Upgrade

00:00:00 ◼   ► [Music]

00:00:12 ◼   ► For Relay FM, this is Upgrade, Episode 398, brought to you this week by Bombas, New Relic, and Memberful.

00:00:18 ◼   ► I'm Jason Snell, and I don't usually read the introduction of Upgrade because Myke Hurley does it.

00:00:22 ◼   ► Myke is in transit, he is caught between the moon and New York City.

00:00:26 ◼   ► Actually, he's caught between Memphis and London.

00:00:30 ◼   ► It's Arthur who's caught between the moon and New York City.

00:00:32 ◼   ► Anyway, old reference lost on younger listeners.

00:00:34 ◼   ► I brought in John Siracusa to join me because he's not on enough podcasts, I thought, and

00:00:40 ◼   ► this is a big week for MaxStop.

00:00:42 ◼   ► So John is our special guest co-host this week.

00:00:46 ◼   ► John, hello.

00:00:47 ◼   ► Yeah, you brought me on to be the co-host and also to be able to hear that song in my

00:00:51 ◼   ► head as soon as you made the reference.

00:00:52 ◼   ► I know.

00:00:53 ◼   ► I know it's crazy, but it's true.

00:00:55 ◼   ► something like Christopher Cross. It's yacht rock, people. It used to be just uncool music

00:01:00 ◼   ► back when it came out, but now it's yacht rock, and my daughter likes it because there's

00:01:05 ◼   ► just a little bit of irony, but the irony breaks down and then you're just listening

00:01:09 ◼   ► to soft, easy listening rock from the 70s and 80s. It's powerful what labels can do.

00:01:16 ◼   ► They can take that unusable old soft rock and you slap a label that says "yacht rock"

00:01:23 ◼   ► it and people are like what I like yachts let's do this it's amazing. It's a 20-year cycle of

00:01:27 ◼   ► nostalgia because that was like from the 80s and the 80s or 20 years ago makes perfect sense. Yeah

00:01:31 ◼   ► it yeah 20 years you drop a decade like Merlin says perfect or two it's perfect I had the

00:01:38 ◼   ► shocking realization that we're coming up to the 30th anniversary of my college graduation

00:01:42 ◼   ► oh man no just no but that's okay we're also coming up to my daughter's college graduation

00:01:50 ◼   ► in a year so I guess it all worked out. Let's do a #SNELtalk question even though

00:01:58 ◼   ► Myke's not here to ask it. I thought this was a almost like a little miniature robot or not,

00:02:03 ◼   ► a podcast that Jon and I do together that's every other Monday on the Incomparable. You should check

00:02:07 ◼   ► it out. It's not just about robots. It's about all sorts of stuff. It's fun. The last batch was

00:02:12 ◼   ► really good, I thought. I mean like they're all good but the last batch was kind of going into

00:02:18 ◼   ► to unexpected areas and they were all a little longer.

00:02:21 ◼   ► It was a lot of fun.

00:02:21 ◼   ► Anyway, Jon, this question comes from listener Andrew

00:02:24 ◼   ► who says, "Do you pronounce it Reed receipts

00:02:26 ◼   ► or Red receipts?"

00:02:27 ◼   ► - Do I?

00:02:30 ◼   ► Is this, this thing is phrased as, do you pronounce it?

00:02:34 ◼   ► Not asking how should it be pronounced

00:02:36 ◼   ► or what is the proper pronunciation

00:02:37 ◼   ► or what is the correct pronunciation.

00:02:39 ◼   ► Yeah, we have a stupid language where we've got words

00:02:42 ◼   ► that not only sound the same

00:02:44 ◼   ► but sometimes they're also spelled the same.

00:02:45 ◼   ► Is there a word for that?

00:02:46 ◼   ► Words that are, you know, homonyms sound the same, right?

00:02:48 ◼   ► - Yeah. - Symptoms mean the same,

00:02:49 ◼   ► but what about when they're spelled the same

00:02:53 ◼   ► and sound the same, but mean different?

00:02:54 ◼   ► That seems like there should be a third word for that.

00:02:56 ◼   ► There probably is.

00:02:57 ◼   ► - Right, like lead and led is a good example,

00:03:00 ◼   ► where there's L-E-A-D can be lead or led,

00:03:02 ◼   ► but led like the element,

00:03:04 ◼   ► not led like the other form of lead, which would be L-E-D.

00:03:08 ◼   ► - Yep.

00:03:09 ◼   ► - Although people sometimes spell it L-E-A-D,

00:03:11 ◼   ► but it's, yeah, I'm sure that there's, are those homophones?

00:03:14 ◼   ► I don't think they are.

00:03:15 ◼   ► their identical spellings with different pronunciations?

00:03:18 ◼   ► - Anyway, in this case, what I say most often

00:03:24 ◼   ► when I have occasion to speak this out loud to someone,

00:03:27 ◼   ► usually when telling them about settings on their iPhone,

00:03:30 ◼   ► I think I generally go with the path

00:03:33 ◼   ► of least tongue resistance,

00:03:35 ◼   ► which is to use the long E in both words

00:03:38 ◼   ► and say read receipts,

00:03:39 ◼   ► because read receipts is a little bit rural juror,

00:03:42 ◼   ► you know what I mean?

00:03:43 ◼   ► Like just slightly different E sound

00:03:44 ◼   ► with two words that both start with R right next to each other, but I also think that

00:03:48 ◼   ► I flip-flop on that depending on my mood or, you know, who I'm talking to or whatever.

00:03:54 ◼   ► So I think I'm all over the map, but read receipts, which makes less sense than read

00:03:59 ◼   ► receipts, I acknowledge that, but I think someone would have to sort of, you know, go

00:04:03 ◼   ► into some sort of investigation to figure out who was the first person to use this term

00:04:08 ◼   ► and can we find anyone who's still alive who remembers what they intended it to say back

00:04:13 ◼   ► - Correct. - And then,

00:04:14 ◼   ► not that that matters that much,

00:04:15 ◼   ► but at least then you'd say it was originally this,

00:04:17 ◼   ► but I think it's all over the place now.

00:04:20 ◼   ► I think there is no consensus,

00:04:22 ◼   ► and I think it would be a pretty tight race

00:04:24 ◼   ► if you sort of surveyed the entire planet about this.

00:04:27 ◼   ► - I, by the way, I think, believe it or not,

00:04:30 ◼   ► the old school word homonym,

00:04:31 ◼   ► which we were all taught as kids,

00:04:33 ◼   ► and then they said, "No, no, it's homophone."

00:04:34 ◼   ► It sounds like homophone is the word sound the same.

00:04:37 ◼   ► There's homograph, which is that they're spelled the same,

00:04:40 ◼   ► but they're different, and then homonym,

00:04:42 ◼   ► it seems probably means that they differ

00:04:46 ◼   ► in pronunciation and meaning,

00:04:47 ◼   ► even though that they're spelled the same,

00:04:48 ◼   ► which is what this is.

00:04:49 ◼   ► I say read receipts too.

00:04:51 ◼   ► - No, I said read receipts. - I mean, read receipts.

00:04:54 ◼   ► I don't say, see, no, it's confused me now.

00:04:57 ◼   ► I call it read receipts because the idea is

00:05:01 ◼   ► it is a receipt of if it was read-

00:05:05 ◼   ► - Did Jason read this? - Oh, God.

00:05:07 ◼   ► - I get a receipt for when Jason, did Jason read this?

00:05:10 ◼   ► Then I get the answer.

00:05:11 ◼   ► -You got to be in the right tense.

00:05:13 ◼   ► Otherwise, it is broken 'cause it's "Has Jason read this?"

00:05:16 ◼   ► But that's not how -- It's a reading status.

00:05:20 ◼   ► And so that's why I pronounce it as "read receipts,"

00:05:22 ◼   ► is 'cause it's a reading status.

00:05:24 ◼   ► -But "read receipts" makes more sense

00:05:26 ◼   ► because it's a receipt about whether something has been read.

00:05:29 ◼   ► -Which means it's in past tense.

00:05:30 ◼   ► -Yeah. -But I don't say that.

00:05:33 ◼   ► I feel it, but I don't say it.

00:05:37 ◼   ► -The point is, the setting should be off.

00:05:39 ◼   ► -Mine's on, by the way. Mine's on.

00:05:41 ◼   ► - That's madness.

00:05:42 ◼   ► - Mm-hmm.

00:05:43 ◼   ► - You're giving too much of yourself.

00:05:45 ◼   ► - So thank you to Andrew.

00:05:46 ◼   ► If you will have a Snell Talk question,

00:05:48 ◼   ► just, I don't know how, Myke tells you how.

00:05:51 ◼   ► It's #SnellTalk on Twitter,

00:05:52 ◼   ► and I think it's question mark Snell Talk

00:05:54 ◼   ► in the Relay FM Discord.

00:05:56 ◼   ► - Just send email to robot@incompetent.com.

00:05:57 ◼   ► - Whisper into a coconut and throw it in the ocean,

00:06:00 ◼   ► and the birds will find it and whisper it in my ear.

00:06:03 ◼   ► That's how it works, something like that.

00:06:04 ◼   ► I've got some follow-up.

00:06:06 ◼   ► I know you like follow-up on podcasts, Jon.

00:06:08 ◼   ► - Mm-hmm.

00:06:08 ◼   ► - I do too.

00:06:09 ◼   ► That's why we do it on this show.

00:06:11 ◼   ► 'Cause I hosted the "Incomparable"

00:06:14 ◼   ► for like many hundreds of episodes

00:06:16 ◼   ► and realized I could never have follow-up on it,

00:06:18 ◼   ► but I can have follow-up here.

00:06:19 ◼   ► - In the "Incomparable," you have full follow-up episodes.

00:06:22 ◼   ► - Well, that's the only way to do it though.

00:06:24 ◼   ► But you can't have like a letter commenting

00:06:25 ◼   ► on the previous week

00:06:26 ◼   ► 'cause things get recorded out of sequence.

00:06:28 ◼   ► - There's no continuity.

00:06:29 ◼   ► - The same people aren't on every week.

00:06:31 ◼   ► But we can follow up, yeah, whole episodes, in fact.

00:06:33 ◼   ► Especially if I have forgotten that we already did it.

00:06:35 ◼   ► 'Cause after 600 episodes, that's really easy to do.

00:06:38 ◼   ► I want to go back to what we've been calling the rumor roundup, just like little bits here

00:06:42 ◼   ► and there.

00:06:44 ◼   ► Things Bing Qiquo has been reporting about.

00:06:46 ◼   ► He's on Twitter now about what's coming up.

00:06:51 ◼   ► And there was a report recently that said the base model iPhones for this fall, the

00:06:56 ◼   ► iPhone 14, the base models will just have the A15 again.

00:07:00 ◼   ► That only the iPhone Pro models will get the A16 and they'll keep the A15 in the lower

00:07:06 ◼   ► and models, which I read this and I thought, or read this, I don't know, and thought this

00:07:14 ◼   ► actually kind of makes sense and that if they were going to do this eventually, they need

00:07:18 ◼   ► to pick a year where they hold one of the phones steady and then after that they can

00:07:23 ◼   ► keep them in lockstep again. So this doesn't sound that surprising to me that they would

00:07:27 ◼   ► do that and that they would create more differentiation between the iPhone, it sounds like it's going

00:07:33 ◼   ► to be iPhone 14 and 14 Max and then 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max and then the mini is

00:07:39 ◼   ► gonna is gonna become... It's a good thing Apple hasn't confused any of their

00:07:43 ◼   ► naming by introducing any other new products that use the Pro and Max

00:07:46 ◼   ► suffixes in a totally different way. iPhone Ultra coming soon I guess. So what

00:07:53 ◼   ► do you think about about splitting the iPhones this way? I mean it's kind of a

00:07:57 ◼   ► bummer that they didn't make this decision before they shipped a bunch of

00:08:01 ◼   ► years of phones where the pro and non pros have the same system on chip in them because

00:08:08 ◼   ► you know from a consumer's perspective for the most part this is a downgrade from what

00:08:12 ◼   ► we have now it's been exciting these past few years to say you don't need to get an

00:08:17 ◼   ► iPhone pro and sue just get the regular iPhone 12 or just get the regular iPhone 13 don't

00:08:24 ◼   ► worry it's got the same system on a chip it's fine the parts that are missing are parts

00:08:28 ◼   ► you don't care about, right?

00:08:30 ◼   ► It just made the decision so much easier.

00:08:33 ◼   ► And not just because people are like, "Oh, why do people need a faster thing?" or whatever.

00:08:36 ◼   ► It's also that depending on the year, there also could be things that people do care about,

00:08:40 ◼   ► like battery life benefits to being built on a smaller processor or whatever.

00:08:44 ◼   ► So when the iPhone chip steps up to 3nm or whatever it's going to be, the old one will

00:08:49 ◼   ► still be on 5, that will take more power, as in battery power, and that is a thing that

00:08:54 ◼   ► regular people actually do care about.

00:08:56 ◼   ► Makes perfect sense.

00:08:57 ◼   ► Pros should have more better stuff than the non-pros,

00:08:59 ◼   ► but we had several years where that wasn't the case,

00:09:01 ◼   ► and now they're sort of taking that away.

00:09:03 ◼   ► So there'll be a little bit of a,

00:09:04 ◼   ► aw, bummer, it was cool the way it was feeling.

00:09:07 ◼   ► But then once they settle into it and people forget,

00:09:09 ◼   ► it'll be fine.

00:09:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, I agree.

00:09:12 ◼   ► And also just as a side note,

00:09:14 ◼   ► as somebody who bought an iPhone 13 mini,

00:09:16 ◼   ► I'm gonna be like, great.

00:09:18 ◼   ► Like, I'm not gonna be,

00:09:20 ◼   ► even though there will be an A15,

00:09:22 ◼   ► I won't feel quite as out of the loop

00:09:24 ◼   ► because the lower end phones

00:09:26 ◼   ► will still have the same processing power,

00:09:28 ◼   ► presumably as the iPhone 13 mini that I have.

00:09:31 ◼   ► So that makes me feel less bad about the mini

00:09:33 ◼   ► not getting an update.

00:09:34 ◼   ► 95 Mac says that Apple has no plans to release a bigger iMac,

00:09:40 ◼   ► that they talk to their sources and they say,

00:09:42 ◼   ► "No current plans."

00:09:43 ◼   ► Now plans change, and it feels like the plans

00:09:45 ◼   ► on larger iMac maybe have changed.

00:09:48 ◼   ► And I'm really unclear, talking about Ming-Chi Kuo,

00:09:52 ◼   ► he said something also on Twitter about a lot of products

00:09:55 ◼   ► that we might have thought would have been happening this year

00:09:58 ◼   ► or not going to happen this year, which is interesting.

00:10:02 ◼   ► Not entirely surprising,

00:10:03 ◼   ► but in the "get used to disappointment" category,

00:10:06 ◼   ► for those who are like, "Oh, yeah,

00:10:08 ◼   ► there's a bigger iMac coming," 9 to 5 Mac sources,

00:10:11 ◼   ► anyway, say they are not currently planning

00:10:15 ◼   ► to release a bigger iMac.

00:10:17 ◼   ► -Yep, that's what I heard, as well.

00:10:19 ◼   ► I mean, you know, here's the thing with Apple.

00:10:22 ◼   ► As very recent history has shown,

00:10:25 ◼   ► what people want Apple to produce,

00:10:27 ◼   ► especially in the Mac line,

00:10:28 ◼   ► and what Apple actually does produce,

00:10:29 ◼   ► don't necessarily have to overlap as much as you might hope.

00:10:32 ◼   ► In fact, they can go many, many years

00:10:34 ◼   ► not making a bunch of products

00:10:35 ◼   ► that many of their customers say that they want.

00:10:37 ◼   ► I think that's bad for Apple to do that,

00:10:40 ◼   ► but in the end, what actually happens is,

00:10:42 ◼   ► well, people grumble and they buy

00:10:43 ◼   ► whatever it is that Apple offers.

00:10:44 ◼   ► So if Apple stops making a 27-inch iMac,

00:10:47 ◼   ► people won't buy it because it doesn't exist,

00:10:49 ◼   ► and they will choose one of the other Macs to go with.

00:10:52 ◼   ► Just like when Apple didn't offer the kinds of machines that people wanted they just chose from what was available and grumbled a little bit

00:10:58 ◼   ► So in many respects it was like inelastic demand or whatever like it doesn't matter that much what Apple does in the end people will

00:11:04 ◼   ► Buy what is offered as long as it is reasonable

00:11:06 ◼   ► But I'm not sure

00:11:09 ◼   ► If this is one of those cases where popular sentiment will just kind of like fester where people feel

00:11:14 ◼   ► Kind of bad as I said an ATP

00:11:17 ◼   ► They sold a lot of 27 inch IMAX and the reason I sold a lot of them like not

00:11:21 ◼   ► Relatively speaking because most of the things they sell are like, you know, 80 90 percent laptops

00:11:25 ◼   ► but the 27 inch IMAX has been a product in their line up for many many years and those machines tend to last a really

00:11:30 ◼   ► Long time because they're good right you can use them for years and years your regular person can use a 5k

00:11:35 ◼   ► IMAX, you know for five ten years easy

00:11:38 ◼   ► That's a lot of computers that are out there in the world and at some point

00:11:42 ◼   ► Those are gonna get old or break or they're gonna want a new one and it's gonna be weird for those people to go

00:11:47 ◼   ► to a store the people who bought and enjoyed a 27-inch iMac and

00:11:51 ◼   ► Realized that they have a weird uncomfortable choice to make where they can't just get me a better version of the thing I had

00:11:56 ◼   ► Which is something they've been able to do for a long time, especially if it's you know, the 5k iMac has been around what for?

00:12:01 ◼   ► Almost 10 years now close to it

00:12:03 ◼   ► Yeah, it was

00:12:06 ◼   ► 2014 I want to say yeah and in between there maybe maybe someone bought an original one and then it got a bunch of years

00:12:13 ◼   ► Old and they got a new one and I got a bunch of years old and they're gonna go on and they're gonna be like

00:12:15 ◼   ► Oh, there is no one for me to get that's like this and they're gonna have to make a different choice

00:12:19 ◼   ► Not necessarily a bad thing, but that is kind of

00:12:22 ◼   ► you know

00:12:25 ◼   ► Apple's done as many times where you can't get a computer

00:12:27 ◼   ► That's just like the one you had only a little better you have to make a different choice now

00:12:30 ◼   ► You had to make different trade-offs the computer, you know

00:12:32 ◼   ► where's my mother went through it when she was so used to getting laptops with optical drives and

00:12:36 ◼   ► Eventually, she got to the point where her laptop with an article drive was really old

00:12:40 ◼   ► She went to get a new one went into the Apple Store

00:12:42 ◼   ► None of them had optical drives not that I'm saying this is the same thing in terms of Apple drives going obsolete

00:12:46 ◼   ► But like that sort of comfort level

00:12:49 ◼   ► Where you can just go into the store every X number of years and get the newest version of your whatever

00:12:54 ◼   ► That you feel comfortable with that changes over time

00:12:57 ◼   ► It remains to be seen is the 27-inch iMac like the optical drive where it's like oh people grumble

00:13:03 ◼   ► But we've all moved on or is it like let's say the laptop with an SD card slot

00:13:07 ◼   ► where people grumble and they don't stop grumbling and they literally never stop grumbling and

00:13:12 ◼   ► then eventually Apple slips into the computer with a laptop with an SD card slot on it and

00:13:16 ◼   ► an HDMI port.

00:13:17 ◼   ► I have some feelings about where the iMac product line has gone in the last 15 years

00:13:23 ◼   ► that I want to talk about in a little bit, but I will say here that I believe that Apple

00:13:28 ◼   ► will release a larger iMac and I know you made this case on ATP that they will do it

00:13:32 ◼   ► at some point.

00:13:33 ◼   ► I'm not convinced that Apple is going to release an iMac Pro or anything like that, but making

00:13:39 ◼   ► a version of, think of it this way, of the 24-inch iMac with a larger screen, maybe with

00:13:45 ◼   ► the panel that's in the studio display and has been in the 5K iMac, and having it still

00:13:51 ◼   ► be based on whatever processor is in the 24-inch iMac at that point, an M1, M2, whatever, as

00:13:58 ◼   ► essentially the same iMac just with a bigger screen.

00:14:02 ◼   ► I feel like that is almost inevitable

00:14:05 ◼   ► because the panel's there, it's a nice experience,

00:14:09 ◼   ► people are used to it.

00:14:10 ◼   ► And I think it's a different argument to say,

00:14:13 ◼   ► Apple is gonna make a high-end iMac that's for pros.

00:14:17 ◼   ► Because I think you can look at this past week and say,

00:14:20 ◼   ► they make other products to do that

00:14:24 ◼   ► and they don't necessarily want that to be the case.

00:14:27 ◼   ► but I don't think that that's required to have

00:14:30 ◼   ► just a bigger iMac for people to use.

00:14:33 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I was, as I've said in ATP,

00:14:36 ◼   ► worst case scenario, even if Apple never makes that decision

00:14:39 ◼   ► and they just stick to their guns in this thing,

00:14:41 ◼   ► eventually the 24-inch iMac will not be 24 inches anymore.

00:14:44 ◼   ► Screens get bigger over time.

00:14:46 ◼   ► We are not yet at the practical limit.

00:14:48 ◼   ► It was 21.5 inches for many, many years.

00:14:50 ◼   ► Then it became 24 inches.

00:14:52 ◼   ► Several years in the future,

00:14:54 ◼   ► that machine will be replaced by a 27 inch version of itself,

00:14:58 ◼   ► simply because 27 inches still within the realm of reason

00:15:00 ◼   ► for a home computer.

00:15:01 ◼   ► It's only a little bit bigger than 24.

00:15:03 ◼   ► And in general, if you're buying an iMac,

00:15:06 ◼   ► you're doing that because you want a bigger screen

00:15:09 ◼   ► than a laptop can offer and you want an all-in-one.

00:15:12 ◼   ► So that'll happen eventually too.

00:15:13 ◼   ► But like whether we get a 27 inch iMac in three years

00:15:18 ◼   ► or in seven makes a big difference to the people

00:15:21 ◼   ► who may be pining for that machine.

00:15:23 ◼   ► but hey, we waited a really long time for laptops

00:15:25 ◼   ► with keyboards that work and the port's something we wanted.

00:15:27 ◼   ► So I guess we Apple customers are used to waiting sometimes.

00:15:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, it just doesn't seem like a huge deviation

00:15:33 ◼   ► from Apple's strategy to say everybody loved the 24.

00:15:36 ◼   ► I mean, this is sort of my prediction

00:15:38 ◼   ► is that they're already,

00:15:38 ◼   ► they actually are already working on it

00:15:40 ◼   ► and it's just gonna be the 24-inch iMac

00:15:42 ◼   ► with a second version that's a little bit larger.

00:15:44 ◼   ► And it's like, people like it,

00:15:45 ◼   ► here's a little bigger one if you want it, that's it.

00:15:48 ◼   ► Like, it's not a thing.

00:15:49 ◼   ► It's not a big major shift in their strategy.

00:15:53 ◼   ► It's really just like we made two sizes of the one iMac.

00:15:57 ◼   ► That's it.

00:15:58 ◼   ► One more piece of follow-up,

00:16:01 ◼   ► which is the baseball,

00:16:03 ◼   ► Major League Baseball ended its lockout.

00:16:05 ◼   ► The players are in camp.

00:16:06 ◼   ► They're gonna start the season.

00:16:07 ◼   ► It's gonna start a little bit late.

00:16:09 ◼   ► They have to add some games to the end of the season

00:16:11 ◼   ► and in the middle of the season,

00:16:12 ◼   ► but they're gonna play them all.

00:16:13 ◼   ► And that means for the purposes of this show,

00:16:15 ◼   ► that Apple TV+'s Friday Night Baseball

00:16:18 ◼   ► is indeed now coming in April.

00:16:21 ◼   ► I wrote a post last week on Six Colors, all about it.

00:16:24 ◼   ► I went into a bunch of detail about this.

00:16:26 ◼   ► Last week on, as a matter of follow-up,

00:16:29 ◼   ► on this show, right after the Apple event,

00:16:31 ◼   ► so we're trying to process all that information,

00:16:33 ◼   ► I said I thought, I mentioned ESPN had packages

00:16:36 ◼   ► that they were losing.

00:16:38 ◼   ► This is a new package.

00:16:39 ◼   ► This is not what ESPN left on the table.

00:16:43 ◼   ► I believe Peacock, owned by NBCUniversal,

00:16:46 ◼   ► is picking up the ESPN package,

00:16:47 ◼   ► which is for national games on Mondays and Wednesdays,

00:16:50 ◼   ► I think, and Apple's doing Fridays.

00:16:52 ◼   ► And my understanding is that Peacock deal

00:16:55 ◼   ► is for exclusivity as well.

00:16:59 ◼   ► And I know you sent me a note from a friend of yours

00:17:03 ◼   ► about why these deals are difficult for fans.

00:17:08 ◼   ► And I agree with it.

00:17:09 ◼   ► And I included some of that in my post on Six Colors,

00:17:12 ◼   ► the idea that you're used to your team

00:17:18 ◼   ► on your team's channel, basically.

00:17:21 ◼   ► And some teams have a cable channel

00:17:23 ◼   ► or they've got cable and some broadcast,

00:17:25 ◼   ► but you're used to seeing it there

00:17:26 ◼   ► and seeing every game, basically.

00:17:28 ◼   ► And in recent years, there have been occasional

00:17:32 ◼   ► national exclusivity windows.

00:17:35 ◼   ► ESPN Sunday Night Baseball is one of them.

00:17:37 ◼   ► Fox had some exclusivity on Saturdays.

00:17:41 ◼   ► But the big one is Facebook, yeah.

00:17:44 ◼   ► Facebook had a baseball game, like every week.

00:17:48 ◼   ► and you could only watch it on Facebook.

00:17:50 ◼   ► And so every local TV channel and radio channel

00:17:53 ◼   ► would have to be like, "We don't have the team tomorrow.

00:17:56 ◼   ► You'll need to watch that on Facebook.

00:17:58 ◼   ► Good luck."

00:18:00 ◼   ► And it's jarring for fans and it's upsetting.

00:18:03 ◼   ► And it totally is.

00:18:05 ◼   ► It sounds like there's gonna be more of that

00:18:08 ◼   ► that the Peacock deal does this too.

00:18:09 ◼   ► So there's just gonna be some games for fans of a team

00:18:12 ◼   ► during this season where the broadcasters are gonna say,

00:18:15 ◼   ► "Tomorrow you can't see it on our channel."

00:18:18 ◼   ► because it'll only be on whether it's Peacock or Apple TV Plus.

00:18:22 ◼   ► Now, the thing that I said to you,

00:18:23 ◼   ► 'cause your friend said, you know,

00:18:27 ◼   ► baseball, that's the rhythms of the game,

00:18:29 ◼   ► and you know the broadcasters and all of those things.

00:18:31 ◼   ► - It was more than that.

00:18:33 ◼   ► Obviously, it was the things you just said of like,

00:18:34 ◼   ► this is the place that I'm used to watching it,

00:18:36 ◼   ► and it's a local thing or whatever,

00:18:37 ◼   ► and the next level is, oh, the people who call the game

00:18:40 ◼   ► are the people who I like to call the game.

00:18:42 ◼   ► But I think we sort of, and that's just like, well,

00:18:44 ◼   ► people who call the games,

00:18:45 ◼   ► regardless of what deals people do,

00:18:46 ◼   ► People, you know get old retire die like that changes over time as well

00:18:50 ◼   ► Although, you know baseball announcers may have very long careers, but the the sort of categorical thing that my friend brought up was like

00:18:56 ◼   ► He's he's used to and prefers

00:18:59 ◼   ► watching a game where the people calling it are

00:19:03 ◼   ► Unabashedly 100% biased in favor of his home team, right?

00:19:07 ◼   ► Right that they are rooting for the Red Sox to win and that's the experience he prefers and you're

00:19:14 ◼   ► regardless of who retires and who calls what and who does what you're not going to get that in a national

00:19:18 ◼   ► broadcast because they can't have the announcers being 100% one-sided towards one of the two teams

00:19:24 ◼   ► That's not how a national broadcast works. In fact, they can't they aren't going to be biased against either

00:19:28 ◼   ► And in fact, they're going to explain lots of things that the fans of those teams already know because they're going to be trying to reach

00:19:33 ◼   ► This third audience, which is this theoretical

00:19:36 ◼   ► I think there's a question of who that audience is and if they really exist but theoretically there's also an audience who is just tuning

00:19:42 ◼   ► in to see a baseball game between two random teams and wants to learn about those teams.

00:19:47 ◼   ► And so they have to tell anecdotes that the fans of the teams have heard a million times

00:19:51 ◼   ► and they're telling it wrong. And I think that's absolutely true. One of the things

00:19:55 ◼   ► that your email brought to mind for me and I, we don't know exactly how this is going

00:20:00 ◼   ► to go. Major League Baseball is producing this for Apple. Apple's not hiring announcers,

00:20:04 ◼   ► right? Major League Baseball, part of the money that Apple is paying to Major League

00:20:08 ◼   ► baseball involves Major League Baseball producing these games for Apple. By the

00:20:12 ◼   ► way, it's $85 million a year over seven years, although Apple has opt-outs after

00:20:17 ◼   ► year one and two in case this is a flop. But they are saying that we're gonna pay

00:20:21 ◼   ► you over seven years almost $600 million. One of the things Major League

00:20:25 ◼   ► Baseball is going to do is produce the games for Apple. Now, my initial thought

00:20:29 ◼   ► when you showed me what your friend had said was, "Would it be clever for Apple to

00:20:37 ◼   ► do something like offer the ability to switch to your home team's radio broadcast if you

00:20:44 ◼   ► really want to hear your home team announcers who all who really just want your team to

00:20:49 ◼   ► win in Red Sox country apparently just for details not I asked my friend about that he

00:20:54 ◼   ► said well the guy who does the Red Sox radio calls around here is like super famous and

00:20:58 ◼   ► no way to dislodge him and he's different from the TV people there's no way there's

00:21:03 ◼   ► no way that you know there's so much so many entrenched traditions that no you can't get

00:21:07 ◼   ► those guys on the radio because the radio is taken.

00:21:08 ◼   ► - This is the bottom line that I think is fascinating is,

00:21:11 ◼   ► is the, so maybe they'll do that.

00:21:14 ◼   ► And somebody asked me interactivity, like, will they,

00:21:17 ◼   ► will they do, since it's a Apple TV+ only broadcast,

00:21:21 ◼   ► could they do interactivity?

00:21:22 ◼   ► There's questions about what the ad breaks will be.

00:21:24 ◼   ► Will they go back to like the,

00:21:25 ◼   ► the highlight desk and show highlights of other games?

00:21:28 ◼   ► Are they going to have, you know,

00:21:29 ◼   ► rolling ads for Apple TV+?

00:21:31 ◼   ► I don't think they're going to sell commercials,

00:21:33 ◼   ► but they have to do something because quite frankly,

00:21:35 ◼   ► If nothing else, the announcers have to be able to go to the bathroom from time to time.

00:21:39 ◼   ► So there's lots of questions about that.

00:21:42 ◼   ► And we don't know how they're going to handle any of this.

00:21:45 ◼   ► But the exclusivity thing in broad strokes, I think, is a frustration.

00:21:50 ◼   ► I get why Apple wants to do it.

00:21:53 ◼   ► I get why Peacock wants to do it.

00:21:55 ◼   ► Fans are going to be irate.

00:21:57 ◼   ► As every broadcast of a team comes up where their team is not on the local TV because

00:22:04 ◼   ► it's on Apple TV+, fans will be irate. Not just because they have to pay for Apple to

00:22:09 ◼   ► see their show, to see their game, but because it won't be the same, because it won't be

00:22:13 ◼   ► their announcers and it won't be the thing that they're used to. I understand the reason

00:22:18 ◼   ► why they do the exclusivity thing, because they kind of think, well, the primary audience

00:22:23 ◼   ► for this thing is going to be people who are fans of those teams that are playing. And

00:22:27 ◼   ► so we really don't want them to be able to seek it out on cable. We want them to have

00:22:32 ◼   ► to go see it. At the same time, I'm kind of sympathetic as a fan of a team. I am sympathetic

00:22:38 ◼   ► to the idea that you end up watching this game and it's like, "This isn't the same.

00:22:42 ◼   ► I don't like it. This is not how I prefer to watch my baseball team. And why don't you

00:22:46 ◼   ► just let me watch my broadcast locally and the rest of the world can get your Apple TV

00:22:53 ◼   ► broadcast?" But they didn't pay for that. They paid for exclusivity. And so we're entering

00:22:59 ◼   ► a period, after being in a period for a few decades where basically every game is on TV,

00:23:05 ◼   ► on your local cable or broadcast, now we're entering a period where there's a bunch of

00:23:09 ◼   ► streaming games that are just not going to be available.

00:23:11 ◼   ► Yeah, that's Major League Baseball selling the fans to another company to make money.

00:23:17 ◼   ► That's kind of the way this works.

00:23:19 ◼   ► This happens. My local team, so the Golden State Warriors or the NBA, I don't have on

00:23:26 ◼   ► On my over-the-top TV service, Fupo, I don't have any of the Turner channels, so I don't

00:23:30 ◼   ► have TNT, which has NBA games, national NBA games.

00:23:34 ◼   ► And so there are games that the Warriors play that are just not on for me.

00:23:40 ◼   ► They're playing, but I can't see it because there's a national exclusivity window.

00:23:46 ◼   ► And like I said, Sunday Night Baseball has been like that for a long time, but I think

00:23:50 ◼   ► your friend would probably complain about Sunday Night Baseball, especially since he's

00:23:53 ◼   ► a Red Sox fan, and ESPN takes the Yankees and the Red Sox and puts them on Sunday Night

00:23:58 ◼   ► Baseball practically every week. So you're losing a lot of games where you'd really rather

00:24:03 ◼   ► just be watching Dennis Eckersley and Dave O'Brien, whoever the announcers are for the

00:24:09 ◼   ► Red Sox. Don't ask me. I just pulled it out of my hat there. Anyway, it'll be interesting

00:24:15 ◼   ► to see, but everybody get ready, because starting April 7th or whatever it is, I guess April

00:24:21 ◼   ► 8th, people will be complaining about Apple stealing their home team's baseball games

00:24:26 ◼   ► away. It will happen, guaranteed. Be like, "What do you mean, Apple TV?" We'll see.

00:24:31 ◼   ► Alright, I want to talk about the Mac a lot because nobody cares about the Mac but us,

00:24:36 ◼   ► but we do care, Jon. That's a reference. But first, let me tell you about our first

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00:26:10 ◼   ► quoted extensively on The Verge today by me because I wrote an article about the X-Mac.

00:26:22 ◼   ► And Nili Patel, who runs The Verge, basically DM'd me and said, "Would you like to write

00:26:28 ◼   ► an article about the X-Mac now that the Mac Studio has been announced?" You want to tell

00:26:33 ◼   ► people a little bit about what the X-Mac is?

00:26:35 ◼   ► - What did you reply to Nili and say, "What the heck is the X-Mac?"

00:26:38 ◼   ► - Oh no, I know.

00:26:39 ◼   ► He actually said the mythical mid range Mac mini tower.

00:26:41 ◼   ► And I was like, oh yeah, I know.

00:26:43 ◼   ► 'Cause I think he has memories of all of those articles

00:26:45 ◼   ► that Dan Frakes and Rob Griffiths used to write about.

00:26:47 ◼   ► The MMMM.

00:26:50 ◼   ► - Yeah, so the X Mac, the term X Mac is, you know,

00:26:54 ◼   ► has its origin as far as I've been able to determine

00:26:57 ◼   ► in an Ars Technica forum stuff from ages ago

00:26:59 ◼   ► in the early 2000s.

00:27:01 ◼   ► But the idea, setting aside the name,

00:27:03 ◼   ► the idea is very common.

00:27:04 ◼   ► And Apple sort of created the idea

00:27:06 ◼   ► by choosing to sell Macs with, you know, with no product in this category. So they sold big, fancy,

00:27:15 ◼   ► super big, super expensive, professional, giant Macs of various kinds from years. And they sold,

00:27:22 ◼   ► you know, consumer models that were smaller, less powerful, more limited. And they never really sold

00:27:30 ◼   ► a thing that sort of tech enthusiasts wanted. You know, Ars Technica is the — I forgot the tagline

00:27:34 ◼   ► It's the PC enthusiast resource or something like tech nerds what tech nerds want is they want all the whizzy things

00:27:40 ◼   ► You know the best of everything they can get but they also

00:27:42 ◼   ► Don't want to or can't pay the thousands and thousands of dollars for the super duper high-end professional things

00:27:49 ◼   ► And that's you know in the PC market. There's lots of as a big part of the PC market

00:27:55 ◼   ► That's like this like say you're building a gaming PC. You're not going to build a

00:28:00 ◼   ► $10,000 gaming PC you could if you wanted to but people are buying gaming PCs what they want is to be able to say all right

00:28:06 ◼   ► Here's what's important to me big GPU. So I'm gonna you know get the best GPU I can get

00:28:11 ◼   ► That's gonna be a big part of the price of my computer and then any of the fastest CPU and you know for the fastest

00:28:16 ◼   ► CPU for gaming specifically I need this amount of RAM and this SSD and I want this size case and

00:28:21 ◼   ► That's all that matters to me, right?

00:28:23 ◼   ► And if their only choice was well if you want those things that you listed you have to pay

00:28:29 ◼   ► $10,000 for a computer the size of a car because that's the only one we make that has those things

00:28:34 ◼   ► It's like well, I don't need 12 PCI slots and I don't need you know afterburner card. No, it's optional

00:28:39 ◼   ► But you know, I don't I don't need all these other things and I can't afford $10,000. Can't you just give me

00:28:43 ◼   ► What you said a quote-unquote?

00:28:45 ◼   ► Mid-range computer that has the good things that I want about it and that I can upgrade those pieces

00:28:50 ◼   ► But doesn't have all that other stuff. That's not important to me, right and

00:28:55 ◼   ► For you know, basically the entire life of the Mac Apple has never really made that computer

00:28:59 ◼   ► They that's not a consumer base

00:29:01 ◼   ► They were interested in sort of the hot I want to make a hot rod and I want to be able to wrench on it myself

00:29:06 ◼   ► Right. I want to be able to go in there and you know

00:29:09 ◼   ► Upgrade the parts that I care about and maybe swap in a new graphics card and you know, it's concentrates a lot on gamers

00:29:14 ◼   ► You know the X Mac is not particularly a gaming Mac

00:29:16 ◼   ► But a lot of people who are interested in gaming would want that type of thing

00:29:20 ◼   ► I was like I need power, but I just needed in these areas. I don't need ultimate expandability

00:29:24 ◼   ► And Apple, you know, as time went on, Apple seemed to get farther and farther away from

00:29:31 ◼   ► making that.

00:29:32 ◼   ► As you noted in your article, there was a time when Apple made desktop computers that

00:29:36 ◼   ► were not the biggest and baddest, but that was from a time when desktop computers were

00:29:40 ◼   ► sort of the prime kind of computer, right?

00:29:43 ◼   ► You know, especially like before the PowerBook or whatever, you'd had a Mac 2 and a Mac 2

00:29:49 ◼   ► and a Mac 2 FX and they looked exactly the same, but the 2 FX was the big bad one and

00:29:54 ◼   ► the 2 and the 2X were the more limited ones and you had your 2 CI and 2 CX and they were

00:29:59 ◼   ► like well they're not as big as the as the 2 FX literally they're not as wide right they're

00:30:03 ◼   ► a little bit smaller and they're almost as good and you know and the reason they did

00:30:07 ◼   ► that was because everybody bought desktop computers it needed to be big enough to hold

00:30:10 ◼   ► the CRT so there was there was one size you know one limiting factor to his dimensions

00:30:15 ◼   ► but they sold a whole bunch of those.

00:30:16 ◼   ► And in the Power Mac era, what you ended up with was the good, better, best thing, right?

00:30:20 ◼   ► Where there were three Power Mac desktops, and there was the tower, which is sort of what you would think of as the Mac Pro today.

00:30:27 ◼   ► But there was also the pizza box, and then there was the one in the middle.

00:30:31 ◼   ► And the last—the way I pegged it was the last modular mid-range Mac desktop was probably the beige Power Mac G3 desktop.

00:30:44 ◼   ► There was a tower, but there was also this desktop configuration.

00:30:47 ◼   ► It was not all that, it was a little bit less.

00:30:51 ◼   ► And when Steve Jobs came back, one of the things he did was say, "There are way too

00:30:56 ◼   ► many Macs."

00:30:57 ◼   ► And he was right.

00:30:58 ◼   ► There were.

00:30:59 ◼   ► He was absolutely right.

00:31:00 ◼   ► There are way too many Macs, we're going to simplify.

00:31:03 ◼   ► But one of the ways they simplified was by making a single Pro Tower.

00:31:08 ◼   ► And then when they brought in another desktop, it was a single consumer desktop, and it was

00:31:13 ◼   ► the iMac. And people don't remember this now, but the iMac started as a low-end consumer

00:31:21 ◼   ► computer, right? It was not powerful. I remember the iRolls from everybody who was a power

00:31:26 ◼   ► user when the iMac came out. It was cool, and it was maybe going to save Apple, which

00:31:30 ◼   ► it did, but it was not a computer that a power user would want to use. And the thing is,

00:31:36 ◼   ► even when the Mac Mini got introduced in 2005, which I know your post was sort of from that,

00:31:40 ◼   ► in the wake of the Mac Mini, is this the mythical mid-range mini tower? Is this the X Mac?" And the

00:31:45 ◼   ► answer is, "No, not really." But Apple has just steadfastly said, "No, we've got these way over

00:31:54 ◼   ► here and this one way over here, and that's it," until last week, basically. So I think it's

00:32:02 ◼   ► interesting that they used to do this all the time, right? And that time passed, and that was

00:32:06 ◼   ► was when people bought desktops instead of laptops.

00:32:08 ◼   ► But still, that to me is the source of the grumbling

00:32:13 ◼   ► and the seeking of the X Mac,

00:32:15 ◼   ► the mythical mid range mini tower,

00:32:17 ◼   ► is that Apple sort of said,

00:32:19 ◼   ► "No, we're not gonna do that.

00:32:20 ◼   ► "We're gonna make a tower

00:32:22 ◼   ► "and then some other little desktops and that's it."

00:32:24 ◼   ► That's all you get.

00:32:26 ◼   ► - I think to keep in mind about the time

00:32:28 ◼   ► when they did make desktop computers kind of in the middle,

00:32:32 ◼   ► was that was back in the time when all Macs

00:32:34 ◼   ► were just horrendously, eye-bleedingly expensive.

00:32:36 ◼   ► Like if you translate them into today's dollars,

00:32:38 ◼   ► you would not believe how much 2CX cost with the monitor.

00:32:41 ◼   ► Like you just, it would cost as much as a car, right?

00:32:43 ◼   ► So, and most people don't remember that era

00:32:45 ◼   ► because they weren't Mac users.

00:32:47 ◼   ► And you're saying, wait a second, that's mid range?

00:32:49 ◼   ► It's like, well, in the grand scheme of things it is,

00:32:51 ◼   ► 'cause it didn't cost as much as a 2FX.

00:32:54 ◼   ► - The Power Mac 7100,

00:32:55 ◼   ► which was the first non-PizzaBox, non-Tower Power Mac,

00:33:00 ◼   ► that was, I had one on my desk at Mac user,

00:33:02 ◼   ► that was introduced at $2,650,

00:33:07 ◼   ► which in today's money is $4,600.

00:33:11 ◼   ► That was the mid range Mac of 1994.

00:33:15 ◼   ► - And that wasn't the good one, right?

00:33:17 ◼   ► The pizza box was the quote unquote cheap one.

00:33:19 ◼   ► And the good one was the 8,100.

00:33:21 ◼   ► - 8,100, yeah, the tower.

00:33:22 ◼   ► - And that was, for the power Macs, they kind of did that.

00:33:25 ◼   ► Pizza box was the low end,

00:33:26 ◼   ► and then you had the middle one,

00:33:27 ◼   ► and then you had the vertical one, which was more expensive.

00:33:31 ◼   ► But that was such, the reason that's not relevant

00:33:34 ◼   ► to most people's memories of X Mac is like,

00:33:36 ◼   ► well, nobody was buying Macs then

00:33:37 ◼   ► because they were all so expensive.

00:33:39 ◼   ► It's just when the Mac started,

00:33:40 ◼   ► like in particular in the age of the iMac.

00:33:42 ◼   ► The iMac, another thing about it, people don't remember

00:33:44 ◼   ► is that from the perspective of an Apple fan, it was cheap.

00:33:47 ◼   ► From the perspective of a regular person, it wasn't cheap

00:33:50 ◼   ► because everything from Apple was expensive.

00:33:52 ◼   ► But I remember being shocked at how little

00:33:54 ◼   ► they were charging for the iMac

00:33:56 ◼   ► in terms of historically,

00:33:57 ◼   ► what does Apple charge for new computers?

00:33:59 ◼   ► So, you know, it was like, imagine the Macintosh LC,

00:34:03 ◼   ► but so sexy that everybody wanted it, right?

00:34:06 ◼   ► It was cheap for Apple, cheap.

00:34:08 ◼   ► And so once- - $12.99 for them

00:34:11 ◼   ► in 1998 money.

00:34:14 ◼   ► - And so once they, once you started getting more people

00:34:17 ◼   ► into the Mac camp, then you started getting people saying,

00:34:19 ◼   ► "Well, I don't want the iMac,

00:34:20 ◼   ► 'cause obviously that's a silly thing

00:34:21 ◼   ► for consumers or whatever.

00:34:22 ◼   ► I can't afford the big fancy one,

00:34:24 ◼   ► but I do want one where I have the flexibility

00:34:27 ◼   ► to spec it the way I want,

00:34:29 ◼   ► and you know, didn't have graphics cards back then

00:34:31 ◼   ► to speak of, but upgraded the way I wanted.

00:34:33 ◼   ► And as time marched on, especially for the few eras where,

00:34:36 ◼   ► not so much the Power Macs,

00:34:40 ◼   ► because most of those towers,

00:34:41 ◼   ► even though they had good, better, best,

00:34:42 ◼   ► the good one was still pretty expensive.

00:34:44 ◼   ► But there were a couple of years there,

00:34:45 ◼   ► especially like, I forget what years,

00:34:47 ◼   ► maybe Marco said on ATP, like the 2006 Mac Pro or something,

00:34:50 ◼   ► where the entry-level Mac Pro was $1,800.

00:34:52 ◼   ► It was a brief moment in time where it's like,

00:34:56 ◼   ► well, how about this?

00:34:57 ◼   ► How about we still just make a monster computer that nobody can afford, but the very base

00:35:02 ◼   ► base model of that is exactly the same size and shape as the expensive one.

00:35:07 ◼   ► It's just got cheaper guts in it.

00:35:09 ◼   ► Is that an X Mac?

00:35:10 ◼   ► And that's pretty much as close as Apple ever got.

00:35:12 ◼   ► But I think where that falls down is I don't have room in my house for this thing because

00:35:16 ◼   ► they're huge and heavy.

00:35:18 ◼   ► Could you make something a little bit smaller maybe?

00:35:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's definitely one of the effects

00:35:25 ◼   ► of what happened in the Intel era is that,

00:35:27 ◼   ► and we watched it at Macworld back in the day,

00:35:29 ◼   ► is they kept ratcheting up what the Mac Pro was.

00:35:32 ◼   ► And it became very clear that Apple was saying

00:35:34 ◼   ► the Mac Pro is a high-end system.

00:35:36 ◼   ► It's really not for people in the mid range.

00:35:37 ◼   ► And you went from people being like,

00:35:39 ◼   ► well, it's expensive, but if I get the base model,

00:35:41 ◼   ► I can make it work, to I can't get the base model.

00:35:44 ◼   ► It's too expensive.

00:35:46 ◼   ► And they had nowhere to go,

00:35:47 ◼   ► 'cause then it's like, do I get a Mac mini?

00:35:50 ◼   ► Like there are, you could, and in those days

00:35:54 ◼   ► you could trick out like the Mac mini that they released

00:35:57 ◼   ► in whatever 2017 or whatever, that one was,

00:36:00 ◼   ► had some power to it.

00:36:01 ◼   ► But the Mac mini in those earlier days

00:36:04 ◼   ► was really not a very powerful computer.

00:36:06 ◼   ► And of course, in terms of expandability

00:36:07 ◼   ► it was also incredibly limited.

00:36:09 ◼   ► - And in terms of graphics for gaming, forget it,

00:36:11 ◼   ► with the integrated graphics, there was nowhere to go

00:36:13 ◼   ► and especially before you GPU support.

00:36:15 ◼   ► Like there was a thing about the low end Mac Pro

00:36:18 ◼   ► for the entire life of any computer with the name Mac Pro

00:36:20 ◼   ► it has been huge, like physically huge. Just the type of computer that to commit to that much square

00:36:27 ◼   ► footage, you know, cubic inches in your house being absorbed by computing, you're already over some

00:36:34 ◼   ► line. And as you noted, if you chose not to do that, your next step down was something the size of

00:36:40 ◼   ► half a tissue box. It was like, just even just forget about what's in these boxes. Physically

00:36:45 ◼   ► speaking you can say your choice is giant suitcase half tissue box and that was you

00:36:50 ◼   ► know the xmac is even if you know nothing about computers you would say it seems like

00:36:54 ◼   ► there should be something in between there that doesn't have a built-in screen and then

00:36:59 ◼   ► apple didn't make it yeah so the mac studio is a big mac benny right it's not expandable

00:37:06 ◼   ► although as you pointed out on atp last week like times have changed and and you you said

00:37:12 ◼   ► to me last week and I put it in the Verge story like you know you you hold

00:37:16 ◼   ► on to your dreams for 16 years and you look at your dreams and say hmm no these

00:37:22 ◼   ► are not my dreams anymore. Eventually they stopped making sense that it was you've had the same

00:37:26 ◼   ► dream but then like it loses relevance in the world because like if you have

00:37:31 ◼   ► some particular dreams like I want the x-mac and here's what defines and you

00:37:34 ◼   ► list out the things that define it like you haven't you never got to the root of

00:37:38 ◼   ► what you really wanted.

00:37:39 ◼   ► Like, I want a computer that I can afford

00:37:42 ◼   ► that does the things that I want well,

00:37:44 ◼   ► but that's not what you defined it as.

00:37:45 ◼   ► You said like, I'm a computer nerd,

00:37:46 ◼   ► so it has to have X and Y and Z,

00:37:48 ◼   ► and you lost sight of what you really want

00:37:51 ◼   ► is a solution to your problem,

00:37:52 ◼   ► and your problem is I don't want to spend

00:37:54 ◼   ► a huge amount of money, but I do want games to run fast,

00:37:57 ◼   ► or I want a computer that lasts a long time,

00:37:58 ◼   ► or I want something that's very powerful

00:38:00 ◼   ► in these particular aspects, right?

00:38:02 ◼   ► But instead you said, no, no, no, that's not my goal.

00:38:04 ◼   ► I have specific like spec demands I need,

00:38:06 ◼   ► And those specs, those ideas, those sort of, you know,

00:38:09 ◼   ► it has to have upgradable RAM.

00:38:11 ◼   ► It has to be, I need to be able to swap the graphics cards.

00:38:14 ◼   ► Like why, why do you want those things?

00:38:15 ◼   ► Well, because they allow me to do this.

00:38:18 ◼   ► If they allow me to have a computer

00:38:20 ◼   ► for a certain number of years

00:38:21 ◼   ► without spending too much money,

00:38:22 ◼   ► they can play the latest games or whatever.

00:38:23 ◼   ► Whatever your goal is, you know,

00:38:26 ◼   ► you lose sight of the goal and you just say,

00:38:27 ◼   ► I want this specific solution to that goal.

00:38:29 ◼   ► And eventually that solution becomes irrelevant to the goal.

00:38:32 ◼   ► And even if you're offered something that says here,

00:38:35 ◼   ► this does what you want it to do."

00:38:37 ◼   ► And you're like, "Yeah, but it's not exactly

00:38:38 ◼   ► what I was asking for.

00:38:39 ◼   ► I wanted this specific thing."

00:38:41 ◼   ► It's like, "But didn't you want it to do these things?"

00:38:44 ◼   ► And I think at a certain point you have to say,

00:38:46 ◼   ► "Well, yeah, if you give me something

00:38:48 ◼   ► that can do the things I want it to do,

00:38:49 ◼   ► even if it doesn't do them

00:38:50 ◼   ► using the exact technique I described,

00:38:52 ◼   ► it's still solving my problem in the end."

00:38:54 ◼   ► - Yeah, and you pointed out that, you know,

00:38:56 ◼   ► we can't upgrade the RAM in Apple Silicon Macs.

00:38:59 ◼   ► You have to buy it in the configuration

00:39:01 ◼   ► it's going to live in.

00:39:02 ◼   ► But there is quite a benefit

00:39:04 ◼   ► from the way Apple has designed this.

00:39:06 ◼   ► And it's not doing it to be mean,

00:39:08 ◼   ► it's doing it to get the performance

00:39:10 ◼   ► that has impressed us all about the Apple Silicon Macs.

00:39:13 ◼   ► So it's just, you know, you gotta,

00:39:15 ◼   ► not everybody's gonna be happy,

00:39:17 ◼   ► but the Mac Studio to me, I look at it and think,

00:39:20 ◼   ► actually very similar to what I thought about the iMac Pro

00:39:23 ◼   ► when it was announced, which is, all right,

00:39:25 ◼   ► this is a powerful Mac at a level where I wanna buy it,

00:39:31 ◼   ► where I'm not gonna buy,

00:39:32 ◼   ► 'cause I was like, I'm not gonna buy Mac Pro.

00:39:34 ◼   ► I'm not gonna do it.

00:39:35 ◼   ► I'm just not gonna do it.

00:39:36 ◼   ► And then I look at the-- - You can't commit

00:39:37 ◼   ► to the suitcase.

00:39:38 ◼   ► - And I look at the Mac Studio and I think,

00:39:40 ◼   ► okay, that I could do.

00:39:42 ◼   ► That price for those features, that I could do.

00:39:46 ◼   ► And that is sort of in the mid range.

00:39:48 ◼   ► Although Dan Morin wrote a piece on Six Colors this week

00:39:51 ◼   ► about how you still are in this, there's still a gap, right?

00:39:54 ◼   ► There's still a gap where with a 27-inch iMac being removed

00:39:58 ◼   ► that you've got kind of the Mac Mini down there

00:40:00 ◼   ► and the Mac Studio up here.

00:40:02 ◼   ► And I wonder if the answer is actually gonna be

00:40:05 ◼   ► that they're just gonna make a,

00:40:06 ◼   ► they're gonna make a more capable Mac mini

00:40:09 ◼   ► maybe later this year or maybe early next year

00:40:12 ◼   ► that creeps up a little bit

00:40:14 ◼   ► so that you've got a little more kind of fine gradation

00:40:17 ◼   ► between kind of Mac mini and Mac studio and Mac Pro.

00:40:20 ◼   ► But there is a little bit of a gap now where,

00:40:22 ◼   ► and Dan is in it, which is why he wrote about it,

00:40:24 ◼   ► which is he wants more than the 24,

00:40:26 ◼   ► but right now you can't, you know,

00:40:29 ◼   ► if you want to get something other than an M1 in a desktop,

00:40:32 ◼   ► you have to get the Mac Studio.

00:40:34 ◼   ► Like that's where it starts because the iMac doesn't have it

00:40:37 ◼   ► and the Mac Mini doesn't have it.

00:40:38 ◼   ► I can't conceive of that being the case

00:40:41 ◼   ► at the end of next year, let's say,

00:40:44 ◼   ► but it is where it is right now.

00:40:46 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, there's two gaps.

00:40:47 ◼   ► There's a pricing gap that's obvious

00:40:49 ◼   ► if you just look at the base prices of the machines.

00:40:51 ◼   ► There's a big gap between Mac Mini pricing

00:40:54 ◼   ► and Mac Studio pricing.

00:40:55 ◼   ► So regardless of, you know,

00:40:57 ◼   ► If you have a nice product line, it's nice to see even jumps from going up the line and

00:41:02 ◼   ► there's this big chasm in the middle, right?

00:41:03 ◼   ► So now the question is, okay, there's a pricing gap, what product fills that pricing gap?

00:41:08 ◼   ► And you could choose a more powerful Mac Mini, which Apple will inevitably make, that will

00:41:12 ◼   ► fill that gap.

00:41:13 ◼   ► It'll fill the price gap easily because it'll probably be a little bit more expensive because

00:41:16 ◼   ► it's got the M1 Pro in it or whatever instead of just the plain old M1, so it'll be more

00:41:20 ◼   ► expensive but it will be less than a Mac Studio.

00:41:23 ◼   ► Problem solved.

00:41:24 ◼   ► gap in there, aside from price, is the form factor gap.

00:41:29 ◼   ► If you want an all-in-one computer, Apple sold one with a 27-inch screen for many, many,

00:41:34 ◼   ► many, many, many years, and now they don't anymore.

00:41:36 ◼   ► And so even if they slot something into the price gap and say, "Hey, there's no gap in

00:41:39 ◼   ► our lineup.

00:41:40 ◼   ► Look at the smooth gradation of prices."

00:41:42 ◼   ► If you are accustomed to a 27-inch iMac and that is the form you prefer, there is still

00:41:47 ◼   ► a gap where you say, "I used to be able to get a computer shaped like this and sized

00:41:50 ◼   ► like this, and now I can't anymore."

00:41:51 ◼   ► You could get a studio display and a Mac mini, but they aren't the same.

00:41:55 ◼   ► They are not the same because now you have one thing being plugged into another box and

00:42:01 ◼   ► it's more expensive.

00:42:02 ◼   ► Like they don't have a price competitive.

00:42:04 ◼   ► They don't have anything that is that is price competitive with a 27 inch screen.

00:42:08 ◼   ► No, no, they don't.

00:42:10 ◼   ► That's right.

00:42:11 ◼   ► And that's why I think we both believe that this these holes will also inevitably be filled.

00:42:15 ◼   ► I think it's pretty I mean Apple is going to do what they want and there are maybe some

00:42:19 ◼   ► areas where they're going to be like, "Yeah, it's not worth it for us." But I look at this

00:42:22 ◼   ► and think it's the proto-Apple Silicon lineup. It's the M1 part of the transition and that

00:42:29 ◼   ► there's another, you know, there's another generation coming and another one after that.

00:42:34 ◼   ► And I think that in the next generation, they're going to have a little more latitude to spread

00:42:39 ◼   ► things out in their product line as they want. But this was take one and this is where we

00:42:44 ◼   ► are now. I think I just I'm pretty confident that they're going to do more now that they've

00:42:49 ◼   ► gotten this generation out the door and you know, but the thing is it's all changing and

00:42:54 ◼   ► moving around and so like does it make total sense right this minute? It's like well, no

00:42:59 ◼   ► not total sense. It's it's there's a lot of good stuff in there, but I don't think they're

00:43:03 ◼   ► done. I don't think they're just going to iterate on these slots for the next five years.

00:43:07 ◼   ► I just I don't think they are I think there are more more variations the fact that there's

00:43:12 ◼   ► still an Intel Mac Mini for sale, right? Like there are more variations to come. My understanding

00:43:16 ◼   ► is that Intel Mac Mini is there in part because there are a lot of industrial uses like server

00:43:21 ◼   ► racks and things, maybe that Amazon contract they've got where they're like, "We don't

00:43:24 ◼   ► want your Apple Silicon. We want your... We standardized on Intel. We can't move yet."

00:43:30 ◼   ► But that obviously they're gonna kill it at some point here and I would think that there

00:43:35 ◼   ► will be a story that isn't just the M2 or just the M1 at that point, but we're not there

00:43:40 ◼   ► yet.

00:43:41 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think it's clear that the decision they made

00:43:43 ◼   ► for this rollout is 27 inches not differentiated enough

00:43:47 ◼   ► from their offering, so they're dropping it.

00:43:49 ◼   ► I think the faster Mac Mini is part of this year's plan

00:43:52 ◼   ► and that is coming.

00:43:53 ◼   ► That's not going to be a reaction to this guy.

00:43:55 ◼   ► When they come out with the more powerful Mac Mini,

00:43:58 ◼   ► don't write any stories that say,

00:43:59 ◼   ► "Oh, see, they saw the 27 inch iMac gap."

00:44:02 ◼   ► And they made, no, that's been coming no matter what.

00:44:04 ◼   ► - It's all part of the plan.

00:44:05 ◼   ► - But next year is the time to reconsider,

00:44:07 ◼   ► okay, like you said, all right,

00:44:09 ◼   ► now we're doing the M2 machines.

00:44:11 ◼   ► Do we want to make a different choice?

00:44:12 ◼   ► Should we make a 27 inch version of the 24?

00:44:15 ◼   ► And that's why my $1 bet with Marco and ATP

00:44:18 ◼   ► was for a three year timeline,

00:44:20 ◼   ► because this year, forget it.

00:44:21 ◼   ► They've made their decision for this year.

00:44:23 ◼   ► Next year, probably too soon to expect anything,

00:44:26 ◼   ► but maybe the year after that is the time they either say,

00:44:28 ◼   ► now it's time for the 24 to graduate to 27,

00:44:31 ◼   ► or now it's time for a 27 to appear

00:44:33 ◼   ► as an option alongside the 24.

00:44:35 ◼   ► I think we're pretty aggressive if I had been more,

00:44:38 ◼   ► if I hadn't just done it on the spur of the moment,

00:44:40 ◼   ► would have picked five years and would have been much more guaranteed to win

00:44:42 ◼   ► that dollar. Three years is aggressive, but I hope that's the decision Apple

00:44:45 ◼   ► will make. Certainly they'll have the flexibility to do so.

00:44:47 ◼   ► I'll back you on this. I think that they'll probably have a larger iMac by

00:44:52 ◼   ► the end of next year, but three years I think you're giving yourself enough room,

00:44:55 ◼   ► honestly. I just I think that it'll be easy, but I don't think it'll be what, you

00:45:01 ◼   ► know, like a high-end iMac. I don't think it's gonna be that. But I do think that

00:45:04 ◼   ► there's gonna be one. All right, I want to talk about more about the iMac a

00:45:07 ◼   ► a little bit and some other Mac stuff because we do care. But first let me take another

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00:46:34 ◼   ► and all of Relay FM and thanks to the CFO, CTO, CEO of that Fortune 500 company. I know

00:46:40 ◼   ► you're out there. One of the points, Jon, that I made in my

00:46:45 ◼   ► Verge piece, and I also wrote a Macworld piece about it in detail like a couple of days before,

00:46:54 ◼   ► is about the iMac. And I'm curious your thoughts about this. Observing the iMac over the course

00:46:59 ◼   ► of, since this introduction basically, the ARC, and I know I mentioned this earlier,

00:47:05 ◼   ► but I just want to hit this point again. It went from being the cheap, in quotes, "consumer

00:47:12 ◼   ► computer underpowered scoffed at by power users." And it feels to me like it became

00:47:19 ◼   ► the vehicle in which all people who wanted a powerful or not powerful Mac desktop, who

00:47:26 ◼   ► because the Mac Pro was getting sort of priced out of the range, it became the vehicle everybody

00:47:31 ◼   ► else got stuffed into, like clowns in a clown car, I don't know. And you ended up, I think,

00:47:38 ◼   ► actually making the iMac in some ways a worse product because they started to chase the

00:47:43 ◼   ► high end. And so you ended up with, like, again, not to pick on it, but that last Intel

00:47:48 ◼   ► iMac, like, it had the nano texture display option, it had these i9 processors that made

00:47:55 ◼   ► the fans just scream when they did stuff.

00:47:58 ◼   ► Like they were so loud

00:47:59 ◼   ► because they weren't really engineered for it.

00:48:01 ◼   ► There was also the iMac Pro,

00:48:03 ◼   ► which was a different kind of more complex diversion

00:48:05 ◼   ► where they're like,

00:48:06 ◼   ► "Well, what if we just made the Mac Pro an iMac?"

00:48:08 ◼   ► No, no, forget about it, forget about it.

00:48:09 ◼   ► We're not gonna, oh, well, we'll sell it,

00:48:11 ◼   ► but we're not gonna do that after all.

00:48:13 ◼   ► And it's just, it struck me that in some ways,

00:48:16 ◼   ► looking at the iMac now with just that colorful 24-inch iMac,

00:48:19 ◼   ► it feels to me like the iMac's actually back to being more

00:48:22 ◼   ► of what it was meant to be

00:48:23 ◼   ► when it didn't have to bear the load of a bunch of user needs that were maybe not what the iMac was meant for.

00:48:30 ◼   ► So this heading in the notes here, and it might've been one of your articles,

00:48:33 ◼   ► listed as the distortion of the iMac. And I think that's, I know what you mean, like, obviously the

00:48:41 ◼   ► way the iMac was originally launched and produced is very different than it is now, but distortion

00:48:45 ◼   ► implies that it is like a spoiling of something good and pure. And I think actually there's an

00:48:50 ◼   ► interesting analogy with the the road the iMac is taken and the Mac Studio

00:48:56 ◼   ► stuff we were just talking about. Obviously the iMac being introduced as a

00:49:00 ◼   ► consumer product that was an important part of the the original idea of that

00:49:07 ◼   ► product because if you're gonna save the company you're not gonna save the

00:49:09 ◼   ► company with the computer that nobody buys. You're not gonna save it with the

00:49:11 ◼   ► super high-end one. It's not like and and you laugh but like you can imagine if

00:49:17 ◼   ► you had made some tech nerd CEO they would say the way to save Apple is

00:49:20 ◼   ► they're gonna make the fastest computer that's ever made.

00:49:22 ◼   ► They're like, that's not how you save Apple.

00:49:23 ◼   ► Like, even if you did that, success,

00:49:24 ◼   ► we've made the fastest computer known to man,

00:49:27 ◼   ► the fastest personal computer known to man, right?

00:49:29 ◼   ► This will surely save the company.

00:49:31 ◼   ► And it's like trying to like save a car company

00:49:32 ◼   ► by making the fastest supercar, right?

00:49:34 ◼   ► That's probably not gonna do it

00:49:35 ◼   ► because not a lot of people buy those

00:49:37 ◼   ► and it may be cool to people who are into cars or computers,

00:49:40 ◼   ► but in the end, you need to sell computers to make money.

00:49:43 ◼   ► So wisely, when they made the iMac,

00:49:45 ◼   ► they made it cheap for an Apple computer

00:49:47 ◼   ► and the most mass market thing they could make.

00:49:50 ◼   ► It's cute, it's adorable,

00:49:51 ◼   ► it's attractive to even non-computer people.

00:49:53 ◼   ► This is the computer that's gonna save the company

00:49:55 ◼   ► because it's a consumer computer, right?

00:49:57 ◼   ► Now, but what happened is of course,

00:49:58 ◼   ► you have a success on your hands.

00:49:59 ◼   ► The iMac name gets a lot of cache.

00:50:01 ◼   ► In fact, it gets so much cache

00:50:03 ◼   ► that Apple starts putting i in front of all

00:50:04 ◼   ► its freaking products, right?

00:50:06 ◼   ► Including ones they had to buy from other people

00:50:08 ◼   ► like iPhone, the name I mean, not the phone.

00:50:10 ◼   ► And you know, it lasts for a long time.

00:50:14 ◼   ► And kind of what happens with the dream of the X Mac

00:50:17 ◼   ► is if you keep doing something for a long time,

00:50:20 ◼   ► the surrounding context changes.

00:50:22 ◼   ► And the thing that changed about the iMac,

00:50:25 ◼   ► yes, there was the thing that you mentioned

00:50:28 ◼   ► where Apple seemed very clear from the outside

00:50:31 ◼   ► that Apple was gonna say,

00:50:32 ◼   ► "Yeah, we're not doing the Mac Pro anymore.

00:50:33 ◼   ► We think we can get by with just making like an awesome iMac."

00:50:36 ◼   ► And they did make an awesome iMac, iMac Pro,

00:50:38 ◼   ► but they changed their mind before they even released it.

00:50:40 ◼   ► So forget about that.

00:50:41 ◼   ► There was that that happened.

00:50:42 ◼   ► But the other thing that happened, setting that aside,

00:50:45 ◼   ► over the course of many, many years,

00:50:48 ◼   ► is that it became plausible for everything about a computer

00:50:53 ◼   ► to be, everything about a good computer

00:50:56 ◼   ► to be in a fairly small self-contained package, right?

00:51:01 ◼   ► That it was essentially inevitable and reasonable and good

00:51:05 ◼   ► for the thing that started as a consumer computer

00:51:08 ◼   ► to move up market because technology changed in such a way

00:51:13 ◼   ► that it was no longer a terrible compromise

00:51:16 ◼   ► to take all the things of a computer

00:51:18 ◼   ► and stick it to the back of the screen essentially, right?

00:51:20 ◼   ► It wasn't that way in the beginning.

00:51:22 ◼   ► In the beginning, it was a bit of a compromise

00:51:24 ◼   ► and it was sort of a consumer play

00:51:25 ◼   ► and especially, you know,

00:51:26 ◼   ► with the one with the iMac G4

00:51:28 ◼   ► where they had the base and the thing

00:51:30 ◼   ► and then they glunged it on the back

00:51:31 ◼   ► but as time marched on, it became clear

00:51:34 ◼   ► that the march of technology, miniaturization, SSDs,

00:51:37 ◼   ► all that other stuff made it possible

00:51:39 ◼   ► to make a new kind of computer.

00:51:41 ◼   ► And the new kind of computer was beautiful screen,

00:51:44 ◼   ► powerful computer, one thing all in one.

00:51:49 ◼   ► And that wasn't possible back in the days of the iMac.

00:51:52 ◼   ► There was no like plausible iMac like computer

00:51:55 ◼   ► that had the guts of the giant suitcase size tower in it.

00:51:58 ◼   ► Technology wasn't there for that.

00:51:59 ◼   ► And the analogy I make with this is look at the insides

00:52:03 ◼   ► of like the original iMac or the Mac 2FX or a Mac SE

00:52:07 ◼   ► whatever and compare them to current Macs like the Mac Studio where you have a

00:52:13 ◼   ► system on a chip that has the CPU the GPU all the memory everything put into

00:52:18 ◼   ► one big square you can put it up on a slide the thing that's on that slide

00:52:21 ◼   ► when they show like the you know the M1 Ultra with all the RAM around and

00:52:25 ◼   ► everything that's like the entire motherboard practically of other

00:52:29 ◼   ► computers the USB controller is in there the Thunderbolt controls are in there

00:52:32 ◼   ► the video controllers and like everything is consolidated into one.

00:52:36 ◼   ► And why didn't we do that? Why weren't computers always designed?

00:52:40 ◼   ► But you couldn't, you couldn't put all that stuff in there.

00:52:42 ◼   ► The transistors were too big. There was no way to package that together.

00:52:45 ◼   ► So everything was separate. There were buses, two slots where you put in the RAM chips.

00:52:48 ◼   ► There was a CPU, there was a Northbridge, there was a Southbridge,

00:52:51 ◼   ► there was a Thunderbolt controller from Intel.

00:52:52 ◼   ► There was all these different chips all around there.

00:52:54 ◼   ► But as technology marched on, we were able to consolidate it all.

00:52:57 ◼   ► And it's inevitable and good that we do that because you get lots of benefits.

00:53:01 ◼   ► lower power, everything is faster, it's physically closer together, it is closer metaphorically,

00:53:06 ◼   ► you know, in terms of latency and everything. So the iMac just traveled that same path. Wait,

00:53:13 ◼   ► we have the technology now to make a reasonably powerful good computer, but also have it be fairly

00:53:19 ◼   ► quiet, and also have it be on the back of this slim thing that just looks like a monitor. And

00:53:24 ◼   ► that turns out to be a product that is attractive to a lot of people. It's not as fancy as a mid-sized

00:53:29 ◼   ► tower and you can look at it it's like oh but you've changed the iMac used to

00:53:32 ◼   ► be a consumer thing it's like yeah but now we can do a thing that we couldn't

00:53:35 ◼   ► do before that the all-in-one computer suddenly becomes something that is not

00:53:40 ◼   ► just for the lowest of the low end but that someone who's in the middle would

00:53:43 ◼   ► look at it not sneer and not feel bad that they're getting it because once

00:53:46 ◼   ► they get their very first one and I think we all have this experience like

00:53:49 ◼   ► well I never thought of myself as an iMac person but like once I got one I

00:53:53 ◼   ► was like you know what this computer is quiet this screen is gorgeous and it's

00:53:57 ◼   ► It's really fast and I love it.

00:53:58 ◼   ► And that's why people love these computers,

00:54:00 ◼   ► 'cause they didn't realize I never thought of myself

00:54:02 ◼   ► as an all-in-one computer.

00:54:03 ◼   ► I always thought I had to have a tower.

00:54:04 ◼   ► How many people do we know like that?

00:54:05 ◼   ► I always thought I had to have a tower

00:54:06 ◼   ► 'cause I do serious development work

00:54:07 ◼   ► or I work on Photoshop.

00:54:08 ◼   ► But once they get that first iMac,

00:54:10 ◼   ► especially the first 5K iMacs,

00:54:12 ◼   ► and they say, wow, I thought I could never do my work

00:54:15 ◼   ► as a designer with Photoshop on an all-in-one Mac,

00:54:18 ◼   ► but now apparently technology's there and I can do that.

00:54:20 ◼   ► And the iMac Pro is the ultimate expression of that.

00:54:23 ◼   ► It's like, if Apple really tries and does a good job at it,

00:54:26 ◼   ► setting aside the stupid nano texture, you know, 5k iMac.

00:54:29 ◼   ► If they do a good job of it,

00:54:30 ◼   ► you can even make a pretty passable, good,

00:54:33 ◼   ► pro-ish computer on the back of an iMac.

00:54:36 ◼   ► That is the wisdom of that is still questionable,

00:54:39 ◼   ► but in the middle range there,

00:54:41 ◼   ► I think it is inevitable and good

00:54:43 ◼   ► that the iMac had to travel up market

00:54:45 ◼   ► as technology changed in the same way

00:54:46 ◼   ► that all the guts of the, you know,

00:54:48 ◼   ► Macs have consolidated into a single system on a chip

00:54:50 ◼   ► because technology allows it and it has advantages.

00:54:54 ◼   ► It is attractive.

00:54:55 ◼   ► It is a natural and good evolution of that form.

00:54:59 ◼   ► I agree with you, but I think the challenge, and when I say the distortion of the iMac,

00:55:04 ◼   ► is I think I feel like the iMac needed to be too many things for too many people.

00:55:07 ◼   ► And what you saw was Apple straining where they would have their, you know, they had

00:55:12 ◼   ► their non-retina model for a while, and they kept the spinning—they had to keep the spinning

00:55:16 ◼   ► hard drive for a while.

00:55:17 ◼   ► And one of the consequences of keeping the spinning hard drive, whether it was the default

00:55:21 ◼   ► or whether it was the default in the fusion drive was also there, which was their hybrid

00:55:26 ◼   ► approach to try and have SSD speeds with the storage instead of like embracing just all

00:55:33 ◼   ► SSD because they couldn't because this was meant to be an introductory level computer

00:55:39 ◼   ► and had a price to match. And so you ended up with like the iMac Pro didn't need to go

00:55:44 ◼   ► down there and so they had the new cooling system in the iMac Pro, but they couldn't

00:55:47 ◼   ► do that in the iMac because they needed to have space for the spinning hard drive. And

00:55:52 ◼   ► I think that was when I say it was distorted, I would say that it ended up being a computer

00:55:56 ◼   ► that was really trying to cover a vast range in the middle ground of the Mac, sort of the

00:56:03 ◼   ► middle to the bottom. And that it could have been a better computer if it had just been

00:56:07 ◼   ► the bottom or just been the middle, but it had to be both because Apple had no other

00:56:12 ◼   ► Like that was literally it.

00:56:14 ◼   ► And I think that I look at the 24-inch iMac

00:56:17 ◼   ► and I think that maybe there's a little bit of freedom

00:56:19 ◼   ► in them making the decision.

00:56:20 ◼   ► Time has moved along and they have embraced SSDs now

00:56:23 ◼   ► and there's no spinning hard drive option anymore,

00:56:25 ◼   ► which is great, but like, it's just a fun computer.

00:56:28 ◼   ► And it just seems like simpler.

00:56:31 ◼   ► It doesn't need to bear the weight of the world

00:56:33 ◼   ► on its shoulders like maybe that other iMac did

00:56:35 ◼   ► because Apple wouldn't surround it with other products.

00:56:37 ◼   ► Whereas now we can have this debate

00:56:39 ◼   ► about there's a studio display

00:56:41 ◼   ► and can you attach, what do you attach to it?

00:56:44 ◼   ► You know, if you don't want to get an iMac,

00:56:46 ◼   ► you can buy a display and then you can attach

00:56:47 ◼   ► a Mac Studio to it or a Mac Mini to it or a laptop to it.

00:56:51 ◼   ► And it's just a little bit more of a conversation

00:56:54 ◼   ► than maybe was had by like people like me

00:56:58 ◼   ► when I was like, I guess I'll just get the 5K iMac.

00:57:00 ◼   ► I love the 5K iMac.

00:57:01 ◼   ► I'm not saying it was a bad computer.

00:57:02 ◼   ► I'm just saying that it led to this very kind of awkward

00:57:05 ◼   ► area where the iMac was kind of it.

00:57:08 ◼   ► Like you really just had to buy an iMac.

00:57:10 ◼   ► that was about your only option for a certain class of user.

00:57:14 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's kind of like they were so married to that name

00:57:17 ◼   ► 'cause the name got such cache and such brand

00:57:20 ◼   ► that they didn't want to give up the name,

00:57:22 ◼   ► but when the opportunity presented itself

00:57:25 ◼   ► due to the advance of technology

00:57:26 ◼   ► to make a pretty darn good computer that's an all-in-one,

00:57:31 ◼   ► they took that opportunity, but they didn't want to give,

00:57:34 ◼   ► they didn't want to sort of give up the name for the low end

00:57:37 ◼   ► and they said, well, you know,

00:57:38 ◼   ► they decided to call that iMac,

00:57:39 ◼   ► It's like, hey, we've got it.

00:57:40 ◼   ► We're going to make computers and there we can make increasingly powerful and

00:57:44 ◼   ► amazing computers sort of culminating in the 5k is the ultimate, like we've done

00:57:47 ◼   ► it.

00:57:47 ◼   ► We've made an all in one computer that is good enough that people who would

00:57:51 ◼   ► formally never think of themselves as all in one customers will not only buy,

00:57:54 ◼   ► but they'll love. They're like, great. And of course, you know,

00:57:56 ◼   ► that's an iMac and that name is going to come along with it,

00:57:58 ◼   ► but they never gave up the low end.

00:58:01 ◼   ► And so once they sort of made that commitment to this is what the iMac is,

00:58:04 ◼   ► you can't really make a really cheap and also good low end computer using the philosophy

00:58:11 ◼   ► of the 5k iMac. That's why you have these machines. Well, how do we keep it the low

00:58:15 ◼   ► price? Well, I guess it'll have to be non retina and I guess it'll keep the spinning

00:58:18 ◼   ► disc. And those were not good computers, but they had committed to the design of the thing

00:58:23 ◼   ► they were going to call iMac because it was just one name. It would be weird to have,

00:58:28 ◼   ► you know, the 5k iMac be a totally different strategy of building a computer than the cheap

00:58:33 ◼   ► iMac but they just refused to let go of the low end and refused to not take the middle end and even the high end with

00:58:39 ◼   ► the pro thing and so yeah, I think the consumer side suffered now that they've sort of

00:58:44 ◼   ► reassigned the iMac back to be just the the low end

00:58:49 ◼   ► It's kind of ironic that oh and by the way now we have all the technology to make that low end one pretty fantastic

00:58:55 ◼   ► Because it's so thin and it's got SSDs and it's retina and it's like this would have been the fantasy high-end iMac of you

00:59:01 ◼   ► know, five, 10 years ago. Right. But now that's the low end one. Um, you know,

00:59:06 ◼   ► and it's good that it got the freedom one. Now you can have colors and it can be

00:59:08 ◼   ► fun and it can be less expensive and it is divorced from the need to sort of

00:59:13 ◼   ► say, Oh, well, but remember, we also have to have one of these that, uh,

00:59:17 ◼   ► that the fancy people want to use for their power things. No, we don't.

00:59:20 ◼   ► We can just be for low end. So it's, it's nice to have the name not stretched as

00:59:26 ◼   ► far. Um, that if,

00:59:27 ◼   ► if they had been able to give up on that branding and had called the 5k iMac something other

00:59:32 ◼   ► than an iMac that would have solved a lot of their problems and then they could have

00:59:35 ◼   ► sort of concentrated on well it was probably too late by then because they'd already committed

00:59:38 ◼   ► to that form factor. I think the iMac Pro is actually an example of like I think we've

00:59:42 ◼   ► stepped through some of the rationale that probably went into the creation of the iMac

00:59:46 ◼   ► Pro but that was in the era where they were like well no we're not gonna do a Mac Pro

00:59:50 ◼   ► anymore and this is this is what we're gonna do but the iMac Pro is what if we made an

00:59:54 ◼   ► the iMac and didn't worry about the low end.

00:59:56 ◼   ► And it's like, well, okay, we're going to embrace SSD and we're going to put in a good

01:00:00 ◼   ► cooling system.

01:00:01 ◼   ► But even then it was like literally physically exactly the same size and shape as the 5K.

01:00:05 ◼   ► It just so happens that it was an amazing feat of engineering to say, can we fit a pro

01:00:09 ◼   ► computer in exactly this?

01:00:10 ◼   ► And the only reason they were able to do it is like, well, the 5K iMac was designed to

01:00:14 ◼   ► have a three and a half inch disk drive.

01:00:16 ◼   ► And if we say we're never going to have that, we have a little bit more room.

01:00:18 ◼   ► But it's not as if they took the iMac row and said clean sheet of paper, iMac Pro.

01:00:22 ◼   ► What does it look like?

01:00:24 ◼   ► they just started with the 5K iMac shape.

01:00:26 ◼   ► They were going in that direction anyway,

01:00:27 ◼   ► so it's not too much of a stretch,

01:00:28 ◼   ► but I think that contrast will live on for a long time,

01:00:33 ◼   ► that there were two machines that were physically

01:00:35 ◼   ► exactly the same size and shape,

01:00:37 ◼   ► but one of them was a little bit darker,

01:00:39 ◼   ► and one of them was amazing, and one of them, not sucked,

01:00:41 ◼   ► but one of them was just terrible.

01:00:43 ◼   ► The loud fan, i9, nano texture, whatever monstrosity,

01:00:47 ◼   ► compare that to the iMac Pro,

01:00:49 ◼   ► which was just silent and competent and amazing,

01:00:53 ◼   ► not that we would have all been happy with it instead of a Mac Pro, it does not fill

01:00:56 ◼   ► the same needs as Apple discovered before they even shipped it.

01:00:59 ◼   ► But it just shows like two different philosophies.

01:01:03 ◼   ► One is taking the consumer iMac and trying to like, you know, crank it up to the nth

01:01:08 ◼   ► level and the other is saying, what if we say we're going to make a pro computer and

01:01:13 ◼   ► we don't have to like this, it's going to start at $5,000, right?

01:01:16 ◼   ► We don't have to worry about making the base version of this available for, you know, home

01:01:20 ◼   ► users to buy.

01:01:22 ◼   ► I think that this is why in some shape or form

01:01:27 ◼   ► the iMac will come back because I do think,

01:01:30 ◼   ► I mean, we've already said it, we think it's coming back.

01:01:32 ◼   ► Like there's room in here for something that is not like,

01:01:36 ◼   ► we're not gonna make a huge effort

01:01:37 ◼   ► because the Mac studio exists,

01:01:38 ◼   ► but there's still some room in there for iMac

01:01:41 ◼   ► to still be a good computer to have.

01:01:43 ◼   ► And maybe there's options and maybe in the end,

01:01:46 ◼   ► you can get even like an M1 or M2, I guess,

01:01:51 ◼   ► pro at the high end, but it's like as long as it fits in the envelope. But not, the goal

01:01:55 ◼   ► is not to get you up to an iMac with an M1 Ultra, right? Like, no, that's not going to

01:02:02 ◼   ► happen. It has a copper heat sink. It's not, we're not designing an iMac to do that. And

01:02:07 ◼   ► I think that's good. They shouldn't. Don't do that. And so I think that if we see a larger

01:02:14 ◼   ► iMac and as the iMac evolves, I think that they're going to be able to draw a line to

01:02:19 ◼   ► to say no further than this, which is, you know, a line must be drawn here.

01:02:23 ◼   ► See, I make a movie reference now.

01:02:25 ◼   ► Look at that.

01:02:26 ◼   ► Apple's biggest problem with this whole iMac thing is they spent many years,

01:02:30 ◼   ► uh, convincing people that they can have an all in one computer and it

01:02:35 ◼   ► will be satisfactory for them.

01:02:36 ◼   ► The 5k IMAX did that over the course of many years.

01:02:38 ◼   ► Those are people, like I said, who prior to the, to the, to the good iMacs,

01:02:42 ◼   ► like they would say, well, I'm never going to get an all in one.

01:02:44 ◼   ► That's for other people.

01:02:45 ◼   ► What I get are desktops or mini towers or like whatever, you know, I get,

01:02:49 ◼   ► I'm a Power Mac customer, right?

01:02:50 ◼   ► Apple did that.

01:02:51 ◼   ► Apple convinced those people.

01:02:53 ◼   ► You might not realize it,

01:02:54 ◼   ► but technology has moved on to the point where

01:02:56 ◼   ► actually if you buy this computer, you will love it.

01:02:59 ◼   ► Because you don't think you care about all-in-one.

01:03:02 ◼   ► You don't think you care.

01:03:02 ◼   ► It's like you have a giant suitcase next to your desk.

01:03:04 ◼   ► You don't care about desk space.

01:03:05 ◼   ► It's not like you care about it being all-in-one.

01:03:08 ◼   ► But then the 5K iMac came along

01:03:09 ◼   ► and it was one of the only options for people

01:03:10 ◼   ► and people loved the screen and they bought it.

01:03:12 ◼   ► And fast forward a few years,

01:03:14 ◼   ► and now they're not convinced that they need

01:03:18 ◼   ► a separate box to connect up to the thing.

01:03:20 ◼   ► They're like, it turns out after all these years,

01:03:22 ◼   ► I've been using just this iMac and it's been great for me.

01:03:26 ◼   ► For the people who never were convinced,

01:03:27 ◼   ► who always like me have just been buying

01:03:28 ◼   ► these stupid suitcases or whatever, that's great.

01:03:30 ◼   ► We love the Mac Studio and we love the Mac Pro,

01:03:33 ◼   ► but there's a whole bunch of people

01:03:34 ◼   ► that Apple convinced otherwise.

01:03:35 ◼   ► And now I'm not sure those people are going to like

01:03:39 ◼   ► be relishing the idea of switching back

01:03:42 ◼   ► to the more expensive, it must be noted,

01:03:44 ◼   ► Mac Studio and external display,

01:03:47 ◼   ► or even let's say equally priced,

01:03:51 ◼   ► better new Mac mini plus studio display,

01:03:54 ◼   ► now that they've lived in the all-in-one life for awhile.

01:03:57 ◼   ► - We will see how this evolves,

01:04:00 ◼   ► but it's fascinating to have the Mac studio

01:04:02 ◼   ► to let us have this conversation now.

01:04:04 ◼   ► I think that's great.

01:04:05 ◼   ► And honestly, and this is a sort of tangential topic,

01:04:08 ◼   ► but I wanted to mention it,

01:04:11 ◼   ► is like now that the studio display exists,

01:04:14 ◼   ► and I know that there were other displays before,

01:04:16 ◼   ► but to get an Apple branded display that is the using,

01:04:19 ◼   ► in this case, it's using the familiar 5K panel,

01:04:22 ◼   ► which is a great panel.

01:04:23 ◼   ► I know it's old.

01:04:24 ◼   ► It's been out there since the 5K iMac, but it's-

01:04:26 ◼   ► - This is something I need to check on.

01:04:28 ◼   ► Maybe- - It is the panel.

01:04:30 ◼   ► It is exactly the panel.

01:04:31 ◼   ► - And the reason, the only reason I question

01:04:33 ◼   ► whether it was the exact panel is 'cause I kept seeing

01:04:35 ◼   ► that it was 600 nits instead of 500,

01:04:37 ◼   ► but I don't actually know what the 5K iMac was.

01:04:39 ◼   ► The 5K iMac screen go to 600 nits?

01:04:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think maybe, but I can tell you,

01:04:43 ◼   ► I can't tell you who told me,

01:04:45 ◼   ► but you know who it was.

01:04:48 ◼   ► It's the same panel.

01:04:49 ◼   ► It is, that is what it is.

01:04:50 ◼   ► So it's familiar, it's not cutting edge, but it's familiar.

01:04:53 ◼   ► And it just opens up all this possibility.

01:04:56 ◼   ► And I had that moment, Jon, when I started to think,

01:05:01 ◼   ► I actually don't know.

01:05:03 ◼   ► I ordered a display and I ordered a Mac studio.

01:05:06 ◼   ► And I assume that that's where I'm gonna end up.

01:05:09 ◼   ► But I had a moment where I thought,

01:05:11 ◼   ► well, you know, those Apple Silicon laptops

01:05:13 ◼   ► are all pretty good too.

01:05:15 ◼   ► and all the Apple Silicon,

01:05:16 ◼   ► all the M1s are the same computer essentially.

01:05:20 ◼   ► So we could probably assume that the Mac studio

01:05:23 ◼   ► is going to behave a lot like a similarly configured

01:05:26 ◼   ► MacBook Pro, right?

01:05:28 ◼   ► So if that's the case, you know,

01:05:31 ◼   ► I just had that moment where I thought,

01:05:34 ◼   ► should I get a MacBook Pro?

01:05:36 ◼   ► Should I just keep my MacBook Air that's an M1,

01:05:39 ◼   ► but it's pretty good.

01:05:41 ◼   ► And I could just get the display

01:05:43 ◼   ► and the MacBook Air for a while, or maybe buy a MacBook Pro.

01:05:47 ◼   ► And it is a lot more money.

01:05:49 ◼   ► It's like $700 more to get the same configuration

01:05:52 ◼   ► in a MacBook Pro as in the base model Mac Studio.

01:05:55 ◼   ► It is a lot more to have it be a laptop

01:05:57 ◼   ► that you can take away with that beautiful screen.

01:05:59 ◼   ► But I did have that moment where I thought,

01:06:02 ◼   ► how committed am I to the desktop life,

01:06:04 ◼   ► given how good Apple Silicon is at docking to a display,

01:06:09 ◼   ► and that this display makes it,

01:06:12 ◼   ► And with the ports and all of that,

01:06:13 ◼   ► it's basically gonna be like an iMac for me,

01:06:17 ◼   ► except I could hang just a laptop off of it

01:06:20 ◼   ► and then unplug and take it away.

01:06:21 ◼   ► The desktop laptop thing, I guess is what I'm saying.

01:06:24 ◼   ► - Yeah, when I found out that the,

01:06:26 ◼   ► as far as I've been able to determine,

01:06:27 ◼   ► the chips aren't even clocked any different in the desktop.

01:06:31 ◼   ► Right?

01:06:32 ◼   ► It's the same if you get a MacBook Pro with an M1 Max.

01:06:35 ◼   ► Obviously I think that like this

01:06:37 ◼   ► must less likely to throttle in the studio,

01:06:38 ◼   ► but they're not even clocked different.

01:06:39 ◼   ► So when I was pricing all this stuff out,

01:06:41 ◼   ► I did, I had that thought and I said,

01:06:43 ◼   ► hmm, this is looking kind of expensive.

01:06:46 ◼   ► And if it really is just an M1 Max,

01:06:48 ◼   ► Apple already makes computers with an M1 Max in it.

01:06:50 ◼   ► You know, I can get a 14 inch laptop

01:06:53 ◼   ► or a 16 inch laptop with an M1 Max

01:06:54 ◼   ► and it's the same exact M1 Max.

01:06:56 ◼   ► - And if you don't want to pay for a Max,

01:06:57 ◼   ► you can get the Pro, which you can't get on the studio.

01:07:00 ◼   ► - Exactly, right.

01:07:01 ◼   ► But then I'd price it out and I realized,

01:07:03 ◼   ► oh, okay, well, you do pay more for the laptop.

01:07:05 ◼   ► I don't like laptops.

01:07:06 ◼   ► I was just thinking, is this a way to get a cheaper

01:07:09 ◼   ► sort of M1 Max desktop system?

01:07:11 ◼   ► And the answer is no, it's not a way to get, because they, because it comes with a whole

01:07:13 ◼   ► screen and a keyboard and all the stuff that I don't care about.

01:07:17 ◼   ► And you pay for that.

01:07:18 ◼   ► So it's kind of weird that like, if you, if you want that, if you want the laptop with

01:07:22 ◼   ► a monitor, it costs more, which I think is appropriate.

01:07:25 ◼   ► It costs more because you're getting, again, you're getting a whole other screen, a good

01:07:28 ◼   ► screen on top of that and a keyboard and a track pad and a case and miniaturization,

01:07:32 ◼   ► all that stuff that you don't get with the studio.

01:07:34 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:07:35 ◼   ► I came down to a couple of things for me.

01:07:37 ◼   ► One is I could use my MacBook Air, my M1 MacBook Air for a while and that allows me to kind

01:07:45 ◼   ► of put off until maybe the next chip generation a decision on this.

01:07:51 ◼   ► But you know how long is it going to be before there's another Mac Studio model right?

01:07:55 ◼   ► It's going to be a while right?

01:07:56 ◼   ► So maybe next year around this time.

01:07:58 ◼   ► Yeah exactly.

01:07:59 ◼   ► Yeah I do I do think that the cadence is going to be Apple's just going to refresh everything

01:08:03 ◼   ► with the same thing the next year and that's just how it's going to be.

01:08:06 ◼   ► once they get this all up and running.

01:08:08 ◼   ► But, so I could do that,

01:08:10 ◼   ► and I could put off making a decision for a little while.

01:08:14 ◼   ► Or I could roll down my MacBook Air

01:08:17 ◼   ► to someone else in my family who has an Intel MacBook Air,

01:08:20 ◼   ► and they would get all the delight

01:08:21 ◼   ► of having an M1 MacBook Air,

01:08:22 ◼   ► and then I could buy a MacBook Pro.

01:08:25 ◼   ► I don't use the laptop very much at all.

01:08:27 ◼   ► I am not a laptop person.

01:08:28 ◼   ► And I think I've just decided the Studio is a better fit

01:08:31 ◼   ► for me because I have the MacBook Air,

01:08:34 ◼   ► which I use a little bit,

01:08:36 ◼   ► it's enough for using a little bit,

01:08:39 ◼   ► it's gonna be disappointing if that's my only Mac,

01:08:42 ◼   ► because it's not that fast at some of those higher end,

01:08:46 ◼   ► like audio plugin things that I do.

01:08:48 ◼   ► So I'm gonna be disappointed.

01:08:49 ◼   ► Would I be better off doing what I've been doing

01:08:52 ◼   ► for the last few years,

01:08:53 ◼   ► which is have a lot of power on my desk

01:08:56 ◼   ► and a little underpowered, but perfectly fine laptop

01:08:58 ◼   ► for when I really need to travel somewhere.

01:09:00 ◼   ► For me, I think that's probably the right decision.

01:09:04 ◼   ► However, what strikes me about the existence

01:09:06 ◼   ► of the studio display and how good Apple Silicon laptops are

01:09:10 ◼   ► is I think for a lot of people,

01:09:12 ◼   ► that's not the right decision.

01:09:13 ◼   ► I think if you use a laptop a lot,

01:09:15 ◼   ► but you also sit at a desk a lot,

01:09:17 ◼   ► you kind of go back and forth.

01:09:18 ◼   ► Like an Apple Silicon laptop and this studio display

01:09:23 ◼   ► seem to be like the right combination.

01:09:26 ◼   ► That's a really strong combination

01:09:30 ◼   ► if you do need a laptop,

01:09:31 ◼   ► but I'm not sure I'm convinced about the desktop/laptop thing,

01:09:34 ◼   ► at least for me, because I don't use the laptop enough.

01:09:37 ◼   ► -Yeah, a point that I meant to bring up on the last ATP

01:09:39 ◼   ► but neglected to.

01:09:41 ◼   ► It's a little bit mind-bending to think about,

01:09:45 ◼   ► but do you remember the DTK that Apple shipped to developers

01:09:51 ◼   ► for developing their Mac software on ARM

01:09:54 ◼   ► before the ARM Macs were actually out?

01:09:56 ◼   ► -Right. -That had an A12Z in it.

01:10:00 ◼   ► the Apple Studio display has an A13 in it.

01:10:02 ◼   ► - Yes.

01:10:03 ◼   ► - That Apple Studio display, not the way it is now,

01:10:07 ◼   ► but like with a similar parts list,

01:10:10 ◼   ► that Apple Studio display could be an entire Mac

01:10:14 ◼   ► that runs macOS.

01:10:15 ◼   ► It would need storage and IO and you know,

01:10:17 ◼   ► like it's not like you can just take the product

01:10:19 ◼   ► and run macOS on it.

01:10:19 ◼   ► But what I'm saying is they put an A13 in there,

01:10:21 ◼   ► which is more powerful than the process

01:10:23 ◼   ► of the system on a chip that they shipped with their DTK

01:10:27 ◼   ► for developing and testing your applications on ARM.

01:10:30 ◼   ► I think that's why a lot of the rumors were confused

01:10:33 ◼   ► that they thought that display itself

01:10:35 ◼   ► was a new fancy iMac, a new 27-inch iMac.

01:10:40 ◼   ► It's got no chin, you know, it's got speakers,

01:10:42 ◼   ► it's got microphones, it's got a camera on it.

01:10:45 ◼   ► - It's got a processor.

01:10:46 ◼   ► - And it's got an A13 in it, and we said like,

01:10:48 ◼   ► oh, the Apple Silicon, this, that.

01:10:50 ◼   ► It has an Apple Silicon chip in it,

01:10:52 ◼   ► and not a particularly slow one.

01:10:54 ◼   ► It's not as fast as the M1.

01:10:56 ◼   ► The M1 is based on the A14 cores,

01:10:58 ◼   ► and it's got a lot of them.

01:10:58 ◼   ► I'm not saying it would be a speedy computer,

01:11:00 ◼   ► but I had one of those DTKs,

01:11:02 ◼   ► and Mac OS ran surprisingly well on an A12Z.

01:11:07 ◼   ► Many things it did faster than my 2019 Mac Pro

01:11:10 ◼   ► that it was sitting right next to,

01:11:11 ◼   ► just because it was ARM,

01:11:11 ◼   ► and they do certain things a lot faster

01:11:13 ◼   ► for whatever reasons.

01:11:14 ◼   ► So it's kind of, if you're thinking like,

01:11:18 ◼   ► could Apple ever make a 27-inch iMac?

01:11:23 ◼   ► Where would they put all the computer guts or whatever?

01:11:25 ◼   ► Like the A13 is already in their monitor.

01:11:28 ◼   ► And yeah, I know you need IO, you need the ports,

01:11:31 ◼   ► you need an SSD in there.

01:11:32 ◼   ► But you know, if you look at how the guts

01:11:34 ◼   ► of the 24-inch iMac are currently packaged,

01:11:36 ◼   ► they're all in the chin and it's almost nothing.

01:11:38 ◼   ► It's really all about the screen.

01:11:40 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:11:42 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, cheers to all the desktop laptop people

01:11:46 ◼   ► out there, but I think Mac Studio is in my future.

01:11:48 ◼   ► I haven't canceled that order.

01:11:50 ◼   ► I'm gonna get one.

01:11:51 ◼   ► I think I'm gonna be happy with it.

01:11:53 ◼   ► I thought about the Ultra and then I laughed

01:11:57 ◼   ► and didn't order it because I don't need that.

01:12:01 ◼   ► - You need to be able to go get a cup of tea

01:12:03 ◼   ► while your isotope things are running.

01:12:05 ◼   ► - Yeah, right.

01:12:06 ◼   ► I don't wanna have to get a cup of tea,

01:12:09 ◼   ► make a whole pot of tea and then bring it back

01:12:13 ◼   ► for the isotope thing to finish running.

01:12:14 ◼   ► I want it to just be like to get a cup of tea.

01:12:16 ◼   ► I want it to be that much cut in half.

01:12:18 ◼   ► - But you don't wanna be halfway through making your tea

01:12:19 ◼   ► and the thing is done.

01:12:20 ◼   ► - No, I don't.

01:12:21 ◼   ► No, that's true too.

01:12:22 ◼   ► - No, no, that would be outrageous.

01:12:23 ◼   ► Yeah, no, no, no ultra for me, forget it.

01:12:25 ◼   ► That would be, that would be crazy.

01:12:27 ◼   ► Okay, we are gonna do some Ask Upgrade,

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01:15:03 ◼   ► Okay, it is time for Ask Upgrade.

01:15:07 ◼   ► Jon, you ready?

01:15:08 ◼   ► - I am.

01:15:10 ◼   ► - This is a little like Ask ATP, except we did it first.

01:15:13 ◼   ► - It's true.

01:15:14 ◼   ► Steven says, "Does it bother you that the new studio display is basically just the same 5K display panel that was released in October of 2014 on the 27-inch iMac?"

01:15:23 ◼   ► We've established it is. I think the nit rating is higher. I think maybe it's just that the backlight is a little bit brighter, but the actual panel itself is the same.

01:15:33 ◼   ► Does it bother you that their brand new 2022 display is the iMac display that has been around for many, many years?

01:15:43 ◼   ► Well, that's the thing about it.

01:15:44 ◼   ► When we were saying if it's the same exact display, do you remember in the early

01:15:47 ◼   ► days of the 5k iMac, there was like, there were two different manufacturers

01:15:50 ◼   ► of the display or like one of them had image retention issues.

01:15:53 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:15:53 ◼   ► Right.

01:15:54 ◼   ► I think like, even though we say it's the quote unquote, the same, um, I think even

01:15:58 ◼   ► just over the life of the 5k iMac, there have been revisions to that panel to

01:16:02 ◼   ► improve it in various ways, whether it's avoiding image retention or maybe better

01:16:06 ◼   ► color reproduction or better viewing angles, because panels like this get

01:16:09 ◼   ► revised, right?

01:16:09 ◼   ► So even if it is more or less the same,

01:16:13 ◼   ► I'm thinking that this is probably the latest evolution

01:16:16 ◼   ► of that same 5K panel.

01:16:19 ◼   ► But spec wise, yeah, it's not HDR, it's not high refresh,

01:16:21 ◼   ► it is a 5K panel.

01:16:23 ◼   ► If you put this, went back in time,

01:16:24 ◼   ► I put this on the original 5K iMac,

01:16:26 ◼   ► no one would notice except that maybe it, you know,

01:16:27 ◼   ► didn't get image retention and you know,

01:16:29 ◼   ► it's a little tiny bit brighter, right?

01:16:31 ◼   ► And that's why I think it doesn't bother me

01:16:33 ◼   ► because for the longest time, everyone's been saying,

01:16:36 ◼   ► you know, I love the 5K iMac, I would love to have,

01:16:39 ◼   ► but I don't, you know, I have a tower computer

01:16:41 ◼   ► or I have something else or I have a laptop,

01:16:43 ◼   ► I would love to have that screen hooked up to my laptop

01:16:46 ◼   ► or my tower Mac or whatever.

01:16:48 ◼   ► Why can't I do that?

01:16:49 ◼   ► Why can't I just buy that screen?

01:16:50 ◼   ► And then LG came along and said, here you go,

01:16:51 ◼   ► you can buy that panel in this terrible case

01:16:54 ◼   ► that has many problems that seem like they shouldn't exist,

01:16:57 ◼   ► but do with like flaky USB ports and a terrible stand

01:17:00 ◼   ► and it interferes with your wifi and all those other things.

01:17:03 ◼   ► And so I feel like, you know, it doesn't bother me

01:17:06 ◼   ► that this is what everybody wanted and Apple delivered it.

01:17:08 ◼   ► and they delivered it in a straightforward way by saying,

01:17:11 ◼   ► by not introducing essentially a 5K display that is,

01:17:15 ◼   ► you know, proportionally less expensive than the 6K.

01:17:18 ◼   ► This is a 5K display that is way less expensive

01:17:20 ◼   ► than if you took the 6K and scaled it down to 5K

01:17:23 ◼   ► in terms of price.

01:17:24 ◼   ► And that's what people wanted and that's what they got.

01:17:26 ◼   ► So I'm not disappointed or bothered.

01:17:29 ◼   ► I'm happy because I think it makes perfect sense.

01:17:32 ◼   ► And for tons of people, like to this day,

01:17:35 ◼   ► That 5K iMac screen is still a gorgeous screen.

01:17:39 ◼   ► I have no complaints about it, you know, for what it is.

01:17:43 ◼   ► And once I got rid of the image retention issues

01:17:45 ◼   ► and all that other stuff, it's, you know,

01:17:47 ◼   ► it's still as good as it ever was.

01:17:49 ◼   ► - Yeah, it doesn't do HDR.

01:17:51 ◼   ► And like, I have no doubt that there will be

01:17:53 ◼   ► a display panel technology that puts it to shame

01:17:56 ◼   ► and that Apple itself will probably release at some point

01:18:00 ◼   ► a more expensive but nicer panel that maybe uses mini LED.

01:18:05 ◼   ► - QD OLED.

01:18:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly.

01:18:08 ◼   ► I love quantum dots and all the other quanta

01:18:12 ◼   ► that are out there.

01:18:13 ◼   ► Yeah, there are so many other technologies.

01:18:14 ◼   ► And of course, whether it's in six months or in two years,

01:18:17 ◼   ► there will be, I think, an Apple display

01:18:19 ◼   ► that outdoes this one.

01:18:21 ◼   ► This one may still stick around even at that point,

01:18:24 ◼   ► and then there'll be one above it.

01:18:26 ◼   ► But it doesn't bother me?

01:18:28 ◼   ► No, because it's good.

01:18:29 ◼   ► It's good and it's what I wanted for a long time,

01:18:32 ◼   ► and I think it'll last a long time.

01:18:34 ◼   ► I'm not so desperate for HDR or anything like that.

01:18:39 ◼   ► HDR is nice, but it's not necessary for my workflow.

01:18:43 ◼   ► And if it was, I guess I would have bought

01:18:44 ◼   ► a Studio Display XDR.

01:18:46 ◼   ► So I'm happy with it too.

01:18:49 ◼   ► I would have been okay if it had had

01:18:52 ◼   ► other fantastic display technology in it,

01:18:54 ◼   ► but the fact that it's got center stage, right?

01:18:58 ◼   ► And that it's got its microphones

01:18:59 ◼   ► and its speakers and all of that.

01:19:00 ◼   ► And we'll see when the reviews come out

01:19:02 ◼   ► how it actually is at all of those things.

01:19:04 ◼   ► But like, it's not just,

01:19:06 ◼   ► we threw a panel in a box and gave it to you.

01:19:09 ◼   ► It is a lot more than that.

01:19:11 ◼   ► And it's an Apple display.

01:19:12 ◼   ► So like, I'm okay with it.

01:19:15 ◼   ► - I actually am kind of desperate for HDR,

01:19:16 ◼   ► but the thing is like,

01:19:17 ◼   ► the reason it's not disappointing is like,

01:19:19 ◼   ► so show me the other 5K high refresh rate HDR display

01:19:24 ◼   ► for an affordable price that you would get otherwise.

01:19:26 ◼   ► Like it's, they didn't, you know, it was,

01:19:28 ◼   ► it remained to be seen whether it was feasible for Apple,

01:19:31 ◼   ► whether that technology existed.

01:19:32 ◼   ► Like, because they put the laptop screens out

01:19:34 ◼   ► and laptop screens are phenomenal.

01:19:35 ◼   ► It's like, wow, if they can do that in a laptop screen,

01:19:38 ◼   ► maybe they can make a 5K screen that has all those things.

01:19:41 ◼   ► But they didn't, and no one else has either.

01:19:43 ◼   ► Like if you look for screens that come close to these specs,

01:19:46 ◼   ► they are very expensive.

01:19:48 ◼   ► They start, you know, thousands of dollars,

01:19:50 ◼   ► through two, three, four, $5,000

01:19:52 ◼   ► for screens that do those things

01:19:54 ◼   ► that are essentially 5K iMac size screens,

01:19:57 ◼   ► but also HDR and iRefresh, right?

01:19:59 ◼   ► And that's a totally different product.

01:20:00 ◼   ► And we've already basically got that with the XDR, right?

01:20:02 ◼   ► So if Apple came out with this,

01:20:04 ◼   ► but everybody else had, you know,

01:20:06 ◼   ► 1600 nits high refresh monitors at the same size

01:20:11 ◼   ► in like the PC world, for example,

01:20:13 ◼   ► yeah, then we'd all be disappointed.

01:20:15 ◼   ► But I don't see how you can be disappointed

01:20:17 ◼   ► because it's like, well, what should they have done instead?

01:20:19 ◼   ► Like there are no alternatives at this price

01:20:21 ◼   ► and Apple should have a monitor at this price

01:20:23 ◼   ► and now they do.

01:20:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, it'll come, it'll happen.

01:20:26 ◼   ► But yeah, this is, I'm not disappointed

01:20:29 ◼   ► by the existence of this product right at the moment.

01:20:31 ◼   ► And I bought one, so there you go.

01:20:35 ◼   ► I'll be happy with it.

01:20:36 ◼   ► And the next one won't cost what this one costs, right?

01:20:40 ◼   ► (laughs)

01:20:41 ◼   ► If it is an HDR display,

01:20:44 ◼   ► if it's whether it's 27 or it's larger,

01:20:46 ◼   ► it's gonna be more expensive.

01:20:49 ◼   ► - Probably, but I got to point out on ADP,

01:20:52 ◼   ► there's that, it's not Dell's Alienware,

01:20:54 ◼   ► but Dell bought Alienware.

01:20:55 ◼   ► There is the Alienware QD OLED gaming monitor.

01:21:00 ◼   ► It's not retina.

01:21:01 ◼   ► I forget what the resolution is.

01:21:02 ◼   ► It's a weird like widescreen aspect ratio curved thing.

01:21:05 ◼   ► So it's not like, it's not suitable for Mac use

01:21:08 ◼   ► 'cause it's not the sort of DPI

01:21:09 ◼   ► and proportions that we're used to,

01:21:11 ◼   ► but it is less than $2,000.

01:21:13 ◼   ► It's like $1,300 or something.

01:21:14 ◼   ► It's a 34 inch wide aspect ratio, $1,300 QD OLED.

01:21:18 ◼   ► If that's how these things are gonna be priced,

01:21:22 ◼   ► it is conceivable that in several years time,

01:21:25 ◼   ► this 5K screen can be replaced with a screen

01:21:29 ◼   ► that is HDR, high refresh, you know,

01:21:32 ◼   ► perfect blacks, QD OLED thing

01:21:34 ◼   ► for exactly the same price as it is now.

01:21:36 ◼   ► Like that's the magic of technology.

01:21:37 ◼   ► We just have to make the next leap

01:21:38 ◼   ► to the next screen tech.

01:21:40 ◼   ► Mini LED is not that tech.

01:21:41 ◼   ► Mini LED is a tech that has its own compromises,

01:21:45 ◼   ► but it's also more expensive than this.

01:21:46 ◼   ► QD OLED seems like a pure win,

01:21:48 ◼   ► kind of like the M1 where it's like,

01:21:50 ◼   ► oh, it's gonna be cheaper and it's gonna be better

01:21:52 ◼   ► and it's gonna be faster and it's gonna take less power.

01:21:54 ◼   ► QD OLED seems like it might be the display technology

01:21:57 ◼   ► equivalent of that if current trends continue.

01:21:59 ◼   ► - Well, when that happens,

01:22:01 ◼   ► then we hand down our studio displays

01:22:03 ◼   ► and they live another lifetime somewhere else.

01:22:07 ◼   ► It's okay.

01:22:07 ◼   ► Different Steven wants to know, this is with a pH.

01:22:12 ◼   ► The first one was with a V.

01:22:14 ◼   ► What are your Apple TV frame rate settings?

01:22:16 ◼   ► Do you bypass the TV's processor

01:22:18 ◼   ► and let the Apple TV do the upscaling for non 4K content?

01:22:23 ◼   ► This question presupposes that I have a 4K TV and I do not.

01:22:27 ◼   ► So my Apple TV doesn't need to do any upscaling

01:22:30 ◼   ► and neither does my TV.

01:22:31 ◼   ► - Just since the 1080p.

01:22:32 ◼   ► - So you don't have 4K or HDR, you just have a plasma.

01:22:36 ◼   ► - That's right.

01:22:37 ◼   ► - The last great plasma.

01:22:38 ◼   ► - I'm working on changing that this year.

01:22:41 ◼   ► But yeah, I don't do that.

01:22:42 ◼   ► In terms of the other settings that,

01:22:43 ◼   ► the main thing I have it set to is the feature

01:22:45 ◼   ► that I wanted for a long time, which is the,

01:22:47 ◼   ► what are they called?

01:22:47 ◼   ► Like match frame rate setting or whatever,

01:22:50 ◼   ► so that I can watch 24 frames per second content

01:22:53 ◼   ► and actually display it at 24 frames per second.

01:22:55 ◼   ► 'Cause my television can do 24 frames per second.

01:22:58 ◼   ► So if the Apple TV outputs it, my TV can display it.

01:23:00 ◼   ► It's one of the advantages of plasma

01:23:02 ◼   ► over some of the early LED LCD stuff

01:23:05 ◼   ► is that many of the early LCDs only did 60 Hertz refresh.

01:23:09 ◼   ► And if you have 24 frames per second content,

01:23:11 ◼   ► the math doesn't work out very well there.

01:23:14 ◼   ► But my TV can literally do 24 frames per second.

01:23:16 ◼   ► And now Apple TV can output that

01:23:18 ◼   ► with the match frame rate thing.

01:23:19 ◼   ► And so that's what I do.

01:23:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, I match frame rate and I do match,

01:23:24 ◼   ► and I have Apple do the resolution, I want to say.

01:23:28 ◼   ► I think I've got Apple TV doing the resolution

01:23:30 ◼   ► and then I'm also matching HDR,

01:23:35 ◼   ► which the problem with matching HDR is,

01:23:39 ◼   ► I was having some issues with certain shows

01:23:42 ◼   ► basically turning purple,

01:23:44 ◼   ► but it turned out that by replacing my receiver

01:23:48 ◼   ► and a bunch of my cables,

01:23:50 ◼   ► the matching HDR actually seems to work now.

01:23:52 ◼   ► So I'm back to just sort of matching whatever is getting --

01:23:57 ◼   ► whatever is in the content, and it seems to work okay.

01:24:01 ◼   ► -In terms of upscaling,

01:24:03 ◼   ► if you don't have a very, very fancy TV,

01:24:06 ◼   ► like read as an expensive TV,

01:24:08 ◼   ► chances are good that the upscaling that's being done

01:24:10 ◼   ► in the Apple Silicon that's in your Apple TV

01:24:12 ◼   ► is better than what's going to be done by the,

01:24:15 ◼   ► you know, low-end media tech chip in your,

01:24:17 ◼   ► you know, like reasonably priced television, right?

01:24:21 ◼   ► I mean, you can try them both ways

01:24:22 ◼   ► and see if you can tell the difference.

01:24:23 ◼   ► You can't tell the difference who cares,

01:24:24 ◼   ► but I'm like Apple's image processing in general

01:24:27 ◼   ► is pretty good.

01:24:28 ◼   ► And they share their, you know,

01:24:30 ◼   ► system on a chips across their phones and their iPads

01:24:32 ◼   ► and their Macs and yes, even their Apple TVs.

01:24:34 ◼   ► And so that Apple TV is getting the benefit

01:24:37 ◼   ► of an image processing section of its system on a chip

01:24:41 ◼   ► that was developed for an iPhone several years ago.

01:24:45 ◼   ► Joey asks, "I know it's not gonna happen,

01:24:48 ◼   ► but an M1 Ultra GPU better than an Nvidia 3090

01:24:51 ◼   ► deserves to play games.

01:24:53 ◼   ► What's stopping macOS from being able to run Windows games

01:24:55 ◼   ► in a translation layer,

01:24:57 ◼   ► a la the well-regarded Steam Deck handheld?"

01:25:01 ◼   ► - I think Joey must be talking about a product

01:25:03 ◼   ► that I haven't heard of

01:25:03 ◼   ► because I don't know what the well-regarded Steam Deck is.

01:25:06 ◼   ► I know what the actual Steam Deck is,

01:25:07 ◼   ► and it is not well-regarded.

01:25:09 ◼   ► Here's why this is a problem.

01:25:12 ◼   ► So when you have, Steam Deck runs Linux, right?

01:25:14 ◼   ► but it wants to run Windows, games that run on Windows.

01:25:17 ◼   ► So it has this translation layer where it translates

01:25:19 ◼   ► like the DirectX type APIs that are available on Windows

01:25:22 ◼   ► and tries to make them available on Linux.

01:25:24 ◼   ► And so the games can run,

01:25:25 ◼   ► even though they were not originally written

01:25:27 ◼   ► to run on Linux, you can take a Windows game

01:25:28 ◼   ► and run it on Linux.

01:25:29 ◼   ► That's super hard to do.

01:25:32 ◼   ► The game developers, if these game developers

01:25:35 ◼   ► are not totally on board with you,

01:25:37 ◼   ► which they probably aren't,

01:25:38 ◼   ► they didn't develop their games against running

01:25:41 ◼   ► in a Windows translation layer on Linux.

01:25:42 ◼   ► They didn't QA them against running on Steam Deck, right?

01:25:46 ◼   ► You know, to get the game sort of certified

01:25:48 ◼   ► and sold on Steam is a lower bar

01:25:50 ◼   ► than actually developing on that from day one.

01:25:53 ◼   ► It's really difficult to chase that around

01:25:55 ◼   ► because you don't control the platform

01:25:56 ◼   ► that you're imitating.

01:25:57 ◼   ► Windows changes all the time,

01:25:59 ◼   ► and you have to constantly keep up with like,

01:26:01 ◼   ► oh, here's my shim layer on top of Linux

01:26:03 ◼   ► or on top of Mac OS that runs the Windows games.

01:26:06 ◼   ► And all I've seen from people using Steam Deck

01:26:08 ◼   ► is that it's not as reliable an experience

01:26:12 ◼   ► as running, playing a Windows game on actual Windows

01:26:15 ◼   ► or on the Xbox,

01:26:16 ◼   ► 'cause that's what the games were developed against.

01:26:18 ◼   ► It's kind of a miracle and amazing that it works.

01:26:21 ◼   ► And the performance is usually pretty good too,

01:26:23 ◼   ► but things like bugs where it gets frozen

01:26:25 ◼   ► or there's a glitch or you can't make progress

01:26:27 ◼   ► at this part of the game or it crashes,

01:26:29 ◼   ► like those are things that are very frustrating for gamers.

01:26:34 ◼   ► And it's very difficult as the creators of Steam Deck

01:26:39 ◼   ► to know how to handle that,

01:26:40 ◼   ► because what are you going to do?

01:26:41 ◼   ► chase down every bug in every other game and then talk to the game developer and

01:26:43 ◼   ► say hey we discover and when you run your game on our weird emulation layer

01:26:46 ◼   ► it does this weird thing can you please fix it for us repeat that by every

01:26:50 ◼   ► single game that has some kind of bug that runs enough a steam deck and then

01:26:54 ◼   ► add to that the fact that valve games are their bread and butter they love

01:26:58 ◼   ► games they're all about games they understand games Apple that's not true

01:27:02 ◼   ► none of those things are true of Apple Apple doesn't understand games they don't

01:27:05 ◼   ► really love them in the same way at least not these type of games they're

01:27:07 ◼   ► on Steam Deck.

01:27:09 ◼   ► And so Apple is not inclined to do that type of thing.

01:27:13 ◼   ► And I think it's a bad idea to even try to do that thing.

01:27:16 ◼   ► It's a bit of a fool's errand.

01:27:18 ◼   ► I don't think like Valve and Steam will be successful

01:27:22 ◼   ► at doing that.

01:27:23 ◼   ► And I think Apple and other companies should not even try.

01:27:26 ◼   ► You either get people to develop games natively for you

01:27:28 ◼   ► or you don't.

01:27:30 ◼   ► But trying to build and field a commercial platform

01:27:33 ◼   ► where you're imitating another platform is a sucker's bet.

01:27:37 ◼   ► We have a friend in a Slack that we're both in

01:27:40 ◼   ► who regales us with tales of using crossover

01:27:44 ◼   ► to play Windows games on his Mac.

01:27:47 ◼   ► And he's a positive guy and often says things like,

01:27:51 ◼   ► "Ah, there was an update released to this game

01:27:54 ◼   ► that fixed the issue where it was all weird and blocky,

01:27:57 ◼   ► and now it's playable."

01:27:59 ◼   ► And it's the, you know, on one level,

01:28:01 ◼   ► I'm very happy for him that he can play these games

01:28:04 ◼   ► and that he considers that a win,

01:28:06 ◼   ► that he can play these games on the Mac.

01:28:07 ◼   ► On the other hand, every time I look at those things

01:28:10 ◼   ► that he says, I think, no, no, no, no, don't.

01:28:14 ◼   ► 'Cause it's, crossover is using Wine,

01:28:16 ◼   ► so it's a Windows code translator.

01:28:19 ◼   ► And they, apparently I saw a very funny tweet

01:28:21 ◼   ► that even though you can't use 32-bit apps on modern macOS,

01:28:26 ◼   ► Rosetta will actually emulate 32-bit code and they use it.

01:28:30 ◼   ► You know, it's a fun thing,

01:28:33 ◼   ► but like you don't build a platform on something like that.

01:28:37 ◼   ► I hear what Joey is saying here,

01:28:40 ◼   ► which is look at the GPU's on these things.

01:28:43 ◼   ► Let's use them for something.

01:28:45 ◼   ► I get it.

01:28:46 ◼   ► I totally get it.

01:28:48 ◼   ► Let us use it for something.

01:28:49 ◼   ► But I think it's gonna need to be native for, you know,

01:28:53 ◼   ► iOS or Mac, one of those.

01:28:55 ◼   ► - I mean, I think Apple Arcade games will run really well,

01:28:57 ◼   ► really, really well in these things.

01:28:58 ◼   ► - Oh yeah.

01:28:59 ◼   ► - And it kind of opens the door if someone was inclined

01:29:02 ◼   ► to make an Apple Arcade game whose graphics scale up

01:29:06 ◼   ► to be much more impressive on the Mac

01:29:08 ◼   ► than they are on the iPad.

01:29:09 ◼   ► I'm not sure if anyone has taken that opportunity.

01:29:11 ◼   ► Most of the Apple Arcade games that I've seen

01:29:13 ◼   ► look more or less the same.

01:29:14 ◼   ► I mean, higher res on the Mac maybe,

01:29:16 ◼   ► but there's nothing drastic about them.

01:29:18 ◼   ► Whereas PC games, even just within a single platform,

01:29:20 ◼   ► just within the realm of PC,

01:29:21 ◼   ► most games have historically come with settings

01:29:25 ◼   ► so you can crank them way down for a weaker PC

01:29:27 ◼   ► and they look ugly,

01:29:28 ◼   ► or way, way, way up for your super high-end one.

01:29:31 ◼   ► And it would be nice if the games that Apple actually is,

01:29:35 ◼   ► you know, does have a platform for basically iOS games.

01:29:38 ◼   ► It would be nice if we saw more iOS games doing that.

01:29:42 ◼   ► And I say Apple Arcade because Apple Arcade games

01:29:44 ◼   ► have to be available on Apple TV and iPhone and Mac, right?

01:29:49 ◼   ► That's a requirement to be an Apple Arcade game.

01:29:52 ◼   ► Otherwise, like for the most part,

01:29:53 ◼   ► iOS developers don't care about the Mac.

01:29:55 ◼   ► But when Apple forces them to, they do.

01:29:57 ◼   ► And when they do that,

01:29:58 ◼   ► it would be neat to see a graphic style

01:29:59 ◼   ► Or you could crank it up to ultra and it would look really good on an M1 Ultra.

01:30:04 ◼   ► Alright, this question is silly, but I think there's something behind it that I think is

01:30:09 ◼   ► interesting.

01:30:10 ◼   ► This is from Jeff.

01:30:11 ◼   ► The year is 2036.

01:30:12 ◼   ► John Syracuse's Mac Pro dies.

01:30:14 ◼   ► No Macs run Windows in a fashion that play games decently and streaming games is still

01:30:18 ◼   ► subpar.

01:30:19 ◼   ► Would John consider buying a Windows PC?

01:30:22 ◼   ► Now, John, I'm going to let you answer, but first I just want to say John won't even buy

01:30:27 ◼   ► an Xbox.

01:30:28 ◼   ► So I think this is really unlikely, but you have talked about using boot camp.

01:30:35 ◼   ► And I have a boot camp thing set up on my iMac Pro that, you know, when I switch to

01:30:39 ◼   ► a Mac Studio, I'm going to lose it.

01:30:40 ◼   ► So how are you feeling about that, about the having a system that you can boot into to

01:30:45 ◼   ► play Windows games if you no longer have an Intel Mac?

01:30:51 ◼   ► Well, to be clear, the Mac Studio that I'm thinking about buying would not be for me.

01:30:55 ◼   ► It would be for my wife.

01:30:56 ◼   ► I still have one.

01:30:57 ◼   ► on to your Mac Pro.

01:30:58 ◼   ► My big Mac Pro, yeah.

01:30:59 ◼   ► At the very least, I've got to see what the Mac Pro that Apple teased at the end of its

01:31:03 ◼   ► event or is that going to be like?

01:31:05 ◼   ► What will happen in 2036 then when your Mac Pro dies?

01:31:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:31:09 ◼   ► Well, so in 2036 will I be running a Mac Pro or will I be running a Mac Studio by that

01:31:14 ◼   ► point or some other thing that's not a Mac Pro.

01:31:16 ◼   ► But either way, the real question is what kind of calamity would have to befall you

01:31:21 ◼   ► to get you to buy a Windows PC?

01:31:22 ◼   ► Yes.

01:31:23 ◼   ► And the real problem with that is I don't like Windows.

01:31:27 ◼   ► I'm familiar enough with it to know that that hasn't changed over the years as I've installed various versions of Windows, you know

01:31:33 ◼   ► XP Windows 7, I don't think I've ever had Vista, Windows 8 and now Windows 10. I purchased these Windows, you know

01:31:39 ◼   ► Oh, yeah copies of Windows and install them in boot camp and use them in various Macs and I use them to play games

01:31:44 ◼   ► I don't think I would get a Windows PC though because

01:31:48 ◼   ► Especially with the way Microsoft is running its gaming business lately

01:31:51 ◼   ► I'm not interested in Windows at all

01:31:54 ◼   ► I'm only interested in the games and most of the games that are available on Windows are also available at the very least

01:32:01 ◼   ► They're available on Xbox

01:32:02 ◼   ► But they're also very often available on other platforms as well

01:32:05 ◼   ► Like that's the strategy as Microsoft is pursuing to not sort of to be less about the exclusives or whatever

01:32:11 ◼   ► So it just so happens so far there haven't been any games that are exclusive to Xbox

01:32:17 ◼   ► That have caused me to buy an Xbox and the games that are exclusive to PC

01:32:22 ◼   ► I've been able to play on my Mac, but I think in the grand scheme of things if current trends continue

01:32:27 ◼   ► That's very it's less and less likely with every passing year that there's going to be a game that I just must play

01:32:32 ◼   ► That I can't play

01:32:35 ◼   ► You know that I have to get a Windows PC to play

01:32:37 ◼   ► Even you mentioned crossover last time even if I was desperate to do that

01:32:41 ◼   ► although I said it's a terrible idea to sort of build a platform like Steam Deck on top of sort of a translation layer a

01:32:46 ◼   ► product like crossover makes perfect sense because if you're like

01:32:49 ◼   ► If my choice is I have to buy a Windows PC

01:32:52 ◼   ► Or I should try I could get crossover and just see how it does you know a crossover running on

01:32:56 ◼   ► You know an Apple silicon thing where it's doing translation, and you know translating from x86 to arm just for this one game

01:33:03 ◼   ► I want to play I try that product out

01:33:05 ◼   ► And you know if it works at all it's kind of amazing and it saved me a lot of money because it's way cheaper to buy

01:33:10 ◼   ► Crossover and one game than it is to build a you know Windows PC

01:33:14 ◼   ► But you know, I don't I can't do the math in 2036

01:33:17 ◼   ► The real problem is and you know, even if I had made the decisions like well

01:33:20 ◼   ► There's this game that I just have to play and all there's no x86

01:33:24 ◼   ► Computers in my house anymore except for in the attic and I really need to play that game

01:33:29 ◼   ► It's not available on an Xbox console

01:33:31 ◼   ► So I have to buy a Windows PC

01:33:32 ◼   ► The real thing that's gonna be right me from doing that is that I have no place to put a Windows PC in my house

01:33:37 ◼   ► like literally

01:33:37 ◼   ► I don't have like a desk but the chair in front of it to put it on and

01:33:40 ◼   ► And in the end, that will prevent me from buying a Windows PC because I'm not going to displace my Mac or my wife's Mac.

01:33:47 ◼   ► I currently have no place to put a Windows PC.

01:33:50 ◼   ► Maybe in 2036 all my kids left the house and I can re-commandeer one of their rooms.

01:33:54 ◼   ► But I'm not sure how that's gonna go and maybe we'll move to a house without bedrooms or whatever.

01:33:58 ◼   ► I just don't have room for it.

01:33:59 ◼   ► Would you buy an Xbox ever?

01:34:02 ◼   ► Well, this is like Green Eggs and Ham now. Would you?

01:34:06 ◼   ► - I would buy an Xbox before I'd buy a Windows PC,

01:34:10 ◼   ► just because like the Xbox is so clearly a gaming thing

01:34:14 ◼   ► and I don't have to deal with Windows, right?

01:34:15 ◼   ► I don't like Windows.

01:34:17 ◼   ► I don't want to deal with Windows.

01:34:18 ◼   ► I don't, you know, I'd rather it just be more plug and play

01:34:20 ◼   ► or whatever in the Xbox is that.

01:34:22 ◼   ► - Right.

01:34:23 ◼   ► All right.

01:34:26 ◼   ► Let's go to this next question then, which is related.

01:34:29 ◼   ► Andy asks, "I know that John usually archives

01:34:32 ◼   ► his old Macs in the attic,

01:34:35 ◼   ► but would he consider selling his 2019 Mac Pro to fund the purchase of an Apple

01:34:40 ◼   ► Silicon equivalent?

01:34:42 ◼   ► I would sell it if I needed to do it financially,

01:34:46 ◼   ► but if I didn't need to do it financially,

01:34:48 ◼   ► the my 2019 Mac Pro has tremendous sentimental value considering I waited 10

01:34:52 ◼   ► years for Apple to make this computer and they finally did and I'm super happy

01:34:56 ◼   ► with it. It's one of my favorite computers that I've ever owned.

01:34:58 ◼   ► I know it's selling ridiculous and no,

01:35:00 ◼   ► I don't quote unquote need it for what I do with my computer,

01:35:02 ◼   ► but it makes me happy and it made me happy after a long wait of me not being happy with the computers that I was selling.

01:35:09 ◼   ► So in the absence of me desperately needing money, this one's definitely a keeper.

01:35:13 ◼   ► All right. Nathan asks, "Will a more powerful Mac Mini with an M1 Pro be possible with the existing cooling?"

01:35:26 ◼   ► Have you looked inside the M1 Mac Mini?

01:35:31 ◼   ► - It's like, it's awful, yeah.

01:35:35 ◼   ► - But the thing is they say with the existing cooling.

01:35:37 ◼   ► So I think, I think yes, yes.

01:35:41 ◼   ► Like here's the way to think about it.

01:35:43 ◼   ► Look at the cooling that's in an M1 Pro based laptop.

01:35:46 ◼   ► Is the cooling in the Mac mini beefier than that?

01:35:48 ◼   ► Yeah, it is.

01:35:49 ◼   ► The fans are taller, they move more air, you can do it.

01:35:53 ◼   ► That said, I feel like if you were going to put an M1 Pro

01:35:57 ◼   ► in a Mac mini and I think Apple probably will eventually,