MacBreak Weekly 926 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy Ihnatko, Jason Snell yes, he's back. Alex Lindsay they're all here. Jason spent two days at the Apple campus getting the demos of all the new AI stuff, so he's going to tell us his experiences there and a few things you might not have seen on stage in Cupertino last week. We'll talk about all the new features. We've also got some rumors on the Apple Watch New features there as well. And what is it those Apple executives are doing with their legs? It's a little weird. We explain all next on MacBreak Weekly.
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This is MacBreak Weekly, Episode 926, recorded Tuesday, June 18th 2024. Hey lady! Do a thing! It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we cover the latest Apple news. Jason Snell's back from his mystery assignment somewhere deep within the bowels of, I'm guessing, the Apple campus. Hello Jason.
I literally sent pictures to the Discord. I know we showed them the member Discord last week. Yeah, we showed them. While I was sitting inside a waiting area inside the ring. So yeah, there was no pressure. I was just, you know, waiting to go into yet another briefing. They didn't intend for us to spend all that time in the ring. I think they expected that. Only, you know the riffraff, the press would not be ever allowed in there. But you know, things changed and we get to go in and there's many trees. It's very impressive. Anyway, it's good to be back in my garage instead of at Apple.
Hey there, hi there, oh there, goodness gracious, it's steamy up here in New England, is it? Oh yeah, you're having. You're under a heat dome. Yes, exactly the dome. The domes are rarely a lot of fun, are they? There's Thunderdome. You don't want to be there, and you don't want to be here either today.
I think I'm pretty low on the totem pole in 3D these days. I was building some 3D models over the weekend and I was like, oh man, I'm really, really rusty. I don't remember where all these buttons are anymore. So I'm trying to come back up to speed.
Impressions from Inside the Apple Campus
Well, I mean the facility itself. It's just amazing. I feel like maybe this is Steve Jobs' greatest product. Like it's amazing I. The scale of it is incredible. It's just a huge facility. The trees, I like. I was there the first time they had the press at the Steve Jobs theater. It still smelled like manure everywhere, right, like they're basically planting everything, so it stunk. It smelled real bad. But uh, it has all grown up and is just gorgeous and there are trees everywhere and the way it's built. You really can't even tell that you're in a city. It's like you're on a little space, a space colony with a big building in the middle of it.
We did a briefing over at the at their fitness center, the employee fitness center, which has, like they took over Bad news for everybody doing hot yoga at Apple last week. Your yoga room was instead where we did an iOS briefing Did it have a certain funk to the.It did not, it did not. I did a podcast last year that was right off of the locker room and that smelled like a locker room, but this was they were lighting candles or whatever they needed to do to get the funk out, and they did.
Reassurance and Market Reaction
Well, I mean, look, I know you talked about this last week. It's all about storytelling, it's all about salesmanship and PR and, in this case, I think, trying very hard to one get across that, no, apple is not behind in AI. We were there all along and we're still there and we're going to be there in the future.
I have a little graph here in front of me of the stock market. This was the, the, this plunge. Here was the day of the event and if you look at the, you know you zoom in. It was an up and down, up and down thing, but as soon as the event concluded you could see the climb here and and apple actually had the biggest uh one day in uh in two years and once again uh eclipsed uh microsoft in its market market cap.
Focus on Privacy and Security
But I think it's interesting, given given the fractious relationship with a lot of security professionals, the fact that Apple is really saying they want the cloud compute stuff to be verified by security professionals. They're going to provide something that you can run in emulation on a mac and actually watch the server and how it works, and that they've taken great pains and and that there's this whole validation system where it won't even send data.The ai system on your device won't send data to the server unless it can verify, via a signature, that that server itself is in the list of verified builds of the server, and the idea there is that if they invalidate a build because of a security problem, it will not send data to that server.
Yeah, I was impressed. I was reminded that back in 2016, when a lot of AI features started coming to have photos, that they made this whole policy statement about. No, we're not going to be training stuff on your photos. If you want to contribute information, that will be strictly opt-in. But basically we're going to be maintaining privacy while we bring this ability to identify your family members, identify your dog. So that's been pretty consistent for like eight years now, so that's a nice track record.
