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ATP

45: Give Up On The Retina Dream

 

00:00:00   The show should not be that long.

00:00:03   People keep asking us about the show, the artwork for the show.

00:00:06   Oh, I moved that down.

00:00:08   But okay, we can talk about it now.

00:00:09   That's follow-up, I think.

00:00:10   So I want Marco to address that, because it is a common, a frequently asked question.

00:00:15   Yes, so.

00:00:16   Right now the show has two pieces of artwork.

00:00:18   It has the old Mac Pro with the new badge on it as the official one in the feed.

00:00:22   Ever since WVDC, I've been embedding in the embedded artwork in each file the black Mac

00:00:27   Pro with the new badge over it as kind of a joke from WWDC. Since roughly then we've

00:00:34   been trying to get better artwork made and the biggest problem, we've talked to a few

00:00:39   designers over the last six months or so, the biggest problem is that we have had no

00:00:44   ideas. And so we ask a designer like, "Hey, we'd love to have you do something for us."

00:00:50   And of course all good designers are always busy. And so they ask us, "Okay, well what

00:00:54   do you want?" And we're like, "Uhh." We have no ideas except that it should contain

00:01:00   the text "Accidental Tech Podcast" because all other podcasts contain their name in their

00:01:05   artwork and therefore many podcast clients are designed to not even show the title. This

00:01:11   is, I believe, true in many sections of the iTunes podcast store where you can just see

00:01:15   the square artwork and you don't even see the title. So it makes it hard to find the

00:01:20   show if the title's not in the artwork. Besides that, we have had nothing else to work on

00:01:24   However, you guys all know us, and you can probably take a guess that even though we

00:01:29   have no ideas, we are going to be critical of anything presented to us, which therefore

00:01:33   means that we are the worst possible clients to have for a designer.

00:01:37   So --

00:01:38   Wait a second.

00:01:39   Are you telling people that we need the full name inside the thing?

00:01:41   Because I would be happy with the initials.

00:01:43   That's what I --

00:01:44   All right.

00:01:45   Well, that's --

00:01:46   We're making progress here.

00:01:49   I -- you know, I would -- I think I would argue against that.

00:01:53   I mean, if you just have the initials, that's enough for a fan of the show who has it in

00:01:58   their feeds to be able to recognize rather than just a diagonal banner saying "new."

00:02:02   Well, the fan, yes. But I would say people who already subscribe to it and already recognize

00:02:10   us as a thing, the artwork being recognizable is less of a problem for them. And I would

00:02:15   say ours now probably is very recognizable still if you're browsing a list. The bigger

00:02:19   problem is attracting new people to the show and most people browsing these like

00:02:24   the iTunes store if they see this square that says ATP they're gonna think this

00:02:27   is like the most interesting adenosine triphosphate podcast in the world and

00:02:31   it's gonna you know that this we're not gonna attract new people that way could

00:02:35   also be a tennis podcast that's true I can't believe you knew a deniseen

00:02:39   triphosphate as the husband of a biology teacher I am very impressed I'm not I'm

00:02:44   not gonna pretend like I know whether it's pronounced that way or not but I'm

00:02:46   pretty sure those are the words. No, you're right. You're right.

00:02:48   All right. Anyway, the reason this question comes up is because since we recorded the

00:02:53   last episode, the new Mac Pros have been released, I'm sure we'll talk about that later in the

00:02:57   show, and people keep asking on Twitter, "Are you going to change the artwork for the podcast

00:03:04   to be the new Mac Pro instead of the old one with a big new banner on it?"

00:03:08   So I mean, I made that artwork six months ago. I could change it. I might as well. I

00:03:14   We're trying to get new artwork made still, so I thought it would be a little weird to

00:03:18   change the artwork now and then change it again in like a month or something.

00:03:22   I agree.

00:03:23   I think you should keep the existing old-style cheese grater with the new thing on it until

00:03:28   we get official new artwork.

00:03:30   And we'll just all have to endure the constant questions about why we haven't changed the

00:03:33   artwork.

00:03:34   But the distinction you were just making there is important that the individual embedded

00:03:39   artwork in each audio file is the new one, but the artwork for the show is the old one.

00:03:46   Right, yeah. The art node in the XML feed is the old Mac Pro, and that's what most clients

00:03:52   will display, including Overcast. But some clients will read from inside the MP3 file and show that

00:03:57   artwork, in which case those people have been seeing the new one. Yeah, and we get a lot of

00:04:01   feedback about, "Oh, well, is there a bug? Is something wrong here? Because sometimes I get

00:04:06   I get the cheese grater, sometimes I get the trash can,

00:04:09   and yeah, that's why.

00:04:10   It's because the XML feed, the RSS feed,

00:04:13   has one icon or one bit of artwork,

00:04:16   and the embedded, what is it,

00:04:18   ID3 tags have a different piece of artwork.

00:04:22   - So bear with us.

00:04:23   We'll make it through this together.

00:04:25   - All right, so with that said,

00:04:28   before we talk more about the Mac Pro and iGoToBed,

00:04:32   is there any follow-up that you might have, John,

00:04:34   about other things?

00:04:36   Last show we talked a lot about rating applications and the things we could do to add more valuable

00:04:42   signal to the suitability of applications besides just easily gamed star ratings and

00:04:49   reviews.

00:04:51   And one of the social things that we talked about was like what if you could know what

00:04:54   applications that your friends are using or that they like or whatever and the various

00:04:58   levels of creepiness and privacy violations of that.

00:05:01   And someone whose name I'm going to take a run at tweeted this today, Runak Jain maybe,

00:05:07   said that App Store pages have Facebook Like on them, which, you know, that's what more

00:05:12   could you ask for in terms of knowing what your friends do, because the Facebook Like

00:05:17   button is ubiquitous.

00:05:18   If people use Facebook, then they already have their relationships with people and they

00:05:21   can see which other friends like something.

00:05:25   I don't really think that's a solution for Apple though, and I don't think Apple thinks

00:05:28   it's a solution either.

00:05:29   seems more like a stopgap because A, it totally cuts out anybody who doesn't use Facebook,

00:05:35   and B, Apple, despite their integration with Facebook and Twitter, tends not to want to

00:05:40   rely on third-party companies for things that are important. And so I have to think that

00:05:46   that is in there just because Apple doesn't know what else to do, but it's not a viable

00:05:51   long-term solution. Personally, it doesn't help me at all because I don't use Facebook,

00:05:55   so that doesn't help at all. I do use the App Store, and if the App Store itself had

00:05:58   a system that was like this, I would use it because I used the App Store, but requiring

00:06:02   me to sign up for and use some other third-party service to make this happen is not really

00:06:06   the solution. And I also think that, okay, what if they did it with Twitter? You use

00:06:10   Twitter, right? Well, it's going to end up like one of those bottom of the blogs from

00:06:14   a couple years ago with 8,000 badges to like it and to post it to Google Buzz and to give

00:06:20   it a plus on Google+ and to retweet it on Twitter and to like it on Facebook. It's ridiculous.

00:06:26   is an actual solution to this, but it is worth pointing out that they've got that Facebook

00:06:29   thing integrated there. And I didn't recall that at all. Do you remember ever seeing,

00:06:35   let alone clicking on the little like button on the App Store pages?

00:06:38   Oh yeah, I mean, I have seen them. They added them, I think even, on iOS 6. Those have been

00:06:42   there for a while. However, maybe it's just me and my circle of friends. I've never seen

00:06:49   more than like one or two likes there, and I'm not really, like, I'm accustomed to ignoring

00:06:55   Facebook embed things all over the web with everything I see anyway, so I like noticed

00:06:59   it once and then ignored it for the rest of time.

00:07:01   Yeah, it's like ad-badder blindness. I literally don't see that thing unless, until someone

00:07:05   tells me to look for it, and even then, has a hard time driving my eyes towards it because

00:07:09   they just bounce off and go around. It becomes invisible. Ad-badder blindness is a fascinating,

00:07:15   I mean, I'm sure there's tons and tons of precedence for the same phenomenon, but to

00:07:20   have a name for it and to have such frequent occasion to see things, ad-badder blindness

00:07:24   is so insane that like I remember maybe five years ago I was about to write like

00:07:30   an angry maybe it was Twitter itself I think it was about to write an angry

00:07:34   email to the people who ran Twitter back in like 2007 to say that it's insane

00:07:37   that they don't have a huge honking button somewhere on there on one of

00:07:40   their pages to do some common function and the button was there but I literally

00:07:45   could not see it because it was surrounded by things that look like an

00:07:47   ad like it had enough adiness around it maybe it was the wrong shape the wrong

00:07:52   proportions or the wrong colors, my eyes just couldn't see it. And I searched the page,

00:07:56   and I'm scanning, and I'm like, "I can't believe this should be totally prominent."

00:07:59   And eventually I saw it, and it was just right in front of my face. And I was like, "Why

00:08:02   did I not see that ad banner blindness?" It's a real thing.

00:08:05   Oh, yeah. I mean, when I was designing Instapaper back in the day, the app didn't really have

00:08:12   a problem. But the website, I had one main content column, and then off to the right,

00:08:17   I had a little sidebar. And the content column would have the main list, and then the sidebar

00:08:21   I would have folders and then kind of other.

00:08:25   I kind of use it as a junk drawer.

00:08:27   That's where the export was.

00:08:29   That would be different management functions,

00:08:31   bulk delete, stuff like that.

00:08:33   I would constantly get feature requests

00:08:36   for features that I had already implemented

00:08:38   that were in that sidebar,

00:08:40   because people just did not see them.

00:08:42   It's a very hard problem in web design.

00:08:46   Anything that you put in a place that usually is an ad

00:08:49   in most layouts, like a sidebar or a big leaderboard on top

00:08:53   or something like that, people just will not see it.

00:08:55   You're totally right, that's a real thing.

00:08:57   And it's a big design challenge.

00:08:59   - The military should use it for camouflage

00:09:01   because if you make something look kind of like,

00:09:03   if you make it with the same proportions

00:09:05   as typical ad banner or with the same kind of colors

00:09:08   or like, you know, just sort of fuzzy

00:09:10   in your peripheral vision out of the corner of your eye,

00:09:11   if it looks vaguely like an ad,

00:09:13   your brain will never look at it.

00:09:14   So they just need to make tanks look like

00:09:16   giant Punch the Monkey ads.

00:09:17   - Like medium rectangle size.

00:09:19   That's not a soldier.

00:09:23   It's a skyscraper.

00:09:24   That's a new kind of dazzle camouflage.

00:09:26   Dazzle's very big right here.

00:09:28   All right, so the next bit is a couple of tweets about dual input displays.

00:09:32   Last show we talked about that slide that Apple had on the Mac Pro presentation, that

00:09:36   it supports single and dual input displays, and we were wondering what the hell is a dual

00:09:39   input display.

00:09:40   A couple of people have responded that there exist displays that it's like we suspected

00:09:49   In the case for higher resolution, they'll split the display into two parts, and they'll

00:09:53   have two connections, and one connection drives one part of the display, and the other connection

00:09:57   drives the other part, and there has to be sort of support on both ends of the connection

00:10:00   to keep things in sync, and so, you know, each side is showing the right image or whatever.

00:10:07   And I assume this was done before the advent of Thunderbolt 2, because it was the only

00:10:12   way then to drive a 4K display, because a single mini-display port in the old standard

00:10:17   or a Thunderbolt 1 connection or a DVI or whatever had a resolution limit that was insufficient

00:10:22   to drive a 4K display, so they said, "Fine, we'll just hook up two of those cables," and then one

00:10:26   gets one half of the display, the other half gets the other, and the operating system is aware of

00:10:30   what's going on and everything works. What I still don't know is, would dual input displays give us

00:10:37   the ability to have something that's above 4K resolution? In other words, could you have two

00:10:42   Thunderbolt 2 connections, and would that allow the Mac Pro with two Thunderbolt cables

00:10:47   going to this monitor be able to drive a higher than 4K display?

00:10:52   Seems like it should, but…

00:10:54   Knowing nothing else about it, I don't really see why not.

00:10:57   I mean, if, you know, like, these displays are, let's see, it says here, it's basically

00:11:03   left and right halves, so it's 1920 by 2160 for each half of a 4K display.

00:11:09   If you just make that a little bit bigger, you can accommodate 5120 by 2880, which is

00:11:18   the 27-inch version of retina from what we have today.

00:11:22   You can accommodate that very easily and not hit any bandwidth limits along the way if

00:11:26   you're doing left and right halves like that.

00:11:28   So it would work presumably the exact same way, just with a few more pixels.

00:11:32   And I don't know if anything like that exists, but what they were putting up on that slide,

00:11:36   thing that we weren't aware of is that before the advent of Thunderbolt 2, this is how everybody

00:11:40   supported 4K, and the Mac Pro supports this. So if you happen to have one of those monitors,

00:11:44   you're, you know, you're good to go. And interestingly, the new Retina Mac Pro,

00:11:48   I'm pretty sure, does not support that. I'll have to verify that, but I think there's

00:11:53   some support document somewhere that says the most it will do is 4K. And that's only

00:11:58   over HDMI, I think. I think actually 10.9.1 might be the first

00:12:01   release of OS X that adds support for this feature as well, so it's a hardware and software

00:12:05   combination to make sure that it supports, you know, dual input displays.

00:12:09   Right, because otherwise you'd have, like, you know, the menu bar would take up the left

00:12:13   half of the top of the screen, and weird stuff like that, as if it were two different displays,

00:12:18   so you wouldn't want that.

00:12:19   Yeah, and speaking of displays, and we'll talk more about the MacPro, but I put this

00:12:22   in the follow-up anyway, because we talked about that Sharp display that appeared briefly

00:12:26   on the European website and it disappeared.

00:12:30   Not only is it back as something you could order on the Apple retail store, or Apple

00:12:35   online store rather, with your Mac Pro, but if you were to go to the new version of the

00:12:40   Final Cut Pro X webpage at Apple.com, they show screenshots of Final Cut and they actually

00:12:46   show it running on these sharp monitors.

00:12:50   With the word "sharp" right in the front of them, they didn't even black out the logo

00:12:52   with the ugly little stand and it is really weird to see a big, you know, a prominent display of

00:13:00   non-Apple hardware on a product page, on a big product page. It's not an obscure thing. This is

00:13:05   not a tiny image off to the corner. This is a full width, gigantic image of sharp displays.

00:13:10   And I don't, do they even show Macs? Yeah, they show a couple of Thunderbolt displays as well.

00:13:15   But since they're really pushing 4K and all this other stuff, I guess, I mean, what choice do they

00:13:19   that, they have to show that, because if they're pushing 4K support, they have to show a 4K

00:13:23   monitor, and that's the only one they've got. So, God, I don't know. A lot of people are

00:13:29   saying that this just proves that they weren't ready with their 4K solutions, they had to

00:13:33   do something. Maybe, but the tiny little scared voice says, "Maybe they're just never going

00:13:38   to make a 4K monitor. Maybe they're just getting out of the monitor business, and you're just

00:13:42   going to have to buy one of these ugly plastic things someday."

00:13:46   Well, or, I mean, it could go a couple other ways too. I mean, it could be that the first

00:13:53   5120x2880 panels that Apple ships might go into Retina iMac. You know, like, just similar

00:13:59   to how when the, when this iMac came out, the one that we have now, the 27-inch screen

00:14:04   when that first came out, as I said a couple shows ago, you could not buy a 27-inch 2560x1440

00:14:12   for anybody else for at least a few months

00:14:14   after they came out.

00:14:15   And certainly the 30-inch displays that had that resolution

00:14:20   were not as good, not as advanced.

00:14:22   You know, they had worse color, worse contrast,

00:14:24   worse brightness, stuff like that,

00:14:26   and they were more expensive.

00:14:28   It's possible, yeah, maybe they are just, you know,

00:14:31   saving these panels for the iMac first and saying,

00:14:33   oh, well, the Mac Pro customers can go

00:14:34   get their own monitors for now.

00:14:36   It's also possible, and these don't have

00:14:39   to be mutually exclusive, it's also possible

00:14:41   that they're simply not going to make a 4K monitor,

00:14:45   that they're gonna just jump right past that

00:14:48   and just make a 5120 by 2880 monitor.

00:14:50   They don't need to make a 3840 by whatever.

00:14:54   Maybe they just skip that because for the purpose

00:14:56   of their computer monitors, it's an awkward resolution

00:15:00   because of the size issues we discussed previously

00:15:03   where if you're gonna run that as a 2X retina monitor,

00:15:08   it pretty much can't be larger than about 24 inches.

00:15:11   And if you're gonna run it as a 1X monitor,

00:15:13   it has to be like 32 inches.

00:15:15   So it's, which is, you know,

00:15:17   a lot larger than what they make now

00:15:18   and a lot larger than what most people want on their desks.

00:15:21   So it's kind of a weird resolution to deal with

00:15:25   as general purpose computer monitors.

00:15:27   - And if you look at the screenshots

00:15:29   on the Final Cut Pro page,

00:15:30   they're not running those monitors in high DPI mode

00:15:32   as far as I can tell.

00:15:33   - They're definitely not.

00:15:34   - Look at the size of the menu bar on them.

00:15:35   They're running them in native res,

00:15:37   which is pretty squinty.

00:15:39   But it's right after my own heart of like,

00:15:43   yes please, no non-native radios on LCDs if you can help it.

00:15:46   If they're going to wait for it to go on the iMac first,

00:15:50   though, that is depressing,

00:15:51   because can you think about how long it's gonna take

00:15:53   for this to be an affordable display on an iMac?

00:15:56   For a, I think we need a better name for this thing.

00:15:59   How about a quad 27 inch?

00:16:01   It's basically, take the existing 27 inch Thunderbolt

00:16:03   display, make four of them, tack them together.

00:16:05   That's what we're talking about in terms of pixels.

00:16:07   All right, so for a quad 27-inch display, it's going to be a long time before that is

00:16:14   inexpensive enough to go in an iMac, because this one, this 4K display that isn't even

00:16:18   that high resolution is $4,000.

00:16:21   So maybe next year it halves in price and it's $2,000.

00:16:23   One more year, it's down to $1,000.

00:16:25   This isn't even as high resolution as what we're talking about, so I don't want to

00:16:28   worry.

00:16:29   Well, to be fair, though, like pro-monitors are always a lot more expensive than similar

00:16:33   quality desktop monitors from, like, you know, for normal use.

00:16:36   monitors have different color and accuracy requirements and stuff like that.

00:16:40   Yeah, but the 27-inch iMac, when that monitor—that has really good color quality, too. When that

00:16:44   first came to the iMac, maybe it wasn't super-duper calibrated professional photography,

00:16:49   but it was really good quality. Sure, yeah, but I mean, you look at the Dell,

00:16:53   the new Dell U-whatever, the U24, the 24-inch Dell 4K display. It's $1,200 or $1,300—I

00:17:00   think it's $1,300 regular, but you know, every time you look at a Dell thing, it's

00:17:03   different price. So it's about $1200 and it's 24 inch 4K. And that's really cheap compared

00:17:11   to everything else we've seen so far. I think they even said the 28 inch version is going

00:17:15   to be cheaper. I think it's going to be like $800 but I think it might not be as good of

00:17:18   a panel, something like that. But the point is, I think the Dell 24 inch 4K shows that

00:17:27   this might not be as far off as we think. For this to be affordable, for this to be

00:17:32   be available and affordable in our quad 27-inch theoretical resolution, maybe this comes out

00:17:39   in six months or a year.

00:17:41   And maybe Apple charges $1,500 to $2,000 for it.

00:17:45   So I guess we should transition right into Mac Pro discussion because we're basically

00:17:49   talking about it.

00:17:50   And I think Casey put this question at the bottom of the follow-up here.

00:17:53   I did.

00:17:54   Did anyone buy a Mac Pro?

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00:20:57   Even this time, we made it even easier for you.

00:20:59   You don't have to worry about the coupon code, which was ATP,

00:21:02   if you still want to use it.

00:21:03   But if you just go to warbyparker.com/ATP,

00:21:07   you'll remember that you came from us,

00:21:08   and you'll get the free shipping on the final order

00:21:11   and everything like that.

00:21:11   It'll be great.

00:21:12   So go to warbyparker.com/ATP, get your home try-on kit.

00:21:16   Thanks a lot to Warby Parker for sponsoring the show.

00:21:18   Can you explain to me why polarized sunglasses are good since you wear them yourself?

00:21:23   Because normally the reason you wear sunglasses, like I wear them almost all the time when

00:21:28   I'm driving, the function of sunglasses is to reduce the amount of light that is making

00:21:35   your eyes have to squint and say, "Ah, that hurts my eyes."

00:21:39   So you can do that in a couple of ways.

00:21:41   You can do that by just cutting the light by a lot, like putting a fogged black piece

00:21:46   of glass in front of your face and just cutting down the amount of light a lot.

00:21:49   Polarized glasses, and I'm a little unclear as to why this has this

00:21:55   effect, but the polarizing filter with the light going through in only one

00:21:59   vibration direction or whatever, it makes it so that you don't need to reduce the

00:22:04   amount of light coming in as much to get the... for your eyes to be able to open

00:22:10   fully and, you know, not be squinting all the time and not have that fatigue. I

00:22:14   I don't know why that is the case, but it is. So the the

00:22:18   The you know the outcome here is that you can you don't have to have everything be as dark

00:22:23   But it still feels good and your eyes get relieved

00:22:26   I don't remember if the sunglasses I got are polarized or not well if you got them from where we parker

00:22:31   I think they all I think they all yeah, right yep

00:22:33   Yeah, I got them after the end of sunglasses

00:22:36   So I'll have to try them out this summer and see see how that it goes. You know what you need to do is if

00:22:43   Marco ever visits you and if he brings his m5 or just Tifs car have a heads-up display

00:22:49   Yes, it does damn it on the money

00:22:51   Anyway, I hate you so much

00:22:53   Anyway, the point is if you if you look at the heads-up display if you look at it at the wrong angle

00:22:59   It will disappear and that's how you know, you know, I just get out one of my old

00:23:03   LCD calculators and well, I think I think any LCD this this effect works on I'm pretty sure I don't think they found a way

00:23:10   to make this not happen, because LCDs have a polarizer as the front layer, at least they

00:23:14   used to. As far as I know, this works on any, because basically the idea is if the LCD polarizer

00:23:20   is at a 90 degree angle to the polarizer on your face, it blocks all light. So that an

00:23:25   LCD screen, if you turn it, if you rotate it around, at some point when you're wearing

00:23:29   polarized sunglasses, it should become black.

00:23:31   That's true, but I've never noticed that in my car, which does not mean you are wrong,

00:23:35   it doesn't mean that it's not the case. I've just never noticed it.

00:23:38   I think modern LCDs have like a diffuser on it that scrambles up all the light so it's

00:23:42   not all… it unpolarizes it after that point?

00:23:45   I don't know.

00:23:46   Something will tell us.

00:23:47   But anyway, yes, we have many ways to tell, and yes, that's what I was saying, what

00:23:49   you do with the old calculator way, if you had a polarized thing, you just twist it and

00:23:52   it turns black.

00:23:53   Right.

00:23:54   So thanks to Warby Parker for sponsoring, and I've mentioned this several times in

00:23:58   the past because they've been kind enough to sponsor us several times, but one of the

00:24:02   great things about Home Tryon is that you can grab several lenses… not lenses, excuse

00:24:07   several frames and you can try all of them.

00:24:11   You can try up to five.

00:24:12   And what I did when I got my sunglasses is I put in like three or four that I thought

00:24:20   were my general style, my standard style.

00:24:23   And they were not hipster at all.

00:24:25   And then I put in one or two that were kind of hipster.

00:24:28   And as it ends up, I actually chose one of the hipster frames because I thought they

00:24:32   looked the best.

00:24:33   And so I am very glad that I was able to try them on at home because if I were not able

00:24:40   to try on several or if I were only able to try on one or two, I don't think I would have

00:24:44   chosen the frames I got and I really, really, really like them and they're really great.

00:24:49   So definitely check them out.

00:24:50   Yeah, Tiff's were even better.

00:24:52   For her home try-on, she only picked three, but they give you five.

00:24:56   So they just picked two other ones that were similar to the ones she had picked, but like

00:25:00   a little bit different.

00:25:01   then she ended up choosing one of the ones they picked for her.

00:25:04   Nice.

00:25:05   Anyway, thanks to Warby Parker. They're awesome. If you wear glasses or if you want to wear

00:25:09   glasses, go to warbyparker.com/atp.

00:25:13   That's a free tip for them. What they should do is have a button that says, "I can't choose

00:25:16   frames. Here's a picture of me. Send me five that you think will look good on me." Just

00:25:21   cut out, because that's the—you know, sometimes that's the best part, and it's also like the

00:25:24   most nerve-wracking part of like, "Oh, which ones do I want?" And sometimes, especially

00:25:27   if you are fashion disabled as I am.

00:25:30   Can you just click a button and say,

00:25:32   "Look, this is a picture of me, this is what I look like.

00:25:35   "Just send me something."

00:25:37   - It's a serious affliction, we shouldn't joke about that.

00:25:39   (laughing)

00:25:40   - So John, today Mac Pros were available for order.

00:25:45   Did you order a new Mac Pro?

00:25:47   - No, and you knew I wasn't, because I said last show

00:25:49   that I wanna wait for gaming benchmarks and other things.

00:25:51   I did click around on the store, but I did not order one.

00:25:55   - Now Casey, why aren't we asking you

00:25:57   If you want a new Mac Pro, did you order a new Mac Pro?

00:26:00   - I did.

00:26:01   - Really?

00:26:02   - No, God, no, don't be silly.

00:26:04   Of course not.

00:26:06   No, there's no part of me that desires a non-mobile computer

00:26:11   and I'm not saying I'm right,

00:26:13   I'm not saying that this makes sense,

00:26:14   but for me, I've ever since, geez, I don't know, 2002,

00:26:19   I've always had laptops

00:26:22   and I've either exclusively had laptops

00:26:25   or almost exclusively had laptops.

00:26:27   And I've always preferred that form factor

00:26:30   because I guess by and large,

00:26:32   I don't need a million gigabytes of storage space

00:26:36   within my computer.

00:26:37   I don't need a lot of the things that you guys need.

00:26:39   I don't mean that to patronize you.

00:26:41   I mean that genuinely.

00:26:42   And so I've always preferred to have mobile computers.

00:26:46   And because of that, I actually have two MacBook Pros.

00:26:49   One is from work, one is one that I bought.

00:26:52   And I've been considering buying a retina MacBook Pro,

00:26:55   but no, I did not buy a Mac Pro.

00:26:58   - Do you have an external monitor hooked up to that?

00:27:00   - I do, I do.

00:27:02   - Don't you feel kind of weird though,

00:27:03   like that you're using this thing

00:27:05   that itself has a screen and a keyboard on it,

00:27:07   but you're not using that screen

00:27:09   and you're not using that keyboard,

00:27:10   you've got another keyboard and another input device

00:27:12   and you're looking at a different screen.

00:27:14   - Whoa, slow down, sir.

00:27:16   So what I have at home is an external Apple

00:27:21   Bluetooth keyboard.

00:27:22   One of the ones that takes, I think it's four batteries.

00:27:25   I have a magic mouse that I use both at work and at home.

00:27:29   And then I have a Samsung display

00:27:32   that's something around 20 inches at home.

00:27:34   And there's a plethora of different displays

00:27:37   that we use at work, all of which are around the same size.

00:27:41   But I always, always, always use dual displays.

00:27:45   So at work, I have two displays, at home,

00:27:47   I have two displays.

00:27:48   And I think it's absolutely barbaric

00:27:50   to not use two displays.

00:27:52   But it's still a mess. One of your screens has this keyboard hanging off of it that you

00:27:55   don't use unless it's on your lap. And it's got a trackpad in front of that that you don't

00:27:59   use because you're using your Magic Mouse. And that monitor is too low unless you prop

00:28:02   it up on a stand. And then it has that big thing jutting out in front of you. If you

00:28:06   want two screens, get two screens. I think there's room in everyone's life for a desktop.

00:28:11   In defense of the setup that you were just making fun of, Jon, I had that setup for the

00:28:16   first few years of Tumblr, and it was great. I mean, when I did finally get a Mac Pro and

00:28:20   dual monitors, that was better. But the setup of having a laptop on a stand and then having

00:28:27   a full-size keyboard and mouse on the desktop and then having a big monitor plugged into

00:28:31   the laptop. So the laptop, you're right, it's just sitting there floating, not being used,

00:28:35   except it's screen. So you have the big display as your primary, you have the laptop display

00:28:39   as your secondary, and then you have full-size keyboard and mouse on the desk, laptops on

00:28:43   a stand. That's a great setup. Your desk is going to be covered in wires, but that is

00:28:48   a great setup.

00:28:49   it better if you could fold the laptop back so that the part that you're not using is

00:28:54   back behind the display, you know what I mean?

00:28:58   Like a slate tablet?

00:28:59   No, no, I understand what you're saying.

00:29:02   You'd still need a little stand.

00:29:03   You'd just get rid of that part, that horizontal part that's jutting out towards you just looking

00:29:07   stupid with input devices that you're not using.

00:29:10   I mean, it does look stupid.

00:29:13   If a normal person walks by your desk, and that's your setup, they will make fun of it.

00:29:16   But then you see them hunched over their desk, hunched over a laptop that's just flat on

00:29:21   the desk all day long, and they complain why their neck and shoulders hurt.

00:29:24   Yeah, no, laptops are ergonomic nightmares.

00:29:26   Yeah.

00:29:27   All right, anyway, Casey did not get a Mac Pro.

00:29:31   Marco, the only person left who could have conceivably bought one.

00:29:35   So I said previously that I was probably not going to get one until they had retina displays.

00:29:42   So I bought one.

00:29:43   Well, technically, it had a retina display.

00:29:45   You just never qualified that it had to be an Apple Retina display.

00:29:48   It was implied, but technically if we go back and listen to the tape, you'll hear that you

00:29:51   just said, "Well, if they offer, they did offer Retina displays."

00:29:54   It's right there on the page.

00:29:55   When you scroll down, you can click, "Would you like to add a 4K display?"

00:29:58   Yes.

00:29:59   And if you don't look really closely, you might think, "Wow, Apple has a 4K display,"

00:30:02   which I thought for a millisecond when I first saw that page, and I said, "No, it's just

00:30:05   a stupid sharp one.

00:30:06   It's just a small icon."

00:30:08   You put that Mavericks background on it, "It's an Apple display."

00:30:11   No, it's not.

00:30:12   And I didn't buy that display, the 4K that Apple's offering now.

00:30:16   So I ordered one. I probably wouldn't have ordered one

00:30:20   today if they were going to be just like in stock normally.

00:30:24   And I could just buy one whenever I wanted. But, and I didn't want

00:30:28   it so badly that I was going to order it at 3am. So I woke up this morning,

00:30:32   took care of my family, did all the morning stuff, and then checked. And it said

00:30:36   "Shipping in February." Okay. Well,

00:30:40   I guess I should probably think about ordering if I want anytime soon.

00:30:44   So there's a thing in New York State where

00:30:48   New York State computer hardware is sales tax exempt

00:30:52   if it's going to be used primarily for software development or making websites.

00:30:56   Which mine is. But to get the sales tax exempt thing

00:31:00   you have to either file for it later with the state after you have paid it and try to get reimbursed, which is

00:31:04   a disaster of paperwork that I don't even want to attempt, or buy it through

00:31:08   an Apple business rep. That's what I did. I emailed the business rep at my store and

00:31:13   I said, "Hey, I want one of these things. Let's do it." Which is good because that also

00:31:18   comes with a small discount. Mine was discounted something like $400 by the business rep. It

00:31:23   was a pretty good discount.

00:31:24   That's not small.

00:31:25   And so I did that because I even asked him, "You think I'm going to get this before February?"

00:31:32   Like the website. And he's like, "Well, we can put it in the separate order system. There's

00:31:35   kind of priority but probably not basically was the answer. So I got it and

00:31:41   mainly because I think between now and February a lot of people are gonna get

00:31:46   these things and everyone else can figure out what is the best retina

00:31:50   monitor situation solution if any right now. Is it the Dells? Is it these other

00:31:55   things? Who knows. Everyone else will have time to figure that out and then by the

00:31:59   time I get mine I can decide then either to keep using my display and hope the

00:32:03   the cable doesn't flake out.

00:32:05   Keep using my 30 inch that I have now

00:32:06   until Apple makes their own four times

00:32:10   the 27 inch that we have today.

00:32:12   Or I can go Dell.

00:32:14   I mean, I've actually, as I said,

00:32:16   I've never even had an Apple display,

00:32:18   so it wouldn't be outrageous for me

00:32:19   to buy a non-Apple display again,

00:32:22   because I've never bought an Apple display.

00:32:24   So that's what I'm going with.

00:32:26   - Was there ever really any doubt in your mind

00:32:28   that you would immediately insta-buy the new Mac Pro?

00:32:31   I really thought that I would wait until the spring and see what people said about them,

00:32:38   see how big of a performance gain there was from the old one, stuff like that.

00:32:43   That's what you said. You were like, "Oh, I'm going to wait. I'm going to wait until

00:32:46   all the retina stuff's ready." And you were totally gung-ho in the waiting, so much so

00:32:50   that I was like, "Yeah, maybe I'll wait like Marco, but I should have known. You're never

00:32:54   going to wait."

00:32:54   Well, the other thing is, with almost all Apple hardware, the price doesn't ever go

00:33:00   down during the life cycle of the product.

00:33:02   Especially, I mean Macs especially, iOS I guess has changed that a lot.

00:33:06   But in the Mac area, it's not like this Mac Pro is going to cost $1000 less in six months.

00:33:13   The price does not change.

00:33:15   It's going to stay this exact same price from now through whenever the next one comes out.

00:33:21   The Mac Pro has only had a price drop once and that was the quote update last year that

00:33:26   they did that wasn't really an update that caused our logo to exist.

00:33:30   So besides that, there's never been a price drop on a current Mac Pro.

00:33:34   Whether I buy it now or whether I buy it in six months doesn't make much of a difference,

00:33:40   really.

00:33:41   It's like you're paying the same price.

00:33:43   Might as well have it sooner and have all that extra performance sooner.

00:33:46   Because there's a lot of stuff I do today that will benefit from the extra speed.

00:33:51   Quite a lot, actually.

00:33:52   Especially with the production of this show and a bunch of image editing tasks I often

00:33:56   do.

00:33:57   batch operations on big folders full of images and stuff like that where I parallelize everything.

00:34:01   I mean, there's a lot that I'm going to gain from it immediately. And it's not going to be like,

00:34:06   you know, tremendous, like 10 times faster than what I have now. But it is going to be between

00:34:11   one and a half and two times faster than what I have now. And that will add up.

00:34:14   So what did you get? You had 8 core, 32 gig terabyte?

00:34:17   Yep, exactly. And so I think I would say that the best value configuration, if you want like the

00:34:24   best bang for your buck, it's the 6 core. No question. The 8 core is probably not worth

00:34:30   its price. It's a lot more money for the 8 core. It's probably not worth it for most

00:34:34   people. You know, not only do you, because like Turbo Boost is basically the same between

00:34:39   the two. 6 core is only 500 bucks more. 8 core is 1500 more than the 6 core. So that's

00:34:47   a big price difference. The only thing is the 8 core does have double the cash. It's

00:34:53   even more actually, it's 12 versus 25 megabytes.

00:34:56   So it has a lot more cache.

00:34:58   That will affect performance,

00:35:00   not as much as like two more cores would,

00:35:02   but that will have an effect on performance

00:35:05   that's noticeable for auto workloads.

00:35:06   So the eight core is, and what's interesting,

00:35:10   there's a big reason, I blogged this whole turbo boost thing,

00:35:13   I linked to it again today,

00:35:14   I'm not gonna go over it in the show

00:35:15   'cause it's too long and boring,

00:35:16   and of course I would never do something like that

00:35:18   in the show, but basically the 12 core

00:35:21   actually going to be slower than the 8 core for a lot of things. For almost anything that's

00:35:26   not using every core all the time, the 8 core is going to be the fastest chip in the lineup.

00:35:31   And that's one of the reasons why Apple has given all their reviewers the 8 core model

00:35:35   and not the 12 core model.

00:35:36   So what GPU did you get?

00:35:38   I was all set to get the D500, the middle one, but I ended up going with the D700. And

00:35:43   the reason why is because once I priced this whole thing out, the price difference, you

00:35:48   know, it's like price relative.

00:35:49   600 extra dollars and it's a small percentage of the enormous cost of this machine.

00:35:54   Right, and with the discount it was probably more like $525 or $550, something like that,

00:35:58   whatever it was. It was less. So yeah, there was that price relativism. If I thought of

00:36:02   it separately, do I want to spend $600 on this extra GPU? I might have said no. But

00:36:06   it's like, well, I already am spending all this stuff. What's the extra few percentage

00:36:11   points on top of that? And I did that because the GPUs probably can't be reasonably upgraded.

00:36:18   can't be reasonably upgraded.

00:36:20   Yes, they're on slots.

00:36:21   Yes, technically they are replaceable,

00:36:24   but you can only replace them with other Apple supplied

00:36:28   parts.

00:36:29   Chances are they're going to cost a fortune to replace these.

00:36:32   If you wanted to upgrade these things in two years,

00:36:35   it's not going to cost you $600.

00:36:36   It's probably going to cost you like $1,500, $2,000.

00:36:39   It's going to cost you a lot.

00:36:41   It would be like upgrading your motherboard and your Mac Pro.

00:36:45   That's not going to be a cheap operation,

00:36:47   even if Apple will sell you the part.

00:36:48   So, and it's not gonna be like,

00:36:50   I'm guessing like OWC is not gonna make their own

00:36:53   replacement GPU that will work with this.

00:36:55   It was mainly that it's gonna be,

00:36:57   it's the kind of thing that basically is not replaceable

00:36:59   over the lifetime of the machine.

00:37:01   So for a very small difference, I can get the best one.

00:37:04   I did it mostly so that I don't regret

00:37:07   not getting the best one in like two years

00:37:09   and I'm still using this and then all of a sudden

00:37:11   I'm hitting the barrier of the D500 on something I'm doing.

00:37:15   You know, and that might never happen,

00:37:16   That's the risk I take, I guess.

00:37:18   And then when I eventually resell this,

00:37:21   it'll be worth a little bit more.

00:37:22   So here's where I'm at with this Mac Pro thing.

00:37:25   Way back in the day, you were going to wait,

00:37:26   and I had to buy immediately because I can't stand

00:37:28   this old Mac Pro anymore.

00:37:29   But now that the thing is out and that I've

00:37:31   played with the price configurator and all that stuff,

00:37:33   god, these things are expensive.

00:37:36   That's a lot of money.

00:37:37   And I'm in the configurator, and the first time you run through,

00:37:41   you just go pick everything you want.

00:37:42   And then you look at the price, and you're like, yeah,

00:37:43   that's not going to happen.

00:37:45   So then I gotta go and say, "What do I sacrifice?"

00:37:47   Well, so, you know, six core.

00:37:48   Let's go back down from eight core,

00:37:50   'cause that's the easy win.

00:37:50   All right, that makes it cheaper.

00:37:52   The GPU, I had picked the 700 in the first run-through,

00:37:57   'cause like half the reason I'm buying this thing

00:37:58   is 'cause I want a big GPU.

00:37:59   I don't need all that VRAM,

00:38:01   but I do like the execution units.

00:38:02   And again, without gaming benchmarks,

00:38:04   I don't know if it's going to serve my needs,

00:38:06   because this machine is not made for me.

00:38:09   I'm just trying to use it because it's the only machine

00:38:12   that comes with something more than a mobile GPU

00:38:14   from Apple. And I don't want a mobile GPU, I want a gaming GPU. Apple doesn't offer gaming

00:38:19   GPUs anymore. They offer professional GPUs, which are these monster things in here that

00:38:23   are not what I want or need and might not even run games that well, we'll see. Or I

00:38:28   have a mobile GPU. And so I'm trying to make this machine into something that it's really

00:38:32   not. And so I can't bring the GPU down. And the other thing about this machine is that

00:38:39   both of us were kind of, you are still caught up in this, but we were both caught up in

00:38:42   the idea of like, this is when the desktop is going to go retina.

00:38:46   Lapsops have gone, well not the Air, but the regular MacBook Pros have gone retina, all

00:38:50   the iOS devices are retina, finally with this crazy ass thing, black cylinder thing, we're

00:38:57   going to have the power to go retina on the desktop.

00:39:00   It's not going to come to the iMac first, it's going to come to the Mac Pro first, because

00:39:03   Mac Pro costs a bajillion dollars and it can run a retina display.

00:39:06   And you're still holding on to that dream, but at this point I'm kind of like, I have

00:39:10   give up on the Retina Dream, at least for 2014. Like, Retina is not a suicide pact.

00:39:15   I'm not gonna—I can't spend, like, my entire life savings on this machine to try

00:39:18   to get just a desktop to spray with something in Retina. I have to just—I have to just

00:39:22   let it go and say, "It's not gonna happen next year." There's no—like, 'cause

00:39:26   you know what I want? I want the big quad 27-inch display that doesn't even exist,

00:39:30   that might not even be able to be driven by this thing anyway. And so if I look at this

00:39:35   as a machine not driving—and by the way, if I was gonna buy a Retina to spray, that's

00:39:39   adding another $1,500 to $4,000 just depending on what display I get to the cost of this

00:39:44   already tremendously expensive thing.

00:39:46   And if I don't get a retina display, then I have to ask, what is this machine getting

00:39:52   me that upgrading my existing Mac Pro wouldn't?

00:39:56   What if I just put in a fast SSD and a gaming card into my existing Mac Pro?

00:40:01   Like would that run games better and CPU stuff acceptedly?

00:40:05   I know it would feel faster because I have a really big SSD and my Mac Pro would work

00:40:08   and I know it feels way faster than the spinning disk here. So I know what that's like. And a

00:40:13   gaming card upgrade, I know what that would be like too. That would be way cheaper. And I wouldn't

00:40:17   like think about buying this Mac Pro. I would also have to like, I'd have all these disks and external

00:40:21   enclosures that are like firewire enclosures. And yeah, I have the NAS and everything, but I don't

00:40:25   want to just get rid of those firewire disks. So would I have to buy a Thunderbolt enclosure to put

00:40:30   that stuff in? Would I have to buy a Thunderbolt hub that I can connect to? Like the money just

00:40:34   keeps flowing out of me and into the hands of Apple and these other people.

00:40:39   And I don't know if I should buy this machine.

00:40:43   I don't know if I should just wait until—like you said, it's not like I'll wait six months

00:40:47   and they'll be cheaper.

00:40:48   No, they won't.

00:40:49   They're not going to get cheaper until the new versions come out next year.

00:40:52   Maybe if I'm lucky at WWDC, they'll announce revised Mac Pros, right?

00:40:55   Well, it won't be that soon because the next Xeon chips won't even be out until, I think,

00:41:00   Q4 next year.

00:41:01   The CPUs won't be the same, but as I said, the GPUs that are in these are already based

00:41:05   on AMD's previous gen core.

00:41:09   They have revised their GPU core.

00:41:11   So it is conceivable that WWC could roll around, which is kind of the year anniversary of the

00:41:15   machine but not really, like the year anniversary of the announcement.

00:41:18   And they'll say, "Oh, well, it's got the same Xeon's because what else could they put in

00:41:21   it?"

00:41:22   Right?

00:41:23   Maybe there would be a slight price drop on that, but mostly what I'm looking for is they

00:41:25   would revise the GPUs to be the newer architecture.

00:41:30   Maybe they would just hold the prices the same and they'd be a little bit better, but

00:41:32   like maybe there's something out for me if I just write off 2014 and say, "In 2015, that's

00:41:38   when I'll get my Mac Pro, and maybe by then in 2015 there's a chance that I'll have Retina

00:41:42   displays, real Retina displays, quad 27-inch."

00:41:44   I don't know.

00:41:45   I haven't made a decision yet, but I'm definitely thinking about, I'm definitely, while I'm

00:41:49   pricing out the Mac Pros, I'm also pricing out an SSD and a new card for my existing

00:41:55   Mac Pro.

00:41:56   if you want to sell your Mac Pro, Marco, you'll give me a sweetheart deal.

00:42:01   I actually was just thinking, how the hell am I going to sell this PCI Express SSD?

00:42:06   Who's going to buy this?

00:42:08   Well, I don't know how good it is. I'll have to look at it.

00:42:11   I would never put that in my machine because it seems finicky and expensive,

00:42:14   and I would rather just have a SATA one or whatever, but I don't know.

00:42:17   It's not finicky. It is expensive.

00:42:20   But I would sell this to you for a good price because I don't want to sell it in public.

00:42:25   in public. I just don't want to deal with it.

00:42:27   I also don't want another cheese grater coming into my house, because this one's

00:42:31   going to go up into the—

00:42:32   I'd just sell you the card if you want.

00:42:34   Ah, yeah. I don't know. See, at that point I would just buy myself an SSD that I could

00:42:39   reuse someplace else. You know, I would buy an actual SATA enclosure.

00:42:43   I don't think he'll mind me saying this. I bought this PCI Express card probably about

00:42:48   eight months ago. It was before WWDC by a good amount. I think it was like in February

00:42:53   something. So I DM'd Jim Dalrymple before buying it, because he and I are friendly,

00:43:01   so I DM'd him and I'm like, "Hey, you don't need to answer this, but do you know whether

00:43:07   the next Mac Pro will still have PCI Express slots?" Because I really wanted to, like,

00:43:12   I was going to buy this thing and I really wanted to reuse it if possible, and I thought

00:43:16   back then, of course it would have PCI Express slots. Why would they remove that from the

00:43:21   Mac Pro. That's why so many people buy the Mac Pro.

00:43:25   It's got PCI Express.

00:43:26   Thanks, yeah.

00:43:27   You were one word off.

00:43:30   Yeah. And Jim usually responds to casual messages, but he doesn't leak his secrets even to friends,

00:43:42   so he just never responded. And I'm like, "Aw." At first I thought, "Oh, well, he's

00:43:49   being coy. He doesn't want to tell me anything about the new Mac Pro. And then it gets announced

00:43:55   and there's no slots. Oh, I should have listened to Jim's non-message more closely.

00:44:01   Yeah, because that's not reusable in anything except for another Mac Pro. So, I don't know.

00:44:05   They do have little enclosures, like basically Thunderbolt enclosures with the PCI Express

00:44:09   slot that I could put this in. So I could do that. But as you said, that's like a lot

00:44:13   of parts though. That's like a lot of things that could flake out. So I'm a little wary

00:44:17   to do that.

00:44:18   It's like $300 for that box, too.

00:44:20   It is, yeah.

00:44:21   It's $300.

00:44:22   So I'm probably just going to try to sell this card.

00:44:25   That's like the rule of cables.

00:44:28   The rule of the Apple Store is nothing less than $30.

00:44:30   The rule of lightning cables used to be.

00:44:34   The rule of Thunderbolt is nothing involving Thunderbolt in any way is less than $200 or

00:44:39   $300.

00:44:40   Aren't the cables still $50?

00:44:42   I'm talking about boxes.

00:44:43   If it's an empty box, there's a Thunderbolt on one end, and then on the other end it has

00:44:47   bunch of other ports. Firewire, USB, all the other things. It's magic that that works,

00:44:51   and it's awesome, but those boxes are always like $200 or $300.

00:44:54   Yeah.

00:44:55   And even an enclosure, if you want to get a drive enclosure, the drive is $80 worth

00:45:00   of the price of this $280 thing.

00:45:03   I also just hate enclosures. I would much rather have everything in the Synology NAS

00:45:07   in my closet and have my desk have only the Mac Pro and nothing hanging off of it except

00:45:11   a monitor. Just no random enclosures on my desk all over the place.

00:45:17   Yeah, I use them for OS X reviews, and that's what I'm thinking of next year. What am I

00:45:20   going to do with OS X? If I get a new Mac Pro, I need some alternate boot disks to boot

00:45:25   off of the new operating system, and you can't really boot off of a NAS, so I'm going to

00:45:29   play that with some of the other things.

00:45:30   You just use USB 3. I mean, USB 3 is this awesome, fast thing that us Mac Pro owners

00:45:34   have never realized existed.

00:45:36   But I feel like that's kind of... I do have a bus-powered USB 3 terabyte drive that's

00:45:41   black in fact, and I was like, "Boy, that'll look great attached to my Mac Pro," but it's

00:45:46   It's kind of not fair to boot the OS off a really slow, like 5400 RPM, 2.5 inch.

00:45:54   It just doesn't seem right to me.

00:45:55   I want to have a reasonable experience testing a new OS and not handicap it in that way.

00:46:01   So I don't know.

00:46:03   I'm conflicted.

00:46:05   The best part of being cheap and not having the ridiculous needs and/or lack of self-control

00:46:12   that you two have is that I have none of this stress right now. I'm perfectly happy and

00:46:18   that has nothing to do with anything I've put in my body today. I'm perfectly happy

00:46:24   with my old non-retina MacBook Pros and I am content with that.

00:46:29   Well, you shouldn't be.

00:46:32   But I am. But I am.

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00:49:00   - Got a few more things to say about Mac Pro value.

00:49:03   - Oh my god, are we not done yet?

00:49:04   - Keeping me up at night.

00:49:06   No, we're not done yet, because I'm going to be thinking about this for the next year,

00:49:09   so you're just going to have to deal with it.

00:49:10   But I don't want to think about it.

00:49:13   For whatever it's worth, I actually just found and pulled up my original 2008 Mac Pro order

00:49:19   receipt, because it feels like the Mac Pro has gotten more and more expensive in each

00:49:23   generation to get mid-range specs.

00:49:29   There was a dip, I bet, if you graph it, because I remember when there was a one in front of

00:49:32   the Mac Pro named for a little while there.

00:49:34   The 2008 was the second generation one.

00:49:36   The first generation one from 2006, that one,

00:49:39   you could get a single CPU, I believe dual core model.

00:49:44   It was either two or four cores on one.

00:49:45   I think it was two cores on one chip.

00:49:46   You can get a single CPU model of that

00:49:49   for I believe 16 or 1800, something like that.

00:49:53   But so mine, when I got mine, I remember being upset

00:49:57   that the price had gone up.

00:49:58   And I paid $3,050.

00:50:02   The extra 50 was for WiFi, which was optional.

00:50:05   So it was $3,000 for the dual 2.8 gigahertz quad core chips.

00:50:10   So eight cores total across two sockets.

00:50:16   So you had all, I believe eight RAM slots across them.

00:50:21   You had all this RAM capacity, dual core,

00:50:24   dual sockets, everything else.

00:50:26   3,000 bucks for that.

00:50:27   At the time, that was the second lowest CPU option.

00:50:33   There was the 3.0 and 3.2 gigahertz,

00:50:37   but it's same number of cores.

00:50:38   So they were very close CPU options.

00:50:40   Between the three, there was one

00:50:43   that was only a single socket, that sucked.

00:50:45   But there was like three up top that were pretty good.

00:50:48   So that was like, that was 3,000 bucks.

00:50:51   - That's the computer I'm sitting in front of right now.

00:50:53   Dual 2.8, eight RAM slots, 2008 Mac Pro.

00:50:56   - Right, at the time, that seemed like a lot of money.

00:50:59   But looking back on it, now that we see modern

00:51:02   Mac Pro pricing, that was actually a pretty good deal. But most of the fault of this,

00:51:08   I think, actually lies with Intel. Intel has been raising their Xeon prices like crazy.

00:51:14   I believe it was the 2009 era Mac Pro, the first Nehalem generation, however that's

00:51:20   pronounced, I know that's wrong. That's when Intel jacked the prices way up and it

00:51:26   became insane to get dual sockets.

00:51:29   Yeah, well, I have a single socket one of those that work, and I think that one still

00:51:32   was under $2,000, because the cheap one has always been like the single socket or whatever.

00:51:37   I've got the single socket stupid one with four RAM slots and triple channel memory,

00:51:40   but it had a one in front of its price. I forget what it was. It was $1,600 or $1,700.

00:51:45   It was really cheap.

00:51:46   I'm pretty sure that's not the case. I mean, I'll have to double check. When we got our

00:51:49   2008s, the cheapest one, I believe, was $2,700, or maybe $2,500. That was for the single socket

00:51:56   one.

00:51:57   about for value for the new Mac Pros is value for me, not value as in like is this a good

00:52:02   product or whatever, because the people who need this know that they need it, right?

00:52:05   For me, for the purposes that I'm going to use, this machine is not made for me. I'm trying to

00:52:09   find if it's useful for me or more useful. And the tests that I want Mac World to run and everything

00:52:14   are questions like, are there existing Macs that you can buy now that are faster at single CPU

00:52:21   task. And I think from their measurements that the top-end iMac is faster in single CPU than

00:52:28   any Mac Pro you can buy. I believe that's correct. I believe it's something like 5%

00:52:32   faster on the single CPU benchmark. Yeah, I mean, the tests, they give a number because they have

00:52:37   to give a number. And that's not really representative of anything because if you

00:52:40   ran some test that blew through the L3 cache on the iMac's thing, then it would totally

00:52:49   tank on the iMac and the Mac Pro would destroy it. But it depends on what you're doing. You can't

00:52:53   just pick some numbers. It's not like the CPUs are represented by this thing. It depends on the

00:52:57   very specific task. But it is possible that there are workloads for which the top-end iMac is faster

00:53:03   at single-threaded tasks. The next question is, are there non-Mac Pro Macs that can run,

00:53:12   pick a modern 3D game at higher frame rates at the same settings and resolutions

00:53:17   Any of the Mac pros? I don't know if that's the case yet, but I could imagine that no

00:53:22   I don't know. It seems like it should never be the case. It's the the best GPU and the IMAX is like a

00:53:27   780 M or something. It's a mobile part, right? It's not even a desktop part and

00:53:32   Surely even the crappiest GPU in the Mac Pro should be able to crush it

00:53:38   but I don't know until we see results but

00:53:39   All these questions lead me to say like if you're gonna buy this machine to have a fast quiet desktop machine

00:53:45   It's not gonna be retina. So like you can't hold that over the iMac or anything

00:53:49   The iMac comes with the big monitor already built in which you would like to buy to replace the small monitor here

00:53:54   What is it that you're spending all this money for if you're not going to get better performance?

00:53:59   Like should you just get an iMac with a 27 inch display top of the top top line?

00:54:03   Because you're not gonna get like hard drive bays or anything that used to get with the Mac Pro that probably appealed to you

00:54:08   right exactly and you know and I

00:54:11   I mean, in both cases I'd be giving, I think that, is there still a Firewire 800 on the

00:54:17   iMac?

00:54:18   I don't remember anymore.

00:54:19   Oh, good question.

00:54:20   I doubt it, but.

00:54:21   Yeah, but anyway, like it's, for value for me, I have to think about that because it's

00:54:25   so much cheaper to get a top-end iMac.

00:54:28   Like it's just incredibly cheaper to get a top-end iMac.

00:54:31   Or like I said, what if I just get a new GPU and a new SSD for my existing Mac Pro and

00:54:36   just wait?

00:54:37   Not that I'm never, not that I'm leaving the Mac Pro and I'm never going to get another

00:54:40   I will buy one eventually, I think, but it just has to be a clean win. Or it has to be Retina.

00:54:45   And Retina, forget it, doesn't seem like it's happening maybe next year. And it doesn't seem

00:54:50   like the Mac Pros, aside from being super sexy and awesome and quiet, which all appeal to me,

00:54:55   is a clean win in terms of value for what I want to do with the machine. And that's what's killing

00:54:59   me. In my case for a true Mac Pro successor, I think this is it, but aimed at a different realm

00:55:08   than where I am.

00:55:10   It's aimed at people who need all the power that's in there, and I would be buying it

00:55:13   and not using an entire one of these super expensive GPUs, and not using most of the

00:55:18   cores.

00:55:19   It's like trying to make the best, fastest, most awesome computer, of which I'm using

00:55:25   a tiny isolated corner.

00:55:27   I'm not using the whole machine, and so few people will be using the whole machine, so

00:55:31   it's kind of wasted on me.

00:55:32   That's kind of disappointing.

00:55:33   Yeah, I mean, given your priorities, especially in regards to gaming performance, I really

00:55:39   do think that an iMac is probably--an iMac in particular, having an iMac and upgrading

00:55:45   it more frequently.

00:55:48   Maybe you have an iMac and you update it every two years.

00:55:50   I think that would serve you better than trying to hold onto a Mac Pro for five years and

00:55:55   trying to get modern gaming performance out of it.

00:55:57   But the thing is, there's no way that the GPU in iMac should, hardware-wise, come anywhere

00:56:04   close to the gaming performance of the Mac Pro.

00:56:06   It's all going to come down to drivers, I think.

00:56:09   Because it's just the number of execution units and parallel processors in that GPU,

00:56:15   and any of the GPUs, even the low-end one, surely has to completely dwarf the amount

00:56:20   of execution hardware that's in the stupid mobile GPU that's in the iMac.

00:56:25   The question for GPU performance, okay, well, so it should crush, by all accounts, based

00:56:30   on the hardware, any iMac, but it will not crush, probably, a real gaming GPU card in

00:56:35   my current Mac Pro, if such a thing even exists for me to buy, because there's plenty of gaming

00:56:40   GPUs that have more execution hardware than the low-end and maybe even than the medium-end

00:56:44   GPUs in the Mac Pro.

00:56:47   They don't have as much VRAM, and they don't have all those other, you know, fancy things

00:56:50   for the drivers for like Maya and stuff like that, but I don't need those things.

00:56:54   If I just want gaming performance, a gaming video card is a way better deal than those

00:56:58   super expensive 2 GPUs, of which I'm not going to use one at all.

00:57:02   All right, serious question.

00:57:03   Why don't you just build a gaming PC for like $1200?

00:57:08   Because PCs are disgusting.

00:57:09   How can you build a gaming PC?

00:57:11   I don't want to deal with that.

00:57:12   I don't want to build anything.

00:57:13   I don't want to have an ugly, noisy box in my house.

00:57:15   I don't want to have two computers.

00:57:17   I don't want to have a KVM switching PC.

00:57:18   I just don't.

00:57:19   I do not want a gaming PC.

00:57:22   The Mac Pro is, my current Mac Pro is the culmination of the dream.

00:57:25   I've got a GUI, I've got Unix.

00:57:27   I can run Windows, I can run Mac, both natively.

00:57:31   It's every computer I've ever wanted all in one.

00:57:33   It's just, you know, five years old or whatever now.

00:57:35   It just seems like you're jumping through a lot of hoops, and in particular you're taking

00:57:39   on a lot of costs that you otherwise probably wouldn't need at all, simply to avoid having

00:57:46   a $1200 gaming PC under your desk that you switch between.

00:57:48   it would be more than twelve hundred dollars if i got a good gaming pc but like

00:57:52   i don't think you realize how cheap pc components are

00:57:55   if i'm going to build a gaming pc i would get like the eight hundred dollar

00:57:58   video card so like right there

00:58:00   you know and those eight hundred dollar video cards are noisy and the power supplies you need to run

00:58:04   them have big noisy fans and it would just be it would be a gigantic noisy hot vacuum

00:58:08   cleaner

00:58:10   or i'd have to go like alienware where they build it for you and they just charge it on top

00:58:13   and then you're already up into three grand for one of those things and they're disgusting looking

00:58:16   I do not want a gaming PC. What I want basically is exactly what that little Mac Pro is, but

00:58:21   attached to a quad retina screen and with even better GPUs that all whose performance

00:58:28   is leveled exactly at gaming. The drivers are tweaked to make that happen. I have to

00:58:33   wait for the benchmarks really because it could be that that hardware is totally squandered

00:58:37   in games because of the drivers or it could be that it is reasonable and it performs the

00:58:42   way you think it should. But even then, I would pick the D700 video card because I know

00:58:49   that the top-end gaming cards have that many execution units or more. So to just be in

00:58:54   that realm, I have to pick that hardware, even though no game is going to use 12GB of

00:58:58   VRAM. I just have to buy that because it comes with it.

00:59:01   How much internal flash storage would you go with?

00:59:03   I would pick terabyte. I mean, I would have to because even if I was going to buy an SSD

00:59:10   for this thing, I would pick something close to a terabyte, just because that's not that

00:59:13   expensive. That's not the big cost thing. And I want to just be able to fill all my

00:59:17   stuff, and I want it to be on the super fast PCI Express SSD. Like, that's part of the

00:59:21   experience of having that machine. That's something that even the top-end iMac has a

00:59:25   PCI Express SSD, probably not as fast as the ones that are in the Mac Pro, but...

00:59:29   I would bet it's the same part, actually. I don't know about that, but we'll see.

00:59:33   They did a brief testing at Macworld of the SSD, and they came up with some number, and they seemed

00:59:38   seem to be impressed by it, so I'm assuming that number is faster than what they got from

00:59:41   the SSD built into the top end iMac.

00:59:43   Yeah, it was just under a gigabyte per second read and write, which was pretty awesome.

00:59:48   So I just did some quick price-outs here.

00:59:51   So for you to have a top-end iMac, 16 gigs of RAM, how's that?

00:59:54   Good for you?

00:59:55   16 gigs of RAM?

00:59:56   What is this, 2007?

00:59:57   All right.

00:59:58   All right, let me bump him up.

01:00:00   32, 32.

01:00:01   Okay.

01:00:02   This is the thing.

01:00:03   I could save money by—well, no, I couldn't save money, because don't they put the 16

01:00:07   all the slots. I was going to say I could go from 16 to 32 by buying third-party RAM

01:00:12   because you can actually replace that on those little pop-out things. That's not going to...

01:00:15   Yeah, but you're going to have to pop them all out and replace them all. So just getting

01:00:21   everything from Apple. For an iMac configured the way you would want it, you're looking

01:00:25   at just under $4,000, $3949. And then a Mac Pro, I put in the 6-core because friends don't

01:00:31   Don't Let Friends by the 4 core, and it's 5800.

01:00:34   So you're looking at about almost $2,000 difference

01:00:39   to get the Mac Pro.

01:00:40   - Plus no monitor.

01:00:41   - So I don't, I'm having a hard time

01:00:42   just to find the Mac Pro for you.

01:00:44   And that's, I would happily justify this

01:00:46   for anybody who wants me to,

01:00:47   but for your expressed needs of, and priorities

01:00:52   of wanting a really great gaming computer for home,

01:00:55   but otherwise, like, besides gaming,

01:00:58   what are you mainly doing on this computer

01:01:00   really stressing it. Like what are your highest needs tasks?

01:01:03   There's a reason I said 32 gigs of RAM is because like if I was, I can go to activity

01:01:08   monitor now, I'm probably using all my RAM. I'm always running out of RAM. I have 16 on

01:01:13   this. And I guess the memory compression in Mavericks does help, but let's see what we've

01:01:18   got on memory. Is Perl that needy?

01:01:21   Yeah, well, you know, it's duct typing, right? All that RAM for duct typing?

01:01:25   No, no, no.

01:01:26   Memory use, 15.4 gigabytes out of 16, but I quit a bunch of apps before I do a podcast

01:01:32   just for safety's sake.

01:01:34   But I mean, and...

01:01:35   I mean, granted, Perl is ancient and old and boring and silly.

01:01:39   Good thing none of us are ancient.

01:01:42   Or boring or old.

01:01:43   Yeah, no, like the SSD is like having a Mac Pro at work with an SSD and one at home without.

01:01:48   SSD is a big part of improving my computing experience.

01:01:53   And the other part is whenever I fire up Steam to play a game or something, my GPU is just

01:01:57   not cutting it, and people in the chat room are taunting me by saying their two and a

01:02:00   half year old iMac beats my current Mac.

01:02:04   The 8800 still holds its own, still does things that a really crappy iMac GPU can't, but the

01:02:10   top end iMac GPUs are getting better.

01:02:13   But I'm not looking for, oh, just get something that can run modern games.

01:02:16   I'm looking for headroom.

01:02:17   If I'm going to spend all this money, I want something that has the power to last me as

01:02:21   as long as this 8800 has lasted me.

01:02:23   - I think you'd be better served either

01:02:26   getting a reasonably spec'd Mac Pro

01:02:28   and getting a gaming PC whenever the Mac Pro

01:02:30   becomes too slow for gaming for you for 1200 bucks,

01:02:33   or just getting a top of the line iMac every two years.

01:02:37   - Or getting a SSD and a new video card for this one.

01:02:40   I have to leave that in the category of things,

01:02:42   or buying some parts of your old Mac Pro from you

01:02:44   and basically doing the same thing.

01:02:46   Or buying your entire Mac Pro from you

01:02:47   if you wanna get rid of the whole thing, who knows.

01:02:49   I do, but I don't know how much it would really help you.

01:02:51   Well, it would be an upgrade.

01:02:53   Yeah, because it's two years newer.

01:02:54   The CPUs are better.

01:02:55   I don't know.

01:02:56   But I have to look at it.

01:02:59   That's filling me with a feeling of dread,

01:03:02   like having you examine my Mac for it

01:03:04   to see if it's good enough.

01:03:06   It'll be in better condition than mine, believe me.

01:03:09   Like, I try to take care of it, but as the children become more

01:03:11   mobile and more violent, then things that are on the floor

01:03:16   are in the path of-- you'll see.

01:03:18   Yeah, I'm actually looking forward to getting it on my desk again.

01:03:21   To try to like, you know, like zip tie all the cables to the desk legs so they can't be pulled much,

01:03:27   and like try to like really clean everything up off the floor.

01:03:30   It'll also really help with dust management in the room. Anyway,

01:03:33   do you want to talk for another two hours about the Mac Pro?

01:03:36   Oh my god, can we please be done?

01:03:39   Who are you?

01:03:40   Oh, seriously. I am so bored right now. It defies description.

01:03:45   Did you watch the videos of the unboxing or the pictures of them unboxing and the videos

01:03:51   of them looking at the Mac Pro and the Mac World site?

01:03:54   Oh hell no.

01:03:55   It's pretty sexy.

01:03:57   Every picture I've seen so far, it's been covered in fingerprints.

01:04:00   Well yeah.

01:04:01   It definitely says something.

01:04:03   But the good thing about it is unlike an iOS device, it's not meant to be picked up when

01:04:06   it's used.

01:04:07   So you can put it in place on your desk, get out your little microfiber cloth, polish it

01:04:11   up, and then just don't touch it again because why do you need to touch it?

01:04:14   I bet the same people who touch monitors, I hate those people, I bet those people will

01:04:19   walk up and be like, "Hey, what kind of computer is that?" and put their finger all over it.

01:04:22   Well, that's why you need to electrify the case.

01:04:24   Oh my god.

01:04:26   You can get some current running through that, and maybe put some blades on the fan on the

01:04:29   top so they stick, "What's inside here?"

01:04:31   Okay, so I'm going to be an idiot and ask one Mac Pro-related question.

01:04:37   So friend of the show, Jason Snell, dear friend of the show, Jason Snell, has taken a video

01:04:43   and sent it to John of the fan in the Mac Pro.

01:04:47   John, would you like to expound at all upon what that video told you?

01:04:52   Well, so he took the video with his phone or other portable thing, and so you've got

01:04:58   the background noise elimination that all these phones do, but the thing is, he put

01:05:02   the phone inside the top of the Mac Pro, right?

01:05:07   So at that range, it is not canceling out the noise of that fan, because it is like

01:05:12   like, millimeters from the noise of that fan. And he listened to the audio after recording

01:05:18   it and said, "Yeah, that's more or less what it sounds like when I'm putting my ear next

01:05:22   to the thing." And it seems super quiet. You can't tell how much you're going to be able

01:05:27   to hear it from far away, because from far away, you know, again, the noise cancelling

01:05:30   comes in or whatever, but were you to stick your ear up to the thing, it's kind of like

01:05:34   on my television set, where the same guy, the video was taking it from like back on

01:05:38   his couch, it was like, "And you can't hear anything." But of course you can't, because

01:05:40   back by the couch, but when he took the phone all the way around to the back of the thing

01:05:43   and shoved that up against the fans, you could hear what those fans sound like.

01:05:48   And the quality of the sound of the fans is kind of what you're coming with.

01:05:51   So you're like, "Okay, if I can hear it from the couch, what I'm going to hear is a noise

01:05:54   like this."

01:05:55   And it's how high a pitch, is it even, is it uneven, is it whooshy, is it one frequency

01:06:00   or a big mess?

01:06:01   And this was very whispery, whisper quiet, kind of like the asymmetrical fans on the

01:06:09   retina MacBook Pros, when they zoom up they sound more kind of like white noise whooshing

01:06:16   and less like droning or single frequency kind of thing.

01:06:21   So I am completely confident that this new Mac Pro will be way, way quieter than even

01:06:27   my existing Mac Pro.

01:06:28   And this Mac Pro is very quiet compared to my Power Mac G5.

01:06:31   So things are going in the right direction, definitely.

01:06:34   And at this point I totally believe the claim that the thing is as quiet as a Mac Mini.

01:06:38   But if I had a Mac Mini or a new Mac Pro on my desk, I'll be able to hear it.

01:06:42   But it's kind of like my TV.

01:06:43   Is it going to be less noisy than my current computer?

01:06:45   Yes, it definitely is.

01:06:46   And so it's an upgrade, so thumbs up.

01:06:48   Yeah, that's -- a lot of people have said that the old Mac Pro was loud.

01:06:53   And I've never found them to be loud.

01:06:55   I mean, maybe -- like, you know, so I've had two.

01:06:57   I've had the 2008 and the 2010, I guess, even though I bought it in 2012.

01:07:03   But I had those two.

01:07:05   And I've never, like, one of the reasons why I love the Mac Pro so much is that every other

01:07:11   Mac, if you put the CPUs under a full sustained load, like if you're running a hand-breaking

01:07:15   code or something like that, the fan will spin up very audibly, and it's annoying.

01:07:21   And the Mac Pro, even at full CPU load, it's either completely the same as, like, the 2008

01:07:29   that you had and I used to have.

01:07:31   That didn't sound any different under full load to me.

01:07:34   It sounds different when I'm gaming because of the cool- the cooler on the video card

01:07:38   has an unpleasant whine when I get gone in games.

01:07:42   As does the 2010 one, actually.

01:07:45   But um, oh god, GPU fans.

01:07:48   One of the best things about the new Mac Pro is that there is no GPU fan.

01:07:52   There has never been a GPU fan that is not a piece of crap.

01:07:54   I've never, ever even heard of one that was not terrible.

01:07:58   I'm just so excited that this 2008 fan has not died in all the years, because all my

01:08:02   other ones went bad way before this. But that was one of the innovations that Apple talks

01:08:05   about in designing this thing is the realization that there's almost no situation in which

01:08:12   all the hot parts are hot at the same time. So it's wasteful to have separate coolers

01:08:17   on each CPU and on each GPU because you'll never be in a situation where all CPUs and

01:08:22   all GPUs are flat out at the same time, or very rarely will be. And if just one GPU is

01:08:29   hot and the other one isn't. All that noise and energy you're spending trying to cool

01:08:32   the parts that don't need to be cool is just wasted and produces extra noise. Like, the

01:08:35   sum total of your noise is never going to be below a certain level if you have three

01:08:40   fans, one for each CPU or one for the GPU or whatever. So the innovation of the Mac

01:08:44   Pro is, let's make them one entire cooling zone for all of them. One fan for all components,

01:08:52   have them in the central chimney, and then I guess just make sure that that gigantic

01:08:55   cooling fan has the capacity to cool all three if they're cranked up, but when they're not

01:08:59   cranked up, you don't have... your ceiling for noise, or your floor for noise, is much,

01:09:06   much lower because you don't have this minimum amount of noise just to keep the fan spinning

01:09:10   on, you know...

01:09:11   I wonder if they would ever, if they considered it as part of their thing to do kind of like

01:09:14   a stop-start thing, or a cylinder deactivation, or all the other thing that car engines do.

01:09:20   What if we just stop the fans on the other thing?

01:09:21   We'll have three fans, but we'll just stop them when they don't need to be cooled.

01:09:24   But I imagine that was probably not a good idea.

01:09:27   So they went with one gigantic fan on really expensive ball bearings.

01:09:30   And I totally applaud that design as someone who's obsessed with noise.

01:09:33   If you're going to make a pro computer and try to figure out how to make it quiet, I

01:09:36   think this is a very clever and interesting design.

01:09:38   Oh yeah.

01:09:39   I mean, and that's one of the reasons why I switched to the Mac Pro is because it was

01:09:44   driving me crazy whenever I would try to record a podcast that the fan on my Mac Pro would

01:09:49   spin up and I would hear it.

01:09:51   And like, I'm obsessed with audio quality.

01:09:53   I want our show to sound really good."

01:09:56   And the fact that that was spinning up drove me nuts.

01:09:59   And the Mac Pro has always—this is one of the things that makes it a pro computer—it

01:10:04   has always handled heavy loads gracefully.

01:10:08   The laptops, you can put them under a sustained load, but you're definitely going to hear

01:10:12   it.

01:10:13   They're going to be very, very hot, and you're kind of worried, like, "Am I shortening

01:10:17   the life of something by doing this very often?"

01:10:19   Yeah, that's another reason laptops suck, and that's why Casey needs to get it, because

01:10:23   But they sound awful.

01:10:24   They sound like they're in pain.

01:10:25   Like, I know this because I have an older generation MacBook Air that my wife uses,

01:10:29   and my son plays Minecraft on it all the time.

01:10:32   And it's not a powerful GPU, but Minecraft is not a complicated game.

01:10:35   But he runs Minecraft full screen on a 27-inch display on an old MacBook Air.

01:10:39   And that thing sounds like it's dying for the entire time he's using it.

01:10:42   It sounds like, "Help me!

01:10:44   Save me!"

01:10:45   Just that terrible, like, really urgent whine of that tiny little fan in this tiny little

01:10:50   case and the whole thing's getting hot back there.

01:10:52   like you play that on my Mac Pro, it sounds no different than it does when it's idling

01:10:56   in the Finder, right? As it should, because it's just playing Minecraft. But yeah, it's

01:11:01   torture to take anything powerful and try to shove it into this little tiny, skinny

01:11:05   sliver of a case with a heat pump attached to it and some weird asymmetrical fans trying

01:11:10   to suck air out sideways and blow through these tiny vents. Desktop, it's the way to

01:11:14   go.

01:11:15   Yeah, I mean, it handles it so much more gracefully. And it also, you know, even though it's unlikely

01:11:22   to happen at any given moment. The fact is, like laptops and other consumer level stuff,

01:11:29   I've had more kernel panics on laptops than I have on Mac Pros. And I've used laptops

01:11:34   and Mac Pros respectively full time, probably about the same amount in total. So I can safely

01:11:40   say I've experienced way more kernel panics and instability with laptops than I have with

01:11:45   Mac Pros. And there's lots of reasons for that. You know, Xeons and Xeon motherboards

01:11:49   are all made to higher standards, higher tolerance.

01:11:52   This is also just ECC RAM, which, yeah,

01:11:54   the chances are that your RAM is not gonna have an error,

01:11:57   but, or if it does have an error,

01:11:59   it's somewhere you won't notice it,

01:12:01   but you use a computer enough,

01:12:04   and that might happen a couple times a year,

01:12:06   and you might notice that.

01:12:07   - Yeah, ECC RAM is, that's another reason

01:12:10   that I would want to not log in on iMac,

01:12:11   'cause I don't think they have ECC yet,

01:12:13   'cause like, you know, ParaNod AM, but HFS+,

01:12:15   ECC RAM is just one extra layer of protection,

01:12:17   because I know there's-- - Yes.

01:12:19   Somebody just completed a bingo board.

01:12:21   There is no safety net down at the bottom for the file system, so at least I can have

01:12:27   a little bit of protection in RAM and hopefully correct some errors there before it gets to

01:12:32   my disk.

01:12:33   Yeah, I mean, it's okay.

01:12:34   So get a Mac Pro and either play games at low frame rates and grumble about it.

01:12:39   You are very good at grumbling.

01:12:41   Or just get a gaming PC and grumble about that.

01:12:43   Either way, you're grumbling about something.

01:12:45   Hopefully it won't be at low frame rates.

01:12:46   I'm awaiting the results of the test, and if anyone at Apple wants to send me a Mac

01:12:50   Pro as a reward for keeping the faith all those years and posting a picture of a matte

01:12:55   black sports car and saying that I want the next Mac Pro to look like that.

01:12:58   Well, they got the color right, I guess.

01:13:00   It's not matte, though.

01:13:02   I know.

01:13:03   Well, you know, beggars can't be choosers.

01:13:04   It also doesn't have any internal drives or PCI Express slots, so, you know.

01:13:09   We made it exactly the car you wanted, but there's no seats.

01:13:11   It's really quiet, though.

01:13:13   So, Casey, do you want to talk about anything else?

01:13:16   I would do anything in the world to talk about anything but the Mac Pro.

01:13:23   Are you convinced to buy a desktop now?

01:13:24   Oh my god, I am more convinced than ever that I do not want a desktop because I don't want

01:13:30   to have to worry about all this bullsh*t that you guys are worrying about.

01:13:33   Killing me.

01:13:35   Killing me!

01:13:37   Can we talk about something a little more entertaining, please?

01:13:41   What else is on the list?

01:13:43   Well, there's a lot of things and most of them are boring.

01:13:47   - Ooh, button shapes, that sounds entertaining.

01:13:48   - No, God, no, please no.

01:13:50   (laughing)

01:13:51   Please, please no.

01:13:53   Can we whine about some stuff that's not Mac Pro related?

01:13:58   So I would either like, I will leave it to John.

01:14:02   I would either like to whine about Outlook 2011

01:14:07   or software development methodologies and big business.

01:14:12   So John, take your pick.

01:14:14   - We're not doing software development methodologies now.

01:14:16   We've only got, yeah, we don't have time for that.

01:14:18   So I pick out one. - Well, excuse me.

01:14:19   Marco and I have time for that.

01:14:21   - Yeah, well, no, because this show should not be that long.

01:14:25   But yes, I have to go at 11 and so we don't have time.

01:14:27   But that's gonna be like a whole show's worth of stuff,

01:14:29   even though I have, like I said,

01:14:30   I'm not preparing at all for methodologies,

01:14:32   but I feel confident that Casey and I alone

01:14:34   can complain about that for a long time.

01:14:37   - As much as I wanna yell at you, it's very true.

01:14:39   - Yeah, I put Outlook 2011 in there,

01:14:41   But if you have some Outlook 2011 things that you'd like to share, feel free.

01:14:44   Take it away.

01:14:45   Oh my god.

01:14:46   So I don't have anything hyper specific to share.

01:14:52   However, I will say that Outlook 2011, as with all of Office 2011, is a steaming pile

01:14:58   of horse manure.

01:15:00   And I cannot fathom having to use Outlook or the rest of Office on a Mac full-time.

01:15:09   I do so as little as possible and even that is too much because Microsoft does not take

01:15:17   Office for the Mac seriously.

01:15:20   None of it seems native.

01:15:21   None of it makes sense.

01:15:23   None of it really fits in with anything else on the platform.

01:15:28   Software update happens constantly.

01:15:30   It's obnoxious.

01:15:31   It gets in the way.

01:15:32   It makes you stop everything.

01:15:35   Microsoft software update makes you stop Safari.

01:15:38   I don't even understand why they're related except maybe Silverlight, which is dead.

01:15:43   Yeah, it's okay.

01:15:46   My favorite thing about Office 2011 is the little—Casey knows this, whatever it is—the

01:15:51   little yellow thing that comes up in the corner to tell you, like, you know, calendar notifications,

01:15:56   like "Oh, you've got this meeting in ten minutes."

01:15:58   You know the thing I'm talking about, Casey?

01:16:00   No, because I probably turned it off because it's terrible.

01:16:03   I like being reminded when I have a meeting, like I'll be there at work and the little

01:16:07   yellow thing will pop up and say you've got a meeting in 15 minutes and it's got a little

01:16:10   snooze button and a dismiss button and they stack up inside there.

01:16:13   It's not that interface that I mind.

01:16:15   It's the thing that runs that little yellow window that pops up is this application that

01:16:19   has an alarm clock icon.

01:16:21   It's like a blue old-fashioned alarm clock with bells on it.

01:16:23   It's actually a pretty nice icon.

01:16:25   The thing that drives me nuts about that particular feature is that on my Mac at home that does

01:16:30   not have an SSD, when I wake it from sleep, usually it'll be like, "Oh, while I was sleeping,

01:16:37   these events happen that it wants to tell you about the events that you either missed

01:16:39   or that are upcoming or whatever.

01:16:41   And so the little alarm clock guy will appear in my dock and start bouncing.

01:16:47   And at one time I tried counting the bounces.

01:16:49   You may not know this, but OS X has for many years and continues to have, it's either OS

01:16:54   X or the app, but I think it's the OS, has a limit on the number of times it will allow

01:16:57   any icon to bounce in the dock.

01:16:59   And after a certain point it just stops bouncing, it gives up.

01:17:02   I have seen the icon give up bouncing because it will grind away at my crappy spinning disk

01:17:07   and just bounce there forever.

01:17:09   Just bounce.

01:17:10   Bounce below.

01:17:11   I think I counted to 75 or 100 or something at one point and then I just stopped counting.

01:17:15   Eventually it will stop bouncing.

01:17:17   I don't know what it's doing during this time.

01:17:19   I think I've looked at FSU usage a few times and seen some random like Microsoft database

01:17:23   stuff that it's doing in the background or something.

01:17:26   The result of it bouncing there for like two minutes, three minutes, five minutes, God

01:17:31   God knows how long, is to bring up a tiny yellow window that says, "Here are your two

01:17:35   meetings that you missed or they're coming 15 minutes from now."

01:17:40   That is an inappropriate amount of disk activity and waiting time to bring up a little window

01:17:44   that tells me which meetings I missed.

01:17:46   So God knows what it's doing, but it's doing something terrible.

01:17:49   But that's not why I put this in the notes.

01:17:51   That's the thing that drives me nuts the most when I wake my Mac Pro at home and see it

01:17:54   grind away.

01:17:55   I mean, maybe it's blocking on some network call.

01:17:57   I don't know what it's doing.

01:17:58   No.

01:17:59   No.

01:18:00   It grinds the hell out of my disk to bring it in.

01:18:01   I'm surprised that people who don't have SSDs have not noticed that and not filed bugs against

01:18:06   it.

01:18:07   But the reason I put this in here, my biggest peeve about Outlook 2010, which I use for

01:18:12   work, because I have to, because there are things that Apple Mail has not done successfully

01:18:18   with my Exchange server at work.

01:18:20   Maybe the new version of Apple Mail does, but I'm always afraid to go back to it.

01:18:22   Because talking about flaky mail programs, in my experience, Apple Mail has been worse

01:18:25   than Outlook.

01:18:26   face better potential features but worse reliability, especially with Microsoft stuff.

01:18:31   But the reason I put it in there is that Alex 2010 has, since it's the dawn of the software,

01:18:36   and continues to this day after many, many updates, to have one of probably the most

01:18:41   user-hostile small feature.

01:18:44   Like it's something like, "Oh, that's not a big deal.

01:18:46   That shouldn't be bothering me.

01:18:47   It's not like deleting your data or whatever."

01:18:48   So you say user-hostile, like is it throwing ads in your face?

01:18:52   Is it deleting stuff?

01:18:53   Is it corrupting your data?

01:18:54   Is it crashing?

01:18:55   all user hostile, yes, but they're so over the top that everyone can agree on.

01:18:59   This is the type of thing that, when I describe it, it's not going to sound like a big deal

01:19:03   until you've lived with it for, I guess, two years now, or whenever Outlook 2011 came out,

01:19:07   I don't remember if it came out in 2011 or not.

01:19:11   Selection and validation.

01:19:13   What I do with my mailboxes a lot of the time is select groups of messages, either by doing

01:19:17   select all, by clicking one and holding down shift and clicking one lower down, or by dragging

01:19:22   them, all the different ways you can select groups of messages.

01:19:24   I'm going to do something with them.

01:19:25   I'm going to mark them as red.

01:19:26   I'm going to drag them all into another folder.

01:19:27   I'm going to do something with them."

01:19:29   Multiple selections, right?

01:19:31   Very often it's "Select All" and then "Mark as Red" because you get a lot of email at

01:19:35   work for mailing lists and they go all into a folder and sometimes you just want to mark

01:19:38   certain sections of them red or whatever.

01:19:40   Selecting any message in the message list in Outlook 2011 is just merely a suggestion

01:19:47   to the program.

01:19:48   You can select them with your mouse.

01:19:51   Immediately your selection is removed.

01:19:53   You can hit Command-A to select all.

01:19:55   Immediately your selection is entirely invalid.

01:19:56   And what I mean is when it's removed is you did Command-A, they all highlighted.

01:20:01   A millisecond later, they all unhighlighted.

01:20:03   Why does it do that?

01:20:04   Because it hates you with the fiery passion.

01:20:06   I don't know why it does it.

01:20:08   Sometimes it's like a smart folder, like I'll click on my unread smart folder to show me

01:20:11   all unread messages.

01:20:13   When you hit Command-A, it will select all the ones that are currently there, but then

01:20:17   the smart folder will grind along a little bit and say, "Oh, I found two new messages

01:20:20   that are also unread."

01:20:21   it will invalidate your entire selection.

01:20:23   And so you just have to wait there

01:20:24   until the number stops going up.

01:20:25   Have you found all the unread messages in that?

01:20:27   Is it safe for me to hit Command + A?

01:20:28   And you never are, you just, you think it's done.

01:20:31   The number goes up to like 27, you hit Command + A.

01:20:33   Oh, no, actually 32, selection invalidated.

01:20:36   Hit Command + A again, you think you're safe,

01:20:37   you go to hit Command + T to mark all the read.

01:20:39   Oh, no, sorry, invalidated, we found one more message.

01:20:42   Even in message lists that are not like that,

01:20:44   that are not part of Smart Folders,

01:20:46   the first time you select one message,

01:20:48   two message, five messages, the first time, forget it.

01:20:51   That's just like a trial run.

01:20:52   Your selection will immediately be gone.

01:20:54   You will never be able to get to a command fast enough

01:20:55   for the selection to be highlighted.

01:20:57   And this is the type of bug when I first saw it,

01:20:59   like, oh, look, silly, a 1.0 bug.

01:21:01   They're surely they'll get rid of this.

01:21:02   But years later, this is still how this program behaves.

01:21:05   It does not care that you selected things.

01:21:07   You wanna select things,

01:21:08   you have to enter a determined battle with the program

01:21:11   to get your selection to stay.

01:21:13   And again, it doesn't sound like it's a big deal,

01:21:15   but I find it incredibly maddening

01:21:18   and I spend a lot of my day just going,

01:21:20   Select unselected. Select unselected. Select unselected. Perform operation. Select unselected.

01:21:24   Select unselected. Select unselected. Perform operation. I don't understand how this program

01:21:29   continues to ship in this form. Like, how can the people at Microsoft use it? How can anybody use it?

01:21:34   I can tell you right now. Why do you use it? Because we have to. Because we have to for work?

01:21:40   You think the people at Microsoft have to for work? If you didn't use it, what would you use instead?

01:21:46   The Gmail web interface? No. Mail. Yes. No. That's what I use. That's what I use for my actual mail.

01:21:52   No, because if you had to connect to Exchange, you would use mail.app.

01:21:57   No, I would forward all my mail to Gmail. Which is?

01:22:00   Against corporate policy, and you can't do that. I mean, I use it. And the thing is,

01:22:05   I liked Entourage, the purple one that came before this yellow pissy one. I liked Entourage.

01:22:11   Mother of God, you're the only person I've ever met that actually liked Entourage.

01:22:14   I like Claris emailer. The Claris emailer guys left, went to Microsoft and made Entourage.

01:22:21   The original classic Mac version of Entourage was really awesome, had great icons from Icon

01:22:25   Factory, it was a great mail program. The OS X version of Entourage, not so great, but

01:22:29   the thing I like about it is I like the integration of my mail application and my calendar into

01:22:33   one thing. Some people hate that and they want it to be separate. I like them to be

01:22:36   combined.

01:22:37   Outlook would not be so terrible if it just worked. Like if it didn't invalidate my selection,

01:22:42   If things worked the way they're supposed to, if the meetings that I accepted in Outlook 2011

01:22:46   stayed accepted and didn't make me re-accept them, that's the other thing that does.

01:22:50   It makes me re-accept meetings hundreds of times,

01:22:52   that was grayed out on my calendar as if I've never accepted them.

01:22:54   Accept them, go to series, accept the series.

01:22:56   Next day, they're all unhighlighted again as if I didn't accept them.

01:22:59   Again, for years of this, it's like, this is all Microsoft,

01:23:03   from the client to the server to everywhere, everything is like modern versions.

01:23:06   It just doesn't work correctly.

01:23:08   And there's still many things that I have to open my Windows VM and go into the "real"

01:23:13   Outlook and do things from there because the Mac version can't do them or does them badly

01:23:18   or wrong or in some strange way.

01:23:19   But the selection and validation is that I'll remember that to the day I died, that once

01:23:24   there was this program that would not respect my ability to select things and it stayed

01:23:29   that way for years and nobody cared.

01:23:31   And maybe it's just me, maybe it's some crazy bug in my computer that's not a problem in

01:23:37   the program, it's some crazy extension that I don't even know I'm running because I'm

01:23:39   not running any extensions at work that I'm aware of.

01:23:45   I can't think of the cause that would cause me to be the only person who has selection

01:23:48   and validation.

01:23:49   Maybe people can write into the show and say, "Yes, Outlook 2011 has been invalidating my

01:23:54   selection for three years as well.

01:23:55   You're not alone."

01:23:57   If nobody writes in like that, then I'll just have to think that there's something crazy

01:24:00   going on in my computer.

01:24:01   But no, it's two computers, my home and work.

01:24:04   So the same thing as infecting my home and work computer, it's got to be the program.

01:24:08   It's got to be Outlook 2011.

01:24:10   Thank you to our two sponsors this week.

01:24:12   Please.

01:24:13   Please.

01:24:14   Wait.

01:24:15   After an hour and a half of you two talking about the Mac Pro, you're not going to give

01:24:21   me more than 15 minutes about stupid Microsoft stuff?

01:24:25   You can have the after show if you want.

01:24:27   Oh my God, I hate you so much.

01:24:30   However, I will say dear dear friend of the show Merlin man has added his commentary

01:24:36   Which I just put into the chat and I'm very happy that he did

01:24:40   I have no idea what it means but candidly

01:24:43   I never know what Merlin's talking about until 20 minutes after he's finished because I'm not as smart as he is

01:24:48   Where did you put it? I don't see this

01:24:50   Thanks a lot to our two sponsors this week

01:24:53   Warby Parker and hover and we will see you next week

01:24:59   And now the snow is falling Their kids are building snowmen

01:25:06   It's accidental (accidental)

01:25:10   Holiday fun time (holiday fun time)

01:25:13   John's gonna make snow angels Marco and Casey are gonna let him

01:25:20   It's accidental (accidental)

01:25:23   Syracuse angels (holiday fun time)

01:25:27   And you can find the show notes deep in Santa's beard

01:25:33   And follow them on Twitter for holiday funtime cheer

01:25:41   E-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:25:46   K-C-L-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-G-M-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C

01:25:58   USA, Syracuse, uh

01:26:01   It's an accidental (accidental)

01:26:05   Snowball fight

01:26:08   ♪ It's an accidental, accidental ♪

01:26:11   ♪ Holiday tech or podcast so long ♪

01:26:16   - Oh, see, he liked Entourage too.

01:26:19   See, Claire's emailer was great.

01:26:21   The first version of Entourage was really great.

01:26:23   The OS X version was less great.

01:26:25   Outlook 2011 needs to die a terrible death.

01:26:28   Or just work, like pick one or the other.

01:26:30   If it started working, suddenly I'd be like,

01:26:33   wow, this program, like, I might like it again or something.

01:26:35   But it doesn't take much to just make it into a device of torture.

01:26:41   But what reason does Microsoft have to improve it?

01:26:43   None!

01:26:44   But here's the thing.

01:26:45   I don't understand how—how does something like that—like, even though this is not

01:26:49   a big problem, it's something that every single person who uses this program has to

01:26:54   be experiencing.

01:26:55   Like, am I the only one this is happening to on my two computers that I ever use it

01:26:58   on?

01:26:59   And so if something like that happens, if you were a developer of this program and you're

01:27:01   forced to run it every day because you write the program, like, you use it for your email

01:27:05   because you work at Microsoft, you have a Mac, you work in the Mac business unit, you

01:27:08   write, you know, you are one of the primary authors of Outlook. How could you tolerate

01:27:12   this bug? You know what it's like when a program that you wrote that you use has a

01:27:15   bug in it. You go fix it like that day, because there's no way that you're going to let

01:27:18   that stand. You wrote the damn program. You know exactly what's going wrong, and you

01:27:22   go fix it. But nope. Years pass, not fixed.

01:27:25   Well, that presumes a culture of value and quality over things like ship dates, and Microsoft

01:27:32   is not even known for that.

01:27:34   They're rushing to meet ship dates. I'm saying like a day to day. It must be annoying these people like a Casey you use it

01:27:39   Do you is this selection and validation thing ever happened to you? Am I allowed to answer truthfully?

01:27:45   Go ahead. I'm I'm ready for the truth. Nope never happens to you, huh? I

01:27:51   Freaking hate outlook. I really hate outlook this selection of valid invalidation thing never happens to me

01:27:59   I should take some movies of it and the most exciting thing about it is the first one the first one never takes right so

01:28:05   you'll switch over to the program and

01:28:07   You'll go and you'll see a bunch of messages

01:28:10   And you just know like I see three messages there

01:28:13   And I want to mark all three of spam or something like that and you just know that

01:28:17   The first you're gonna click one of them. It's gonna highlight. You're gonna shift click down to the next one

01:28:23   It's gonna remove your entire selection that all that action is gonna be wasted, but you go through the motions anyway

01:28:28   And then you do it the second time and it takes and it just becomes this thing that you do. First one, it doesn't count.

01:28:35   All right, so hold on, are we officially in the after show? Oh, yeah.

01:28:39   Why the f*** are you making me listen to an hour and a half of MacPro discussion

01:28:45   and I get 12 minutes of listening to John preach about something that affects me and then you... It doesn't affect you!

01:28:53   It does well in principle it affects me and then Marco decides. Oh the king is fucking bored

01:28:59   So we're gonna end the show that's pretty much it. Yep

01:29:02   I'm so angry the people in the chat room pretty much hit it on the head

01:29:06   We Marco and I have been waiting for a Mac Pro for a long time

01:29:09   It's kind of the genesis of the show was around the time that we got the fake Mac Pro update

01:29:13   It's the reason we have the icon that we discussed at the top of the show

01:29:16   Now the new Mac pros are finally out and we can configure them and Marco bought one surely

01:29:20   that's deserving of an entire show's worth of discussion.

01:29:23   I think that's reasonable.

01:29:24   - I even cut stuff.

01:29:25   I could have gone more on the Mac Pro.

01:29:27   - Oh, God. - I could have too.

01:29:29   - I'm so angry at you two right now.

01:29:31   - I could have gone into Turbo Boost more.

01:29:33   I could have gone into the workstation pricing

01:29:35   from HP and Dell.

01:29:36   - Oh, please. - Yeah, see?

01:29:37   - There's so much more I could have gone into.

01:29:38   - We'll save that for a future show

01:29:39   now that we know how much Casey likes it.

01:29:41   - No, no!

01:29:43   Oh, God, please, no. - If anyone at Apple

01:29:45   wants to send Casey a complimentary Mac Pro

01:29:47   so he can stop- - Oh, God.

01:29:49   I will use it as a trash can.

01:29:51   I looked at the picture that you tweeted of your little setup, Casey.

01:29:54   You've got three glasses of liquid sitting right to the left of your laptop,

01:29:59   which is open with a keyboard in front of it.

01:30:01   No, it is directly to the right of my laptop.

01:30:04   Well, whatever. Yeah, all right.

01:30:06   But the point is, if you were to knock those over,

01:30:08   they would spill directly into the keyboard of your crappy laptop.

01:30:11   You're right, but because I'm not an idiot and I'm also a professional,

01:30:15   I will not knock them over.

01:30:16   Uh-huh, yeah, right.

01:30:18   But that's something a sober person would say.

01:30:20   Oh, son of a...

01:30:21   No, just kidding.

01:30:22   It just seems like an ill-advised arrangement.

01:30:25   Oh, God, I'm so angry at you guys right now.

01:30:28   And you've got the dual monitor problem of like, you are aligned with the space where

01:30:31   there is no monitor, so you're constantly looking to either your right or your left.

01:30:35   Oh, God.

01:30:36   You are so high maintenance.

01:30:37   I cannot believe that any piece of electronics actually fits your ridiculous requirements.

01:30:45   Well, it doesn't.

01:30:46   You just pick whoever's closest.

01:30:49   That I want to have the monitor in front of me?

01:30:50   Yeah, I'm a crazy person, you're right.

01:30:52   Oh, God.

01:30:53   No, that actually is one of the reasons why I prefer one giant monitor to two smaller

01:30:57   ones is because when you have two smaller ones, I would always just kind of sit in front

01:31:01   of the left one, center myself to the left one, but then the right one's kind of out

01:31:05   there like in New Jersey.

01:31:06   I don't know.

01:31:07   It's kind of hard to see.

01:31:09   As someone who, as I pointed out before, was using two monitors when you guys were probably

01:31:13   learning to walk, I always had the...

01:31:15   Oh, stop it.

01:31:16   The twin monitor was in front of me and the auxiliary monitor was off to the side.

01:31:20   And it was a clear arrangement because the auxiliary monitor was a black and white 9-inch CRT.

01:31:24   So clearly very auxiliary and the 24-bit color, huge 14-inch Trinitron display was in front of me.

01:31:31   And so it was clear that's the real monitor and that other thing is a place where I might put a pallet once in a while.

01:31:36   Oh god, I'm so angry at you two. Seriously, this is the most boring ATP I've ever been a part of.

01:31:43   I said 12 words during that entire episode.

01:31:47   You could have joined in about what your feelings were on the value proposition of the Mac Pro

01:31:51   for someone who wants to play games.

01:31:52   There's no goddamn way I have any thoughts about the Mac Pro.

01:31:55   Oh, God, it's so boring.

01:31:56   Well, next week we'll talk about software methodologies, and then I will become you,

01:32:00   and you can take over the whole show.

01:32:03   For the love of Christ, I hope so.

01:32:05   Oh, Margo will have things to say about software.

01:32:07   I know you will.

01:32:08   I know it.

01:32:09   Oh, I'm so angry right now.

01:32:11   There are so many bees in my bonnet.

01:32:13   What is the Merlin line?

01:32:15   What is it?

01:32:16   Something about my…

01:32:17   Ah, I can't remember it.

01:32:18   But something about my…

01:32:19   He's all angry.

01:32:20   Ah, he's probably listening right now and I feel like an idiot, but that's all right.

01:32:25   So fired up right now.

01:32:26   I don't even know which expression of his you're thinking of, and I know all of his

01:32:31   expressions, so I think you may have beat your limit.

01:32:35   You may have been over-served tonight, sir.

01:32:38   I still hate all of you.

01:32:41   How did we talk so long about the Mac Pro?

01:32:43   It was so boring.

01:32:45   This is supposed to be our Christmas special,

01:32:47   and it's so boring.

01:32:48   (upbeat music)

01:32:52   Oh God.

01:32:57   I do like "You Might Need a Drink" as well.

01:33:00   - That is currently the top voted.

01:33:01   - I disapprove of alcohol-related titles.

01:33:04   - Ah, fine.

01:33:05   You might need a Sprite as well.

01:33:07   - No, 'cause then, unless we're being sponsored by Sprite,

01:33:10   And Lex should get on that.

01:33:13   You might need a lemon-lime flavored soft drink as well.

01:33:16   No, because then you give you Sierra Mist, which is not the same.

01:33:19   Oh my god.

01:33:20   Have you gotten that one where it's like--

01:33:22   I know the Coke Pepsi people hate it, where you go into a restaurant

01:33:25   and it says you can have a Coke and they say Pepsi OK,

01:33:27   and then you have to kill them, right?

01:33:28   But at least Coke and Pepsi are trying to be like each other.

01:33:32   They are direct competitors.

01:33:33   Pepsi is trying to be like Coke.

01:33:35   They're trying to make the same product.

01:33:37   Sierra Mist is about as much the same product as Sprite as Root Beer is the same product

01:33:42   as Sprite.

01:33:43   Sierra Mist is better.

01:33:44   Sierra Mist is vile donkey piss.

01:33:48   It is not as bad as Mountain Dew, but it's close.

01:33:53   Sean, I love you.

01:33:54   Just like that, you've redeemed all of this.

01:33:56   No, I didn't think anybody in the world actually liked Sierra Mist.

01:33:59   I thought it was just something that they would make people take when you're a restaurant

01:34:03   who belongs to whatever brand.

01:34:05   I think Sprite is Coke and Sierra Miss is Pepsi or whatever.

01:34:07   I don't remember what it is, but I was like, they would force you to take it because you

01:34:10   would be like, okay, you're now a Pepsi restaurant and we force you to take Sierra Miss that

01:34:14   no human would ever willingly order.

01:34:16   And so when I say, can I have a Sprite?

01:34:17   And they say Sierra Miss is okay.

01:34:18   That's worse than if you asked for Coke and I say Pepsi, okay.

01:34:21   No, it's not okay.

01:34:23   Seven Up and Sprite, then okay.

01:34:26   Then I feel like you have a reasonable substitution.

01:34:28   Seven Up versus Sprite is like Pepsi versus Coke.

01:34:31   Like it's a reasonable substitution.

01:34:32   Sierra Miss is not a reasonable substitution for anything.

01:34:34   No, no, no. Stop. Okay, so here's the thing. Pepsi is better than Coke, but Diet Coke...

01:34:40   What? What? What? Pepsi is better than Coke?

01:34:43   Everybody relax. Pepsi is better than Coke. However, Diet Coke is light years ahead of Diet Pepsi.

01:34:50   Pepsi is not better than Coke. Aren't you from the South? What are you talking about?

01:34:54   I'm not from the South! Oh my God, I'm so angry.

01:34:57   You live in Virginia.

01:34:58   I'm not from Virginia. Oh, I'm so angry. I'm so angry right now.

01:35:04   Even Pepsi drinkers don't think that Pepsi is better than Coke. They just say they like it better, but no one seriously believes that Pepsi is better than Coke. I mean, come on.

01:35:11   So angry. So angry.

01:35:13   I hate Mo's soda, and yet I can tell you that Pepsi sucks compared to Coke. Coke is way better.

01:35:17   Seriously, is there anybody in the chat room who believes that Pepsi—not that you like Pepsi better than Coke—but who believes that Pepsi is actually better than Coke?

01:35:25   So angry.

01:35:26   I'm really curious—I bet no one. No one. I mean, this—I've never heard of anybody saying that. And diet, like, why bother?

01:35:33   And diet, yes, is like, which carcinogen do you find the least distasteful?

01:35:39   This is ridiculous.

01:35:40   I mean, diet soda, seriously, no nutritional value, possible cancer-causing, tastes terrible.

01:35:48   Like it is the anti-- it is like, what's the worst thing I can put into my body and not

01:35:53   die immediately?

01:35:55   I mean, diet soda, seriously, like, at the very least, I feel like they should be putting--

01:36:00   I'm going to take out the caffeine.

01:36:02   Like, it has nothing, then.

01:36:03   It's just completely devoid of any possible value.

01:36:05   It is just giving you cancer.

01:36:07   That's all it's doing.

01:36:08   I just like any-- like, all the sugar substitutes,

01:36:11   they all-- like, I can taste them all very clearly.

01:36:13   And they all taste like crap.

01:36:14   Like, it's-- when you--

01:36:16   this is my little side rant where, like, going shopping

01:36:20   and trying to read food labels, like, you

01:36:22   have to read any food label as if a lawyer is reading it.

01:36:28   Like, you have to read it like a lawyer.

01:36:30   Like when they say like, "Oh, this is natural strawberry flavor," if they're like, "Wait

01:36:35   a minute.

01:36:36   What does natural actually mean in the context of food?

01:36:39   And does strawberry flavor really contain any strawberries?

01:36:42   Probably not."

01:36:43   And you have to think like, "What is the most sinister, disgusting explanation that

01:36:49   could fit within the phrasing they've chosen legally?"

01:36:53   And that's probably what it's made from.

01:36:54   **Matt Stauffer:** Yep.

01:36:55   Nope.

01:36:56   It's not good.

01:36:57   It's not good at all.

01:36:58   And of course, you know, regular soda is terrible because it's just full of actual sugar or

01:37:03   full of corn syrup.

01:37:05   Have you guys ever done that blind taste of sugar versus corn syrup, like, you know, Mexican

01:37:10   Coke versus regular?

01:37:11   I have.

01:37:13   I cannot tell.

01:37:14   I thought I could tell until I did the blind test, and then I was like, "Yeah, nope, can't

01:37:18   tell."

01:37:20   And the thing is, they don't taste different, and I can't tell which is which, it's exactly

01:37:23   the same.

01:37:24   Yeah.

01:37:25   You know what I've learned this episode of ATP?

01:37:26   I've learned that I'm so goddamn thankful that I'm not as picky as you two.

01:37:32   We just said we couldn't tell the difference.

01:37:33   If we were picky, we'd be like, "Oh, I can totally tell the Mexican is different."

01:37:36   Nope, can't tell.

01:37:37   That's why someday I should have Marco make me coffee so I can try it and spit it out

01:37:41   in front of him.

01:37:42   Oh, I've done that.

01:37:43   I've done that.

01:37:44   It doesn't end well for you.

01:37:45   I promise.

01:37:46   I always want to know.

01:37:47   Maybe I'm just missing the problem.

01:37:50   I'm very sensitive to bitter taste, being a supertaster and all, so I imagine I would

01:37:54   hate his coffee as much as I hate all coffee, but it would be his fault.

01:37:58   Humble break.

01:37:59   It's the only thing I'm super at, so, you know, I have to… got that going for me.

01:38:07   Or against me, as the case may be.

01:38:11   All I know is, diet coke is the best drink in the world.

01:38:16   You and your Sprite.

01:38:17   It's ridiculous.

01:38:18   And I don't…

01:38:19   I don't have that in the house.

01:38:21   I don't drink it.

01:38:22   It's terrible.

01:38:23   It's sugar water.

01:38:24   No, Sprite.

01:38:25   Oh, god.

01:38:26   You're missing out.

01:38:27   It's just when I go out, very often their water tastes gross or is weird, and I don't

01:38:32   want an alcoholic drink, so I go with Sprite, which is less, uh, I don't know, I like it

01:38:38   better than Coke most of the time.