00:00:00 ◼ ► One of my favorite things is to take the listeners on the journey through the show notes.
00:00:05 ◼ ► And I feel like I've been doing this a lot lately, but the boys have been very clever with their entries in our internal show notes.
00:00:21 ◼ ► I couldn't think of a better way to word this. Can you give me a couple seconds to think about this, though?
00:00:26 ◼ ► Because I just read this now, and I want to, before you tell me what it is, I'm going to try to figure it out.
00:00:38 ◼ ► We have talked about his pants pockets and the weight of the phones and stuff like that.
00:00:41 ◼ ► No, no, no, John, this is like role reversal here. I actually remembered something. I'm very proud of myself.
00:01:38 ◼ ► That and pouring drinks on Aaron's laptops. Just basically anything that's precious that's Aaron's.
00:01:48 ◼ ► Well, now, whenever I tell this to people, like, are you sure he didn't throw it at the windshield?
00:02:08 ◼ ► Well, right? I mean, again, I should call Aaron up here to tell you her version of the story,
00:02:18 ◼ ► if she wasn't there and didn't witness it herself, she would be saying the exact same thing.
00:02:27 ◼ ► are so lucky that I was here to witness this, because I would never have believed that that just happened.
00:02:51 ◼ ► And it created, the event created a large mark on the screen, a long either scratch or crack on the screen.
00:03:12 ◼ ► Do you have like those metal rivets sticking out of the back of your, any of your things that you would be sitting with?
00:03:17 ◼ ► I don't know how that kind of mark would have been made, but regardless, it looked bad.
00:03:29 ◼ ► The owner of the iPad was understandably very upset about this to the point where, again, this is what created the whole swap where I swapped this iPad with my iPad
00:03:39 ◼ ► and I reset them, you know, transferred everything over, swapped them so that, you know, the owner of the iPad could be compensated with a fresh one and I would use the cracked or scratched or whatever one.
00:03:56 ◼ ► And I thought, you know what, I'll just use a cracked iPad. It's still working for me just fine, whatever.
00:04:06 ◼ ► I remember there was a kerfuffle about it, but I don't remember if you ever actually got it working.
00:04:09 ◼ ► I'll get to that in a minute. The answer to that is no, I did not eventually get it working.
00:04:14 ◼ ► I even now have a totally separate physical SIM fresh from AT&T in there, which also worked for a couple of days and then got no service.
00:04:27 ◼ ► Oh, so you unquestionably have bought a brand new iPad with brand new cellular service because you will throw money at the problem to make it go away.
00:04:46 ◼ ► And a couple of people had written in to say, "Why don't you just bring it to an Apple Store and have them look at it?"
00:04:51 ◼ ► Sometimes if there's no other signs of obvious damage, like drop damage on the frame, sometimes they'll just replace it kind of out of goodwill or assuming that maybe it kind of broke too easily.
00:05:08 ◼ ► So I brought the iPad with me along with the iPad Mini that I got a few months ago because I wanted to trade it in because I hate it for reasons.
00:05:24 ◼ ► And also I really miss promotion. And also I really hate using iPads without keyboards, it turns out.
00:05:29 ◼ ► And the keyboard options for the iPad Mini are terrible. Trust me, I know, I've tried them.
00:05:35 ◼ ► Yes, even listener, that one that you say is highly rated on Amazon that has five stars, yeah, even that one, terrible.
00:05:46 ◼ ► And I don't even use the Magic Keyboard with the trackpad, I use the regular flippy smart keyboard folio.
00:05:51 ◼ ► I still like that better than the Magic Keyboard for my own purposes and my preferences.
00:05:57 ◼ ► I love that combo, the 11 inch iPad with that keyboard, the smart keyboard folio, not the trackpad Magic Keyboard.
00:06:03 ◼ ► It's a great combo, it's relatively small and lightweight. The keys actually feel pretty good, especially considering, which is funny, I think they're butterfly keys.
00:06:15 ◼ ► Anyway, I hate the iPad Mini. So I'm like, this is going terribly for me, I've had it for too long, I can't return it, I don't want to deal with selling it.
00:06:34 ◼ ► I show the iPad to the Apple Store representative and he was a very nice guy and he's looking at the scratch crack and he's like, I don't think it's a crack.
00:06:43 ◼ ► And I'm like, well, is there some way? Because I told him, I'm like, look, I'm fine working like this, but if it can be easily repaired, I don't want to lose a bunch of money on trading down the road.
00:06:53 ◼ ► So he looked at it and he's like, he ran his finger over it and I showed him how it works on the touchscreen and he's like, nope, I'm pretty sure this is not a crack.
00:07:03 ◼ ► And so this shouldn't hurt your trade in value. And so I thought, great, in that case, I'd like to trade this in.
00:07:23 ◼ ► Yeah, because like I have someone here right now who says it's not a crack and this person can accept a trade in. So let me just do this now and not keep it for another two years and then trade it and then for nothing if by then the mailing company says, oh, no, that's a crack.
00:07:33 ◼ ► So I'm like, okay, I quickly decided, like, you know what, I'm going to trade both of these iPads. So I traded them both in and Adam has a new one.
00:07:48 ◼ ► I narrowed it down further, although the way you were talking about before made me think that Marco sat on it. So I don't know. I can't decide, but it was pretty clear that it was Adam's iPad.
00:07:55 ◼ ► Yeah, so regardless, Adam has a new iPad on the way, funded almost entirely by the trader of these two iPads that I didn't want for reasons. And then I will take back my iPad that has the bad cellular. I'll take that back and deal with it some other way.
00:08:11 ◼ ► That was totally a crack, though. I mean, again, if it's a scratch, what would have made the scratch and if it's so visible, how, why would you not be able to feel it's just an internal crack. It's like one of the layers below the top layer has cracked.
00:08:25 ◼ ► You don't need to explain to the guy about internal cracks. Once he says it's not a crack and it shouldn't affect trading, you are wise to say, great, here you go.
00:08:30 ◼ ► Exactly. That wasn't even my plan going in. I was going to trade the small one, but like as the, as he was like doing, like, you know, getting all the logistics in place to trade in the small one, I was like, wait a minute. This, what am I going to hold onto this for? Like I have, I have an open, I have an open out now. Take it.
00:08:49 ◼ ► Exactly. I'll take this chance. So yeah, anyway, the, the, the situation hopefully will resolve itself with the butt crack. Well, that has resolved itself. And then the cellular, I'll figure out, you know, I'm not a huge rush to solve that if it's on my own iPad, cause I don't use my iPad that much. So we'll solve that some other time.
00:09:14 ◼ ► I'd like to start with some follow-ups slash follow outs. I was listening to the beginning of today's upgrade before we recorded. I didn't get too far into it, but I got far enough to discover what the title was referring to. The title of upgrade number 467 is the least important Mac.
00:09:44 ◼ ► I think probably there should be. Yeah, no, I did see the, this episode appear in my podcast feed and I had to look at the summary and then of course there's always a thing in the notes. And so yes, it all makes sense.
00:09:53 ◼ ► Yeah. So Jason and Mike had a reasonably brief, but actually very interesting conversation about, okay, well what, what is the deal with the Mac Pro? And Jason said, you know, Hey, I think I can summarize it. So now I will summarize Jason's summary. This is getting inception like, but here we are.
00:10:11 ◼ ► All right. So Jason was saying, look, Apple wanted to ship. What was it? It was a Jade 4C die. Was that the internal code name?
00:10:17 ◼ ► Yeah. Okay. The, the, the, the, technically that was the one with, with four M one maxes, not even four M two maxes, but we get the idea. They wanted to ship the quad is what we keep calling it on the show.
00:10:26 ◼ ► Exactly. So they wanted to ship the quad. They couldn't make it work. And you know, Gurman said this months ago that they just can't make it work or they abandoned it for one reason or another. Well, they can make it work. It's just a question of, do you want to pay as much money as it would take to make it work? Also fair, but one way or another, they, they, they shelved the project at least at the time.
00:10:42 ◼ ► And yet, you know, they still wanted, Apple still wanted the, the Apple Silicon transition to be done. And so that means they had to ship something. So they shipped what they got and what they got is an M two ultra, which I think, you know, as Jason had said, it's what is it? Occam's razor. You know, the, the most obvious answer is probably the correct one.
00:11:01 ◼ ► He made a pretty compelling argument that that could be the case. Is there anyone contesting that that was the case?
00:11:07 ◼ ► Not necessarily, but I don't know. I thought it was a pretty good summary that he spelled out in just a couple of minutes.
00:11:13 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, the only thing I would add is the thing that I mentioned, they didn't have to ship what they had. They could have said, uh, no macro transition is complete.
00:11:21 ◼ ► Well, but I think that the implications Jason was saying was that they will probably bring back this quad chip when I bring back, you know what I mean? Like they will actually bring a quad chip at some point. Bring the gap.
00:11:32 ◼ ► We'll see. That's the nature of the Mac pro and there are many things that they could do and we wonder what they will do, but yeah, but they, I feel like if they, if you know, if you know, the four C doesn't work out, the quad doesn't work out for whatever reasons, pricing, whatever they just, it was, I think it would have been in keeping with Apple's actual plans to just say, ah, nevermind.
00:11:52 ◼ ► The transition is complete and they would have had to do, they wouldn't have had to, but it would have been nice if they did that to say kind of like they did by saying, oh, the Mac pro is for another day to reassure people.
00:12:02 ◼ ► They could have said, we're not shipping one now because we couldn't make the Mac probably we wanted to make, but rest assured this product isn't dead and we're going to have another one. Um, that'd be almost unprecedented except they literally did that with this exact computer back when they had the round table.
00:12:15 ◼ ► So it's precedent Apple does not talk about future products with one exception and that is the Mac pro and they've done it twice now once the round table, which is like, do they ever do that? We're going to make a new computer and we haven't even started making it, but we're going to tell you about it, but it's totally coming.
00:12:30 ◼ ► And the second, we haven't announced something during this keynote presentation, but rather than just not saying it, we're going to tell you, oh, I know you were expecting us to say it, but don't worry. It's coming later twice.
00:12:40 ◼ ► At least they've done it the least important Mac, the least important and the one that is the most likely to Apple to do totally uncharacteristic things like telling you about what they're going to do in the future.
00:12:52 ◼ ► It is the least important Mac in terms of, you know, sales volume, but it's the most important Mac in many other ways.
00:13:04 ◼ ► Yeah, but it's not just the halo car thing. It's the idea that Apple should, the idea that I think that I espouse, which Apple can agree with or disagree and so can other people, but if I was running Apple, I would say that it would be important for the company to reach for the stars and try to make the world's fastest personal computer.
00:13:23 ◼ ► Not the world's fastest computer. They're not selling supercomputers, but they sell personal computers and they sell a range of them and they sell laptops and they sell desktops and there is something to be said for shooting for the stars and going for it to make the best, fastest thing you could possibly make.
00:13:38 ◼ ► Because it's cool primarily, which is the argument I made in the thing. You're not going to make money on it. It's not going to sell any things or whatever.
00:13:45 ◼ ► Yes, there's also a trickle down in tech and we'll get to that in a little bit because apparently they talked about that in upgrade as well.
00:13:49 ◼ ► But it's important for the company. It's important for the people who work at the company. It's the reason they make the GR Toyota stuff.
00:13:56 ◼ ► It's like the people who work there, some of them want to make a hot rod too and it does advance the state of the art and it does attract and retain employees and there is sometimes a trickle down effect, but all of that aside, it's also just cool.
00:14:09 ◼ ► And if you run a company, you can decide, what do I think is cool? Maybe I don't think desktops are cool at all. I'm going to do all laptops. Maybe I think what's cool is headsets and watches. Everyone can decide what they want for their company.
00:14:19 ◼ ► I'm not saying this has to be the way Apple does things, but if I ran Apple, this is what I would do.
00:14:24 ◼ ► And I know there are some people at Apple who agree with me and probably more people at Apple who don't. And so it's a constant struggle against good. That would be me.
00:14:31 ◼ ► It's happening inside the company. It happens outside the company. Some people have no interest in the Mac Pro and some people like me have a disproportionate, seemingly inexplicable interest in the Mac Pro.
00:14:49 ◼ ► John, you probably know off the top of your head, which will make this very brief game very unfun, but the case for a true Mac Pro successor. Give me a date off the top of your head.
00:15:06 ◼ ► What did I say was the anniversary of ATP? That was almost to the day when we really and truly embraced, or the two year anniversary, excuse me. No, that was it. It was 2013.
00:15:21 ◼ ► Yeah. So I was, I was writing this before the trashcan had come out. And as I've said multiple times before, people said, Oh, is the trashcan a true Mac Pro successor? I think it is. They tried to make a hard rod. They didn't do a good job.
00:15:35 ◼ ► But, you know, they, it's not like they didn't try, right? It's not like they said, ah, give them a tall Mac mini. You know, they did something. And so, you know, full credit to Apple for that attempt. They're not all going to be winners.
00:15:48 ◼ ► Golly. So ATP was just a wee little baby in March 8th of 2013. The case for true Mac Pro.
00:15:54 ◼ ► Well, so here's a question. If they had released only the Mac Studio and had called it Mac Pro, what would we think of that as a Mac Pro?
00:16:06 ◼ ► People would have been super angry because that they already had that name and they made a big deal at the round table of it being an expandable modular computer, blah, blah, blah.
00:16:20 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. But like the problem is that like they, we've already been there and done that. And Apple, for whatever reason, decided, no, let's have a round table. We are going to make this kind of computer that some people want.
00:16:30 ◼ ► That's what they said. And we're going to call it Mac Pro. If it came out and it was called Mac Studio, then it would be like, I guess there's no Mac Pro. And people would be mad. But, you know, but if they tried to call that thing the new Mac Pro, it would be the trashcan all over again.