] The idea was I'm going to fire up Codex on the new computer. I'm going to create all the connections necessary between Codex on the new computer, Codex on the old computer, and Codex on Windows on my gaming PC. And these three instances of Codex are going to be talking to each other. And they will coordinate. It sounds like science fiction. It actually worked. They're going to coordinate the benchmarks. [SPEAKER_05] And I'm just going to sit in the office and watch the numbers and open the window every once in a while because it got really hot, especially when the 5090 got involved. Yeah. [SPEAKER_03] I am sitting in front of a stack that has two sparks, a Mac mini, and a 3090 running in my old gaming machine. But I also have fans. I have a window open right there. And it still gets warm. It really does get warm. Yeah. So I think that's smart. And it's quiet, too. It's down in the basement. It's not going to bug anybody. [SPEAKER_05] Well, obviously, I kept the M5 Ultra in my house because it was an unreleased product. [SPEAKER_00] I was going to say, it's a review unit. You don't want to have that in the basement. Yeah. No, I just couldn't. Apple wouldn't want that. Yeah. [SPEAKER_05] So I kept it in the office. And yeah, I coordinated with these three models running on three different machines. [SPEAKER_03] Did you know ahead of time what you had the benchmarks? Did you know what model you were going to put on there? [SPEAKER_05] So that was a bit of a challenge. And that's why the article, I mean, it was pretty successful, but it will need an update. And that's the whole thing with local AI on Apple platforms. It's very community driven. And that's both a great advantage, but also when you have a review unit, there's no community to help you. [SPEAKER_03] Oh, good point. You can't say, hey, how are you guys? [SPEAKER_00] It's not going to be optimized for out of the gate. I didn't even think of that. [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. And I can tell you. That's one advantage of using Sparks is it's been around for almost a year and there's a large, vigorous community. The disadvantage, Federico, is there's a new model every freaking day. Pretty much overnight, every night. My guys call it a bake-off. Same thing as you have. We have our own personal benchmarks and they do a bake-off trying to decide which model I should run. Yeah. So you must have had in your head, were you going to use DeepSeq? What were you going to do? [SPEAKER_05] So I figured I'm not going to have the 512 gig version. So big models are going to be a bit of a struggle. [SPEAKER_04] Right. [SPEAKER_05] And I landed on QN 3.8 Flash Next. This is one of the new Alibaba models from the QN family of models. And it's 120 billion parameter model with only, I believe, I want to say 20 active. It's a mixture of experts model. So only a few of those parameters get activated at runtime. It's a medium-sized model, I would say. [SPEAKER_05] I did get some guidance. Behind the scenes, I sent a DM to the developer of one of the backends that you can use on macOS to run models with the MLX Apple framework. [SPEAKER_03] So we should talk about that as well. [SPEAKER_05] We should talk about that. [SPEAKER_03] Basically, I'll give you a thumbnail sketch. You've got the model, but you need something to run the model. And a lot of people, you've probably, if you've done any of this, you've seen LM Studio or Ollama. There are a variety of, you know, these are GUI programs you can run a model in. If you're going to run it headless, there are other things you can use like VLLM or I would assume OMLX is what you're running. Okay. [SPEAKER_03] And that's important because most of the stuff that's out there is not tuned for Apple's stuff. It's tuned for NVIDIA's CUDA. Yes. It's tuned for CUDA. So if you want to get the most out of this Mac, you're going to want something tuned for MLX. [SPEAKER_05] Yes. And my challenge was, I got to get something tuned for MLX and I got to get something that is going to run well on the M5 Ultra, which is a machine that nobody else has at the moment. [SPEAKER_03] You can't go to X and say, hey, what are you guys using? [SPEAKER_05] But I did send a cryptic message to the OMLX developer. I was like, hey, big fan. Hypothetically, if, you know, down the line, I were to cover the M5 Ultra just so that I can be prepared for the next month. What kind of model do you think I should load? [SPEAKER_03] It's cagey, but smart. [SPEAKER_05] And so I don't know if the person who, by the way, has been hired now by Hugging Face, the open source portal. [SPEAKER_03] Which means he's been hired in a way by OpenAI, right? No, by Stripe. Oh, Stripe bought Hugging Face. No, no, NVIDIA, I mean. No, NVIDIA. [SPEAKER_00] I was thinking OpenRouter, which was Stripe. Sorry, sorry. [SPEAKER_05] OpenAI did hack Hugging Face. So maybe that's the... That's where I was confused. [SPEAKER_03] Yes, I linked them together in my mind. And I don't think that app purchase probably has gone through yet. So he's probably still working for Hugging Face. But eventually he'll be working for NVIDIA, which is a nice place to be. If you're creating OMLX, wait a minute. No, it's not. Anyway, he... He was helpful? [SPEAKER_05] He told me. It was helpful because he told me like, oh, I also have an M5 Ultra on order from Apple. I was like, oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Me too. Same. Of course you do. We all do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he said, I think one of the first tests that I'm going to do, since the architecture is... Essentially, it's like what? Four M5 Maxes sort of glued together. It should scale linearly from the M5 Max. [SPEAKER_05] And OMLX is already tuned for the M5 Max. So maybe just, you know, just try that and try this QAN model because I think it's going to run well. And that was correct. But there's a problem. It's been a week since I published the story. And the benchmarks, the numbers have already doubled. Because more people have gotten their hands on the M5 Ultra. And the MLX backend has already been updated. [SPEAKER_05] And these little engines like OMLX, there's another called MLX Serve. Similar idea. It's a program that lets you run these models. They've already been updated in the span of seven days. They've been updated. And I reran my benchmarks. And I get doubled the performance from a week ago. [SPEAKER_03] Wow. There's even a new thing that's coming out that's a little weird. Ash is doing this Tensor Fold thing. [SPEAKER_05] Yes. [SPEAKER_03] And that looks like it might double it again. [SPEAKER_05] Yes. [SPEAKER_03] But here's... This is... To me, this is good news. Because as a Spark owner, my concern with the Mac was... This is going to get a little technical. Pre-fill. So we knew the Mac would decode very fast. A lot of times you see people measure the speed of the AI in tokens per second. And sort of that's what you see coming up on the screen. What you don't see is how long it's taking to ingest the prompt and the context and all that stuff you're feeding to it before the tokens per second. [SPEAKER_03] And if that's slow, it means you're going to sit there for minutes before you see the fast tokens per second. And Apple's... While their specs... Their bandwidth specs are great for tokens per second. The M3 Ultra was not great on this pre-fill. This context caching. And so there was some concern about that. But I think your numbers show that it's actually pretty good. [SPEAKER_05] It's much better than the M3 Ultra, which is... You know, I mentioned on the M3 Ultra, I had that deep-seek agent. And it would just take several minutes to... Not even just to process a note in my notion, but just to start. Just to read the prompt. Just to think about it. Just to think about it. And it would take several minutes. And then it would start. And on the M5 Ultra, the pre-fill stage. [SPEAKER_05] So how quickly can the agent running locally process your prompt and then start displaying the first token? Whether it's a visible token or a reasoning token. The time has gone down significantly. And the reason why I talked about running local AI agents in my review. Well, first of all, I'm not a video maker. I don't know. [SPEAKER_05] You know, there's other people reviewing the M5 Ultra for video and 3D graphics, that sort of thing. I have been trying to use a local agent as a chatbot running locally for the past year or so. And on the M3 Ultra, it was just horrible. It's painful. You will ask a question and then just stare at your screen for a minute and be like, okay, this is kind of useless. [SPEAKER_05] Now, especially a week has passed. And especially now with the updates that we've already gotten from the community. The pre-fill stage has gone up to... You know, in my review, I think I benchmarked 3,000 token second pre-fill. It's now well over 5,000. [SPEAKER_03] And that's fast. That's really fast. Yes. Yes. [SPEAKER_05] So even if you set a local model to extra high reasoning, and even if you use something like OpenClaw or Hermes agent, these agents that have a long system prompt with lots of instructions, now it's no longer awful to use a local AI agent with it. Because it's fast enough to answer you, to begin answering you in 10 or so seconds. Yeah. [SPEAKER_03] So, by the way, you're never going to be able to finish this review because tomorrow there'll be another update and another update. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And I know there are people going, well, okay, fine. But how does it do with Final Cut? And I'm going to echo Marques Brownlee who said, you don't need this. You don't need an ultra if you're doing video editing. This is an AI. [SPEAKER_03] If you're going to get an M5 Ultra, it's because you get it from local AI. There's really no other job you could do on this thing that needs it. You can get a Max, right? Or you could probably get a buy with an M6 Mini, which is fine. They're very good. Would you not do, by the way, would you not do local AI on an M6? [SPEAKER_05] I think for laptops and something like an M6 Mac Mini, I'm very fascinated by this new wave of small language models. There's this company called Desert Ant Labs. They make a collection of small models, like really small models, really specialized models. [SPEAKER_05] For example, they have a model whose entire purpose is to remove the verbal ticks from audio, like um or you know, like that sort of thing. It's a specialized language model that runs locally. It's very small, very fast. So I think for those machines, you're not going to be able to run DeepSeq. You're not going to be able to run Quen 3.8. [SPEAKER_05] You may be able to get a really optimized 4-bit version of a small model, like a 9 billion parameter model, I'm sure. Does that make sense to use for an agent? Probably not, right? Because it doesn't have that kind of capability of going back and forth with answers, long context, tool calling, that sort of agentic behavior. [SPEAKER_05] But I am fascinated by this new sort of trend of specialized local small models for very specific tasks. So it's always going to be a moving target, I think, especially in the MLX community. Like the fact that for a machine that very few people have, in a week the performance has doubled. [SPEAKER_05] I mean, it's not impossible, but it's very difficult to keep up. And so, I don't know, I would check in again on the M6, you know, maybe in three months. Right. And see what can you really do with MLX on an M6 Mac Mini. Probably not a medium to big model, obviously. Just because of memory. Just because of memory, right? Yeah. But it's also not going to be useless. Right. Yeah. [SPEAKER_03] Well, and on the other side, the model makers themselves, especially Alibaba, are coming up with better and more efficient models all the time. That may be full capacity. You may be able to run in a 96 gig or 64 gig Mac Mini, a decent model like when 4.0 flash next, something like that. Right. So, most people are going to say, how much does this M5 Ultra that you have on your desk is $200? [SPEAKER_03] It's like $15,000. It's like $13,000. [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [SPEAKER_03] So, most people are going to say, well, wait a minute. If I buy a $200 or even the new $500 a month OpenAI subscription, let's see, $500 a month, that's $6,000 a year. It'll be three years of the fastest high-end state-of-the-art AI before I pay for that Ultra. Why should somebody run it locally? [SPEAKER_05] That's a big question. [SPEAKER_01] Not for any economic reasons. Especially considering the Ocean 11 sort of routine you had to pull to get the internet down there. [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. Look, and I would actually add to that, that with that subscription, you will have access to the latest and greatest frontier models. [SPEAKER_03] At 300 tokens a second. [SPEAKER_05] GPT-6 Astra at 300 tokens a second. And you have multiple years until you've repaid your M5 Ultra. Right. [SPEAKER_03] And if you use DeepSeek or something cheap, it'll be your lifetime. You will never, ever hit $15,000. [SPEAKER_05] Never. So, I think there's a few reasons why you may want to consider it. Well, first of all, you're rich and you don't care. I mean, maybe it sounds silly. But if you have money to burn and you just want to have some fun with local AI, I won't judge you. There's, you know, I'm not a millionaire. There are some of those in the world and maybe that's a reason. [SPEAKER_03] I wish I were that rich. I would, I would have, there's a guy who just bought 32 NVIDIA Sparks. He's calling it, what is it? He's got a great name for it. But I wish I were that rich. It was a nail-biter to spend $10,000 on two Sparks. [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. [SPEAKER_03] But I'm, I am very happy I did. It's not a, it's not an economic decision by any means. But imagine having what was a Frontier model six months ago in your storage unit. A brain in your storage unit that you could talk to. [SPEAKER_05] The second more, slightly more serious thing I will mention is that there's something about it that as a nerd speaks to me. [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. [SPEAKER_05] Does it speak, does it speak to me $15,000? Probably not. But it's still, there's something about the principle of it that you're running AI locally that I think is fascinating. Then I will say that it makes sense for a small to medium sized business to invest maybe in a computer that can be your entire server for your company with storage, right? [SPEAKER_05] And private. And for data ownership and privacy. So the fact that you can have, as you mentioned, something that would have been considered Frontier six months ago, running, I don't know, GLM 5.3 flash on it, which runs really well. And have your entire setup be local. Maybe you're dealing with sensitive documents. Maybe you're dealing with sensitive data that you don't want to upload to anybody's cloud. [SPEAKER_05] And if you think it makes sense for your small business to have that kind of expense and know that this computer will let you run AI with privacy, everything locally for the next couple of years until the M7 Ultra comes out. I think there's an argument there. I would also say, maybe you just lease this computer. You just rent it. Maybe you don't buy it upfront. [SPEAKER_05] You sign up for the least terrible leasing plan that you can find. Maybe that's also an option. I think judging from the kind of people that I think have read my story and that I see purchasing M5 Ultra's, I think it's a combination of these two audiences. The nerds with money to burn because they want to have fun. [SPEAKER_05] And small business owners who think, I just want to run AI locally. I don't trust OpenAI. I don't trust Anthropic. I don't want to pay for a subscription. I don't care. Or I need to have AI run locally on this machine. And it's also, it's a local AI machine. And it's also a computer. Because most people are not going to take this down to a storage unit in the basement. Most people will just put it on a desk and connect it to a display. [SPEAKER_05] And it's going to be a normal computer for them. So it's a complicated and polarizing conversation. Every once in a while, there's somebody on Twitter saying local AI is useless. [SPEAKER_03] Matt Schumer yesterday. Yes. But he also runs a cloud AI company. Thank you. You might have a dog in this hunt. [SPEAKER_05] Didn't he also try and come out with his own local model a couple of years ago? And it was horrible. So yeah, that's ironic. [SPEAKER_03] It was really horrible. It was like really bad. [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. But I think, you know, I don't like in life or otherwise, I don't like to be an extremist person. I don't think local AI is useless. I also don't think, I also see these people saying, ah, I'm using local AI. It's, it's astral level or fable level. No, it's not. No, it's not. So I think. [SPEAKER_03] Even on a 512 gig M. Actually, I've seen people lately say maybe get two 256 Mac M5 Ultras instead of a single 512. There's even an argument for that. [SPEAKER_05] So there's this new technology called RDMA that you can actually more easily enable in macOS 27 in settings. Used to be that you had to boot in, what's it called? Recovery mode on, in macOS and enable it with the terminal command. Now it's an option in system settings under developer options. [SPEAKER_05] RDMA is this technology that allows you to connect multiple Macs with Thunderbolt 5. And you're going to have a high bandwidth access across these multiple Macs. There's this application called ExoLabs. That is another of these AI local inference engines. [SPEAKER_05] It gives you a little GUI that shows you your multiple Macs connected over Thunderbolt 5. And you can basically split inference via Thunderbolt 5 across multiple machines. This is Apple's latest favorite demo at WWDC. For the past few years, there's been a cluster of four Mac studios in the hands-on area at the Steve Jobs Theater. [SPEAKER_05] And they love to give out this demo where there's four Mac studios connected together with Thunderbolt 5 running a 1.2 trillion parameter model like Kimi K27, for example. Because these four computers, they have something like two terabytes of memory across the entire cluster. And that allows multiple machines to run that model, which is a giant model with pretty good [SPEAKER_05] performance because the memory and the inference is being split at runtime thanks to Thunderbolt 5. Now, again, my main concern here is that you would have to wait for the MLX community to catch up. Because, for example, in my review, I wanted to try this. [SPEAKER_05] I thought, oh, I'm going to daisy chain an M3 Ultra to an M5 Ultra, right? They both have Thunderbolt 5, so why not? And then I thought about it and I did some research and I realized it's going to be useless. Because if I daisy chain them with TB5, the memory bandwidth is going to be capped by the M3 Ultra. The M3 Ultra has a slower memory than the M5 Ultra. [SPEAKER_05] And so even if I connect them, it's not going to be that one computer goes with fast memory and another computer goes with slow memory. No, they're going to baseline at the slowest memory of the M3 Ultra. So I would probably, if your plan is to say, well, I'm going to wait and get two M5 Ultras with 256, I would say maybe wait a little because it gets, like, it's already complicated with MLX. [SPEAKER_05] And the moment you start adding the daisy chaining on top of it, it gets even more complicated. [SPEAKER_03] So I'm very grateful that Apple said you can't buy the 512 Leo until October because I might have done something dumb. [SPEAKER_05] How much is it? We don't know. [SPEAKER_03] They haven't announced a price, but it's going to be at least $15,000 and I think maybe $20,000. [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. [SPEAKER_03] But we don't know. And I'm very grateful to you because your benchmarks and your continued work on this at maxstories.net is really valuable to people who are trying to decide. You know, honestly, I might just wait till the M7. I can, I can, I can, I'm very, you know, I, I go back and forth, but I think I'm happier that I spent $10,000 on two sparks. You can't do that anymore, by the way. They're out of stock. They're gone. [SPEAKER_03] Then I would have been had I spent the same amount of money on a 256 gig M5 Mac Ultra. [SPEAKER_05] So. I'm really, I'm really curious about the spark. I would love to try one and especially a couple of, a couple of sparks. [SPEAKER_03] On paper, it's, it's memory bandwidth is much slower, but because of CUDA, it's pre-fill is much faster. I'm running GLM. I was running GLM, uh, 5.3 flash next on it. Uh, but it was a little sluggish, although it's getting faster and faster because there are people every day tweaking it. I don't understand how there could be this many levers, but they're tweaking and tweaking it. And then, uh, I've recently switched to a Quinn 3.8 flash next because it's so much faster. [SPEAKER_03] And that, and it's currently running 70 to a hundred tokens a second, depending on what you're doing. So that's, that feels snappy. Uh, and, and, and I'm really tie me to the mast because I don't, I don't need to spend another 20 K on local AI, but it's addictive. It's like tattoos. You get the first one and it's hard to stop. [SPEAKER_05] All right. Well, I know. [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. I've seen your sleeve. So I know too. That's why I made that analogy. I thought, I thought you would appreciate it on both sides of the equation. So, uh, when you, at some point Apple will want this back, right? Yeah. What are you going to do? [SPEAKER_05] Oh, you got to give it back. [SPEAKER_03] You could say, I don't know where it is. Maybe it's in the storage locker. I don't have the key anymore. [SPEAKER_05] Uh, they haven't said, oh no, actually they did say, I think in November. Um, I don't know. [SPEAKER_03] Would you buy it? Probably. Um, you get hooked on it, don't you? Yeah. [SPEAKER_05] Yes. And I would, I think I would actually consider one of those payment plans maybe. Yeah. [SPEAKER_03] Even Klarna, it would be, I don't know what they do. Do Italy, do you have a binary? Yeah, we have Klarna. Yeah. Klarna. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. [SPEAKER_00] They started in Europe. [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. Oh, I didn't know that. [SPEAKER_03] Um, you still have to ask because finance is weird. [SPEAKER_05] Uh, probably consider that, but yes, I, I'm hooked and I, and I saw the results this summer with the local agents that I had. And, um, there's, uh, it's one of those things where if you are that type of nerd and, um, um, if you like working with AI, obviously, but there's that, it kind of sort of, uh, it, [SPEAKER_05] it, it plays with that part of my brain with the constant tinkering. Me too. [SPEAKER_03] And I wake up in the middle of the night. Yeah. With ideas. Do you do that and say, I gotta try this? [SPEAKER_05] Oh yeah. I mean, yeah. [SPEAKER_03] It's a disease. Yes. Yes. [SPEAKER_05] Uh, it's a, some people would say it's a, it's a, it's a form of psychosis. I don't know. Uh, but yeah, it's, it's a, I think for me, the, the sort of the North star that I've been trying to keep in mind is it's fine to experiment. Just do it in a way that you can write about it so you can justify the time spent in the name of content. [SPEAKER_01] And, and so that's, that's been, I tell you when I started, Timothy Leary has the same idea about LSD. Yeah. Right. It's all research. [SPEAKER_03] It's research. No, I started in this business, Frederico, before you were born, I started it in the seventies and the, and the, it was so expensive even to have a floppy disk drive that I started writing for magazines because I, in my mind, I said, I gotta, I gotta justify this. I gotta pay for this because I will always, I knew it then want the lady, I will always want to have whatever the latest thing is. Yeah. [SPEAKER_03] And now the latest thing is AI and keeping up with AI is, I mean, I know Christina knows this is expensive. It is. It is. Even with a corporate sponsor like a copilot, like. [SPEAKER_00] Oh yeah. I mean, I don't want to know how much I spend on tokens. And so, I mean, you know, I, I love local AI. I, I don't think that I would be, well, I'm not in the position to necessarily spend like 10 or $15,000 on a, on a. [SPEAKER_03] I'm spending my kids inheritance. I'm an old. [SPEAKER_00] Well, I mean, and I think like, it depends on what your use cases are going to be. My, my main concern with it is always with these things. Thinking about, I guess, like, unless to Federico's like original point, if you're, if you're very wealthy and this is something that is not going to be a concern for you, great. But even if this scratches your itch, so much is happening so quickly. And I do think that it's one of those things where you're like, okay, well, when do we get in? Right? Like, because there's an argument to be made that like for you, Leo, you bought your Spark boxes. I was lucky. [SPEAKER_03] I bought my Spark in August with the feeling that I don't know how much longer you're going to be able to get these. [SPEAKER_00] Right. Exactly. And, and we don't know how much longer this, this RAM crisis is going to last. And so you might be, this might be the cheapest you could buy something for the next year. It's unclear. And obviously if you were able to get like a, you know, an M3 Ultra a year ago, like that would be like a 512 or something like that, that would have been a fantastic investment. But it's just one of those things where I think that if you have like, I think a lot of us who are interested in these things do, if you have that kind of addiction [SPEAKER_00] to the latest model, the latest release, the latest, greatest, fastest, we have to kind of, I think, pace ourselves a little bit and go, okay, this is not the sort of thing you can upgrade every single year. Talk me down. For most people. Like you can't. Like it's just not one of those things. I mean, if you, if you can do it for business expense reasons and whatever else, if you're able to, to make that work, all power to you. But most individuals, hobbyists, enthusiasts are not going to be in a position where they [SPEAKER_00] can go, okay, this is a $15,000 expenditure that I can make on an annual basis. And yet, as you, as we were kind of pointing out, it's amazing what you can do now, which was the frontier eight, nine months ago, which is great. But we don't know what the frontier is going to be like eight, nine months from now. And so I think, I think that's, that's where, at least when I kind of look at it, I'm going, okay, I love all this stuff. And I wish that I had a machine like an M5 Ultra to be able to play around with and do things with. [SPEAKER_00] Right now, I can't make that argument, but I very much support people who love that. But I think it's just one of those things where we are, we don't quite know where we are, I think, necessarily on this, on this hamster wheel to go, okay, is this the right point to jump on or not? Which is what you were saying too, Leo, like, do you just wait for a, for an M7? Like, I think that that becomes like the hard thing to know. [SPEAKER_02] But then I will buy it and there'll be an M8 and an M9. [SPEAKER_00] Well, that's the thing, it never stops. And so I think it just kind of gets to a point where it's like, okay, are you at a point where you feel like if this is the max capabilities, they're not going to modify the software anymore? They're never going to be there. It's never going to be there. Well, no, no. But what I mean, if you're making a buying decision, if you're saying, if I'm buying this with the expectation that this is as good as it's going to get, is this going to be enough to sustain my use for X number of years versus spending $200 a month or even stacking multiple [SPEAKER_00] subs, you know, from the frontier labs and saying, okay, that's, that's going to be a better use of, of my money. I don't know. [SPEAKER_03] There's also, there's, and I'm sure Frederico, you still use cloud AI. You don't, even if you have great local AI. Yeah. I do. I have them running three different models. Yeah. Yeah. No. I, you still just use, in fact, I have max subscriptions on all the other AIs too. [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. No, no. Same. So it's not like you stopped that. No, I mostly just use the local AI for background tasks. Like things that need to wake. Yeah. Yes. Things that need to wake up every few minutes. [SPEAKER_03] I have more than a hundred cron jobs running. [SPEAKER_05] Okay. I don't. [SPEAKER_03] But, uh. It does. Well, it does all the show prep for me. It does. It's doing a ton of stuff all the time. [SPEAKER_05] Is that happening locally? [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. [SPEAKER_05] Oh, that's great. [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. [SPEAKER_05] I love it. Uh, yeah. So for those things, I probably don't want to plug in my codex subscription or some API key because just the costs would just go through the roof. So, yeah. [SPEAKER_03] And in fact, there's signals coming open. AI has basically told everybody they had their dev day to day and we'll talk about it tomorrow on intelligent machines, but, uh, they've basically told everybody we want to move everybody to paying for your tokens through API. We don't want people to have subscriptions anymore. And I think that that's going to be the case. There will be a better economic case for local AI. As time goes by, there's open weight models that are free out of China and other places. [SPEAKER_03] Uh, but I, I think it's really at this point still, it's, it's either for, as you said, an enterprise that really can spend the money and needs local AI for privacy and business reasons or for the crazy nut job hobbyist, which I am proud to be pretty. We go, you want to stick around? We're going to take a break. There's a hand. He's been, uh, nudging us to talk about this breaking story from Mark Gurman about John Ternus. We're going to talk about that. [SPEAKER_03] If you want to stick around, we'd love to have you. Yeah, sure. All right. We'll take a break and we'll come back with more. Believe it or not. This is not AI weekly. It's Mac week weekly. [SPEAKER_01] I know. I feel bad. When you, when you have a guest like this on who knows his stuff and has such wonderful hands-on experience with Macs that are running local AIs, let them talk for heaven's sake. This is a, this is a treasure. [SPEAKER_03] Even, even Apple has recognized, I think that after the open claw moment of January, where they sold out all their Mac minis, there's something happening here. And I think Apple has, has kind of said, you know, that creator thing that we were doing, there's this whole new group of people who are willing to spend absurd amounts of money on Mac hardware. Maybe we should cater to them. And so it is, I think it's, it's, it's a shift in Apple's market as much as anything else. [SPEAKER_03] So it is part of our, it's part of our story. Yeah. And I apologize to people who think AI is disgusting. And I'm sorry, because the next few years are going to be really hard for you. I just really apologize. I call it super intelligence. Our show, we'll have more with Frederico Vittici from Macstories.net, editor-in-chief there. He does such a great job. What a great site that is. And I'm proud to be a subscriber. Thank you. Yeah. [SPEAKER_03] On everything, not, you know, shortcuts. By the way, have you, have you been writing any shortcuts with your local AI at all? Or are you just using Siri AI for that? [SPEAKER_05] Actually, yes. I have been working on my own little competitor to the Siri AI shortcuts creation. [SPEAKER_03] I think I might've known that actually. Yeah. [SPEAKER_05] I released the first version. It's called shortcuts playground before WWDC. And then Apple announced their thing at WWDC. And so I've been working on a version two of my plugin that is actually faster and smarter than Apple's. See? [SPEAKER_03] You're going to pay for that M5 Ultra. I know you are. Great to have you, Frederico. Andy and Anaco also here. Where do you stand on the whole AI thing, Andy? [SPEAKER_01] I've always been very pro AI. I think the world revolves around AI. I think that AI has a good role to play in the future. I also have opinions about artificial intelligence. Oh, you're talking about Andy Anaco AI. Of course. The best AI. Yes. Again, the future has always been. And I also think that AI could destroy the world one day if guardrails are not placed around him. And that's, again, I know them a bit much sometimes. Andy gives us a 10% chance of extinction all by himself. [SPEAKER_01] But I like everybody in this conversation. Good. And those of you who are Twit supporters, Twit members, you certainly have a better chance than people who don't. I'm just all the same. [SPEAKER_03] And especially if you're an Andy Anaco supporter at anaco.com. Christina Warren is also here from GitHub where she does developer relations. And I would imagine many of those developer conversations center around AI. Oh, yeah. [SPEAKER_00] I mean, and that's been the case since we first introduced Copilot four years ago. And it's only increased. And not everybody is for it, right? There's some people who are uncertain about it. Although there's been a very palpable shift, I would say, since the Frontier models became really good last November where even the naysayers kind of went, okay, this is now something that is the better or worse. [SPEAKER_03] It's live and it could code. That's what happened to me. It was a complete eye opener. I started writing stuff like crazy. Vibe coding it like crazy. And it's very exciting. And everything's on GitHub. So it's good for you, too. Our show today brought to you by, now let's talk about security, Palo Alto Networks. [SPEAKER_03] Every time your team deploys a new cloud workload or AI agent, another identity gets permanent access to your critical systems. You know that. Did you know how bad it is? 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Again, paloaltonetworks.com slash I-D-I-R-A. IDERA. This is an idea whose time not only has come, this is much needed. Thank you, Palo Alto Networks, for supporting MacBreak Weekly. This morning, 8 a.m., Mark Gurman files a story that kind of, I mean, I was busy watching Dev Days, the OpenAI Dev Days. [SPEAKER_03] This shook the Apple world. Apple's new CEO seeks to make company run faster and leaner. In fact, John Ternus is already letting people go. Are we surprised? Didn't we think he would sit back a little bit and kind of enjoy the ride before he started putting his stamp on it? [SPEAKER_01] Probably not. I mean, he is CEO now. He's not just, you know, he's not just the person who's taking up the job after Tim. He wouldn't have been the right choice if he didn't decide that this is the direction that I want to take the company in. I just don't want to simply coast by on the inertia that Tim Koch has said over the past 10 years. A lot of the stuff that's in this, and this is a really good report. This is, oftentimes we make a distinction between, I mean, Gurman is always, almost always gives us something to talk about every week. Oftentimes it's the newsletter stuff, and if it's in the newsletter, it can be speculative. [SPEAKER_01] This is a feature article, which usually has, you want to pay a little bit more attention to. He has a lot of sources inside of Apple. Managers are saying, well, here's what Ternus has been saying. Here's some presentations he's been giving internally. And a lot of it seems to be that he thinks that there's a lot of, that there's too much hiring going on. There is opportunities to sort of streamline and mainstream things. And the impression that I get from the article isn't so much that he's, Ternus is trying [SPEAKER_01] to just unilaterally reduce headcount to save labor costs. It's more like his philosophy is that with fewer layers of management and directors inside the company, they could do more with fewer people. That's one, almost a direct quote. Um, and also looking for, uh, take, take more chances, introduce more products on a faster timetable, which will make some people happy, which will make some people kind of cautious, depending on what you, how you think that things were working under Tim. [SPEAKER_01] I personally would love to see Apple take more chances and do more things that are just a little bit odd. I think that's one of the benefits of being a $4.5 trillion company. You can occasionally. You can afford it. I mean, again, I mean, if it's a good idea and it seems like something that's very, very Apple, there's a chance you're going to eat it, but okay, let's go ahead and better to eat it on something fun, you know, like a, like a ring than, okay, we saw a $3,500 VR headset. Okay. That's fine. [SPEAKER_03] It's like a skateboarder. If you don't attempt to do this triple Ollie, you might biff it, but you might, it might also either way you wind up being a viral video. Okay. That's right. [SPEAKER_01] And I'm being, I'm being quite serious. I mean, that's interesting. It's, it's interesting. [SPEAKER_03] Um, German is quoting, uh, he said in a way he's implying we should have known this was coming. He says when Ternus was leading hardware engineering, he told employees during an all hands, Apple should hire fewer people, ask more of its existing engineers and reduce organizational blow. This was when he was a hardware engineering manager in the last two weeks. German says the company's hardware engineering division began dismissing a number of engineering program managers. [SPEAKER_03] Uh, EPMs manage timelines, coordinate work across teams, middle management, right? Uh, the cuts also affect several program managers, including roughly half a dozen directors. And those are, once you're a director at Apple, you're pretty senior. Those employees were given just weeks to find other positions within Apple. And those who don't will be laid off later this year. Um, so that is, that's a big move. [SPEAKER_03] We've been talking a little bit about the cuts at vision pro. In fact, there's a little back and forth, even I think in Mark German's own mind about what the future of a vision pro holds. Uh, uh, you know, sometimes he says it's over. Sometimes he says, no, they're going to do glasses. I'm not sure. And they certainly cut way back on the vision pro division series, digital assistant cut back AI related software engineering organizations cut back. [SPEAKER_01] But that, but that adds a little bit color too. We've been hearing dribs and drabs of, Hey, wow, they cut there. There've been a lot of firings at, at Apple health, but a lot of firings here, there, and other where everywhere, which in absence of other information made us think, Oh, maybe they're not prioritizing this as much as they used to. It might be just that all across the board, his philosophy is that smaller teams are more efficient teams. It's certainly, I mean, obviously this is only a couple of hours old, so we haven't had [SPEAKER_01] much time to think about it, but with a, I would assume that a 5.4, again, $4.5 trillion company, they are not under pressure from shareholders to reduce labor costs and to streamline the payroll. So this is, must be like a philosophical. [SPEAKER_03] You can't really go and say, you know, it's been a tough year for Apple and we're going [SPEAKER_01] to have to do some right sizing. My bone, my bonus is tied to head count. And so therefore some heads have got to roll. Yeah. [SPEAKER_03] Did you have any inkling of this, Christina, or is this out of the blue? [SPEAKER_00] This happens at every company when a new leader takes over period end of story, even if the leader has been there for a long time, anytime something new comes in reorgs are going to happen. And like there's kind of a, in big tech, there's kind of a saying, you know, live, love, like reorg. And it's just- [SPEAKER_03] Love reorg? Do you have that in your kitchen over the stove? [SPEAKER_00] I don't. I don't. But I mean- Eat, drink, pray, reorg. Yeah. But people have like made stickers. [SPEAKER_03] Eat, drink, pray, clean out your desk. I want that poster. That's good. [SPEAKER_00] Right. And so, I mean, look, I'm not sure. I didn't expect necessarily this, but this does not surprise me. This is what happens. And this is the downside, frankly, the human downside when new leadership comes in. But you have to expect when a new leader comes in, again, even if he's been there for a long time, he's going to have his own opinions about how things should run, about what the organization structure should be, about what priorities should be. And that sometimes means that people are not in the right role. [SPEAKER_00] Sometimes that means that the right people aren't employed. And that's unfortunate. But yeah, no, that in and of itself does not surprise me. Now, what does that do for morale? What does it do for anything else? I'm sure it very much depends on what team you're on and whether you're impacted or not. I mean, and I think that, you know, it's a big company and so it's hard to say. These things are never easy to go through. But I think that, I don't think there's any big tech company that exists right now where [SPEAKER_00] most of the employees feel a lot of job security. Let me just put it that way. And so, you know, at least you have Apple on your resume. Looks like at least they're giving people a chance to try to find some things internally, which is good. [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, that's the right thing from a corporate point of view to do. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. I mean, look, and look, none of these companies are your friends. Some of them care about you. So let's just be honest. [SPEAKER_03] Sounds like a brutally learned lesson somewhere in your history. [SPEAKER_00] It's just a fact. I mean, I've seen it happen to a lot of really talented people and it has nothing to do with their talent or anything else. It has to do with, you know, numbers that are coming from on high and people who are looking at bigger bottom lines. And I do, I will say, I don't like kind of the adage like we can do more with less. I mean, maybe that's true, but that just, I don't know. You know, Apple was smart versus the other big tech companies and that it did not overhire [SPEAKER_00] during the big hiring boom that happened in like 2020, 2021, where you saw like a massive, massive number of people being hired and then laid off very quickly after that. [SPEAKER_03] And so Apple was kind of immune to that. [SPEAKER_00] They were because they didn't hire that same way. They didn't add, you know, tens of thousands of employees. They've always been very lean. And so, but, but yeah, but am I surprised? No, I'm not. This is the sort of thing that happens. I think though, that what we will see is that this is just the first of many steps of reorganization and of, of resetting things. And this is what I think is interesting vis-a-vis what we saw when Tim Cook came in, because when Tim Cook came in, you know, he'd been interim CEO before and it's possible that he made changes [SPEAKER_00] to the company, but also Apple was in a very different place and was in pure growth at that point. So whatever personnel changes happened and there were some, and there were some big famous ones were, you know, maybe not going to be as, as noticed as whatever John Ternus says. And, and so this is an interesting, I think just for us as Apple watchers to just kind of go like, okay, this might be both with the number of, of long-time Apple executives who are going to be [SPEAKER_00] looking at either retiring or, you know, uh, lowering some of their duties and, and other stuff is this is an opportunity for one of the first big resets that Apple has had in quite some time. And so that, that's a certainly an interesting opportunity, uh, for us to all watch. And, and I definitely feel for anybody who's impacted and, and I, and I, I hate that. Uh, but am I surprised? No, I'm, I, this is what happens when new CEOs come in. [SPEAKER_03] A hundred percent. German writes, managers are already feeling pressure to move faster. Everything is a lot more hands-on than it used to be. Said one person familiar with the situation. It's hectic right now. That person and others said managers in product development groups are being pushed to deliver more products more frequently and on shorter timelines. So, um, how, you know, do you worry Frederico about when you hear that people are being laid off from a Siri AI? Does that make you nervous? [SPEAKER_05] A little, if only because, um, I think Siri is a good product. Um, but it's obviously not the state of the art of, of, you know, it's not really competing with frontier labs and models. And I feel like now is the time for Apple not to slow down on Siri AI. Right. [SPEAKER_05] Um, I, I think, I think it's, you know, we, we've heard this before all these, you know, new CEO comes out, uh, declares that they have to be faster and to be faster, they have to be leaner. And like it, it happens everywhere. Um, I don't think with Siri AI specifically, you can be leaner and faster. I don't think Apple is in a position to lose talent. [SPEAKER_05] Right. With, with, in the Siri AI department, I don't know about the, especially in this job market. [SPEAKER_03] Well, it's very competitive, right? [SPEAKER_05] I mean, it's very competitive. Apple is far from having anything remotely resembling recursive self-improvement. [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. If you want to be on the frontier, you're not going to work for Apple. [SPEAKER_05] Right. So I don't know, make, make that team smaller. [SPEAKER_01] Whatever AI destroys the world and humanity, it will not have an Apple logo on it. Not because of their ethics, but because of their capability. [SPEAKER_03] Well, but that is really interesting because the world has changed so much. Apple's product cadence was slow always, but fine. Right. They, they could wait, watch everybody make M33 players and then say, but we've got the best one. They could, they could, you know, wait and make the best smartwatch. They could watch smartphones and say we could do better. But that, that stuff takes years and we are not in that kind of timeframe right now. [SPEAKER_03] I'll give you an example. Within the last month, agents have come out, little agentic tools have come out. OpenAI announced theirs today. Dots, Metamuse, Grokbot from XAI. And those are the big names. There's also Instinct. There's also Foe, which came out two days ago. There's, I mean, I can go on and on. These are, this is the hottest category. [SPEAKER_03] Apple could have had something like this. I guess Google could have too. They both kind of missed the boat. And I think Meta's Muse is number one on the App Store right now for a very good reason. Now, maybe Apple says, that's fine. We make the platform. Do they need to be in that game? Maybe they just, you know, we'll make the hardware that you run Muse on. [SPEAKER_00] No, I think they need to be in the game. And, and I think that the fact that, I mean, look, let's just be honest about it. Federico's right. Siri AI is not a frontier class product. It is fine. And if it's your first experience with this source of thing, I'm not going to take anything away from it. Is it way better than what we used to have? Absolutely. Are there things about it that I really like, including, you know, the ability to do things with shortcuts and whatnot? Yes. Right. Is this a big improvement from where we were? 100%. [SPEAKER_00] Is this in any way going to be, you know, leading class and keeping up with where the puck is going, which is this, you know, always on agentic task stuff, which is where, you know, GrokBot and Meta and now, you know, OpenAI are going? No, it's not. And, and so I do worry. It's like, okay, you took this long just to get to rebadged Gemini. [SPEAKER_00] And now what is it going to take before you get to the level beyond that? And maybe I think you have a certain amount of time, which is fine because people are in your ecosystem. You still need to have a device to run your phone on. You still need a computer to run your, your, your stuff on. And that's great. But what happens when one of these companies and they're all having to go public and that's going to be happening sooner rather than later, what happens if they do have a viable phone [SPEAKER_00] project and, and, and, and mobile OS, and maybe it's not perfect out of the gate, but if you think that individuals are not going to be compelled to try it out or potentially switch, I think that you're mistaken because this is increasingly how we are going to be interacting with our devices. Not everybody's going to like that. Not everybody's going to want that. And I respect that, right? I have a lot of personal concerns about Muse. I do not trust Meta with my data. I do not want them to have access to my things. [SPEAKER_00] We've already seen how, even when you limit it, giving access to certain stuff, it will still access things anyway. There are a lot of concerns and the frontiers are moving so quickly with these things and, and not really caring what breaks because they can. That's something that Apple and Google can't do quite the same way to be totally frank, because they are companies that have existed for much longer. They are already public companies and have, I mean, Meta is too, but it's, it's, it's slightly different. I don't think, you know, people look at them have ever been like, oh, well, that's the, that's the company I trust. [SPEAKER_00] I, I, I, I'm sure that they're going to do everything right by me, right? Like no one's ever thought about that, about Facebook ever. I mean, come on. They've been known for privacy skills. [SPEAKER_03] Apparently it doesn't bother people. I mean, I look at it and all the people around me are using Muse all of a sudden. [SPEAKER_00] Absolutely. But I'm just saying, but you go in with that knowing like Facebook has been literally, a privacy scandal since it launched. [SPEAKER_03] There's been a lot of news in the last two days about Muse and maybe it's not the safest thing to use. [SPEAKER_00] Well, of course it's not, but like, but that's, it's not going to necessarily stop people from using. What I'm saying though, is that Meta isn't, doesn't have that reputation for being trusted and where, oh, we, we can do this. And so, so they, they can, you know, um, you know, move fast and break things, which used to be the old Facebook motto. Um, I understand why Apple and Google can't move as quickly. That said, it does concern me that, you know, they're finally getting to where the chat apps were two years ago. And we're now a full generation past that. [SPEAKER_00] And that's going to come even faster. Now, Apple, I think is well positioned to be able to do agentic work and have an always on companion and whatnot. Do they have the engineering talent to do it? I don't know, do they have the infrastructure to be able to support it? I don't know. Do they have the vision to be able to do that? I don't know. They definitely, you know, could, how long will that take? And when that comes out, is that going to still be an also ran behind everyone else? I don't know. And I'm not, I'm not trying to be critical here. I'm just being honest, right? [SPEAKER_00] Like I'm, I'm a Apple fan and, and, and I'm deeply embedded ecosystem, but I'm not going to lie to the, you know, the MacReay weekly audience to be like, oh, they are definitely on the cutting edge of AI. No, they're not. And honestly, [SPEAKER_03] Maybe it doesn't matter though. That's the, that's the other way to think about it. Maybe it doesn't matter. Right? [SPEAKER_00] I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I think that it, it's look, they have a big benefit, as you said earlier, that they are a platform and people can run their apps there. And I think that that lasts for a long time. Again, like my fear, if I were Apple, I would look at the existential crisis of not being, oh, these always on agents and, and these apps that'll have these capabilities and whatnot. It is what happens when one of these companies decides to actually make a go of it and say, we are going to make a mobile platform because that's going to happen. [SPEAKER_00] And that is going to be, I think the first big threat that they've had for a long time. [SPEAKER_03] I almost thought open AI would announce something today, but don't forget Meta did at Meta connect a couple of days ago. That Tamagotchi is a wedge in the door. That's the nose in the camel's tent. [SPEAKER_01] If you will, it's, I mean, it's, it's, this is an area where I really wish that Apple were by had the, by personality was, you know what? Let's try that. We don't know if it's going to work, but, and if it fails, it fails. We'll, we'll, we'll take the loss and we'll admit that, Hey, we didn't, we're going to work the way we want it to, but we're going to, we learned things from it because the thing is people are forming allegiances at this point to their favorite AI. They're their favorite. [SPEAKER_01] And even if they're not sophisticated enough, like Federico or, or Julio or you, Christina, like they understand that they use chat GPT a lot. They've had a lot of experience with it. They trust it and they've integrated into what they work with Gemini the same way. So if Google were to say, Hey, here's a pendant, it costs about 60 bucks, I'll give it a try. And it's a new access point for Gemini that might work out. And if it worked with a chat GPT, Cheryl, and again, if I were a chat GPT user, yeah, sure. [SPEAKER_01] Append it with a little Tamagotchi sort of thing that, so I can actually leave my phone at home and has 5g and it can actually piggyback onto my existing 5g plan. If it's not that expensive, sure. I'll give it a try. If it's another way that I can use my favorite chat bot, my favorite AI, great. That'll be doing. But whereas Apple, they have no, nobody has any allegiance to it whatsoever. So at the time when they do come up with a product like that, again, when they do the usual thing of, well, you know, we weren't first with this, but we did it right. That's great. [SPEAKER_01] People will appreciate it academically, but they might not use it because great. Can I use it with chat GPT? No, I'm locked into Apple, Apple intelligence. Okay. Well, I enjoyed the demo. Thank you. So that's the danger that Apple is in. And again, they're still, they're still very much a hardware company, at least with Google. Google, they'll make money on anything that they can sell as a service to other people, including AI compute. Okay. So they don't necessarily, if they come late to the game of having again, a little Tamagotchi [SPEAKER_01] or a dongle or pair of glasses, that's not a real fatal thing. Whereas with Apple, you wonder if what's going to happen five or 10 years from now, if they are the people who are just, we sell, we sell the socket for the light bulb, but we can't sell the light bulb or the electricity. [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. Yeah. I think Apple felt safe for a long time because they thought, well, not, no one is going to touch iOS and no one is going to touch Android. Right. And I mean, remember when Facebook tried to build a phone, remember when Amazon tried to build the phone? Absolutely. And so they felt safe. They thought, well, we are untouchable at this point. There's two ecosystems and we make the best one and nobody else is going to make another one. [SPEAKER_05] The issue now, and I think what we're not talking about enough maybe is that if you consider the frontier labs and we're going to count meta in the frontier labs at this point, these companies, they have access to probably the next two generations of frontier models, right? There's probably people right now at open AI that are developing and working with GPT-7, right? And it's only accelerating. [SPEAKER_05] And I wouldn't put it past any of these frontier labs at this point to just say, you know what, why don't we have a go at putting together a mobile OS? Why don't we give GPT-7 the task over the course of a week to put together a little shim around a Linux distro and make it mobile optimized. That's all it takes. And I mean, kinda at this point, I am seeing some early experiments. [SPEAKER_05] Max Weinbach from Creative Strategies posted a couple of weeks ago on Twitter a little demo. He had, I think, Fable 5.1, make for him a custom Android OS for his Xiaomi phone. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. [SPEAKER_05] It's not unthinkable to imagine that open AI or I don't see Anthropic doing hardware, but open AI or Meta, and maybe that's actually how the pendant, the Tamagotchi came together surprisingly quickly. Maybe that's how they did it. Like, how do we, can we get some kind of base level OS? We don't have any kind of detail on the Muse charm. [SPEAKER_05] I would not be shocked at all if it's actually running some version of Linux inside. Of course it does. Yeah. Or Android. Or Android. [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. Android Open Source Project. Yeah. AOSP. [SPEAKER_05] These models, they love Linux. They are surprisingly capable of dealing with Android. And it's not so impossible as it used to be 10 years ago to make a custom OS from scratch anymore, especially if you have ultra fast mode, infinite tokens, and infinite budget. [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. I have, I bought the Rabbit R1, which they have, by the way, just discontinued. Thank you. It's kind of a, kind of a tradition of mine. [SPEAKER_00] I bought one too, because I knew I was like, this is stupid. They gave me, I think perplexity, the same amount of perplexity as it cost. And I was like, okay. I'll take it. Yeah. [SPEAKER_03] Maybe they're clearing out the stock. It's a beautiful little thing. They're trying to become an agentic. They have their new OS 3. It's so dumb, because this is what we were talking about. This is Android. It's got two gigs of RAM. It's got a MediaTek processor. This could easily be my new phone. And you know what? I bet, I bet I could get Astra to write the OS for this. And I think I know there are third parties doing that right now. There are a lot of third party OSs. [SPEAKER_00] Oh yeah. I got good. Because they didn't lock down their bootloader role at all, because Rabbit has zero security. And it was, no, they don't. They had zero security. Like when I saw how their initial system was working, when you would initially connect it, this is when they were lying about having agentic capability, capabilities. And they didn't. Right. They literally just had playwright scripts. They didn't have agents at all. And what they would do is when you would log in to an account, now this has been changed, but this was, you know, two years ago, when you would log into their portal, [SPEAKER_00] the portal would actually pull up like a fake VNC screen. It would look like it was a login for whatever service you were connecting it to. God. And then you would enter in your credentials. And I noticed, I was like, why is one password not showing up? And I was like, oh, this is going through a third party thing. Like literally, this is just serving a VNC screen from an AWS container that is, you know, logging me in. There's nothing agentic happening at all. Now, whatever their capabilities might be in the future. I mean, who knows? I mean, they're, they're going to go out of business. No one cares, but it's a fun project. [SPEAKER_00] But devices like that, I think are definitely going to be things that we see in the future. Totally. Absolutely. [SPEAKER_03] I keep buying ESP32 boxes. I have way too many of these because, because I feel like I know I can write the firmware for these. Claude writes beautiful firmware for these. Absolutely. I know they can do a ton of stuff and they're cheap. Yeah. That Tamagotchi, like I said, I think that's the wedge. I honestly think Meta really has ambitions in that direction. [SPEAKER_01] Oh, absolutely. And that's, can I say, that's an excellent example, ESP32. There is such an explosion of different devices based on it. Let's just try this out. I just bought, I just reordered another, another like e-ink, a tiny little e-ink panel that's based on ESP32. It's more open than the ones that we've been talking about earlier on the show. It is, yes, of course, but it's because it's so open and based on an open standard. Yes, there, it comes with like an AI note taker, but it's just as easy to convert it into an e-book reader. [SPEAKER_01] And I plan on after I tire, if I tire of it for its built in uses, I bet I could build stuff for it that I haven't thought about. And again, there are so many form factors of ESP32 that cost like less than $100 and sometimes less than $30. And we're all figuring out, gee, for 20 bucks, I'll buy one of these and see what I can make of it. And soon enough, that leads to actually consumer facing capabilities and consumer facing products. And suddenly, ESP32 becomes like Linux. [SPEAKER_01] It's the software that everybody uses without even knowing that they're using it. [SPEAKER_03] That's sort of risk taking. I bought this seven color e-ink screen a couple of years ago and I never wrote any software for it. It has a little Raspberry Pi hat. And now I, this was all agentically coded. This is an ESP32 with an e-ink screen on the back of it showing my weight steps, my muscle mass and my body fat as a graph. [SPEAKER_03] I mean, we live in really interesting times, but that's the risk for Apple is that people are empowered. [SPEAKER_00] Well, people are empowered and yeah. And then I think gather risk too is like if you were to do a mobile phone, right? I think that obviously Android would be what the base you would use, even if it was more more Linux stuff, you would, you would be, you would do that just because of the APK compatibility, right? Because you would want access to those applications. And the interesting thing there is that when Facebook and Amazon tried this, you know, more than a decade ago, what prevented that from happening, there were a lot of things that did, but a big part of the thing that prevented that from happening was that you didn't have [SPEAKER_00] access to the, you know, Google Play store. And like Amazon had to convince people to build things for the Fire store, which, you know, they still do to a certain extent, or do they maybe, I'm not, I don't even know that it even exists anymore. I assume it does for the tablets, but, but whatever. And, and, and Facebook was having to face like kind of the same problems, like, okay, you're going to, you know, basically have to, you know, submit and, and put apps in, in our sort of marketplace thing. And they never even fully went, actually Facebook never even got that far. [SPEAKER_00] They did like a weird HTC, like an interface kind of thing. [SPEAKER_01] It was, it was a launcher pretty much. It was a launcher. It was a launcher. [SPEAKER_00] I was going to say it was, it was launcher. It was not great. It was not a good phone. And then the whole thing, but, but that was always the challenge. Like Blackberry ran into that too, you know, where anybody, Windows Phone, where if anybody was trying to get into these ecosystems, you had this, this big, you know, unmovable object of how do we get people to build apps for, for it? Right? Well, the interesting thing here is because of the, the Epic lawsuits where Google lost much [SPEAKER_00] worse than Apple did, even though they were similar arguments, that is now not a thing that, that, you know, Google can tie in quite the same way. Now that's not to say that every single major apps developer would instantly be like, oh yeah, we'll let our app be available in the open AI store, the cloud store, or the, you know, name your, your AI, you know, first device here. But if it's the APK that you're basically saying, we're going to let this run the way that we want [SPEAKER_00] to run it and we can access these things and it's not going to, you know, require me to do any more, you know, dev time. I don't think that you will see the same type of pushback that you saw when Microsoft tried to do similar, you know, Android compatibility shims with Windows Phone or when Blackberry tried to do similar things too. I think that now it will be much easier for, you know, third party marketplaces to exist. And that does lessen many of the, you know, the walls that prevented in the past, a third mobile, [SPEAKER_00] a mobile player from, from emerging. So I, I feel like it's almost this perfect moment where, to Federico's point, you can turn these, you know, frontier models, the latest, greatest ones that we don't even have access to on a project and say, build something and probably get a pretty good MVP. And the regulatory climate is such that the lock-in from the app stores, at least on the Android side, is not going to be what it was, which, which was really debilitating, you know, 12, 13 years ago. [SPEAKER_03] There's a big step though. Running this in the house is no big deal, but as soon as I want to make it, you know, like a cell phone that can go out, I'm going to have to get regulatory approval from the FCC. That's one advantage this rabbit has is it has a SIM in it. I have a Google Fi SIM in it. And it, it has a radio and it has, it's a phone basically. It's a, so you're going to want to be looking for that. You, to your point, Federico about AI loves Linux. The, the one Linux that runs [SPEAKER_03] well on a Mac, Asahi has said, we don't want any contributions from AI, no AI contribution. Of course. Of course. So immediately it was forked because it's open source and there's a new project called gravity Linux, uh, for Apple Silicon built by LLMs for LLMs. Um, there's O marquee also, which runs on the Apple Silicon as well, which is, it's not the same. I wouldn't get [SPEAKER_00] that one. I will look at this gravity. I think is an interesting project. And like, look, the Asahi project is technically very interesting and I am not surprised in the slides. Oh, God bless [SPEAKER_03] them because they were the first to figure out how to do it. Right. For sure. And, and, and that [SPEAKER_00] community is toxic and they are, they've got all kinds of infighting and all kinds of stuff going on, but, but, but they are incredibly smart. So I'm not surprised in the slightest that they have the stance on LLMs that they have. And like, I respect that. Right. And most of their, many of their best reverse engineers who worked on the project before have either left. I think one of them was hired by Intel. Um, you know, but there've been some very smart people who've come along. The only unfortunate thing about this fork and I, and I, I, the person who was working on the fork is very smart. Um, [SPEAKER_00] is that they're targeting just like the, the M4 devices right now when finally the injuries had gotten into the, um, at least into the testing phase in the main Asahi branch. And like, that's the only thing that with this sort of bothers me, I'm going, okay, I forking, forks should not be a four letter word. It's a essential part of the open source ecosystem. Like I'm a big fan of forking. Like if you were going to put something under a license that allows that to happen, then those are the consequences and, and you are welcome to run your project and have whatever policies [SPEAKER_00] you want about LLM contributions. And I support that. That is how you should run your project. That does not mean that someone else can't come along and try to get their own work tree going and, and, and have their own policies involved. I just wish that it wasn't what this so clearly seems to be aimed at, which is someone has an inform mini and wants to be able to run you know, um, uh, a Linux like thing on it in, in still not a real way, but you know, closer, [SPEAKER_00] um, and, and add support and would instead have taken, you know, the, the various, um, you know, device trees that, that, that team was working on too. That's the only unfortunate thing with this is that it's like, okay, this is one guy's pet project. Um, and he could probably, [SPEAKER_03] I can understand why though, he doesn't want backward. I mean, I don't think it's unreasonable [SPEAKER_00] to say we're going to start at the M4 and go forward. Well, I don't know. I, I, I think so only because you still don't have M3 shipped on Asahi. And so that's where I'm like, okay, you know, like just, I'm just kind of like, there's this window and this is a gap. There's this gap. And that's just me being selfish as like a, uh, an end user who looks at this and goes, man, you know, it would be nice if you would finish the work that wasn't done rather than just starting at this new, um, point. But I also understand why, you know, he's just going to go after what he wants to go after. [SPEAKER_03] One of the problems with running a local model, like you are headless on a Mac is you've got a lot of overhead that you're not using for the Mac operating system. Yeah. Did you consider putting Linux on it? I did. Well, it's Apple, so you probably don't want to. I probably don't want to. I actually, [SPEAKER_05] so my main, I'm gonna, I don't know if it's controversial or not. I really don't like Linux. Linux. The only flavor of Linux. I'm sorry. Look, I'm sorry. Look. [SPEAKER_00] No, I'm just teasing. Oh no, you're on Mac very quickly. You don't like Linux? What? You're on a good show for that. [SPEAKER_05] The only flavor of Linux that I actually like is SteamOS. [SPEAKER_03] Well, there you go. [SPEAKER_05] I did try this summer though, because I like to challenge my preconceptions every once in a while. I got one. Have you ever seen those like wireless KVMs? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. [SPEAKER_04] Okay. The J. [SPEAKER_05] I got the Comet something pro. [SPEAKER_03] Okay. [SPEAKER_05] So I got one of those little devices. [SPEAKER_03] The idea is you put it on a machine and then you could, the machine could be in your storage unit. [SPEAKER_05] You're joking, but that's actually what I did. Right. So I had one of those old B-Link mini PCs. [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. [SPEAKER_05] I got a couple of years ago for testing gaming on a mini PC. So I connected this KVM to it and I put it in the basement, connected all the cables, got it on my local network. And I opened it at the time, it was GPT 5.6 Sol. And so the way that this KVM works is that you can basically see the screen of a connected PC in a browser window. [SPEAKER_05] So I opened GPT Sol and I said, use Chrome, use your computer integration. And I want you to wipe Windows 11 and flash Linux on it. [SPEAKER_01] That is brave. [SPEAKER_05] And only interrupt me when you need me to enter a username and a password for my new account. And it actually did it. It actually did it. So for a couple of weeks, I tried, then OpenAI released Codex on Linux. So I actually tried it. I don't like it. I really don't like it. But there's one aspect that I think makes it so much more, so much friendlier. [SPEAKER_05] If you're working with AI and agents, or maybe it's a downside, but it's the absolute lack of permissions. You can get Codex going on a Linux machine. It's never going to interrupt you. It's never going to ask you for accessibility permissions or screen recording permissions. You can just let it run wild. [SPEAKER_05] And which is why I know a lot of people that actually prefer setting up Linux boxes for AI agents these days because they are more ergonomic. Some people will say less secure. You know, pick your... [SPEAKER_03] Oh, secure, smacure. [SPEAKER_05] Exactly. I mean, so I don't like Linux, but I will admit it's, you know, if you're... [SPEAKER_03] If you're not looking at the screen and keyboard and mouse, it doesn't really matter what it's running. [SPEAKER_05] You just put an agent on it. It's never going to ask you for any kind of permission whatsoever. [SPEAKER_03] I was appalled because my Sparks were running a GUI. They were running... They came, I guess, out of the box running GNOME. And at one point, my agent said, you know, you're wasting like six gigabytes running... I said, well, take that off. I don't need that. I actually... So Muse has been posting on my Instagram. So I want to apologize to anybody who follows me on Instagram. But what it does is it looks at my Obsidian daily note and makes up a picture and a post. [SPEAKER_03] And this is exactly the post from yesterday. The upsize of having an AI sysadmin. The network is fully fixed. I don't know anything about what's going on or how it works. I am demoted to the guy who owns the credit card. It's really true. I don't... I can no longer fix my system. If something goes down, I'm screwed. And the other day, the network went down. The AI, stupid AI, did something to take down the machine that the AI was running on. [SPEAKER_03] I said, you committed... You killed it. What are you doing? And I said that after I got it back running. And I said, from now on... By the way, you know who got it running? Muse. This is a long story. I'm not going to get into it. But Muse fixed it, which was lucky because I had no idea how. And I said, from now on, could you write an emergency manual for me to tell me like an idiot? Like I always say, like I'm a St. Bernard. [SPEAKER_03] Just explain to me how to get my system back up because I won't have access to any agentic support. It'll all be on my own. I used to know how to do all this. This is like having GPS. Yes. I don't know how to navigate in a car anymore either. I would drive off a bridge if it told me to. We're going to take a break. We've got Federico Vittici here. We're very happy to have him from maxstories.net. It's... What time is it in Rome? [SPEAKER_03] Oh, it's 9.38 p.m. Okay. We'll get you out of here by bedtime, I promise. Okay. [SPEAKER_03] Thank you for staying up late with us. I appreciate it. And Andy Ihnatko, who is merely on the East Coast. So it's just tea time for him right now. Exactly. Yeah. And of course, Christina Warren. Great to have all of you. And great to have all of you watching our show today brought to you by Cover On. Okay. So I'm sure because you're smart, you've got a password manager, right? Maybe you have an antivirus. You've got credit alerts on all your credit bureau stuff. All good stuff. [SPEAKER_03] Here's the thing nobody talks about, though. You can have all that stuff, but when you get bit, when a scam actually works, and by the way, I do too, and I got bit, those tools might tell you it happened, but they don't get your money back. They don't help you fix it. And scams are really working. And if they can fool me, they could fool anybody. The FTC says Americans last year lost more than $15.9 billion to fraud. [SPEAKER_03] These days, the scams, the reason is they don't look fake. They look real. They're written by AI. Their English is perfect. Their Italian is perfect. Whatever language. No typos. No obvious red flags. Just a message that looks like it's your bank. In my case, it looked like it was my phone company. T-Mobile said, hey, you're going to lose all your T-Mobile points. You could get free headphones if you've just clicked this link. I said, oh, I don't want to lose my T-Mobile points. Turns out there are no T-Mobile points. [SPEAKER_03] I gave it one credit card. And then it said, no, that's not good. Give me another one. And I gave it another one. Then I said, wait a minute. Hold on. That's how easy it is. One click, boom. And it's over in minutes. That's why I need CoverOn. And that's why you need CoverOn. CoverOn watches the dark web for your personal information. Alerts you when your data, logins, or payment details are exposed. Because that's what happens, right? They get the credit card. They sell it on the dark web. [SPEAKER_03] So you can act before someone starts using it, right? Before someone steals your identity. CoverOn tracks changes to your credit. That's very handy. Helps stop fraudsters from opening new loans in your name. And here's the part that stands out. CoverOn steps in when money is on the line. You get up to $100,000 in coverage if you're hit with cyber extortion or online fraud. And you get real people who walk you through recovery step by step. [SPEAKER_03] So you're not spending, as I did, weeks on the phone with banks trying to fix it yourself. CoverOn even offers up to $2 million in identity theft coverage. Including the worst case. Somebody uses your identity to take out a loan. That could add up. To check it out, go to CoverOn.com slash MacBreakWeekly. Use the coupon code MacBreakWeekly. By the way, CoverOn also has family and couples plans. One plan, one dashboard. [SPEAKER_03] It covers the kid whose social security number could show up in a breach. And the mom or dad who's one convincing text away from getting phished. Tools reduce risk. Insurance reduces loss. CoverOn gives you both. One scam could cost you everything. Protect yourself now. First 100 users get 20% off with the code MacBreakWeekly at CoverOn.com slash MacBreakWeekly. [SPEAKER_03] Again, that's CoverOn.com slash MacBreakWeekly. The code is MacBreakWeekly. Thank you so much for their support of MacBreakWeekly. So you think if Muse is posting for me on Instagram, it's also probably trying to sell my sparks on the Facebook marketplace and inviting people over to buy them. I bet it is. That happened to them. You see that? That happened to a guy. [SPEAKER_05] And lowballing the offer. [SPEAKER_03] Yes. That was another one. Yeah. And the seller got pissed off. So what are you... Get out of here. [SPEAKER_05] I think the guy posted an update today. Did he? They worked with Meta to figure out what was going on. And Meta admitted that Muse actually did a few things wrong, including dealing with the offer and sending out the address. [SPEAKER_03] He sent out the guy's address and then the buyer came to his house when he wasn't home and was pissed off. Well, I guess these things are happening as long as Meta fixes them. Then there's a guy who didn't realize, didn't think he'd given Muse access to his Apple messages, but all of a sudden Muse is saying, hey, you got a text message. That's right. How do you know? Oh, I just know. So do you recommend this comment? [SPEAKER_03] Is it that, Frederico? [SPEAKER_05] The comment KVM? Yeah, it's pretty good. It even has a little display that shows you network information. It has built-in support for Tailscale. [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, I use Tailscale like crazy, so that's nice. [SPEAKER_05] Yeah, same. So you can get it really easily onto your Tailnet. [SPEAKER_03] Oh, so I can remote access my computer when I'm in Southeast Asia. I like it. [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. And when you combine it with an agent that has computer use, you're basically telling the agent to go to a web page. Right. And then it clicks around the web page, but the web page is actually the screen of your computer. [SPEAKER_03] That's very cool. [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. [SPEAKER_03] So you need one for each computer. What you need one... Oh, no, you don't. The remote computer just goes on the internet. Yes. On the Tailnet. [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. [SPEAKER_03] Oh, that's nice. [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. All right, I'm ordering one right now. If you have Apple computers, I have seen... Today, for example, I have a new Mac Mini, and I needed to get some data from my old Mac to the new Mac, and I cannot be bothered to do so manually anymore. I just asked Codex with computer use to do it for me. Yeah, go get it. I set up the initial SSH connection between the machines because I got to do that. But then I just tell Codex, figure it out. [SPEAKER_05] You need to migrate my data, like my audio hijack session templates, like all that kind of stuff. And today, I saw Astra actually open the Apple screen sharing application and we can see the Mac Mini on it. [SPEAKER_03] What could possibly go wrong? [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. And I noticed because I was working on my desk with my MacBook Pro, the Mac Mini is plugged into the studio display. And at some point, I see the screen go blank, completely back. And the voiceover saying, this computer is being controlled via remote screen sharing. And for a second, I thought... I'm being hacked? Am I being hacked right now? And then I checked and it was Codex opening the screen sharing application. Oh, yeah, yeah. [SPEAKER_03] That's wild. Yeah, I probably shouldn't have given Muse SSH access into my computer. But I'm glad I did. I put it on the Tailnet and I gave it SSH access because that's how it fixed... I was really lucky. It fixed the computer so I could get back in and never break again, I hope. [SPEAKER_05] Did you have Muse fix your network? [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. So, the long and the short of it is I was setting up a... Also from GLNet, the broom so I could have remote access from everywhere. And it's a Tailnet exit node now on my network. People at Tailnet will understand that. But for some reason, as I was doing this, Hermes decided, just going to test that exit node. [SPEAKER_03] So, it set my desktop exit node to the broom and then forgot. And then screwed up the broom somehow so I couldn't get online. So, and I couldn't get online and say what happened. I just... All my... Claude stopped working. Opus. Everything stopped working, including Hermes. And I realized how helpless I am without AI. But... So, I don't know why I mentioned it to Muse. [SPEAKER_03] And Muse says, oh, I got this. And because it was on the Tailnet, it could see that the exit node had been set to a dead device. Reset the exit node. Everything started working again. And I don't know if I would have figured that out. I don't know how I would have gotten back. So, yes. So, I'm glad. So, while I don't recommend it, I'm glad I gave Muse access to the Tailnet. [SPEAKER_05] I once had my colleague at Mac Stories, John Voorhees, set up his Mac Studio. So, John is based in North Carolina. And I really wanted to watch the Grammys. Yes. But I couldn't with the VPN. Yes. John sent me... I'm just going to set up a Mac Studio as my exit node. And you can share an exit node with somebody else, like a friend or family member. [SPEAKER_05] And so, I connected to John's Mac Studio. And I watched the Grammys. And then I guess I forgot about it. [SPEAKER_04] It's your Cuisinella's internet. [SPEAKER_03] Convenient, isn't it? [SPEAKER_05] The problem is that a few days later, I'm going to, you know, on a bunch of Italian news websites. And I'm getting pharmaceutical ads in English. [SPEAKER_03] Uh-oh. [SPEAKER_05] And I was like, wait. Uh-oh. For a minute, I thought, wow, these Italian websites, they really don't know what ads to sell anymore. And then I looked in my menu box. [SPEAKER_03] You were surfing the net through Voorhees' computer that whole time. [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. For a few days, I was. [SPEAKER_03] It thought you were in the US. Yes. Well, truthfully, that's why I bought the broom, because we're going on a Southeast Asia trip in a month. And Lisa doesn't want to miss the 49ers game. [SPEAKER_00] No. [SPEAKER_03] So, she can surf to our little device in our network and watch YouTube TV, and it won't know the difference. It won't know we're in Bangkok. [SPEAKER_00] You could have just used WireGuard for Freelio and then used the WireGuard app on iOS. Well, yeah, but I'm just saying you wouldn't even need the broom, because I do that with YouTube TV. Yeah. All the time. [SPEAKER_03] Basically, this is a shortcut to the WireGuard. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. [SPEAKER_03] It's easier for me. Although, you're right. I could have just asked Claude. [SPEAKER_00] Well, I was going to say, Claude will do it, but not only that, but WireGuard on iOS, even on Apple. I will say, Apple TV and WireGuard, a little bit finicky. There's an app you have to buy. It's like $9. Oh, see. But it will import your profile for you. It was clearly Vibe-coded, but I don't mind. And the nice thing about how it'll import your profile is it does it using a QR code, and then it sets up basically like a local network and then transfers your thing over. [SPEAKER_04] It's a profile on the phone. Exactly. [SPEAKER_00] And then it'll basically like transfer from your Mac or your phone or whatever onto the Apple TV. And then let's just say for legal reasons that this is just theoretical, but let's just say that someone has you added to their YouTube TV account, and you don't actually live where they live. And let's say that you have to log in every 90 days. [SPEAKER_03] Let's say they live in North Carolina. Absolutely. [SPEAKER_00] Right. And let's say that you have to log in every 90 days and that you need to make it look like you're from that location. And so I don't know. Maybe the YouTube TV app on the Apple TV using a WireGuard profile that is configured to their exit node would work well for that. Just a thought. [SPEAKER_03] Just a thought. Then you're going to get pharmaceutical ads, though. [SPEAKER_00] Well, yeah. Then you get pharmaceutical ads. But if you're from the United States, for instance, then you're used to it. So it's not as daring as if you're from a proper country where they're like, wait. [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. You don't get ads for pharmaceuticals in Italy at all? [SPEAKER_05] No, it's mostly, well, I don't know. Whenever I watch American TV, the pharmaceutical commercials are so strange. They're nonstop, too. They really are. It's insurance companies and pharmaceutical ads. And anytime. I really like watching American TV and American commercials because it's so exotic. [SPEAKER_03] It's the same reason I love Italian pop music. It's just different. Yes. [SPEAKER_05] Yes. [SPEAKER_03] Actually, the reason it is that way, just so you know, Federico, is because the only people who still watch TV in the United States are all over 60. [SPEAKER_05] Everybody else is watching YouTube. I also had this thought, like, am I getting all these pharmaceutical ads because John is 61? [SPEAKER_03] Yes, that's the other reason. [SPEAKER_05] And I figured that's actually what had me look into the menu bar for the exit note. [SPEAKER_03] Oh, I know what happened. I know what happened. Let's see. You were excited. I remember, Christina, about having two iPhones, an iPhone 17 Pro Max and an iPhone Duo. Duo. [SPEAKER_00] Yep. [SPEAKER_03] But apparently AT&T seemingly has no plans to support the two-phone system that Apple was offering. Are you on? I don't think Verizon is either. [SPEAKER_00] No, Verizon says by the end of the year. [SPEAKER_03] Oh, okay. But AT&T says, while we see there could be potential in capabilities like iPhone handoff, our focus remains on delivering innovations that make life simpler and keep customers connected with confidence. Huh? [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, okay. [SPEAKER_03] Huh? Okay. So T-Mobile's doing it. T-Mobile already has it. But they charge you. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, they charge you $5. No, it's $5. [SPEAKER_03] $5, okay. [SPEAKER_00] Which is a big difference. That's not bad. No, look, honestly, it's less than I was expecting. I pay $10 for my watch, I think. Yeah, the watch is usually $10 and then sometimes you can get that at a discount. Tablet is often $20 and you can get a discount on those things too. I think $5 is fine. I hope that Verizon stays with that. I will not be surprised if they go higher. [SPEAKER_00] But for me, it would just make it much, much easier than the alternative, which would be to have to manually move your SIM every time you want to switch devices, which is possible, but not anything anyone wants to do. But yeah, I mean, I'm surprised that AT&T, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I haven't been an AT&T user in a really, really long time. But you look at an opportunity like this and you go, okay, just implement this. [SPEAKER_00] This is not going to probably take many resources and you would make a lot of money off of it because there's going to be a not insignificant portion of your iPhone personnel who will be interested in this. [SPEAKER_03] And if you do say we're not going to do it, don't say because we want to be innovative. [SPEAKER_00] Right. [SPEAKER_01] That's a very Apple way of doing that. We decided not to give you this thing that you want. You're welcome. [SPEAKER_00] Right. [SPEAKER_01] You're holding it wrong. [SPEAKER_00] I mean, the only thing that I can kind of gather is that they look at it as saying, oh, we are afraid that rather than adding an additional line on the phone, people will just do this. And the thing is, yeah, maybe. But if you're someone who is going to be using it the way that I will use it, and I think that most people who would use this feature would use it, you don't actually need two separate lines. I mean, like the way that my current setup works is that I have a separate voice and data line for my work phone versus my regular phone. [SPEAKER_00] And in that work phone case, I am not going to put that on Verizon. I'm not going to pay them $65 a month for that. Absolutely not. I have like a Mint Mobile plan, and when my Mint Mobile one year, you know, at $15 a month goes away, I'm going to sign up for a plan with like either, you know, Visible or U.S. U.S. Mobile, I think is what they're called or something. And one of the MVMOs. And I'm going to get a $15 a month plan for that. And like for my work purposes, that is fine. [SPEAKER_00] Now, for my personal device, if I came down to it, would I buy like a second line? I mean, I guess I would, but I wouldn't be happy about it. But in this case, I'm just like, okay, AT&T, I don't know how many people are realistically going to be foregoing, like who would have already paid for another line would be giving something up. It just seems short-sighted to me. [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. Yeah. Federico, do you even have this option in Italy, the iPhone handoff? The ability to have two handsets with the same number? No. [SPEAKER_05] We got eSIMs a couple of years after everybody else and so on. Our carriers are extremely behind on anything. I believe to this day, there's still only one carrier with support for Apple Watch cellular. What? Yeah. [SPEAKER_03] Oh, that's a bummer. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. AT&T is having a moment with Apple. I was on Reddit the other day and there are a lot of AT&T users who bought the AT&T Pro and have been reporting that their phone has gone into SOS mode and just will not reconnect to AT&T. It's just been, they're describing it as bricked. I don't know if it's actually bricked. It's a lot of people who have a lot of people who have been in the U.S. [SPEAKER_01] And they're saying that different users are having different experiences with trying to get AT&T to admit it's their fault versus getting Apple to admit that it's their fault. So it's very, very much in flux right now. But if you're an AT&T subscriber and you're having problems with your phone, you are not alone. I don't think it's a crisis yet. [SPEAKER_01] It takes a few weeks of a new phone being out to figure out what the issues are and if it's a very, very isolated thing or if it's something where there will be a line in one of the next .01 updates to the iOS saying, okay, we've updated the profile for this in the firmware to address a tower issue or something like that. [SPEAKER_03] Apple did put out 27.0.1 to fix this Face ID reboot. Yeah. Right? I think that was another issue. There's some issues. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Yeah, there's nothing that gets my attention like a .01 release shortly after the main release because that means that there was something that they found that was so mouth-drying that they said, yeah, let's not wait until .01. Let's get this in people's hands right quick. So it's either a security issue or like a show-stopping bug. Yeah. [SPEAKER_00] And in this case it was. It was an unlock thing where the phone was just hardcore crashing. [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. It says, and this is on my iPhone right now. Wrong screen. On the, yeah, there you go. It says, iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Pro Max unexpectedly restart when a Face ID fails to authenticate. That's not a matter of problem. Not only do I not recognize you, but I'm going to reboot. A color artifact may appear on photos captured at 2x under certain lighting conditions. [SPEAKER_03] Opening notification center and control center simultaneously may cause the touch screen to be unresponsive. Yeah, I think I'm going to update those. That sounds like a good thing to update. 27.0.1. And presumably, it doesn't mention that AT&T issue. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. ScooterX just posted into the Discord. No fix. No fix. It's not a fix. So it's a mysterious way. Again, this is the sort of problem that's frustrating as hell because it could be a problem at all kinds of points during the chain. The fact that it's only affecting AT&T on a certain model phone makes you think that it's an AT&T problem. But that's not necessarily the case. [SPEAKER_00] Well, I mean, I would say. [SPEAKER_01] It's unknown at this point. [SPEAKER_00] It's unknown at this point. I would say that Apple has the ability, and so does AT&T for that matter, that if there is something that is going to be a wireless update or whatever, they could issue separately from an iOS update. You can issue a baseband update to the device itself. And so if it is something with AT&T's towers, they have the ability to basically troubleshoot that with Apple and issue an update that is not going to be part of the same iOS cycle. [SPEAKER_00] And that happens fairly frequently across carriers. So who knows what the case is? I mean, it's kind of ironic when you consider that AT&T had that original partnership with Apple for the first couple of years. But it does definitely seem like in the last few years that this has not been, you know, AT&T hasn't been getting all the latest and greatest features the same way that T-Mobile and Verizon have. [SPEAKER_01] So, yeah, I got to tell you, if my telegraph service wasn't so good, I would switch to T-Mobile in a minute. [SPEAKER_03] You know, I think I recognize your key. You have a certain style that I just know it's AI on the line. We're going to take a break on that. Use of dashes instead of dots. Yes. [SPEAKER_01] Thank you. Thank you. I'm here. [SPEAKER_03] M dots. Andy Anaco at anaco.com. Everybody should become a member. It's a great site. I-H-N-A-T-K-O for keeping up with what's going on in the world of tech plus great writing. I mean, that's what Andy is so good at. And Christina Warren also here from GitHub. And we're really pleased to have the editor-in-chief of Mac Stories, Federico Vitticci with us, macstories.net. [SPEAKER_03] If you are at all interested in M5 Ultra and local AI, that's the definitive article. Absolutely definitive article. Thank you. Our show today brought to you, and when I say brought to you, I mean literally brought to you by Cashfly, our CDN, our content delivery network. Cashfly has been keeping our content moving practically since the very beginning, 20 years now. [SPEAKER_03] Every stream, every download, every on-demand episode, Cashfly quietly does the heavy lifting behind the scenes. They've been around for more than 20 years. They're anything but static, though, and I love this about Cashfly. Always adding new features, new things to make your life better. Here are a few things to know. If you're thinking about a CDN for your infrastructure, by the way, absolutely a must. Are you a game house, game downloads on Cashfly? [SPEAKER_03] Cashfly up to 158% faster than the competing providers. That's a lot. This is important, not sub-second video start times on any device at scale. We know if you come to our website to watch a show and it doesn't start up within a second or two, you're going to leave. 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[SPEAKER_03] It certainly is the one built for our business. Look how you can get your first month free at cashfly.com slash twit. How many years have you heard me say this? Bandwidth for MacBreak Weekly is brought to you by Cashfly. At C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y dot com slash twit. Apple stock price, I'm noticing, tumbling down 2.66%. Possibly a sell-off because their price has been so high. [SPEAKER_03] Possibly that Mark Gurman article might have shaken some people in the markets. Or maybe it was Meta Connect. Time for our Vision Pro segment. [SPEAKER_04] What do you see? What do you know? It's time to talk to Vision Pro. [SPEAKER_03] The Vision Pro segment really this time should have been brought to you by Meta because at Meta Connect, they announced a device that is a third of the cost of the Vision Pro, a fifth of the weight. Mark writes, Meta's VR glasses are what the Apple Vision Pro should have been. Uh-oh. [SPEAKER_00] I mean, I don't think, points were made. [SPEAKER_03] Now, it does need a little, you know, backpack because it is lighter. That's one of the ways you make it lighter is you got not only a battery pack, but I think computing is offloaded onto this little. But, you know, when you're hanging a battery from your belt anyway, why not put the computer there too? Yeah. Yeah. [SPEAKER_00] I was going to say, it's not like that. It's not like the Vision Pro is, you know, better in that regard. [SPEAKER_03] You look a lot less goofy in them too. Gurman pointed out, yeah, you do this, you know, and people have worn it. I mean, you don't look normal, but you don't like. Well, you look like a bug. But you look bad, yeah. But you don't, yeah, you don't look like it's a nerd helmet. It looks like you're maybe wearing some elaborate sunglasses. You look like you've made a fashion choice. [SPEAKER_01] Yes. A statement sunglasses. But the mere fact that you could credibly wear them without feeling as though, okay, I got to get these things off my head. That's the most important part. And it's not the biggest win. It's like, that's non-negotiable. [SPEAKER_03] Gurman writes, I spent nearly an hour with Meta's VR glasses and I was blown away by their comfort and compact size. Now, he also has been saying that Apple considered such a device but has canceled it, doesn't want to do it. A year ago, Apple shelved another attempt to revamp Vision Pro the Vision Air that would have been very similar. Another project, N109 was canceled as well. It envisioned a lighter, lower cost Vision Pro with a less powerful chip. [SPEAKER_03] So, there's really some question, I think, about how much Apple's committed to Vision Pro at this point. I hate to bring you the bad news, but… [SPEAKER_00] No, obviously, look, come on. If it had sold well, then that would be one thing. But this segment is a joke for a reason. We are the premier of Vision Pro's podcast. But the fact that the most interesting thing to happen in this space is not coming from Apple, but it's coming from Meta, I think is telling. [SPEAKER_00] And look, the interesting thing, I think, about this particular product from Meta is I think that it really kind of hones in on exactly why if this sort of device is to take off, and I think that is still a very big if, that it's doubling down on the areas where we've seen success with the Vision Pro, which is with an immersive 3D kind of content or watching movies, right? [SPEAKER_00] And potentially enhancing some productivity and using it as kind of a second screen thing. But I think that most people… I mean, my experience with Vision Pro, and granted, I don't have one, but I don't have one because I know I wouldn't use it. But the thing that I would use it for would be to watch video. That would be the primary purpose. And there's no way I could justify spending that much money to have something be on my face and leave marks on my face, you know, to watch movies as much as I would like to. [SPEAKER_00] And as much as I have, frankly, thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars in the Apple ecosystem in terms of purchased films. But something like this from Meta, assuming you could get it to work with, you know, your content either through Movies Anywhere or some other service to pull those things in, because I seriously doubt that Apple will support it, would be great potentially. And certainly, I mean, it's way less heavy, way less expensive. [SPEAKER_00] And I think it kind of doubles in on saying for the people who aren't wanting to go after something from a gaming perspective, but are wanting to just kind of have a different view, either for viewing video or, again, maybe productivity. That's what people want versus the spatial awareness and being able to depend things any place you want and the weird googly eyes and the very impressive technical things that the Apple Vision Pro has. But like that as a consumer product, we just we don't care about. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, it feels like, again, retrospective is always you're always a genius when you look back. But it seems as though I wish that Apple had decided to launch this platform the way that they had launched the iPhone, where we're going to start small and then we're going to build up from there. It doesn't have to be 3G. We can start with 2G. It doesn't have to have apps. We'll add apps later on. We'll basically much like they launched the Apple Watch, where we're going to we're going to figure it out as we go along. We're going to get something out there. [SPEAKER_01] But, yeah, it's if they'd started off with something that it was more along these lines, even if it were a $2,000 device, that was just, again, minimum requirement is it has to be comfortable enough to wear that people are going to want to wear it. But once it's once it's as bulky and as uncomfortable as the Vision Pro, it has to be the miracle platform of the century to be worth that kind of strain. So but we'll we'll see. [SPEAKER_01] I mean, as as you've said before, they canceled the the Apple car. But a lot of the work that they did in artificial intelligence to build the Apple car paid off well for other products. Hopefully we'll see that kind of same tale here. [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, Mark, despite, you know, all the things he likes about it, does point out it only has a 70 degree field of view compared to the 100 degree field of view on the Vision Pro. The screens aren't as high resolution. [SPEAKER_04] Right. [SPEAKER_03] But does anybody care? Yeah, that's the big point. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. They decided to go, we're going to make the best version of this product we possibly can without taking into an advantage. Are people still going to want to wear this thing and use this thing and pay $3,500 for this thing? And the answer, unfortunately, was no. [SPEAKER_03] Honestly, when I saw it, I thought this is a this is an inertia product from Meta. Meta had spent a lot of money and a lot of energy becoming the VR company. [SPEAKER_01] They renamed the damn company after this idea. [SPEAKER_03] They renamed the company. I think they've pivoted to AI, but they had this in the drawing board and they felt, well, let's just put it out there. And, you know, I mean, they had they bought, you know, Quest and they have the Meta Quest. And, you know, I had a couple of them and stuff. Federico, have you ever played with VR? Are you a Vision Pro guy? [SPEAKER_05] I actually have a Vision Pro. [SPEAKER_03] Congratulations. [SPEAKER_05] Thank you. Every once in a while, I charge it. [SPEAKER_00] I was going to say, when did you last use it? When did you last use it genuinely? [SPEAKER_01] I like it enough that I don't want the batteries to be destroyed because I didn't charge it. That's how much affection I have for this platform. [SPEAKER_05] I think it's actually bricked at this point. Oh, dear. I'm pretty sure I put Vision OS 27 Beta 1 on it in June and I never updated from Beta 1. [SPEAKER_03] Wow. [SPEAKER_05] So I don't know. I will see some kind of error on screen. [SPEAKER_00] So you need the $60 developer cable to be able to connect it to your Mac. Which I have. Which, of course, you have. But I'm just pointing out that, like, this is the irony of this product is that if you want to even do this, you have to buy a special cable, a developer cable, to be able to connect it to your Mac. [SPEAKER_03] Once you do that, would it help if I told you you could put Linux on it? No. [SPEAKER_00] No. Why? You can't, by the way. No, but also, why would we want to? Linux would never be able to support any of the custom stuff that this is. I know. [SPEAKER_03] I'm just joking. I know. I know. I'm sorry. I'm trying to put two of Frederico's favorite things together. Emacs on that device would be legendary. Actually, Mark does say it's interesting that the meta, he says, the gestures are the same, by the way, as the spatial computing on the Vision Pro. But he says the keyboard's much better. It's actually, you can actually fake type very well with it. I still, I don't think this is a, I think this is a market that nobody, I don't think there's any market for. [SPEAKER_00] It's like 3D TV. Like, we get really excited. And we think, like, this is going to be the future. And then you're like, actually, no. And it's interesting because, like you said, like, both you and Andy made a point. Like, we renamed the company after this. They went all in on this. Obviously, now I think they've pivoted to AI. And I'm sure they had this kind of in the back channels. And so you might as well ship it. But I wouldn't buy this product either, to be clear. Like, I think this is definitely something that's more compelling than a Vision Pro. But I wouldn't buy this either. [SPEAKER_03] No. I thought, oh, it's a third of the Vision Pro. And I'm still not going to buy it. And I still don't want it. [SPEAKER_00] Like, I had a Quest, whatever the cheap Quest was, the Quest 2, the Quest 3, whatever the cheap one was. They then continued to raise the price on. So it was one of those things where I was like, oh, well, this got more up. [SPEAKER_03] I bought the $1,500 Pro version for some reason. I don't know what I was thinking. [SPEAKER_00] I mean, you were thinking that you are Leo Laporte and this is what you do for a living. I should keep up on this category. And that you buy all these gadgets. This is my job. And that's what you were thinking. Yeah. Which I totally respect. I got one of the ones, I guess it was like $300 or something. And I was like, fine. This is fine. And I think I used it once. [SPEAKER_03] I was on the Kickstarter. I always did the Kickstarter. What was the name? [SPEAKER_00] Oh, I did that one too. Yeah. I was too. For the original. Palmer Lucky's. Yep. Yeah. For the original. [SPEAKER_03] And I had that. And then Meta sent me a replacement because they bought the company then after I'd supported it with my money on the Kickstarter. So I think they gave me a replacement. And then I bought the Pro. I kept, like Meta, like Mark, thinking maybe this is a category. Yeah. [SPEAKER_00] I reviewed an HTC Vive and I liked that a lot. It was the Oculus. Oculus Rift. Yeah. Yeah. The Oculus Rift. And then they had Oculus Quest and other things and like HTC Vive. And like there's some really interesting immersive things you can do. I even did before I actually one of the final big stories I did before I transitioned into engineering was I talked about VR filmmaking and went to the Tribeca Film Festival and interviewed [SPEAKER_00] a bunch of filmmakers and had some really interesting experiences to seeing like, okay, how are filmmakers trying to use this technology? And then the challenge was there were two dual challenges. One is how do you record these things in stereoscopic and get it so that it can be in compelling quality? And then the secondary thing is how do you distribute this? Because some of the files for even very, very small, you know, like five-minute clips were like 20 terabytes in size or something. [SPEAKER_00] And we're just, we're not really at a place where you could widely distribute. And a lot of those things have been handled. But this was a thing, this was nine years ago and was very interesting to kind of like think about, okay, is this going to potentially be a new medium that could be used maybe not by everyone, but by certain sectors of people? And so, you know, gaming obviously became one of the big areas and, you know, video and then, [SPEAKER_00] you know, kind of got into this more general category of spatial computing. But I think that, I think all of us just, we have to look at this. We're a decade into this now, more than a decade into this, and it's still a very niche thing. And that's not to say that people shouldn't experiment. And if Meta wants to experiment on this, that's fine. But I mean, no one's, no one's buying, this is not like a big. [SPEAKER_03] I'm more excited about that Tamagotchi, to be honest. [SPEAKER_00] I was going to say, that's the sort of thing, right? That, and this is what happens sometimes is that you have predictions and this happens with every technology company and just throughout the industry where you really think like this is going to be the next big wave. This is what we think is going to take off. And it's not, it winds up being something that comes completely far off field, which is not to take away from the initial brilliance of that first Oculus Rift, right? Like that was such an impressive, you know, kind of demo, especially what someone so young [SPEAKER_00] was able to do with relatively, you know, low spec hardware and was able to do really interesting things. And maybe we do eventually get to the point where they will be lightweight enough and the lenses will be good enough that this will be a real category. But I think if anything, what's going to be and what has proven to be a real category is like the, you know, the meta Ray-Bans and that's the sort of thing where, for all the different privacy constraints and issues people have with that, that's been a really successful product. [SPEAKER_00] That's a thing people really like and having kind of that augmented experience versus, okay, we need to have a headset, whether the computer battery is on my, you know, hip or not, or whatever the case may be. Like there's always going to be like a limited market for that. But if there is something out there, then having these more aware, and especially with AI, you know, connected, you know, kind of, you know, glasses of, okay, I can give you more context about what's around you. That was kind of the original goal of Google Glass way back when. [SPEAKER_00] And maybe there is something there. Or maybe in 20 years, we'll all be talking about how, well, yeah, just around the corner, we're going to have these headsets. [SPEAKER_01] Someday cars will drive themselves. Right. Sometimes you skate to where the puck is going to go, and then you look around and everybody's playing basketball. That's what Apple has found themselves in right now. You brought a hockey stick to a basketball game. It's a Wednesday. They covered up the ice with floor. Okay. My bad. [SPEAKER_03] But that parquet is beautiful. You can't deny that. It really is. All right. That's the Vision Pro segment. Nice as it is. [SPEAKER_04] Now you know we're done talking about Vision Pro. Oh, dear. Oh, dear. [SPEAKER_03] But I bet you, see, the thing about the Tamagotchi that I like, it does have a camera. It does have array mics. It is really the meta glasses without putting them on your face. [SPEAKER_01] This is something that keeps coming up. People taking the Apple Watch off of the band and putting it in a 3D printed case and just using it like a pocket watch or a fob. To me, that would be a really compelling product. If Apple could put continuity features on it and a limited number of AI features on it and basically also make the iPod style features of it really, really easy to access. I don't mean, we've talked about this before. [SPEAKER_01] Between my plain fitness band and my love for Casio watches, I have no need for a smart watch. But there's a reason why my jeans have a watch pocket. And I would actually say, you know what? I might have $300 for a device like that. [SPEAKER_00] Right. No, you're not wrong. I bought one of those accessories that turns your Apple Watch into an iPod type of thing. And it was incredibly janky. But it was still kind of a fun thing. But yeah, I mean, I think, but I thought about this for a long time. It's like, okay, you could very easily turn that into, as we've discussed, like a much broader accessory and be, and that would be kind of a perfect thing. I mean, even if they wanted to make it a unique accessory, different from the watch, you could [SPEAKER_00] use many of the same components that you use in the watch in a device like that. Maybe alter your operating system slightly. But yeah, I mean, I'm with you. I think that there's something to that. [SPEAKER_03] And I think Apple looking at this should be a little nervous. German does say that Apple considered a pendant and has decided not to make it. But I think this, it doesn't feel like this is the thing that's going to replace the iPhone. [SPEAKER_00] No, I could. I mean, it could. Well, I don't think it replaces the iPhone, but I think that maybe it gets people less reliant on their iPhone as the only device, right? Right. And so I think that is more of the problem than, is this going to replace your phone? Because like, if you were faced, Leo, with what am I going to leave the house with? My phone or one of these, you know, Tamagotchi things. [SPEAKER_03] A cute little Tamagotchi. [SPEAKER_00] No, you're not. You have to pick one. [SPEAKER_03] I can make phone calls. What if I can make phone calls? I could take pictures. I can call an Uber. [SPEAKER_00] You're not going to send your text messages. [SPEAKER_03] Sure you can. It's Muse. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. [SPEAKER_03] You just say, send a text message to Christina. [SPEAKER_00] And then I'm going to get a green bubble and I'm going to be like, what the hell is this? Who is this? I'm not talking to you. [SPEAKER_03] Oh, green bubbles are so last year. I don't think you have to worry about that. By the way, this is my cute little Muse guy. I told him. I told him, dress for the weather every morning when you get up, figure out what the weather's going to be and dress for it. [SPEAKER_00] Lele, is that his name? [SPEAKER_03] Lele. Yeah. Little Lele. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. We're going to take one last break and then it is pick of the week time. I've already bought what could have been your pick of the week, Frederico. I already bought that, the KVM. Oh, that was fast. Yeah. Well, that's exactly. So every once in a while, my computer will reboot and then say, oh, you need to enter a password or something. I mean, it's all set up so it shouldn't. But you never know. [SPEAKER_03] And if I had that thing, I could just send her the password. Even if I'm in Kuala Lumpur, I can do it. That's what I care about. Or Rome. Maybe I'll go to Rome. I don't know. I have a craving for some gelato. Okay. I'm just saying. Pizza. Emma's Pizza is my favorite pizza place in the world. It's in Rome. It's really good. Which one? Emma. You ever hear of that one? No. [SPEAKER_03] I'm going to have to come bug you and you can tell me all the best places to go. [SPEAKER_05] Okay. [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. Yeah. I had a lovely cacio e pepe. Or was it a carbonara? It was a carbonara at Fortunata. That was good. [SPEAKER_05] Can't go wrong. Yeah. [SPEAKER_03] That was really good. Yeah. There's a nice lady, nice Italian mama making the pasta in the window. And then they put it in a bowl and a give it to you. It's great. This is Mac Break Weekly and it is here thanks to you, our dear club members. Without you, honestly, we would probably have fewer shows, certainly have fewer hosts, and Leah would have fewer toys. No. I want to say this very clearly. That's coming out of my pension. [SPEAKER_03] It's coming out of my retirement savings because every penny that you pay to join the club goes to people like the impecunious Andy Inotko. It goes to people who really need the money. Sure, you could watch his show and not support Andy, but that would be a crime. So go to twit.tv slash club twit. But $10 a month gets you ads-free versions of all of our shows. It gets you chapter markers in every show. [SPEAKER_03] It gets you access to the club twit. Discord, which is a wonderful place to hang out. All the special programming we do. Our AI user group is coming up on Friday. It's going to be Harper Reid and his misfit toys. He's bringing the creator of superpowers along with him and a bunch of weird ESP32 devices. He's just a madman. We'll take a look at the future, I think, with Harper Reid on Friday. If you're in the club. If you're not, go to twit.tv slash club twit. [SPEAKER_03] We would love to have you in the fam. Actually, let's do our guest, Federico. I don't know if they mentioned the pick of the week. Is there something? You already have picked one thing, but if you'd like to pick something else that these days is exciting you. [SPEAKER_05] I want to point people to an iPhone and iPad app. It's called Open Minis. I never heard of it. Yeah, so this is pretty cool. It's a chatbot app. It's more of an agent app, really. Think of it as a lightweight version of Hermes Agent. [SPEAKER_04] Okay. [SPEAKER_05] But running on the iPhone and iPad with a twist. So this app is open source. It's made from a single developer in China. This person figured out how to make a custom agentic harness on iOS that has access to a whole bunch of Apple-specific integrations. [SPEAKER_05] This person turned, and this is the genius part of this app. They turned native iOS features like access to your photos, music, maps, health, all these exclusive Apple frameworks. This guy turned it into a bunch of CLIs for agents to use. [SPEAKER_05] And so this is basically Siri AI as it was meant to be as an agent. [SPEAKER_03] Does it use the AI intents? It does not. It doesn't. It does not. [SPEAKER_05] It doesn't. It just works with health kit, event kit for calendar reminders. Perfect. Works with photo kit so it can access and process your photo library. It uses the same native permission prompts of iOS because it's actually using native iOS APIs behind the scenes. The trick is that you can log in with your favorite AI provider, including your OpenAI subscription, or you can put in your API key. There's a support for a whole bunch of providers. [SPEAKER_05] And you can use GPT-6 in Openminis and say, hey, can you visualize my photos on a map? And it's going to put together, yeah, it's going to put together a little map based on your iPhone photos. Or you can say, give me an overview of my week. And it's going to pull from your iCloud calendar and your reminders. [SPEAKER_05] And maybe it's going to look into your contacts and see if you have a birthday coming up from a contact. All of these iOS integrations that all of these companies are now doing, right, like Meta with Muse. Allegedly, OpenAI is going to have more iOS integrations in ChatGPT in the future. This single indie developer from China did it months ago in an app that you can download for free from the App Store. [SPEAKER_05] And it keeps getting better every week. There's a new test flight beta. It's remarkable what this person has achieved. [SPEAKER_03] I'm setting it up right now with Anthropic with my Opus. Actually, we do Sonnet 5.5, the new Sonnet 5.5. [SPEAKER_05] It works great with Sonnet 5.5. It can use sub-agents. This custom harness can use sub-agents on iOS. It can talk to your devices with tail scale. I just used OpenMinis here on my phone as we were recording. I set Opus on a task. [SPEAKER_05] And I said, can you figure out how to add support for GPT-6 Ultrafast, which came out two hours ago? Yes. To OpenMinis. Because this harness, the OpenMinis can tweak itself. The harness is able to reconfigure OpenMinis. This is too good. Opus put together a custom, a little tweak for the OpenMinis harness. So now I can use Ultrafast already. [SPEAKER_05] And I'm sure the developer will be making official support by tomorrow. But yeah, this is one of my favorite discoveries of the year, which funnily enough came from a chat GPT deep research. I was like, wait, this has to be an hallucination. This app cannot possibly exist. And sure enough, I clicked. I'm signing in right now. [SPEAKER_03] This is incredible. [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. It's a fun. I wasted hours and hours. You made me very happy. [SPEAKER_03] I only wish I could point it at my local AI. But I have. [SPEAKER_05] Oh, you can. Oh, Leo. Oh, Leo. Oh, you can. Can I point it to Hermes? I created, for my review of the M5 Ultra, I created a little bridge sitting in front of MLX so that I can use QN in OpenMinis. Yeah. [SPEAKER_03] Oh, my goodness. Okay. Now, I'll see you all later. I got somewhere to be. Great pick. Is it free or is it an app purchase? Free. [SPEAKER_05] Free and open source on GitHub. [SPEAKER_03] Very nice. And there's a very good article from July. See, if I had just been paying attention to MacStories.net. [SPEAKER_05] You were probably at the beach. [SPEAKER_03] I was probably at the beach instead of reading the latest blog posts at MacStories.net, which I should have been doing. And, of course, all the information about how Federico's got this working, I'm sure, with his local AI as well would be in here. Wow. That's really cool. That's one bad thing about Hermes. There's really no good mobile interface to it. There's a bunch of janky stuff. [SPEAKER_05] You should go. I will give you one extra pick. Go check out. There's an open test flight. This other indie developer, Florian, I believe. Go to cadu.bot. That's C-A-D-U dot bot. It's an upcoming iPhone and iPad client for Hermes. It's really nice. It even supports the new bot mode. [SPEAKER_03] Yes, I use the bot mode. [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. Oh. Okay. That's a... [SPEAKER_03] I have too many toys. [SPEAKER_05] I know, right? [SPEAKER_03] I know. By the way, Open Minis does support Copilot via GitHub. So you can use your GitHub Copilot subscription as well. [SPEAKER_00] Nice. [SPEAKER_03] I'm sure Christine is pleased to hear that. Oh, no. [SPEAKER_00] This is life-changing for me. I can't believe I didn't know about this until now. So thank you so much, Federico, because this is great. You're welcome. No, I will absolutely use my GitHub Copilot subscription with that. Thank you. Yes. [SPEAKER_03] Do they give you a bunch of tokens? Do you get like... Oh, I... Should I be really jealous? Oh, I get all the tokens, Leo. All the tokens? All the tokens. Oh, man! [SPEAKER_00] I get all the tokens. [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. Just... Yeah. Just that's a dream come true. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, it's nice. It's nice. [SPEAKER_03] Did you... Federico, did you sign up for the ultra-fast? [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. [SPEAKER_03] Are you... $500 a month? Do you have to have a $500... You have to have a $500 a month subscription for that, don't you? [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. [SPEAKER_03] But it's 300 tokens a second! [SPEAKER_05] Look, I figured I'm just going to take it for a spin for a month. Month. That's what I was thinking of. I'll actually give you... You'll be hooked on it. It's not a scoop or anything. Now, I was scrolling through the response in Open Minis. [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. [SPEAKER_05] Opus took it on its own to actually run benchmarks on my Mac Studio. I'm looking now. It created a bridge on my Mac Studio to measure the performance of the three speed tiers that OpenAI now offers. Oh, nice. Standard, fast, and ultra-fast. [SPEAKER_03] Yes. [SPEAKER_05] And? And OpenAI is saying that they run a 300 TPS. [SPEAKER_02] Yeah? [SPEAKER_05] According to Opus, it's just short of 100 at 97 TPS. [SPEAKER_03] Oh, I've already got that on my Sparks. I don't need to sign up for that. [SPEAKER_05] So maybe it's a rollout type of issue. [SPEAKER_03] Everybody's doing it is why. [SPEAKER_05] Everybody's doing it. I also saw, as I was quickly scrolling through, that some people were able to completely run through and exhaust their Pro 500 in 45 minutes. [SPEAKER_03] That I believe. That's exactly why I don't sign up for stuff like that, because I know I would. Oh. I absolutely know. You know what? I do have a subscription to Cerebrus, which is using custom hardware. They only do a few small models, but the Quen runs really fast on it. It's kind of fun. [SPEAKER_05] 1,800 TPS on that model. [SPEAKER_03] It's kind of neat to see something that fast. Yeah. So if I need, you know, I mean, it's relatively intelligent, 27B, but if I need a dense model for some quick stuff, and it's pretty cheap, too. I like doing that. Christina, I think we should, thank you, Federico, by the way, for being here. You're welcome. I'm going to let you go to bed, because you've been very patient. [SPEAKER_00] Thank you for being here, Federico. [SPEAKER_03] And I'm sure, thanks for your girlfriend, wishes you were done. It was such a pleasure. Such an honor. [SPEAKER_05] It was an honor for me to be here. I've been a huge fan for the longest time. Well, thank you. So thank you for inviting me. [SPEAKER_03] Well, if you don't mind, I might have you come back. And what I'd actually like to have you on our AI show also, then we can really let our hair down and talk serious AI stuff. [SPEAKER_05] Okay. We were not serious enough here, but yes, anytime, I'd be happy to. [SPEAKER_03] I love talking to people who are doing interesting things with local. To me, that's really where the frontier belongs. So I appreciate it. Thank you, Federico. [SPEAKER_05] Thank you. Great to have you. It was good to talk to you. [SPEAKER_03] Christina, your pick of the week. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. Okay. So this is actually fun. So there's a developer who's been around for the scene for a really, really long time. Great person, Rosina Keller, who just recently re-released, I guess, kind of updated some apps that have been around on the Mac back in the olden days. So if you've been a Mac OS user for a long time, you might remember things like Haxes and the fact that you used to be able to really customize and plug in and change the way your Mac worked. And that hasn't really been a thing that you've been able to do for a long time. [SPEAKER_00] But Rosina recently just actually, I think maybe last week, just relaunched a couple of different apps, including one called Fruit Menu Redux and one that is called Zounds Redux. And these are both basically kind of new versions of what these older Haxes were from back in the day. And Fruit Menu Redux is basically a way to customize your Apple menu. [SPEAKER_00] So you can pin various, you know, items or, you know, hotkeys to individual files or like have it like it's an extra menu bar. Just basically customize, you know, you could have like go to system settings directly from the Apple menu and, you know, go to, you know, shortcuts and go to other sorts of things. Really customize it. And so that's one option. [SPEAKER_00] And then Zounds is one that basically lets you kind of customize various sounds that work along with your interface. Anyway, I think this is really fun. I'm glad to see this. I think Rosina is a great person. And both of these apps through tomorrow, I guess, through today, they are $7 apiece where you can get a bundle, I think, for a discount from that. Right now, you can get the two of them together. They're $10 apiece normally. And then there's like a bundle that's a discount. [SPEAKER_00] Right now, they're $7 US apiece or you can get a bundle. I think it's like, you know, $13 or something if you get them together. That ends tomorrow. But anyway, I just wanted to give them support. [SPEAKER_03] I love the name of the company. Totally not malicious software. [SPEAKER_00] Totally not malicious software. I was going to say the URL is great. But this is the long time, you know, like Mac asked, Mac developer, somebody who actually worked at Apple for a time and is just, you know, I'm really glad to see this sort of innovation coming back to Mac OS. [SPEAKER_00] So Fruit Menu was one that I bought them both immediately, but I just wanted to give them a shout out and tell people if you like these sorts of little fun utility apps, support a good indie developer and check them out. [SPEAKER_03] That is awesome. What's his name or her name? [SPEAKER_00] Rosina. Rosina Keller. Rosina. [SPEAKER_03] Is it a woman or a man? Do we know? [SPEAKER_00] I think they're non-binary, but I... [SPEAKER_03] Could be either. Either. Yeah. All right. Rosina. R-O-S-Y-N-A. Totally not malicious software dot com. The whole ethos of this is fantastic. I love it. [SPEAKER_01] Andy and Atko, pick of the week. My pick of the week is a keyboard that I picked up a few weeks ago. I've been eyeing the Keychron K3 keyboard for a long, long time. Nice. And I found one that was... So this model is a couple years old, and so it looks like Keychron has been clearing it out. Oh, it's cheap. Because I got this for... Actually, I got this for $42. What? Wow. Because these are normally hundreds of dollars. About $100. [SPEAKER_01] The K3, they have versions that are kind of like this that are more expensive. But the K3 is their $100, sort of halfway between a MacBook keyboard and a big, chonky desktop keyboard. It's a really nice compromise. These are all... This is a 75% keyboard, which means that it's nice and compact. However, the keys are full mechanical keyboards, full mechanical key switches. So they feel really great. They sound really great. [SPEAKER_01] I can't use it in the library unless I'm inside a conference room. But it's really, really great to type on. The key caps, if you don't like the key caps, you can buy new key caps and switch them out. All the cool things you can do with a really big keyboard. Also, it's nice enough that it supports both Windows and Android and macOS and iOS. There's just a switch in the back that lets you select between key layouts. But it does come with all the key caps that you would expect. [SPEAKER_01] I mean, the key caps here are exactly like what I've got right in front of me on my MacBook Pro. So it's not as long as you have to remember that, oh, wait, that's not the Windows command. That's not the Alt key. That is Control, Option, and Command. And you can pair up to three devices simultaneously. So you can easily, I mean, I've got this paired to my laptop, my iPad, and my phone at the same time. It's got fully backlit LED. [SPEAKER_01] You can also, it's got the stupid, no, I don't want to say stupid, but the sort of like young people's LED, which is when I first set it up, it started doing these like crazy light shows. It pulses, yeah, mine does that too. It's like zing, zing, zing, zing, zing, zing. Like tell me that that's not going to be like the default state of this keyboard. But no, there's a key right here that can switch it to something more sensible. [SPEAKER_03] Actually, I have it set so that the key that you just hit lights up. And I find it very helpful for typing better. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, I mean, it's nice. I know it's... This is the older one. The newer K3s, they're full RGB so that you can actually like set your key cap backlit so that it's easy to guide to like the stuff, the different view of the function keys and stuff like else. This does have, as the older one, I noticed that, you know, we talk about in design, especially with Apple, like these little moments of delight where the caps lock key is backlit, but it turns into red when the caps lock is on. See, that's good. [SPEAKER_01] With this older one, that's the only one that's actually RGB, I think. The newer ones, all the keys are RGB. And there's, of course, a desktop app you can use to customize that however I want. But it really, I mean, if I had... Is it Bluetooth or USB? USB. It is Bluetooth or USB. Oh, that's nice. There's a switch again on the back that you can choose from. Battery lasts not as much... Excuse me, again, this is the older one, but the newer one, the battery lasts about 70 to 80 hours. This one lasts about half of that. [SPEAKER_01] That's why some of the reviews you might look up on this particular model might not be super, super great. But the thing is, this is like the beautiful, happy medium that I've sort of been looking for. I am a sort of... I'm not a keyboard nerd, but like I'm really... Oh, it's like if I had more money, I could be a keyboard. [SPEAKER_03] I have the DOS keyboard you recommended. I do have that. [SPEAKER_01] I have the Keychron you recommended. That is my main desktop keyboard. But the thing with this is that there are times where I am going to be gone for a week or a weekend, but I do have writing goals to perform. And this is small and light enough that I can justify putting a wrap around it and putting it like in my bag. It is very, very solid. It's not as heavy as the normal $300 desktop keyboards you might find, but it is solid. It will not skate around on the desktop. [SPEAKER_01] Flip out feet so that it holds up at a nice angle. Nice, like that. Like I said, at $42, it's a freaking steal. On Amazon, the best price you can find is there's another reseller of overstock that has it for $65. But even if you're buying the newest version, the newest version of the K3 for $100, if I had borrowed this from a friend for a weekend after they said, oh my God, I got this for $42, I would have no qualms about spending $100 for the latest one because it really is just quality. [SPEAKER_03] And do you have the red or the brown switches? I've got the brown switches. Oh, those are the quiet. [SPEAKER_01] It's a little, again, it's still too noisy to use in a quiet room with a library. Again, the feel is great. The thing is, again, I love my DOS keyboard. The problem is if I've been working all day on my MacBook, it's the difference in feel between these big, huge, chonky switches and the flatter MacBook switches. Sometimes it takes a while for my fingers to adjust. Whereas with this one, it's a much, much easier transition [SPEAKER_01] because it's more like a laptop keyboard if the laptop were made in like 1988 or something when they didn't have to worry about weight or thickness or anything like that. [SPEAKER_03] But really nice. Keychron, K-E-Y-C-H-R-O-N. And this is the K3 Max. But don't buy it from Keychron because they're going to charge you full list. Shop around. [SPEAKER_01] Again, I have the K3 Max like in the show notes because it's the one that you can buy. It's still a current model. The one that I have is technically speaking the K3 version 2, which was released like five or six years ago. Again, I'm pretty sure it's listed as out of stock on the website. And I believe that's been discontinued. But that's where you get the deal. So exactly. So if you find one of these, there's a good chance it will be like new old stock. And you might get a good deal out of it. [SPEAKER_01] And again, for some people, $100 is right on that edge of what they might spend for a keyboard they don't think they need. [SPEAKER_03] Especially when you get a keyboard for $5. [SPEAKER_01] Right. Exactly. For $65. But again, the $5 keyboard is water-soluble. This one is actually a real productive keyboard. I have bought so many keyboards because of you. I have folding keyboards. I have all kinds of little crazy. Oh, God. I've got – I'm writing something about like for the iPhone Duo. Like I'm looking back at like portable, like smaller and older keyboards. Oh, yeah. That's right. [SPEAKER_01] And in addition to ones that are worth recommending, I'm going – I went right through like my storage and found all of these weird, weird tiny keyboards that came out like when the first iPad became a thing. Yeah. I bought them because of you. But at least I was on a costume. I was thinking like $50 or $60. I'm not trying to twist your – I'm not like Alex saying here's an $18,000 camera that you just have to have. [SPEAKER_03] That's a very good point. Thank you, Andrew. And Otco.com, I-H-N-A-T-K-O is the website. Become a premium member. It is worth supporting Andy for his incredible writing. Lots of great stuff there, including, of course, all the latest Apple news. It's I-H-N-A-T-K-O. And he's going to be talking about the iPhone Duo accessories, which I think will be very, very – [SPEAKER_01] Because it's going to take a while to talk Apple into lending me one, I think. So I better get that pipe – send other things into the pipeline first. [SPEAKER_03] I already ordered a sight unseen because I know I'm going to need a case for this thing, the Nomad leather case. I know they make good stuff. I like Nomad. So – Yeah. I'll be ready when it comes, October 23rd. Yes. Are you excited, Christina? [SPEAKER_00] Oh, I can't wait. I can't wait. Well, I thought it was the 23rd that's coming out. [SPEAKER_03] We ordered the 16th, and then I think – [SPEAKER_00] We ordered the 16th, and then it comes on the 23rd. [SPEAKER_03] They come the 23rd, I think. I may be wrong. [SPEAKER_01] It's in my calendar. We didn't talk about it on the show, but you might want to jump on it. There's a couple of stories from supply chain that's saying that yields on the assembly of those devices is much lower than they were hoping for. Yeah. So, I mean, I don't think you'll have a problem getting one if you want one, but if you really want one, like, early – Get it at 5 a.m. Pacific time. It's a good idea to order on, like, the day that pre-orders lunch. [SPEAKER_00] Right. Right. That's right. That's right. That's right. Yeah. So, it's coming up Friday the 23rd. That's right. Because I'm going to be going out of town right after that, and I, like, purposely made it clear. I was like, no, I'm leaving on the 24th. I'm not – it's either day. [SPEAKER_03] I will be in Thailand on the 16th, and the good news is 5 a.m. Pacific time. It's 8 p.m. Bangkok time. Right. So, I will be having dinner ordering my iPhone 2. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. And someone in the chat posted earlier that they have, like, the whole getting ready thing on the 12th. Yeah. So, you'll be able to preset things then, which will be good. And that way – Yeah. [SPEAKER_03] Somebody was asking – emailed me and said, well, I can't – because in the past, you've been able to save it. You've been able to set it all up, save it, and then when the order comes, you can press a button. Well, they didn't turn that on, and they won't turn that on until the day before for some reason. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. I'm not sure why they're waiting on that, although I think they've done that in the past before, too. It hasn't always been the case where you could do it well in advance. So, I mean, I think that makes sense. And so, the good thing there is that if you are looking to finance, whether it's with an Apple Card, if you don't have an Apple Card already, or the Klarna thing, that, I think, gives you an opportunity. At least it has in the past. I can't speak definitively this time. [SPEAKER_00] But in the past, that has given you a time to set up your financing and go through any of the preapproval process that you might need, which, if you're not just knowing what credit card you're going to put down, you might want to do this time. The same thing with any carrier trade-in offers or things like that. And so, if you don't have a set payment plan set up, taking advantage of that kind of time beforehand is good. [SPEAKER_03] So, you can preorder on the 12th, or rather, save on the 12th for the preorder on the 16th. And that gives me enough time to get down to Louis Spumoni, the local lump shark. And I don't know if it's going to take a kidney, a lung, whatever. I got two of each. Oh, please. Please. [SPEAKER_00] You just, you know, rent out a slice of your spark for a couple weeks. [SPEAKER_03] There you go. Nobody's touching my specs. I love those. Love them. Turned out. [SPEAKER_01] Don't trust Limita, but you can trust Leo. Yes. [SPEAKER_03] We do Mac Break Weekly every Tuesday, 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern, 1800 UTC. And if you want to watch us do it, you can. We stream it live. Of course, in the club. You watch in the club, Twitter, Discord. But everybody can watch on YouTube, Twitch, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Kik. After the fact, get a copy of the show from our website, twit.tv slash mbw. You'll find audio and video there. There is a YouTube channel. All of our shows have their own dedicated YouTube channel. You can go to the main channel, youtube.com slash twit. [SPEAKER_03] Find links to Mac Break Weekly and all the other shows. Or maybe the best thing to do, get yourself a podcast client like Pocket Cast, Overcast, Apple Podcasts, and subscribe. It's free to do, and you'll get it automatically as soon as we're done on a Tuesday, and that way you never miss an episode. Thanks to Christina, Senior Developer Relations at GitHub, where she gets all the tokens. Did you get all the tokens? All the tokens. Thanks to Andy Inotko at Inotko.com. [SPEAKER_03] And a special thanks to Federico Vittici. It was great to have him on. [SPEAKER_01] That was solid. [SPEAKER_00] That was awesome. It was great having Federico on. Amazing. [SPEAKER_01] He's a real nerd. It really did inspire me to think about, gee, I've never done that kind of experimenting with AI, AI that I actually run and own. And it's got me experimenting. I actually made a note to myself saying, let's look into that and maybe just not buying stuff, but maybe leasing services. Yeah, you don't have to buy it. And spinning up my own instances. That's how good that conversation was. That was great. [SPEAKER_03] Good. Good. Yeah, he's just a really great guy. Thank you all for being here. We'll see you next week. But now, I'm sad to say, it is my heavy heart with a heavy heart, I have to tell you. Get back to work, because break time is over. We'll see you next time. Hey, everybody. The show's over, but the listening continues at twit.tv. In fact, we've got so many great shows, I don't even know where to start. How about Intelligent Machines? [SPEAKER_03] That's the show where we cover AI, robotics, and all the smart stuff all around you, with two of the most fun, smart people I know, Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis. It's often philosophic. We sometimes debate. But if you're interested in AI in this world that is changing so fast, this is the show for you. Intelligent Machines. You'll find it at twit.tv slash I am our website or wherever you get your podcasts. I'll be looking for you.