The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► I think we should switch over to Skype, for old time's sake.

00:00:03 ◼   ► We'd have the distinction of being the last podcast recorded on Skype.

00:00:10 ◼   ► Somebody's got to be the last.

00:00:13 ◼   ► I thought I was going to be the last.

00:00:15 ◼   ► I used it longer than most people, because I'm a creature of habit, and because, I don't

00:00:20 ◼   ► know, it just worked, you know what I mean?

00:00:22 ◼   ► And it was-

00:00:23 ◼   ► Yeah, well, we were the same way.

00:00:24 ◼   ► In fact, you talked about it on the website, about how they kind of kick-started the whole

00:00:31 ◼   ► podcast industry, but it also, for creative types like us, we used to have our weekly status

00:00:37 ◼   ► meetings and stuff on a phone call, and when Skype came around, we just latched onto that,

00:00:42 ◼   ► and it was great.

00:00:43 ◼   ► And eventually, we moved over to Slack and came up with more modern ways of doing things,

00:00:48 ◼   ► but yeah, it was pretty transformative technology.

00:00:52 ◼   ► Yeah, I talked about it on Dithering a little, but if anything, I think what I wrote on Daring

00:00:57 ◼   ► Fireball, I undersold how much Skype and Skype alone pushed podcasting years ahead of when

00:01:06 ◼   ► it would have happened.

00:01:07 ◼   ► Like, I don't know how the whole first run or two runs of the talk show, when I was doing

00:01:16 ◼   ► it with Dan Benjamin, I really don't know that we could have done it without Skype.

00:01:20 ◼   ► I really don't.

00:01:21 ◼   ► Certainly not 2006, 2007.

00:01:24 ◼   ► Whatever option B was, was terrible.

00:01:27 ◼   ► In theory, we could have done something that sounded terrible, and just by relying on our

00:01:34 ◼   ► local recordings for double-enders, the show would have sounded all right.

00:01:37 ◼   ► But it was something about the fact that the actual Skype quality was so high fidelity and

00:01:43 ◼   ► low latency that it made conversation natural.

00:01:47 ◼   ► It didn't feel like talking over the internet.

00:01:49 ◼   ► That's why we switched from being on phone calls.

00:01:51 ◼   ► I had this nice polycom speaker phone.

00:01:54 ◼   ► It was like top of the line thing.

00:01:55 ◼   ► And once we started using Skype, that thing just sort of sat there and gathered dust because

00:02:01 ◼   ► the quality was good enough that you felt like you were in the room with the person having

00:02:05 ◼   ► a conversation.

00:02:06 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:02:07 ◼   ► That's kind of the baseline functionality.

00:02:09 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:02:10 ◼   ► I remember getting feedback in the early days.

00:02:12 ◼   ► Like the very first run of this show was like one of the first podcasts and people were

00:02:19 ◼   ► listening and they would be like, I can't believe you guys don't aren't recording together in

00:02:24 ◼   ► the same room because that's what it sounds like.

00:02:26 ◼   ► And no, we don't even live in the same state.

00:02:28 ◼   ► And, you know, it has that feel and everybody takes it for granted now.

00:02:34 ◼   ► But the weird thing now, too, is I still hear podcasts occasionally where like one of the

00:02:39 ◼   ► guests is obviously not a regular podcaster and they're calling in from a phone or I don't

00:02:47 ◼   ► know, like using a really old laptop mic or something and they just sound so tinny.

00:02:53 ◼   ► And it's like, yeah, remember when the callers on the radio always sounded like that because

00:02:58 ◼   ► they were always on a phone?

00:02:59 ◼   ► It has a different vibe.

00:03:01 ◼   ► It does not sound like a conversation.

00:03:03 ◼   ► It sounds like it sounds like you're talking to somebody on the phone, right?

00:03:06 ◼   ► It's a different thing.

00:03:08 ◼   ► Your your mental image is that they're out and about, you know, at the shopping mall, having

00:03:13 ◼   ► a chat with you while you're doing your podcast or whatever.

00:03:16 ◼   ► Right.

00:03:16 ◼   ► So anyway, it's a big week.

00:03:18 ◼   ► Yeah, we could go in chronological order.

00:03:22 ◼   ► I don't have much to say about the new iPads.

00:03:24 ◼   ► Do you?

00:03:25 ◼   ► I mean, it's no, no, it's the revs.

00:03:30 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:03:30 ◼   ► And hopefully came across.

00:03:32 ◼   ► But, you know, and I know everybody, it's like Apple can't win.

00:03:36 ◼   ► Nobody can win because everybody wants everything to be super exciting.

00:03:39 ◼   ► And it's I guess what everybody really wants is a fantasy world where every 12 months there

00:03:45 ◼   ► is a revolutionary new upgrade to every product.

00:03:49 ◼   ► People want to be blown away every 12 months or every 11 months.

00:03:54 ◼   ► Blowing away is hard.

00:03:55 ◼   ► It's not going to happen in 12 months.

00:03:57 ◼   ► Sorry.

00:03:58 ◼   ► But in practice, you know, that's just not going to happen.

00:04:02 ◼   ► And the truth is, it's not just that it can't happen.

00:04:05 ◼   ► I honestly think if you think about it objectively, if you could just had a magic genie and could

00:04:11 ◼   ► make it happen, you wouldn't really want it to happen.

00:04:13 ◼   ► You don't want unfamiliar new products replacing familiar ones every 12 months.

00:04:18 ◼   ► Right.

00:04:18 ◼   ► There's right.

00:04:20 ◼   ► It's look at the look at the problem.

00:04:23 ◼   ► People are having adjusting to Apple intelligence now.

00:04:26 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:04:26 ◼   ► A lot of things have changed because of that.

00:04:28 ◼   ► And some of the things are good.

00:04:29 ◼   ► Some of the things are bad.

00:04:30 ◼   ► But everybody's having to deal with the change, right?

00:04:33 ◼   ► If you did that every 12 months, it would get old pretty quick.

00:04:37 ◼   ► So, you know, and so what are the practical alternatives?

00:04:41 ◼   ► The practical alternatives are regular speed bumps with occasional major revisions or irregular updates

00:04:50 ◼   ► and years-long gaps between updates at all where, because Apple's company-wide longstanding policy

00:04:59 ◼   ► is not to comment about future products, everybody's left to wonder,

00:05:03 ◼   ► hey, is Apple, like, abandoning the iPad mini or the whatever has?

00:05:08 ◼   ► Like keyboards.

00:05:10 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:05:11 ◼   ► It's like, well, what's going to happen here?

00:05:14 ◼   ► Well, they did try updating those.

00:05:16 ◼   ► Remember, they had a couple, like...

00:05:18 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:05:19 ◼   ► That was, you know...

00:05:20 ◼   ► And, yeah, Apple's damned if they do and damned if they don't.

00:05:23 ◼   ► And they know that, right?

00:05:25 ◼   ► Right.

00:05:26 ◼   ► They just roll how they're going to roll.

00:05:28 ◼   ► I'm not asking anybody to be super-duper excited about the new M3 iPad Airs.

00:05:36 ◼   ► I keep getting mixed up because some of the new products,

00:05:39 ◼   ► as we'll get to in a much more interesting topic, M3s mixed with M4s, I keep thinking new, so bigger.

00:05:47 ◼   ► And I've had to correct the typo on Daring Fireball at least twice this week,

00:05:51 ◼   ► calling the new iPad Airs the M4 iPad Airs, which aren't true.

00:05:55 ◼   ► They are new, but they're new with the M3 because they're only the Air, which starts at $600.

00:06:03 ◼   ► Yeah, honestly, I only pay attention to that stuff when I need one, right?

00:06:08 ◼   ► And if you're one of those people, yeah, you want to hear about this new product announcement

00:06:15 ◼   ► and you make your product buy decision and all of that.

00:06:18 ◼   ► But if you don't, it's just like, my iPad Air, I'm not even sure which generation it is.

00:06:26 ◼   ► It's fine, right?

00:06:27 ◼   ► I don't need anything.

00:06:29 ◼   ► I'm still using, as my personal iPad, a 2018 iPad Pro 11-inch.

00:06:38 ◼   ► And at this point, it is long in the tooth.

00:06:41 ◼   ► I'm actually wondering, but I also have sort of found myself, the less I use an iPad, the

00:06:49 ◼   ► more productive I am, that I should either be somewhere out and about, and if I need to

00:06:55 ◼   ► do anything, use my phone, or I should sit my ass down at my desk at my Mac and work.

00:07:00 ◼   ► And for me, trying to quote-unquote work, even if it's like, I think, well, you know what I

00:07:06 ◼   ► need to do?

00:07:07 ◼   ► I just need to catch up on email.

00:07:08 ◼   ► I haven't gone through my inbox in days.

00:07:11 ◼   ► I should just do that.

00:07:12 ◼   ► I could do that on my iPad.

00:07:13 ◼   ► But then it's like somebody sends me a link, and the link I open in a browser.

00:07:17 ◼   ► And then I'm thinking, maybe I should link to that from Daring Fireball.

00:07:21 ◼   ► And now I'm trying to post something to Daring Fireball from my iPad, which I can do, but

00:07:27 ◼   ► none of it is like, click, click, click, all my shortcuts.

00:07:31 ◼   ► Yeah, you don't have all your macros and automations.

00:07:34 ◼   ► Right.

00:07:34 ◼   ► You're just not set up to...

00:07:38 ◼   ► Right.

00:07:38 ◼   ► And next thing I know, instead of being 10 in the morning, it's 1.30 in the afternoon,

00:07:45 ◼   ► and I still haven't posted the thing.

00:07:46 ◼   ► And it's, what am I doing?

00:07:47 ◼   ► Why am I not at my desk?

00:07:49 ◼   ► But at this point, a 2018 iPad, it's like noticeably slow.

00:07:53 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:07:54 ◼   ► I'm curious if I just do the factory reset and restore from backup, if that clears it up.

00:07:59 ◼   ► Because I don't know that I've ever used...

00:08:01 ◼   ► Probably not.

00:08:02 ◼   ► I don't think so.

00:08:03 ◼   ► But I don't think so.

00:08:04 ◼   ► But it's curious to me how slow it feels.

00:08:07 ◼   ► Like, it feels like maybe I have run into the...

00:08:11 ◼   ► I think Apple's done such a better job with this over the years.

00:08:14 ◼   ► But I think at this point, they're not really testing iPadOS 18 on 2018-era hardware.

00:08:21 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

00:08:22 ◼   ► No.

00:08:23 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:08:23 ◼   ► And...

00:08:24 ◼   ► You see, well, it's kind of across the board, right?

00:08:28 ◼   ► The older versions of Mac...

00:08:29 ◼   ► Or older Macs with new versions of Mac OS is where you tend to see the problems.

00:08:35 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:08:35 ◼   ► And I can...

00:08:36 ◼   ► I'm not trying to diagnose engineering problems just by using it.

00:08:41 ◼   ► But you can kind of smell or just use the force that this 2018 iPad Pro doesn't have enough RAM.

00:08:49 ◼   ► It's just RAM.

00:08:50 ◼   ► Because I notice I'll just be using Safari and not even switching apps.

00:08:55 ◼   ► And all of a sudden, tabs will reload.

00:08:57 ◼   ► And it's like...

00:08:58 ◼   ► Or you do something in Safari, you go back to the other app, and it's launching from...

00:09:04 ◼   ► Back to a blank screen.

00:09:06 ◼   ► Right.

00:09:06 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:09:07 ◼   ► So...

00:09:08 ◼   ► So, yeah.

00:09:09 ◼   ► But, you know...

00:09:10 ◼   ► I guess the other thing I'll just say about the speed bumps, though, is it is interesting...

00:09:14 ◼   ► A little interesting to me...

00:09:15 ◼   ► Because I think what Apple naturally wants is a 12-month cadence to everything.

00:09:20 ◼   ► The human beings run on an annual cycle.

00:09:24 ◼   ► The planet does.

00:09:26 ◼   ► It's very natural.

00:09:28 ◼   ► The iPhone has always been very predictably annual.

00:09:33 ◼   ► At this point, I think...

00:09:37 ◼   ► Again, I'm not going to speak for Tim Cook, but I honestly think that if they weren't planning to release iPhone 17s in September, they would need to actually, like, somehow warn the world.

00:09:50 ◼   ► Issues, you know, do some kind of...

00:09:52 ◼   ► They'd have to warn their suppliers.

00:09:54 ◼   ► Right.

00:09:55 ◼   ► The whole machine is just set up to just crank these things out every 12 months.

00:10:01 ◼   ► Right.

00:10:01 ◼   ► And they've done it.

00:10:03 ◼   ► Even remarkably so, kept it pretty much on schedule during 2020 and even 2021 with COVID.

00:10:12 ◼   ► And then the year after COVID, yeah, the whole supply chain had lurched and the world had sort of stopped for months.

00:10:19 ◼   ► And some of the phones came out in October or something, but they were able to announce everything in September.

00:10:24 ◼   ► But, like, the Mac in the Intel era would go through years-long gaps.

00:10:30 ◼   ► And everybody's like, what the hell?

00:10:31 ◼   ► Remember the long, long wait for a Retina MacBook Air?

00:10:35 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:10:36 ◼   ► To the point...

00:10:38 ◼   ► Well, again, there was another company calling the shots there.

00:10:40 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:10:41 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:10:41 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:10:42 ◼   ► They couldn't build the Retina MacBook Air that they wanted to with the chips that were available from Intel.

00:10:49 ◼   ► The Mac Pro, famously, with the trash can design, they had to do the weird, call a couple of us in, me and Panzerino and...

00:11:00 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

00:11:01 ◼   ► I remember that round table thing.

00:11:03 ◼   ► Diener Fried, and I forget who else was there, and do a, okay, we sort of screwed up the Pro hardware, but we mean it.

00:11:09 ◼   ► We're going to come out with a...

00:11:12 ◼   ► We're not going to say it's a new Mac Pro here, but we're going to come out with new Mac Pro hardware.

00:11:17 ◼   ► And we're even going to come out with a Pro iMac.

00:11:21 ◼   ► And I remember asking, is it going to be called the iMac Pro?

00:11:26 ◼   ► And Federighi looked at Schiller, and Schiller just gave him a look, and they're like, it's going to be a Pro-targeted iMac.

00:11:33 ◼   ► It was like, no, we're not going to tell you the name.

00:11:36 ◼   ► Was it the iMac Pro at that point, or were they thinking about the studio that early?

00:11:41 ◼   ► No, no, it was the iMac Pro, because they weren't going to hint at Apple Silicon.

00:11:45 ◼   ► It was like 2017 when they had that?

00:11:48 ◼   ► Oh, that's right, right, right, right.

00:11:51 ◼   ► Because, yeah, and then the new Mac Pro came out with all the Xenon.

00:11:55 ◼   ► Right.

00:11:56 ◼   ► In 2019, right.

00:11:57 ◼   ► But they'd go through those gaps.

00:11:59 ◼   ► And then even when they did come out with the first Retina MacBook Pro in that era, and it was Retina, but then it was stuck where it was for years, because they didn't have any new chips from Intel to move it forward.

00:12:13 ◼   ► So I think getting to an annual cycle is what they want for almost everything.

00:12:19 ◼   ► And it seems like now, in addition to the phones, the MacBooks are very, very predictable.

00:12:25 ◼   ► It's down to like the same time of October, right around Halloween, right?

00:12:29 ◼   ► And they had a Halloween-themed virtual event two years ago for the M3 Pro and Macs, MacBook Pros.

00:12:38 ◼   ► And then this year's, they didn't have a Halloween theme, but it was October 30th where they announced them.

00:12:43 ◼   ► It seems like they want the MacBook Airs to come out around now, which they did this week.

00:12:50 ◼   ► We'll get to them next.

00:12:51 ◼   ► The iPad still is the one, it's like the middle child of the family, right?

00:12:56 ◼   ► It's like the iPhone is the star, and the iPhone gets September, hell or high water.

00:13:01 ◼   ► If we have to drop other products, we're coming out with an iPhone in September.

00:13:04 ◼   ► The Mac seems to be the second favorite, and it's like especially MacBook Pros and especially MacBook Airs.

00:13:11 ◼   ► MacBooks are the main Macs, and they're very, very predictable at this point, or have been for two or three generations.

00:13:18 ◼   ► And iPads are still sort of like, well, not every year.

00:13:24 ◼   ► Well, I think it goes to show, at least in Apple's mind, the relative importance of those platforms, right?

00:13:31 ◼   ► The mobile, super important.

00:13:33 ◼   ► Right.

00:13:34 ◼   ► The desktop, super important.

00:13:36 ◼   ► I mean, everybody doing development at Apple or any other kind of work has got a Mac, right?

00:13:44 ◼   ► You need them.

00:13:45 ◼   ► Yeah, but I think the difference, though, is that the Mac market really needs new Macs.

00:13:51 ◼   ► So many people need, if they can make a buying decision based on something that's vaguely predictable, they might hold off because they know.

00:14:00 ◼   ► You know, like somebody in January, just two months ago, who kind of needed a new MacBook Air, probably if you did any kind of research, you'd probably figure out you should wait.

00:14:11 ◼   ► And that's good.

00:14:11 ◼   ► Right.

00:14:12 ◼   ► It's kind of good that people have a sense.

00:14:13 ◼   ► And if you're like, I don't care.

00:14:15 ◼   ► I really don't care.

00:14:16 ◼   ► If you read the Mac rumors page and it said it's expected that it's going to be just like the M3 MacBook Air, except with an M4, which is the truth.

00:14:25 ◼   ► That's what they just announced two days ago.

00:14:27 ◼   ► And if you're like, what do I care?

00:14:29 ◼   ► Who buys a phone in August?

00:14:32 ◼   ► Right.

00:14:33 ◼   ► I know.

00:14:33 ◼   ► I do wonder.

00:14:34 ◼   ► And there are got to be people out there, and they're probably the people that are like, they're going to be happy with the 16e, right?

00:14:42 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:14:42 ◼   ► It's just like, okay, I just need a phone.

00:14:44 ◼   ► My old one broke.

00:14:45 ◼   ► I need a new phone.

00:14:46 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:14:48 ◼   ► I do think, but what I think is a little interesting about these new iPad Airs that just came out this week with the M3 is that the M2 ones only came out in May last year, which is now it's under a year where they've gone from the M2 to the M3.

00:15:02 ◼   ► I think once Apple's under a year, that's like when they're really rolling.

00:15:07 ◼   ► That's a sign that all gears are turning internally, and chip yields are high, and margins are good.

00:15:16 ◼   ► And sure, let's just...

00:15:18 ◼   ► That's a huge part of the equation right there, right?

00:15:21 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:15:21 ◼   ► The fact that they have all the chips kind of aligned, and they can bin some and throw them in these products, and they've got that whole machine just cranking components out.

00:15:34 ◼   ► And then they can distribute the components as they need.

00:15:38 ◼   ► Yeah, and there's obviously some binning involved because with the M3 MacBooks, it's like there were eight core models at the entry level, but most of the configurations were 10 core GPUs.

00:15:53 ◼   ► And now these iPads all have nine core GPUs.

00:15:57 ◼   ► And I guess that's just how binning works, that some percentage of hopefully 10 core GPUs only have nine that are good, and so they put them in a pile and save them for iPads.

00:16:12 ◼   ► I do have to wonder, and I feel like this is the sort of thing we'll never find out because it's like the people who know at Apple are like in a sanctum.

00:16:23 ◼   ► But if it is binning, not purposeful making nine core GPUs to save some amount of money, does that mean there are iPads out there that could have functional 10 core GPUs where one is just disabled?

00:16:39 ◼   ► Right.

00:16:41 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:16:43 ◼   ► Is this a software disable, right?

00:16:46 ◼   ► I think it would have to be...

00:16:48 ◼   ► I don't even know how they disable them.

00:16:51 ◼   ► I don't know either.

00:16:51 ◼   ► Say you have a chip that has 10 supposed core slots in it.

00:16:56 ◼   ► How do you pick which of the nine to use?

00:17:01 ◼   ► Is there like somebody in there with a tiny little soldering iron going, no, this one's no good anymore.

00:17:07 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:17:08 ◼   ► And I've tried to see if anybody, like there are some good, like Tom's hardware, it's just sort of a layperson's what is binning.

00:17:16 ◼   ► And basically it's just the high level.

00:17:19 ◼   ► Conceptually, it's a very easy thing, but I bet in practice it's a lot more complicated than it appears.

00:17:25 ◼   ► Right.

00:17:25 ◼   ► And how clear is it that all 10 cores are up to snuff?

00:17:29 ◼   ► And is that really why if you take two identical, it doesn't matter which product, but you take two brand new iPad Airs this week, just go to the hour next week, I guess, when they come out.

00:17:43 ◼   ► Same configuration, 128 gigs of storage, same price, open them up at the same time, turn them on at the same time, put them on the same Wi-Fi network right there in the Apple store and run Geekbench at the same time.

00:17:57 ◼   ► You'll get like a slightly different score.

00:18:00 ◼   ► You'll get like 3,257 and 3,248.

00:18:07 ◼   ► I don't, you know, it's like, there's like a margin of error there.

00:18:09 ◼   ► Why?

00:18:11 ◼   ► Right?

00:18:12 ◼   ► Is that because the chips aren't?

00:18:14 ◼   ► You've got a new conspiracy theory.

00:18:15 ◼   ► No, it's not a conspiracy, but it's, you know, and it's like, it could be that.

00:18:22 ◼   ► It's physics, John.

00:18:23 ◼   ► It's just the electrons are moving around a little bit differently.

00:18:26 ◼   ► Yeah, I guess.

00:18:27 ◼   ► But is that sort of how it goes and they're running something like that and one of the CPU cores is coming up low or is it like totally bum?

00:18:36 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:18:37 ◼   ► Nobody, there's no, it seems.

00:18:38 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:18:39 ◼   ► Again, it goes back to how do you determine that one of those things is bad, right?

00:18:43 ◼   ► You've got to run some sort of test, right?

00:18:45 ◼   ► Right.

00:18:45 ◼   ► And what is that, right?

00:18:47 ◼   ► And you've got to do that test pretty quickly because you've got a lot of these chips to go through, right?

00:18:52 ◼   ► Right.

00:18:52 ◼   ► They make a new iPhone every second, let's say.

00:18:56 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:18:57 ◼   ► Right?

00:18:57 ◼   ► Something like that.

00:18:58 ◼   ► You've got to test that new CPU in under a second.

00:19:00 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:19:01 ◼   ► Well, I don't know.

00:19:03 ◼   ► If anybody out there really knows the answer and has the nitty gritty answer, somebody out there definitely knows it.

00:19:07 ◼   ► If somebody out there is listening and knows a really good answer and wants to give it to me in confidence, I'm all ears.

00:19:13 ◼   ► Hit me up on Signal.

00:19:14 ◼   ► I don't know if Apple is an expert on this.

00:19:16 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:19:16 ◼   ► I would love to know the nitty gritty details of how Apple or anybody determines, okay, this M3 is only nine GPU cores.

00:19:25 ◼   ► It is curious to me that the CPU cores aren't binned.

00:19:29 ◼   ► They're all exactly the same.

00:19:30 ◼   ► I forget what the number is, but it seems like GPU cores are more, I don't know, delicate, finicky, precise.

00:19:37 ◼   ► Easier to do without?

00:19:38 ◼   ► Maybe.

00:19:39 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:19:40 ◼   ► But I think one of the things that the CPU can't be binned is because you've got the performance and the efficiency cores.

00:19:49 ◼   ► So you're basically splitting your odds.

00:19:50 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:19:51 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:19:51 ◼   ► Right.

00:19:52 ◼   ► Right.

00:19:52 ◼   ► You got four and four.

00:19:54 ◼   ► You can't go with, okay, you got three performance cores, not four, right?

00:19:57 ◼   ► That would be weird.

00:19:59 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:19:59 ◼   ► So, whereas GPU, you've got 20 of them.

00:20:03 ◼   ► No, no, you only got 18.

00:20:04 ◼   ► In my mind, especially just talking it out with you here, Craig, I've got in mind that CPU cores are like what we think computers are like.

00:20:16 ◼   ► It is binary, right?

00:20:17 ◼   ► It's like here's the CPU, here's the test, pass or fail.

00:20:21 ◼   ► And it's like an exact, it's just like a one or a zero.

00:20:26 ◼   ► It comes out, yes, all 10 cores are good, good to go.

00:20:29 ◼   ► Or no, one of the CPU cores is not good, thumbs down, absolutely out.

00:20:34 ◼   ► I feel like with GPU cores, it's more like picking produce, right?

00:20:38 ◼   ► You're at the store.

00:20:39 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:20:42 ◼   ► Oh, that tomato's a little green.

00:20:43 ◼   ► No, no problem with that one.

00:20:45 ◼   ► Well, that apple's got a little blemish on it.

00:20:47 ◼   ► Yeah, or picking avocados, right?

00:20:50 ◼   ► And it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you got to squeeze it.

00:20:52 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, you want a little bit of give because if it's like a baseball, if it's hard as a baseball, it needs a couple more days.

00:21:02 ◼   ► And if you're planning to make guacamole for company tonight, I got good at this.

00:21:09 ◼   ► One of the worst feelings is you go to get the avocado out of the place where you've been letting it right.

00:21:14 ◼   ► You grab it and your fingers just kind of sink into it.

00:21:17 ◼   ► Oh, right.

00:21:20 ◼   ► So I learned if avocados come to mind because I have learned we're a big avocado house here that you kind of want them good to go right now.

00:21:30 ◼   ► You know, if Amy says we need four avocados to make guacamole for the family, I want four that have a little give but aren't soft so that she could use them right now.

00:21:40 ◼   ► Because if I buy really hard ones thinking, hey, we'll use these in the next couple of days, right?

00:21:46 ◼   ► We'll figure out something to do with them.

00:21:48 ◼   ► Like you said, all of a sudden you're like, hey, I wonder how those avocados are doing.

00:21:52 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:21:53 ◼   ► And it's great disappointment.

00:21:55 ◼   ► It's just like, oh.

00:21:57 ◼   ► And I'm like making tacos or something, right?

00:22:00 ◼   ► You're thinking, oh, that avocado is going to be great on the taco.

00:22:03 ◼   ► You're going to grab it and say, no, it's going to be an oily brown mess.

00:22:08 ◼   ► Yeah, a mess.

00:22:09 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:22:11 ◼   ► Unlike bananas, which you can truly just eyeball as they age.

00:22:17 ◼   ► And I actually like bananas that are a little bit past their due date.

00:22:20 ◼   ► But you can really just eyeball it from across.

00:22:24 ◼   ► It's like I can tell how it's going to feel and how it's going to taste just by looking at the peel.

00:22:29 ◼   ► But avocados, you've got to pick up.

00:22:31 ◼   ► I feel like GPU cores are like that.

00:22:34 ◼   ► And they're like, yeah, this one core is no good.

00:22:37 ◼   ► This expert at Apple is going to get in contact and go, yeah, they're exactly like avocados.

00:22:44 ◼   ► The other interesting bit of iPad news is that the regular iPad, the one with no adjective and the $350 starting price,

00:22:53 ◼   ► it gets the A16 chip, which doesn't support Apple intelligence.

00:22:58 ◼   ► So I don't think that's surprising given the low price.

00:23:02 ◼   ► Our friend Mark Gurman said it was going to have the A17 Pro so that it would have Apple intelligence.

00:23:08 ◼   ► And that wasn't right.

00:23:09 ◼   ► I don't really think this is a big deal.

00:23:13 ◼   ► But I bet it almost certainly is the last device Apple's ever going to make that doesn't have Apple intelligence, right?

00:23:20 ◼   ► Because if the iPhone 16e did, then they're not going to make another iPhone that's under the 16e performance-wise ever.

00:23:30 ◼   ► Basically, all the Macs are now, too.

00:23:33 ◼   ► So it's just, yeah.

00:23:35 ◼   ► Right.

00:23:35 ◼   ► They've remarkably qualified the Macs all the way back to the original M1s, some of which only have 8 gigs of RAM.

00:23:44 ◼   ► Like, I honestly, I don't hear people complaining.

00:23:46 ◼   ► It's that memory that's the key, right?

00:23:49 ◼   ► These models need a big chunk of memory to do their work.

00:23:53 ◼   ► Right.

00:23:53 ◼   ► And there's been a side benefit for everybody, isn't it?

00:23:56 ◼   ► You're getting more memory in your devices now.

00:24:00 ◼   ► Because you may not be using Apple intelligence, but you still have a benefit from it.

00:24:04 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:24:05 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:24:05 ◼   ► And we've talked about it, and other podcasts have talked about it at length, that you can chart Apple's base RAM over time.

00:24:15 ◼   ► And it actually, the slope of the curve, or whatever, the line, changes dramatically when Tim Cook becomes CEO.

00:24:23 ◼   ► I mean, and, you know, the buck stops there.

00:24:25 ◼   ► And it is a Tim Cook-type thing.

00:24:27 ◼   ► It's a margin thing.

00:24:28 ◼   ► But you can definitely see that even before jobs came back, even if you go through the early 90s, there was, like, a sort of slope to the curve.

00:24:40 ◼   ► It was a steady increase.

00:24:40 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

00:24:41 ◼   ► There was just kind of a year over year, maybe not, but over a decade, you could see a trend.

00:24:48 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:24:49 ◼   ► My 1991 Mac LC had four megabytes of RAM.

00:24:54 ◼   ► Megabytes.

00:24:55 ◼   ► I held out for the fat Mac.

00:25:00 ◼   ► I didn't want the one with 256 kilobytes of memory.

00:25:04 ◼   ► I was the one with 512.

00:25:06 ◼   ► Man, that was sweet.

00:25:09 ◼   ► I think it was, I think the first one was 128.

00:25:11 ◼   ► I don't think, I don't think they had a 256.

00:25:13 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, we're right.

00:25:14 ◼   ► Yeah, it was, it was, yeah, it was, it was four times as much, man.

00:25:17 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

00:25:18 ◼   ► That was awesome.

00:25:19 ◼   ► Kilobytes.

00:25:21 ◼   ► And it's a credit to those original developers that they got the thing to work in 128 kilobytes of memory.

00:25:27 ◼   ► It's really amazing if you think about it, that they had a GUI with multiple windows and all the things, as limited as the original Mac was by any reasonable today's standards, it's absolutely amazing that all of that worked with 128 kilobytes.

00:25:46 ◼   ► I still remember, I know it's a site, but one of my, the whole thing is remarkable, but Andy Hertzfeld's folklore.org website, here, I'll put a note in the show notes, and then the book version, what was it called?

00:25:59 ◼   ► Revolution in the Valley.

00:26:00 ◼   ► Can't believe I remember that.

00:26:02 ◼   ► Yeah, both are great, yeah.

00:26:04 ◼   ► So many great stories, and again, it's sort of sad that it doesn't seem like that sort of thing is going to come out for the iPhone or anything after, the sort of code of silence is deeper now.

00:26:17 ◼   ► Yeah, I think Ken Koshinda's book is part of the way we're going to get.

00:26:21 ◼   ► But one of my favorite stories from Hertzfeld's folklore.org website and Revolution in the Valley book was when they first showed Bill Gates a prototype Mac.

00:26:32 ◼   ► Do you remember this story?

00:26:34 ◼   ► I know you've read it, but they showed, and I think Andy Hertzfeld was the guy who showed it to him, and Jobs had told him, don't tell him any secrets.

00:26:42 ◼   ► Show him the Mac, because we want Microsoft to build some apps for it, but don't tell him anything.

00:26:50 ◼   ► Press him, but don't give anything away.

00:26:52 ◼   ► Right, and it's like, imagine pleasing, especially young, more irascible Steve Jobs at the time.

00:27:00 ◼   ► And Bill Gates as well, right?

00:27:03 ◼   ► Yeah, the thing Gates was obsessed about was the mouse cursor on screen, that it didn't leave trails, and that, because he knew, because Gates was super, Gates, Bill Gates was a really good programmer by all accounts, like really, really super talented as a programmer, and really knew.

00:27:20 ◼   ► Good architect.

00:27:20 ◼   ► Yeah, and knew how computers worked, and knew, especially in that era, the things that should be possible and impossible, and the things that should be slow or fast.

00:27:31 ◼   ► And one of the things that seemed like it should be impossible was a mouse pointer moving on screen without leaving trails behind it, or stuttering.

00:27:45 ◼   ► Like, the refresh rate seemed too high.

00:27:47 ◼   ► And it was just that they were that clever.

00:27:49 ◼   ► And I think he, like, accused Hertzfeld of that, you guys have a hardware, like a whole hardware card just for the mouse, right?

00:27:56 ◼   ► And he was like, no.

00:27:57 ◼   ► And Hertzfeld wanted to do it.

00:27:59 ◼   ► No, we just have Bill Atkinson, that's all.

00:28:01 ◼   ► I hope I'm not misremembering this story too bad, but it's really fantastic.

00:28:07 ◼   ► He really wanted to explain how they did it, but he knew Jobs had told him, don't tell him how we did anything.

00:28:12 ◼   ► And if you remember, the early versions of Windows, the mouse pointer moved like shit.

00:28:16 ◼   ► I mean, it was horrible.

00:28:18 ◼   ► It was a really hard thing.

00:28:20 ◼   ► Somehow they did it in 128 kilobytes of memory.

00:28:24 ◼   ► Well, now we have more memory, but not enough for the iPad.

00:28:27 ◼   ► I had to think back.

00:28:29 ◼   ► Was it kilobytes or megabytes, right?

00:28:31 ◼   ► Yeah, kilobytes.

00:28:32 ◼   ► It was kilobytes, yeah.

00:28:33 ◼   ► Yeah, and you start to question yourself.

00:28:35 ◼   ► You're like, well, that's impossible.

00:28:36 ◼   ► How could you write a whole graphical user interface?

00:28:39 ◼   ► That's less than the thumb drive I've got sitting on my desk.

00:28:42 ◼   ► Right.

00:28:43 ◼   ► Like, how does that work?

00:28:44 ◼   ► Right.

00:28:46 ◼   ► But then you start to realize things like why into the 90s there was still, like, a default text editing field in the Mac toolbox that only supported...

00:28:57 ◼   ► 32 kilobytes of text, I think was the limit, right, of the...

00:29:01 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, something like that.

00:29:03 ◼   ► But there were all sorts of apps and text fields in apps that if you pasted more than 32 kilobytes of text and the text was eight, each character was just one byte because that's how text was encoded back then.

00:29:18 ◼   ► 32,000 characters.

00:29:20 ◼   ► If you get to 32,000 and then one...

00:29:25 ◼   ► You know, if we're going to go back in time and reminisce about this stuff, remember having to set the memory limits on apps as well?

00:29:31 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, of course.

00:29:31 ◼   ► It's like, oh, yeah, yeah.

00:29:32 ◼   ► This app can't use more than 50 kilobytes of memory.

00:29:37 ◼   ► It doesn't make sense now, and it doesn't make sense to people today, but at the time when you had a machine that only had four megabytes of memory, which, again, in 1991, four megabytes seemed pretty generous from the eyes of somebody thinking with a 1989 computer.

00:29:58 ◼   ► And then by 1993, it seemed way too little.

00:30:01 ◼   ► But if you only had a very limited amount of RAM and you wanted to run three apps at the same time, being able to specify, well, this app is limited to 1.5 megabytes of RAM.

00:30:13 ◼   ► That's it.

00:30:13 ◼   ► You don't get any more.

00:30:15 ◼   ► And then you just get the app would test, is there a memory available for me to do this?

00:30:21 ◼   ► Yes or no?

00:30:22 ◼   ► Yes.

00:30:23 ◼   ► Okay, I'll do it.

00:30:24 ◼   ► And if the answer was no, then show the user the error out of memory.

00:30:28 ◼   ► Right, or crash.

00:30:30 ◼   ► Yeah, or crash.

00:30:31 ◼   ► Because a lot of apps didn't do the test.

00:30:34 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:30:34 ◼   ► It was extra work.

00:30:36 ◼   ► And this will never break.

00:30:39 ◼   ► Right.

00:30:39 ◼   ► Oh.

00:30:41 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, that was one of the reasons why, you know, preemptive multitasking and memory managing virtual memory and stuff like that were so important with apps.

00:30:51 ◼   ► What comes around goes around, you know.

00:30:53 ◼   ► And there was this sweet decade for Tim Cook where he could be really miserly with the default RAM configs.

00:31:01 ◼   ► And every one of those devices with 8 megabytes of RAM for Macs or whatever the 4 megabytes or 2 or 3 or whatever older iPhones had, they could make…

00:31:11 ◼   ► Well, I think, look at the iPhone.

00:31:13 ◼   ► You don't know how much memory is in an iPhone.

00:31:14 ◼   ► You can figure it out.

00:31:16 ◼   ► Right.

00:31:17 ◼   ► You don't know.

00:31:18 ◼   ► Right.

00:31:19 ◼   ► There's no thing on Apple's website that says, oh, the iPhone 16 Pro has X gigabytes.

00:31:26 ◼   ► Right.

00:31:26 ◼   ► It just doesn't exist.

00:31:28 ◼   ► And they got away with…

00:31:30 ◼   ► It doesn't need to either.

00:31:31 ◼   ► Really.

00:31:31 ◼   ► People are interested more in what can it do.

00:31:34 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:31:34 ◼   ► But it came to bite them with this Apple intelligence.

00:31:38 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:31:39 ◼   ► And again, I know people out there, users are like, ah, it's not that big a deal.

00:31:44 ◼   ► I don't like it.

00:31:45 ◼   ► It's not good.

00:31:46 ◼   ► The image generation playground thing doesn't make good images.

00:31:50 ◼   ► You can get better ones from elsewhere.

00:31:51 ◼   ► But Apple obviously thinks it's important.

00:31:53 ◼   ► They're the ones who are touting it in advertisements.

00:31:57 ◼   ► They seem to think, and they'd be the ones to know that if actual customers are coming into

00:32:01 ◼   ► stores and saying, I'm curious about this Apple intelligence thing I keep hearing about.

00:32:05 ◼   ► I want to buy a new device that does it.

00:32:08 ◼   ► They might know.

00:32:09 ◼   ► But they're the ones who are paying the price with all these zillions of iPads out there and now older iPhones that people spend a lot of money on, like iPhone 14s or an iPhone 15 not Pro, which is not old.

00:32:25 ◼   ► That came out a year and a half ago.

00:32:27 ◼   ► It doesn't run Apple intelligence because of the RAM and it doesn't have more RAM because margins.

00:32:33 ◼   ► That's Apple.

00:32:34 ◼   ► That's on Apple.

00:32:35 ◼   ► They've made the break, right?

00:32:37 ◼   ► They're moving forward.

00:32:38 ◼   ► Right.

00:32:39 ◼   ► And I think that's all you can ask of them, right?

00:32:41 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:32:42 ◼   ► And we're at a point now, I think, where we're early days with this whole AI stuff, right?

00:32:51 ◼   ► A lot of it, like image playgrounds, is a solution in looking for a problem, right?

00:32:55 ◼   ► I don't feel the need to go in and use image playgrounds.

00:33:00 ◼   ► But at the same time, there are stuff emerging like summarization, like better Siri recognition is hopefully down the line.

00:33:10 ◼   ► That kind of thing is going to be really important to people.

00:33:14 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:33:14 ◼   ► And you've got to take it back to the old how Apple rolls thing that you wrote however many years ago, right?

00:33:20 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:33:20 ◼   ► They've started the role with Apple intelligence.

00:33:24 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:33:25 ◼   ► And we're going to see where that goes, and it's going to not be the next 12 months that it happens.

00:33:31 ◼   ► It's going to be the next decade that happens.

00:33:33 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:33:33 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:33:34 ◼   ► And think about Maps, right?

00:33:36 ◼   ► It's the first version of Maps came out, and they kind of had to launch it when they did for reasons with licensing.

00:33:42 ◼   ► It was rough.

00:33:42 ◼   ► But it clearly wasn't ready, and it was what it was, and it got a bad rap, and then like a year later, people would be like,

00:33:51 ◼   ► it still stinks, and with very, very concrete side-by-side, here's if I ask for directions from this point A to this point B in Google Maps,

00:33:59 ◼   ► and I do the same thing in Apple Maps, here's how much better Google Maps is than Apple Maps.

00:34:06 ◼   ► And it was like, yeah, that's night and day.

00:34:07 ◼   ► Or here's places where the drive-by real terrain view from Apple Maps still shows bridges that look like they melted in half and other glitches.

00:34:19 ◼   ► But everything was perfect in San Francisco.

00:34:22 ◼   ► Right, right.

00:34:23 ◼   ► Everything looked great in San Francisco.

00:34:25 ◼   ► It really did.

00:34:26 ◼   ► If you just didn't go any further than like two or three dollars of gas.

00:34:31 ◼   ► If you want a great Apple experience, move to San Francisco.

00:34:34 ◼   ► Like two or three gallons of gas drive around that range, it was really good.

00:34:40 ◼   ► But here we are.

00:34:41 ◼   ► And so those impressions matter.

00:34:43 ◼   ► And I think it's going to happen with Apple Intelligence, where people are forming this negative impression of Apple Intelligence based on where it stands right now.

00:34:53 ◼   ► And it is going to get significantly better.

00:34:57 ◼   ► And people will still think they'll have Apple Intelligence filed away in their head as, oh, that's a thing that stinks, even after it gets good.

00:35:05 ◼   ► Apple Maps is definitely a prime example of that.

00:35:08 ◼   ► Oh, it's what we use now, right?

00:35:09 ◼   ► It's not going anywhere.

00:35:10 ◼   ► It's the default.

00:35:11 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:35:12 ◼   ► It's better, in my opinion.

00:35:13 ◼   ► It used to be that Google Maps was the default.

00:35:15 ◼   ► And then, God, the UI, they just started throwing shit here and there.

00:35:18 ◼   ► And it's like it just became hard to deal with.

00:35:22 ◼   ► You had to navigate the navigation.

00:35:24 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:35:25 ◼   ► Which is, that's not a good state to be in.

00:35:27 ◼   ► I find the app itself to be confusing user interface wise and the actual results to be cluttered with ads.

00:35:34 ◼   ► And I've read rumors, you know, there's rumors that Apple is going to start selling ads or more ads for locations in Apple Maps.

00:35:42 ◼   ► So, I'm not saying it's always going to be the way it is now.

00:35:45 ◼   ► But the clutter, both UI-wise and content-wise in Google Maps, to me, it's actually flipped.

00:35:52 ◼   ► But it's amazing to me how those impressions stick, where so many people just sort of form an impression.

00:35:59 ◼   ► Google Maps better, Apple Maps worse.

00:36:02 ◼   ► And 10 years later, it could be very, very different, but they still have those impressions.

00:36:05 ◼   ► But I do think it's true, though, that Apple, and it is, it's the way Apple markets with, I don't know what the word is, integrity?

00:36:14 ◼   ► Like when they say you have Apple Intelligence, they're going to keep supporting Apple Intelligence on that device going forward as Apple Intelligence improves, right?

00:36:22 ◼   ► That's part of why they cut off so many iPhones, you know, like the iPhone 15 or all iPhone 14s, including the iPhone 14 Pro.

00:36:31 ◼   ► Like, you just don't get it.

00:36:33 ◼   ► Because it's not just that those phones aren't going to give a good experience this year with a limited subset of the Apple Intelligence features available now.

00:36:44 ◼   ► It's about the fact that they don't want to be building, targeting that low RAM constraint next year, the next year, 2027, 2028.

00:36:52 ◼   ► You might see some segmentation in the future there, right?

00:36:57 ◼   ► Yeah, I could see a case where, you know, you're able to run some models in older devices and newer models and newer devices, just because of, again, purely because of the RAM requirements.

00:37:13 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:37:13 ◼   ► All right, let me.

00:37:14 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:37:15 ◼   ► Like I said, we're in early days there, and we'll see what happens.

00:37:20 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:37:20 ◼   ► All right, I'm going to take a break here for a very unusual sponsored message.

00:37:24 ◼   ► Okay, this episode of the talk show is exclusively sponsored by Google Gemini, Google's AI assistant app that's available for download on iOS and Android.

00:37:34 ◼   ► Their ask for this read was simply for me to record some actual conversations about actual questions I had, my interaction, my actual conversations with Gemini, and play them for you.

00:37:45 ◼   ► So this is me talking to Gemini, the free version that's available to everyone, and our actual conversation response times aren't shortened.

00:37:53 ◼   ► Hey, Gemini, what's your best recipe for a grilled cheese sandwich?

00:37:58 ◼   ► All right, since you asked so nicely, here's my take on the perfect grilled cheese.

00:38:04 ◼   ► First, the bread sourdough is my favorite for grilled cheese.

00:38:07 ◼   ► It has a nice tang that plays well with the melted cheese.

00:38:11 ◼   ► Next, the cheese, you can't go wrong with a classic sharp cheddar, but if you want to get fancy, try adding some Gruyere or Havarti.

00:38:17 ◼   ► And finally, the cook.

00:38:19 ◼   ► Use a little mayo instead of butter on the outside of the bread.

00:38:22 ◼   ► It helps the bread get crispy and adds a little tang.

00:38:26 ◼   ► All right, I'm going to stop you right there.

00:38:28 ◼   ► My wife hates mayonnaise.

00:38:32 ◼   ► Here's another way to get that perfect grilled cheese.

00:38:34 ◼   ► You could try using a little olive oil instead.

00:38:36 ◼   ► It adds a nice richness and helps the bread get crispy.

00:38:39 ◼   ► Or, if you want to keep it simple, just use a little extra butter.

00:38:43 ◼   ► You could also try grilling the sandwich in a panini press.

00:38:46 ◼   ► If you've got one, it gets that perfect golden crust with the melted cheese on the inside.

00:38:49 ◼   ► All right, let's wade into something controversial.

00:38:55 ◼   ► What is your recipe for a martini?

00:38:58 ◼   ► All right, let's get fancy.

00:39:01 ◼   ► Now, a classic martini is a pretty simple drink, but there's a whole world of debate about what goes in it.

00:39:06 ◼   ► Some purists say it's just gin and vermouth, with maybe a twist of lemon.

00:39:10 ◼   ► Others like to get creative with olives, dirty or extra dirty, or even a splash of orange bitters.

00:39:16 ◼   ► So, I'm curious, what's your take on the perfect martini?

00:39:18 ◼   ► Well, I got to tell you, I'm a Vesper man.

00:39:22 ◼   ► Do you know a recipe for a Vesper?

00:39:25 ◼   ► Of course, the Vesper is a classic.

00:39:27 ◼   ► It's a little different from your standard martini.

00:39:29 ◼   ► You'll need gin, vodka, and Lilet Blanc.

00:39:32 ◼   ► Shake it all together with some ice and strain it into a chilled glass.

00:39:36 ◼   ► And for a finishing touch, add a lemon peel.

00:39:39 ◼   ► Well, what are the portions of gin to vodka to the Lilet Blanc?

00:39:45 ◼   ► The classic Vesper calls for three measures of gin, one measure of vodka, and half a measure of Lilet Blanc.

00:39:52 ◼   ► That's straight from Ian Fleming's book, Casino Royale.

00:39:55 ◼   ► You could adjust it a little to your taste, but that's the original recipe.

00:39:59 ◼   ► And you shake it, not stir.

00:40:01 ◼   ► Correct.

00:40:03 ◼   ► Shaken.

00:40:04 ◼   ► Not stirred.

00:40:05 ◼   ► Though, if you want to get technical, James Bond actually asks for it shaken and strained.

00:40:09 ◼   ► That extra step removes any ice chips that might sneak into your drink.

00:40:14 ◼   ► Okay, there we go.

00:40:15 ◼   ► End of discussion with Gemini.

00:40:17 ◼   ► That was fun.

00:40:18 ◼   ► Really natural.

00:40:19 ◼   ► My thanks again to Gemini.

00:40:20 ◼   ► It's really impressive.

00:40:21 ◼   ► The way you can just interrupt it, break it off, take it in a new direction.

00:40:25 ◼   ► Just, you know, it's just natural conversation style.

00:40:29 ◼   ► Gemini is a free download, free to use for both iOS and Android.

00:40:33 ◼   ► And all they want you to do is download it and give it a try.

00:40:35 ◼   ► My thanks to Gemini.

00:40:37 ◼   ► All right, well, that was fun.

00:40:38 ◼   ► It really was fun, I have to say.

00:40:42 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:40:42 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:40:43 ◼   ► Interesting.

00:40:43 ◼   ► I never really thought I'd be talking to robots on my podcast, but I suspect in the future I'll be doing more.

00:40:52 ◼   ► How do you know that I'm not a robot, John?

00:40:55 ◼   ► You know, I've had my doubts for years.

00:40:59 ◼   ► I'm a highly intelligent being.

00:41:00 ◼   ► The other news was the MacBook Air this week came out.

00:41:07 ◼   ► Again, a pure speed bump.

00:41:09 ◼   ► Went from the M2 to the M3.

00:41:11 ◼   ► They added a new color, sky blue, which seems nice, but I haven't seen in person because they didn't.

00:41:19 ◼   ► Well, it replaced the space gray one.

00:41:21 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

00:41:22 ◼   ► Which I think is actually, you know.

00:41:25 ◼   ► That's the right move.

00:41:26 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:41:27 ◼   ► You don't need two black ones, right?

00:41:29 ◼   ► You got the midnight one.

00:41:30 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:41:30 ◼   ► Well, and the space gray was never really dark enough, right?

00:41:36 ◼   ► It was, I think, for a couple of years there.

00:41:39 ◼   ► Just the dark silver.

00:41:39 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:41:40 ◼   ► It really was sort of like, my son even said it at one point a couple years ago.

00:41:46 ◼   ► Like, he'd forgotten whether his was silver or space gray because it was just sort of like this medium gray.

00:41:52 ◼   ► And then you'd see an actual silver one and be like, oh, that is a lot lighter.

00:41:55 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:41:56 ◼   ► As a general rule of thumb, designing anything, it's always better to go to one extreme or almost always better to go to one extreme or the other.

00:42:05 ◼   ► If you're going to go dark, go really dark.

00:42:07 ◼   ► If you're going to go light, go really light.

00:42:10 ◼   ► And maybe, you know, there are obviously there's a whole middle range in between, and maybe that's wrong, but at least as a starting point, that's good to go.

00:42:16 ◼   ► And if you're only going to offer two grays, having silver gray and slightly darker silver gray is, I don't know.

00:42:26 ◼   ► Yeah, commit to it.

00:42:27 ◼   ► Commit to it.

00:42:28 ◼   ► The midnight one, they committed to it, right?

00:42:31 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:42:31 ◼   ► So, like, it's dark enough to get fingerprints on it.

00:42:33 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:42:33 ◼   ► That's a good thing, right?

00:42:35 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

00:42:35 ◼   ► If you want a dark MacBook, there you go.

00:42:38 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:42:39 ◼   ► And now they've got this sky blue, which seems like a nice idea.

00:42:43 ◼   ► I like the idea of a blue laptop.

00:42:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:42:45 ◼   ► They've been hesitant for reasons they will not explain to just do colors, right?

00:42:51 ◼   ► Oh, man.

00:42:52 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:42:53 ◼   ► I know.

00:42:54 ◼   ► And people complain.

00:42:55 ◼   ► Especially with the Air.

00:42:56 ◼   ► Especially with the Air.

00:42:57 ◼   ► The Air is like the iMac, right?

00:42:58 ◼   ► It's like the everybody device.

00:43:01 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:43:02 ◼   ► Just give me a, I'd love, like, an orange MacBook Air.

00:43:06 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:43:06 ◼   ► You'd think so?

00:43:07 ◼   ► I'd probably, I'd go replace the one I've got with, just to get the orange MacBook Air, right?

00:43:12 ◼   ► And I'm looking at a MacBook Air right now, as I'm talking to you, this is what I'm using

00:43:18 ◼   ► to record the show, and it's the screen, you don't really see the color.

00:43:21 ◼   ► So, if it was, like, your sweater that I see you wearing, which is sort of a brick orange,

00:43:28 ◼   ► right?

00:43:28 ◼   ► I wouldn't really see brick orange around my display, right?

00:43:32 ◼   ► Right.

00:43:33 ◼   ► You'd see the black bezel.

00:43:35 ◼   ► It would be on my palm rest, and that's the device.

00:43:38 ◼   ► I'd know that it, yes, that's a vibrant orange color on my palm rest here and the track pad

00:43:44 ◼   ► in front of me, but that's what I chose.

00:43:45 ◼   ► Like, I'm not, like, I don't know why they, I don't know, but, like, I've been in briefings

00:43:51 ◼   ► with them.

00:43:52 ◼   ► I think, I think the most interesting was when they, yeah, because it was WWDC a couple

00:43:59 ◼   ► years ago when the M2 MacBook Air first came out, with the design that they've stuck with

00:44:06 ◼   ► since, right?

00:44:06 ◼   ► Instead of, because the M1 MacBook Airs looked like the Intel.

00:44:10 ◼   ► The awesome Mac, right?

00:44:11 ◼   ► The best Mac that's ever been made in my opinion.

00:44:15 ◼   ► The M1 MacBook Airs looked like the Intel ones, the teardrop classic shape.

00:44:21 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:44:22 ◼   ► The wedge.

00:44:22 ◼   ► And then with the M2s, they came out at WWDC two and a half years ago, I think, or something.

00:44:28 ◼   ► Whatever, we could look it up.

00:44:29 ◼   ► But whatever that was.

00:44:31 ◼   ► And I guess that's when they first debuted Midnight, but it would seem interesting, and

00:44:37 ◼   ► at least it's dark.

00:44:38 ◼   ► But everybody, they had, like, a briefing I was in after the keynote and after some time

00:44:45 ◼   ► in the hands-on area at Steve Jobs Theater.

00:44:47 ◼   ► And then they had one of these briefings, and I'm in there with, like, I don't know, they

00:44:51 ◼   ► always break us up for things like that into, like, groups of, like, six, sometimes as many

00:44:56 ◼   ► as eight, depending.

00:44:58 ◼   ► You know, and you get a spiel with product marketing people, you get to see stuff with

00:45:02 ◼   ► less of a scrum around you in a smaller, more like a little meeting room, and then they'll

00:45:07 ◼   ► take questions.

00:45:08 ◼   ► And somebody in my group asked, just sort of just asked, like, why don't you just make,

00:45:12 ◼   ► like, vibrant colors?

00:45:13 ◼   ► And it's frustrating because they don't give you a straight answer.

00:45:17 ◼   ► But they do try to answer, but they answer in this opaque, Apple-speak way.

00:45:23 ◼   ► And it's like, we like the colors we are offering, or something like that.

00:45:28 ◼   ► Right, right.

00:45:28 ◼   ► And it's what I'm trying to glean.

00:45:30 ◼   ► Are you worried that people think they want colorful laptops, but you've tried it, and

00:45:36 ◼   ► it doesn't look good?

00:45:37 ◼   ► Like, they won't, they'll never even say that, which would be an interesting answer.

00:45:41 ◼   ► Yeah, remember the iPhone 5C?

00:45:42 ◼   ► You know, everybody's like, oh, yeah.

00:45:43 ◼   ► I've got iPhones in all sorts of cool colors, and then they did that, and it was just kind

00:45:48 ◼   ► of like, eh.

00:45:48 ◼   ► Yeah, and nobody bought them.

00:45:49 ◼   ► There's probably some market research there that we don't know about.

00:45:54 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:45:55 ◼   ► Right?

00:45:55 ◼   ► I mean, Apple's not dumb.

00:45:56 ◼   ► They're going to do some investigation.

00:45:59 ◼   ► They do sell gobs and gobs of MacBooks, so they know what they're doing, and they probably

00:46:05 ◼   ► know better than us.

00:46:06 ◼   ► But there's a part of me that just wants them to make, like, a cool orange laptop, or a cool

00:46:11 ◼   ► red one.

00:46:11 ◼   ► Make, or make the blue one instead of sky blue, which is really close to silver.

00:46:16 ◼   ► Make it that blue titanium one that they had that year.

00:46:20 ◼   ► I forget what the name of the ocean blue or something like that, but it was just a, that

00:46:25 ◼   ► was a really good blue.

00:46:27 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:46:27 ◼   ► I got some pre-release, under-embargo images of the MacBook Air the night before, and I'll

00:46:39 ◼   ► just say, I shared them with Syracuse, and his first reaction was the color tint on these,

00:46:46 ◼   ► because they were pings, not JPEGs, which is a little weird.

00:46:49 ◼   ► You don't really think of photographs as being pings, and his thought was that the color

00:46:53 ◼   ► temperature on these images is so weird that it looks blue, not silver.

00:46:57 ◼   ► And I was like, no, no, I forgot to tell you, that actually is sky blue.

00:47:00 ◼   ► But that's how slight the sky blue color is.

00:47:04 ◼   ► It could almost be mistaken for silver, yeah.

00:47:06 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:47:07 ◼   ► Silver under a tungsten lamp or something like that.

00:47:10 ◼   ► Yeah, like it's just the color grading, to use movie terms, of the imagery.

00:47:15 ◼   ► And Midnight, the one that they've been using for a couple of years, is so dark that you could

00:47:21 ◼   ► almost mistake it for super dark gray or black, really.

00:47:25 ◼   ► In certain light, you can tell it's definitely blue, but in other light, it just looks black.

00:47:31 ◼   ► They don't really have one that's Crayola blue, right?

00:47:33 ◼   ► They just blue, like Cookie Monster blue.

00:47:36 ◼   ► They just don't.

00:47:37 ◼   ► And I can't help but think some people would really like that, and it would be fun, but

00:47:42 ◼   ► they don't do it.

00:47:43 ◼   ► And I guess I also do notice that PC makers don't do it either.

00:47:48 ◼   ► Like, you can't just go buy a Dell in a fun orange color.

00:47:52 ◼   ► But I don't know how much of that...

00:47:53 ◼   ► Would they do it if Apple started doing it?

00:47:55 ◼   ► Right.

00:47:56 ◼   ► Has Apple become so influential that nobody does anything without following Apple's lead,

00:48:03 ◼   ► right?

00:48:04 ◼   ► Yeah, it's like there were no notches on phones until somebody did notches on phones.

00:48:08 ◼   ► There were no islands on phones until somebody did islands on phones.

00:48:11 ◼   ► And I think Google's pure Android, like when you get a Pixel phone, looks really clearly

00:48:19 ◼   ► derived from the iOS 7 look, right?

00:48:23 ◼   ► iOS 7 was like this statement redesign of software that, you know, here we are 11 revisions

00:48:32 ◼   ► later at iOS 18, and it's been a very much this is how Apple rolls scenario year to year.

00:48:39 ◼   ► From iOS 7 to iOS 18, the look of iOS has definitely changed every year in subtle ways, but you can't

00:48:49 ◼   ► look at one of those years and say, oh, yeah, that was the one year where they really

00:48:53 ◼   ► changed things up.

00:48:54 ◼   ► You know, remember when they went from iOS 13 to 14, and they really added some depth and

00:48:59 ◼   ► made the buttons look different and stuff?

00:49:01 ◼   ► No, there hasn't been a single year like that.

00:49:03 ◼   ► And I think even pure Android looks pretty shamelessly like a copy of the flatness and the

00:49:12 ◼   ► overall look that Apple started with iOS 7.

00:49:15 ◼   ► But then I'll watch an MKBHD video about some Android brand that I don't follow closely, and

00:49:23 ◼   ► I'll look at their custom skin, and it's like ridiculous how much it looks like an iOS ripoff.

00:49:28 ◼   ► I mean, it's like at this point, it's like you can't even comment on it.

00:49:31 ◼   ► It's like, do these people have no shame at all?

00:49:33 ◼   ► I mean, it's...

00:49:34 ◼   ► They don't.

00:49:36 ◼   ► Right.

00:49:36 ◼   ► And it's like you expect it from Samsung, but it's...

00:49:39 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:49:40 ◼   ► I just expect some of these Android brands to sort of...

00:49:43 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:49:44 ◼   ► Just make...

00:49:45 ◼   ► I think people would be glass of ice water in hell if somebody came out with a phone where

00:49:51 ◼   ► everything had depth and texture.

00:49:52 ◼   ► Like...

00:49:54 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:49:55 ◼   ► I'm not saying make it look...

00:49:56 ◼   ► Back to iOS 6.

00:49:58 ◼   ► I'm not even saying like fake leather and fake ripped pages in the Notes app and that form

00:50:05 ◼   ► of...

00:50:06 ◼   ► Yeah, that was over the top, but you could...

00:50:10 ◼   ► The comment back on the...

00:50:12 ◼   ► When the change happened was you could tell a button was a button.

00:50:16 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:50:16 ◼   ► Right?

00:50:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:50:17 ◼   ► A button was very clearly a button.

00:50:19 ◼   ► And for a while it wasn't, and it's starting to come back.

00:50:23 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:50:24 ◼   ► Every time somebody posts screenshots from like Snow Leopard, if they post them on Mastodon

00:50:30 ◼   ► or Blue Sky or something, there will immediately be comments saying, oh man, remember when software

00:50:37 ◼   ► looked like that.

00:50:37 ◼   ► When you see screenshots of the first versions of Mac OS X from 2002, it's over the top, right?

00:50:44 ◼   ► It is like nobody...

00:50:46 ◼   ► People...

00:50:47 ◼   ► You might say, oh...

00:50:47 ◼   ► Yeah, the stripes.

00:50:48 ◼   ► The stripes in the menu.

00:50:50 ◼   ► That was a bad idea.

00:50:51 ◼   ► Right.

00:50:52 ◼   ► The stripes that...

00:50:54 ◼   ► Too many things.

00:50:55 ◼   ► If you think there's a problem with the level of translucency now, we had transparency then

00:51:01 ◼   ► where they didn't even blur behind it.

00:51:02 ◼   ► You just...

00:51:03 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:51:03 ◼   ► It's like...

00:51:05 ◼   ► It was like trying to read something printed on onion paper.

00:51:08 ◼   ► 50% wide over everything, right?

00:51:11 ◼   ► You're done.

00:51:11 ◼   ► There's a reason that they don't print books.

00:51:15 ◼   ► Like if you go to buy a novel, they don't print it on see-through paper.

00:51:18 ◼   ► But you know, like around where Mac OS X's look settled in around 10.6 or so with Snow Leopard,

00:51:25 ◼   ► it just was like a nice look.

00:51:27 ◼   ► And it's like there was depth and more shadows and buttons look like buttons.

00:51:32 ◼   ► And when you pressed buttons, they clicked and went in.

00:51:34 ◼   ► And I think somebody can make a phone like that today, the whole phone that looks like

00:51:38 ◼   ► that, and people would kind of go nuts, like in a modern way, not like retro 2006 phone

00:51:45 ◼   ► look.

00:51:45 ◼   ► But I think there's like a modern 2025 look where buttons have depth that somebody could

00:51:52 ◼   ► do.

00:51:53 ◼   ► And it's nobody's going to do it till Apple does it first.

00:51:55 ◼   ► And then if Apple does it...

00:51:56 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:51:56 ◼   ► Mac OS Platinum on a phone.

00:51:58 ◼   ► Right.

00:51:59 ◼   ► That would be pretty cool.

00:52:00 ◼   ► It would be.

00:52:01 ◼   ► Like a modern take on that look would be...

00:52:04 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

00:52:04 ◼   ► And that's how style is...

00:52:05 ◼   ► Flat, but with bevels.

00:52:07 ◼   ► That was it, right?

00:52:08 ◼   ► It's like you can do a lot with the highlight edge and the shadow edge of the bevel.

00:52:13 ◼   ► And instead, we're sitting here trying to get excited about Sky Blue.

00:52:22 ◼   ► Which is really kind of silver.

00:52:25 ◼   ► I get these review units every year for the phones and they usually send me...

00:52:30 ◼   ► I get so many phones in September.

00:52:31 ◼   ► I get...

00:52:31 ◼   ► I mean, who knows?

00:52:32 ◼   ► This year I might get six or five or something.

00:52:35 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:52:36 ◼   ► But I guess just four because they're saying the plus is going away.

00:52:39 ◼   ► But like the last few years, I've had review units for the regular 16, the 16 plus, the 16

00:52:46 ◼   ► Pro and the Pro Max.

00:52:47 ◼   ► And I'll have four of them for one person to review in a week.

00:52:51 ◼   ► And it's like, I just pick one and use it.

00:52:54 ◼   ► But they won't give me two of the same color, right?

00:52:56 ◼   ► So they'll give me like a Pro and a Pro Max in two different colors.

00:53:00 ◼   ► They usually pick the colors they want to show off.

00:53:03 ◼   ► But...

00:53:04 ◼   ► And I always show them to Amy or Jonas when he was home and now he's at college.

00:53:08 ◼   ► But...

00:53:08 ◼   ► And they're always like, what shade of gray are they all this year?

00:53:11 ◼   ► That's every year.

00:53:14 ◼   ► I can totally see Amy saying that.

00:53:16 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:53:16 ◼   ► She wants...

00:53:18 ◼   ► What's the gray look like now?

00:53:19 ◼   ► Tell me, John.

00:53:20 ◼   ► And again, she's not...

00:53:22 ◼   ► You know her.

00:53:23 ◼   ► She's not unsophisticated technically.

00:53:26 ◼   ► Oh, she's got a great sense of color.

00:53:27 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:53:28 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:53:28 ◼   ► But she would honestly be more interested in upgrading her phone if it was like, oh, cool

00:53:34 ◼   ► looking.

00:53:34 ◼   ► Not...

00:53:35 ◼   ► She really thinks it's insane that they're always same looking.

00:53:39 ◼   ► And I'm like, well, this one, they're calling it graphite.

00:53:42 ◼   ► And she's like, that's the same color.

00:53:44 ◼   ► She goes, it's the same color.

00:53:45 ◼   ► You just hold it in different light and you can't tell the difference from last year.

00:53:50 ◼   ► And I'm like, yeah, I guess you're right.

00:53:52 ◼   ► And there's probably some materials engineered at Apple right now going, well, what do you expect?

00:53:57 ◼   ► It's metal.

00:53:58 ◼   ► I can only do so much with the process, right?

00:54:02 ◼   ► And I think some of that is purely process.

00:54:06 ◼   ► Yeah, maybe.

00:54:07 ◼   ► And with titanium, I don't know.

00:54:09 ◼   ► You know, and I come home and I am, and it's not, I'm not hepped up on Apple propaganda coming home from California after getting these review units or something.

00:54:20 ◼   ► But I'm more excited.

00:54:22 ◼   ► I've seen them and examined them in different lighting.

00:54:24 ◼   ► Like with the iPhones, they've got like white with a silver, you know, like a pure titanium.

00:54:29 ◼   ► And then there's natural titanium.

00:54:31 ◼   ► And Amy will just be like, they're the same.

00:54:34 ◼   ► They're the frigging same.

00:54:36 ◼   ► There's no difference.

00:54:38 ◼   ► And they're not the same.

00:54:40 ◼   ► They are different.

00:54:41 ◼   ► But in the grand scheme of possible colors, they are the same, right?

00:54:46 ◼   ► There's this narrow, very narrow sliver of the spectrum that Apple picks colors from.

00:54:53 ◼   ► And sky blue is in that very narrow sliver.

00:54:57 ◼   ► They haven't expanded it.

00:54:59 ◼   ► The bigger news, the most exciting and weirdest news, I guess it's only proper that on this show we saved it for an hour in, is the Mac Studio.

00:55:08 ◼   ► The Mac Studio came out this week, was not expected.

00:55:13 ◼   ► There were no, for as much as the M4 or M3, there I go again, M3 iPad Airs, the M4 revision of the MacBook Airs was definitely expected around now.

00:55:28 ◼   ► It's become like sort of an annualized schedule that around March or so is when they come out.

00:55:33 ◼   ► Nobody was saying, I bet they'll come out with Mac Studios.

00:55:36 ◼   ► Nobody.

00:55:37 ◼   ► I mean, total surprise, kind of fun.

00:55:40 ◼   ► And then it turns out, not only is the Mac Studio here, but it's the M4 Max, which is the exact same M4 Max from the MacBook Pros that came out at the end of October.

00:55:53 ◼   ► There's no difference in like the core options or the RAM options.

00:55:59 ◼   ► It's do you want an M4 Max system in a chip in a laptop or do you want it in a cute little box called the Mac Studio?

00:56:11 ◼   ► Do you want a desktop?

00:56:12 ◼   ► And the M3, not 4, Ultra chip, which was sort of like a record scratch when they told us in a product briefing the night before.

00:56:24 ◼   ► Not, oh, that's horrible.

00:56:26 ◼   ► Oh, my God.

00:56:27 ◼   ► The M3 generation.

00:56:28 ◼   ► But it just seems weird, right?

00:56:32 ◼   ► At first.

00:56:33 ◼   ► No, there's got to be some part of the story there that we're not hearing.

00:56:38 ◼   ► And it probably has something to do with production lines and what they can get their hands on chip-wise and all that, right?

00:56:49 ◼   ► You know, these Ultra chips, you know, where they have that, what do they call it?

00:56:53 ◼   ► The fusion interconnect or something like that.

00:56:57 ◼   ► So it's the name of the thing that ties the two dyes together.

00:57:02 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

00:57:03 ◼   ► That cannot be a simple thing.

00:57:05 ◼   ► We were talking about bending earlier, right?

00:57:07 ◼   ► When you're talking about three nanometer things or actually four nanometer, whatever it is now, whatever the process size is.

00:57:15 ◼   ► It's like everything at that scale gets more difficult.

00:57:18 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:57:19 ◼   ► I mentioned this on Daring Fireball.

00:57:22 ◼   ► Snell mentioned it in his write-up.

00:57:25 ◼   ► Jason was in my little virtual WebEx briefing group.

00:57:29 ◼   ► Somebody was there from ours.

00:57:31 ◼   ► I don't think it was Andrew.

00:57:33 ◼   ► It wasn't Andrew Cunningham who wrote their story.

00:57:35 ◼   ► But I forget who else was in my group.

00:57:39 ◼   ► Oh, Ina Fried was there and asked the question.

00:57:43 ◼   ► It was like they did their spiel with the demos and telling us and stuff.

00:57:48 ◼   ► And then it was like, okay, now we'll open it up to questions.

00:57:50 ◼   ► And Ina asked the obvious one right off the bat.

00:57:53 ◼   ► Thank God, because it was on everybody's mind.

00:57:56 ◼   ► Why is it the M3 Ultra and not the M4 Ultra if everything else is on the M4?

00:58:01 ◼   ► And the Apple representative from product marketing, it's an off-the-record briefing.

00:58:06 ◼   ► We're allowed to say we had a briefing.

00:58:08 ◼   ► I'm not supposed to quote them directly.

00:58:11 ◼   ► But he answered as straightforwardly as he could and said something to the effect of,

00:58:16 ◼   ► our Ultra chips do have our longest development cycle.

00:58:22 ◼   ► And then he said, and ours picked up on this, and Jason did too in his writing, and I can confirm I wrote it down,

00:58:29 ◼   ► that he said, I forget if it was we're not going to have an Ultra.

00:58:35 ◼   ► I think he said we may not have an Ultra in every generation because of the development time it takes to make them.

00:58:45 ◼   ► Which is super interesting, because Apple doesn't say anything like that.

00:58:49 ◼   ► And again, it serves them well overall, but they've taken the policy of not talking about the future to such an extreme

00:58:56 ◼   ► that it leads to unpleasant surprises like this, right?

00:59:01 ◼   ► Like they didn't really, they never set the stage for as good, and you and I were just talking about it for the last hour, how...

00:59:08 ◼   ► I was just going to say, that predictability works for you and against you.

00:59:12 ◼   ► Right, where all these other products are so predictable, but the Ultras have been at the highest end.

00:59:20 ◼   ► I'm sure it's both factors, a little bit of column A and column B, where it is the hardest engineering challenge chip design-wise.

00:59:28 ◼   ► And it is, by quantity, the smallest selling product, right?

00:59:34 ◼   ► It's the Mac Pros are a super niche.

00:59:37 ◼   ► The Mac Studios surely are the lowest selling Macs next to the Mac Pros by quantity.

00:59:44 ◼   ► And they are expensive, so it's not like they're giving them away.

00:59:48 ◼   ► But, of course, they could probably come out with Ultra Series chips faster if there was some reason to think we'll sell a zillion of them, right?

01:00:00 ◼   ► We'll sell as many of them as we sell iPad Airs.

01:00:04 ◼   ► Right, if they were putting them in phones, it would take on a whole different priority.

01:00:09 ◼   ► Right, if there was some kind of reason to make M5 Ultra chips for the iPhone or M6, however many years they would need to build up to that.

01:00:20 ◼   ► But at some point, then I'm sure they could throw more resources at it.

01:00:24 ◼   ► But, like, the proper allocation of engineering resources to Ultra chips is in balance, I think, with the amount that they sell.

01:00:33 ◼   ► And I think that 2017 meeting where they said they are committed to the pro hardware market, it's proven out over the last eight years.

01:00:41 ◼   ► And, yes, the current Mac Pro is really just a Mac Studio in a bigger box.

01:00:48 ◼   ► And it has better I.O. capability.

01:00:49 ◼   ► It's not just hiding in the box.

01:00:51 ◼   ► There's I.O. capabilities.

01:00:52 ◼   ► It's got an SD card on the front, too.

01:00:54 ◼   ► There are things.

01:00:55 ◼   ► In fact, I just ordered one.

01:00:57 ◼   ► A Mac Pro?

01:00:58 ◼   ► I've been dying.

01:00:59 ◼   ► Yeah, the Mac Studio.

01:01:02 ◼   ► Oh, not the Mac Pro.

01:01:03 ◼   ► The Mac Studio.

01:01:04 ◼   ► No, no, no, no.

01:01:05 ◼   ► Just the Mac Studio.

01:01:06 ◼   ► For me, the whole upgrade thing.

01:01:08 ◼   ► Which one did you get?

01:01:09 ◼   ► What did you order?

01:01:10 ◼   ► The M4 Mac.

01:01:13 ◼   ► M4 Mac.

01:01:14 ◼   ► With the, I think it was 48 gigabytes of memory.

01:01:18 ◼   ► I don't remember.

01:01:19 ◼   ► And a terabyte storage.

01:01:21 ◼   ► And I'm replacing an M1 iMac with 16 gigabytes of unified memory.

01:01:34 ◼   ► I'm not looking at the M1 CPU-wise is kind of okay.

01:01:40 ◼   ► I mean, Xcode builds fine.

01:01:42 ◼   ► Everything else is just dandy.

01:01:44 ◼   ► But, yeah, having 16 gigabytes of unified memory is just not cutting it these days.

01:01:51 ◼   ► So that, for me, was the big thing.

01:01:54 ◼   ► But, yeah, I'm looking forward to getting that.

01:01:57 ◼   ► And probably getting a couple of studio displays as well.

01:02:00 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:02:01 ◼   ► I still haven't written it.

01:02:03 ◼   ► I can talk about it.

01:02:04 ◼   ► And it's just the way some things fall through the cracks for me as a one-person show.

01:02:10 ◼   ► But I got a 16-inch M4i MacBook Pro for review back in November when they came out.

01:02:20 ◼   ► And I switched to it full-time for, I think, at least four weeks.

01:02:24 ◼   ► And I switched back sometime around.

01:02:27 ◼   ► I still haven't written a review of it.

01:02:29 ◼   ► But I do mean to.

01:02:30 ◼   ► And maybe I'll tie it in with a review of this new stuff if I get any of the new stuff.

01:02:34 ◼   ► But the most interesting thing about it is that I got, A, they sent me the review unit had the nanotexture display, which is, I really love matte displays.

01:02:46 ◼   ► I thought, yeah, when I say I'm going to get a couple of studio displays, I've got, I mean, can you go to the Apple store and check it out?

01:02:56 ◼   ► I mean, that's one of those things I'd really love to see in person before I pull the trigger on.

01:03:00 ◼   ► You definitely can.

01:03:01 ◼   ► I don't know if every store has one.

01:03:03 ◼   ► And I think our store here in Philadelphia only had, last time I was there, they only had one in person.

01:03:10 ◼   ► They're not, most of the configs for display are the glossy ones.

01:03:13 ◼   ► And most people just prefer glossy.

01:03:16 ◼   ► They don't.

01:03:17 ◼   ► Most people aren't annoyed by the glare and reflections of glossy displays.

01:03:22 ◼   ► Apple has, over the years, done yeoman's work to make shiny displays as anti-reflective as they can.

01:03:32 ◼   ► And I know they're better than they used to be, but I see them.

01:03:35 ◼   ► And some people, I know there are super picky people.

01:03:39 ◼   ► You've worked with designers your whole life.

01:03:41 ◼   ► There's no accounting for taste.

01:03:43 ◼   ► And some people who are super, super picky like the way colors look on a glossy display more than any matte display, that they think matte takes away certain pop from colors.

01:03:56 ◼   ► Others, you know, I remember when the studio display first came out, the Apple studio display came out with the nanotexture.

01:04:03 ◼   ► And the Verge got, like, pinged the opinion of one of their staff photographers, or maybe a couple of their staff photographers.

01:04:10 ◼   ► And they all raved about it.

01:04:12 ◼   ► Now, these are photographers who are specifically thinking about wanting to get accurate color on screen.

01:04:18 ◼   ► Right.

01:04:18 ◼   ► And they love the nanotexture.

01:04:20 ◼   ► I'm sure there are other photographers and video people out there who are like, no, no, I don't want matte.

01:04:26 ◼   ► So it's good that they offer both.

01:04:28 ◼   ► But I really like it.

01:04:29 ◼   ► The way that I'm looking at it and the major consideration, yes, there's the color correctness, which is, that's, Apple's always been good at that.

01:04:38 ◼   ► Their color profiles are spot on.

01:04:41 ◼   ► Right.

01:04:41 ◼   ► But there's also the eye strain aspect, right?

01:04:44 ◼   ► Yep.

01:04:45 ◼   ► I'm 65.

01:04:46 ◼   ► My eyes are not as good as they used to be.

01:04:48 ◼   ► I don't.

01:04:49 ◼   ► And anything I can do to make it easier to look at my screen, it's kind of money well spent, right?

01:04:55 ◼   ► So that's the other thing that I've heard.

01:04:56 ◼   ► And I'm a little behind you in years, but my eyes might be effectively older than yours.

01:05:04 ◼   ► Right.

01:05:04 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, the eye problems you've had.

01:05:06 ◼   ► The downside of, even with nanotexture, which I think is the best, you know, I think Apple's justified in calling it nanotexture instead of matte, giving it a fancy Apple name.

01:05:16 ◼   ► But I know that people with really good eyesight say that they think they can see that it makes things a little blurrier.

01:05:24 ◼   ► Because it has to, right?

01:05:25 ◼   ► Like, that the actual pixels...

01:05:28 ◼   ► Yes, diffracting light.

01:05:28 ◼   ► Right.

01:05:29 ◼   ► And so if your eyes are so good that you can really see the difference in crispness of text on a regular Apple display versus a nanotexture one, A, your eyesight is excellent, enjoy it.

01:05:45 ◼   ► And B, then buy the one that you think looks better, right?

01:05:48 ◼   ► And I remember when I was younger, my eye, I could definitely, I'd run every display I got at the highest, most pixels per inch resolution it could possibly support.

01:05:58 ◼   ► And the smallest, tiniest text to pack the most stuff on screen.

01:06:03 ◼   ► And maybe that's why my eyes went bad.

01:06:05 ◼   ► I spent years looking at tiny text on a...

01:06:10 ◼   ► Paying for past mistakes.

01:06:11 ◼   ► On blurry CRT monitors.

01:06:14 ◼   ► But I, the advantage of being a little older and not having the super sharp vision is I don't see any difference in crispness from a nanotexture versus non-nanotexture Apple display.

01:06:27 ◼   ► I see that.

01:06:27 ◼   ► That's actually one of the reasons why I want to see it in person, right?

01:06:30 ◼   ► Right.

01:06:30 ◼   ► Because there's no product shot that's going to convince you one way or the other.

01:06:34 ◼   ► You've got to just be there and look at it.

01:06:36 ◼   ► But anyway, I used it for a month, loved it.

01:06:40 ◼   ► And because I was testing it, instead of using it at my desk, what I, my usual rig for 98% of my work, other than podcasting, where I go down here and use this other machine, is I use an, I have an M1 Max MacBook Pro.

01:06:56 ◼   ► And it's maxed out with the highest specs from that M1 MacBook Pro generation with 64 gigs of RAM.

01:07:02 ◼   ► And I don't forget how, I don't know, maybe it's not maxed out on the SSD.

01:07:06 ◼   ► I think I only have, because I don't have a lot of storage needs, but I maxed it out on RAM.

01:07:10 ◼   ► But I run it with the lid closed hooked up to a studio display with the nanotexture finish.

01:07:17 ◼   ► Right.

01:07:18 ◼   ► And I don't really use the laptop as a laptop all that often.

01:07:21 ◼   ► I just like having a laptop.

01:07:23 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't travel as much as I used to, and I don't have to work in other rooms of the house or whatever.

01:07:28 ◼   ► Like, one reason I used to move around the house was for sunlight hitting my display in my office and making it unreadable.

01:07:36 ◼   ► And now it's not a problem, because nanotexture actually takes care of it.

01:07:40 ◼   ► But to test the MacBook Pro in November, December, I was using it as a laptop, because that should be part of the review, is testing the nanotexture display.

01:07:49 ◼   ► It was amazing.

01:07:50 ◼   ► I just loved it.

01:07:51 ◼   ► And I could work in direct sunlight hitting the screen, and it's like, yeah, it's totally usable.

01:07:56 ◼   ► And I thought, I need to buy one of these.

01:07:58 ◼   ► That's kind of amazing.

01:07:59 ◼   ► Right.

01:07:59 ◼   ► It's like the dream.

01:08:02 ◼   ► And I like...

01:08:04 ◼   ► Not having to find shade when you're out and about.

01:08:06 ◼   ► I like dark things.

01:08:09 ◼   ► I always buy my iPhones black, or the closest to black they sell them.

01:08:13 ◼   ► I love the new space black look on the MacBook Pros more than the space gray of mine.

01:08:20 ◼   ► Now, that's totally just spending money to buy a thing that looks like a cooler shade of aluminum.

01:08:25 ◼   ► But I thought, well, I've waited a couple of years.

01:08:28 ◼   ► I should just upgrade.

01:08:29 ◼   ► This is a work tool.

01:08:30 ◼   ► I wouldn't just throw my M1 generation MacBook Pro in the garbage.

01:08:35 ◼   ► I'd find some either use for it.

01:08:37 ◼   ► Maybe I'd make that my new podcast station, or sell it, or something.

01:08:41 ◼   ► It's very usable.

01:08:43 ◼   ► But then I switched back to my...

01:08:46 ◼   ► From this thinking, I should buy myself an M4 MacBook Pro with the nanotexture.

01:08:51 ◼   ► And then I switched back to my M1 MacBook Pro, my personal one.

01:08:57 ◼   ► And I didn't notice anything get slower.

01:08:59 ◼   ► Nothing.

01:09:00 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:09:01 ◼   ► Nothing I do.

01:09:01 ◼   ► And I really thought, and how much do I use the laptop as a laptop where I'm looking at the laptop display?

01:09:09 ◼   ► Very little.

01:09:10 ◼   ► Like, it doesn't...

01:09:12 ◼   ► Even if I sold this older machine or found a good use for it, I just really...

01:09:16 ◼   ► There was no argument to be made for...

01:09:20 ◼   ► You couldn't convince yourself that you needed to go spend the money.

01:09:23 ◼   ► All these years that I've been doing product reviews of Apple products, and now that I'm in the circle I'm in where I get review units to try, I don't have to buy them myself to try them.

01:09:35 ◼   ► Every time a new thing comes out, a lot of times...

01:09:37 ◼   ► I write about this often in my reviews, right?

01:09:40 ◼   ► Where I'll get the new one, and I don't notice, hey, this feels faster, right?

01:09:44 ◼   ► Because my personal kit usually isn't out of date.

01:09:48 ◼   ► But I get the new thing, and it feels fast, but I don't think it feels faster.

01:09:53 ◼   ► It doesn't matter.

01:09:54 ◼   ► Phones, iPads, certainly Macs over the years.

01:09:57 ◼   ► And so, eh, this is pretty nice.

01:09:59 ◼   ► And then I go back to my thing from two years ago or three years ago.

01:10:03 ◼   ► And I think, ah, shit.

01:10:05 ◼   ► This feels slow.

01:10:07 ◼   ► I'm ruined now.

01:10:08 ◼   ► What?

01:10:09 ◼   ► And I think, like, I would think sometimes, what happened?

01:10:11 ◼   ► I know I wasn't using this Mac for a couple of weeks because I was using a review unit.

01:10:17 ◼   ► What did it?

01:10:18 ◼   ► Did it get cold?

01:10:19 ◼   ► Did it get hot?

01:10:20 ◼   ► Did something happen?

01:10:21 ◼   ► Why is it slow?

01:10:22 ◼   ► And I'm like, no.

01:10:23 ◼   ► It's going backwards that makes you notice the speed improvements of going forwards.

01:10:29 ◼   ► I don't know why.

01:10:30 ◼   ► But when I went back to my personal M1 MacBook Pro from an M4, I didn't notice anything get slower.

01:10:39 ◼   ► Nothing.

01:10:40 ◼   ► I mean, like, literally no difference.

01:10:41 ◼   ► Well, if you spent your day encoding video or training AI models or doing other things.

01:10:47 ◼   ► Swift.

01:10:47 ◼   ► If I used Xcode.

01:10:49 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:10:49 ◼   ► Right?

01:10:50 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:10:50 ◼   ► And even Xcode, even Xcode is not too bad going back in time as long as you've got enough

01:10:57 ◼   ► memory.

01:10:57 ◼   ► It's a memory hog these days.

01:10:59 ◼   ► And there's a good reason for that.

01:11:02 ◼   ► You and I have mutual friends who work at Adobe on the Photoshop team.

01:11:08 ◼   ► And Photoshop, believe it or not, takes a long time to compile.

01:11:14 ◼   ► Well, yeah.

01:11:16 ◼   ► It takes a long time.

01:11:16 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:11:17 ◼   ► The room gets a little warm.

01:11:20 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:11:20 ◼   ► Even with Apple Silicon, it gets a little warm.

01:11:24 ◼   ► There is a totally justified case for engineers who work on something like Photoshop at Adobe

01:11:32 ◼   ► to buy a new MacBook every time they come out or a new Mac Studio or whatever comes out.

01:11:39 ◼   ► If you get 10% improvements in compile times on a massive project, it really adds up.

01:11:46 ◼   ► And if you go back in time, 20, 30 years, every project that went through, like, a C compiler

01:11:53 ◼   ► or a C++ compiler was a get up, take a break, crack your knuckles, go get a cup of coffee, right?

01:12:00 ◼   ► I mean, that's just the way things work.

01:12:03 ◼   ► You know, compiling tapestry right now is that for me, right?

01:12:07 ◼   ► It's like, I know it's going to take five minutes.

01:12:09 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:12:09 ◼   ► Thereabouts.

01:12:10 ◼   ► All right.

01:12:10 ◼   ► Right?

01:12:10 ◼   ► And it's a release build, right?

01:12:13 ◼   ► If I'm doing debug builds, it's not an issue.

01:12:15 ◼   ► But, you know, we're going to send out our weekly release.

01:12:18 ◼   ► I did it once or twice a week, maybe three times.

01:12:21 ◼   ► I know I've got to go take a five-minute break, right?

01:12:23 ◼   ► I'm going to go make some lunch, use the toilet, whatever.

01:12:26 ◼   ► There are lots of tasks in the world that still remain bound by performance like that,

01:12:33 ◼   ► like minutes long or half hour long.

01:12:35 ◼   ► I know from my annual talk show live at WWDC,

01:12:39 ◼   ► how long a final render takes of an hour and a half or hour and a half plus 4K recording.

01:12:47 ◼   ► Well, you've been exporting this podcast, right?

01:12:50 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:12:50 ◼   ► Well, I don't do that, though.

01:12:52 ◼   ► Yeah, but, you know, somebody like Caleb is going to be interested in a new processor,

01:12:57 ◼   ► more cores and all that stuff.

01:12:58 ◼   ► But I do know, like, when we do, like, hey, it's final, and if I give it a listen or something,

01:13:04 ◼   ► some random thing comes up and it's like, oh, crap, we needed to edit something out or I wanted

01:13:10 ◼   ► to insert something.

01:13:11 ◼   ► I know what the turnaround time is like, and I know that getting faster hardware can make that work.

01:13:16 ◼   ► I don't do anything like that.

01:13:19 ◼   ► And so I really...

01:13:21 ◼   ► You want top performance with BBEdit, though.

01:13:23 ◼   ► Got to have that.

01:13:24 ◼   ► I remember when I used to do things with BBEdit that would take time.

01:13:28 ◼   ► I don't do it.

01:13:29 ◼   ► Nothing I do takes time.

01:13:31 ◼   ► All I need is gobs of RAM.

01:13:33 ◼   ► 64 gigs is still, for me, enough.

01:13:36 ◼   ► So I'm actually...

01:13:37 ◼   ► Yeah, I would suspect your main use of memory is Safari tabs.

01:13:41 ◼   ► Yes.

01:13:42 ◼   ► Oh, you know it.

01:13:43 ◼   ► It's...

01:13:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:13:44 ◼   ► It's my problem.

01:13:46 ◼   ► For a lot of developers, it's the same thing.

01:13:48 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:13:48 ◼   ► I'm researching a problem.

01:13:50 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:13:50 ◼   ► I got...

01:13:52 ◼   ► In fact, I love that moment where I've finished some sort of part of a project where I can go close

01:13:58 ◼   ► all the browser tabs, close all the windows.

01:14:00 ◼   ► There's something really satisfying about just, okay, I don't need this anymore.

01:14:05 ◼   ► I've learned what I need to learn.

01:14:07 ◼   ► I've researched what I need to research, and I'm done.

01:14:11 ◼   ► That's kind of like shipping a product to my house.

01:14:15 ◼   ► If I were...

01:14:17 ◼   ► My problem is I do too...

01:14:20 ◼   ► My problem is, A, I'm a mess.

01:14:22 ◼   ► My physical desk has always been a mess anyway.

01:14:26 ◼   ► If you remember Andy Rooney on 60 Minutes, I've got books, I've got papers.

01:14:32 ◼   ► And if I'm doing a research for one post on Daring Fireball, I've opened up one new window

01:14:37 ◼   ► and have all the tabs for that there.

01:14:38 ◼   ► And in theory, a lot of the times, I will then close that window and all the tabs.

01:14:43 ◼   ► And I do get that sense of satisfaction of there.

01:14:45 ◼   ► That's done.

01:14:46 ◼   ► I posted about that.

01:14:48 ◼   ► But more often than not, what happens is I've already moved on to the next thing,

01:14:52 ◼   ► or I started working on the next thing while I was working on the previous post.

01:14:55 ◼   ► And those tabs...

01:14:56 ◼   ► Yeah, I'll finish that later.

01:14:57 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:14:58 ◼   ► And then that tab with those eight tabs...

01:15:00 ◼   ► Three months later.

01:15:01 ◼   ► That window...

01:15:01 ◼   ► Three months later, that post shows up on Daring Fireball.

01:15:04 ◼   ► I meant to do this in November when this thing happened.

01:15:07 ◼   ► But the tabs are still open.

01:15:09 ◼   ► Anyway, no, I couldn't do it.

01:15:12 ◼   ► But it's a fantastic hardware.

01:15:14 ◼   ► I mean, but it speaks to...

01:15:17 ◼   ► If you have enough RAM, any M-series silicon is good enough for most tasks.

01:15:22 ◼   ► It's amazing.

01:15:23 ◼   ► What's a real eye-opener, and I've had to do this a couple times for testing stuff,

01:15:28 ◼   ► is to go back to Intel.

01:15:30 ◼   ► It's just like my MacBook Pro, whatever year it was, the last year that they made the 16-inch

01:15:39 ◼   ► with the Intel chip.

01:15:40 ◼   ► My God.

01:15:43 ◼   ► And the thing's got plenty of memory.

01:15:45 ◼   ► I was testing something with Sequoia a while back, and it's just like, God, this thing is

01:15:50 ◼   ► just not...

01:15:51 ◼   ► No snap to it, right?

01:15:52 ◼   ► But that brings us to the M3 Ultra, and why we...

01:15:56 ◼   ► Before we digress there, we were talking about the fact that Apple just admitted that

01:16:00 ◼   ► it takes us longer to make an Ultra.

01:16:01 ◼   ► It's not...

01:16:02 ◼   ► It sounds like it's easy, and they're describing it as two M3 Max chips fused together with their

01:16:08 ◼   ► Fusion technology, and that sounds like it should be super easy, right, as a layperson.

01:16:14 ◼   ► Yeah, just take two of them, solder some connections.

01:16:18 ◼   ► And we know that things are not as easy as they sound, right?

01:16:23 ◼   ► You've got to think about it, they're going to flip it, too, right?

01:16:28 ◼   ► So it's like, it's not just like a mirror image, it's rotated 180 degrees.

01:16:32 ◼   ► So how do you interconnect all this stuff?

01:16:35 ◼   ► There's got to be some magic going on there, too.

01:16:38 ◼   ► It is obviously much more involved, and it would be great if they would talk more about it,

01:16:45 ◼   ► maybe.

01:16:45 ◼   ► And I do think that they should, and who knows, it's not with me, I can say, that I don't

01:16:51 ◼   ► have any briefings with their Silicon team, but it would be interesting to me if now that

01:16:56 ◼   ► they've made this announcement, if they do pick some media people who can write about this

01:17:02 ◼   ► intelligently.

01:17:02 ◼   ► I mean, it's who, though?

01:17:03 ◼   ► It's like, in the old days, it would have been like a non-tech or somebody like that.

01:17:08 ◼   ► But non-tech, it's just no more.

01:17:10 ◼   ► But it would be great if Apple would take somebody behind the scenes and show them just how complicated

01:17:16 ◼   ► it is to go from a Max to an Ultra and set people's expectations.

01:17:22 ◼   ► Is it something that deserves some special branding, right?

01:17:25 ◼   ► You've got the A-series chips for mobile, right?

01:17:28 ◼   ► M is more the Mac Pro iPad.

01:17:34 ◼   ► Is there like a P3, Pro 3, and just Pro 3 Max, Pro 3 Ultra, whatever.

01:17:42 ◼   ► But just another way of identifying.

01:17:45 ◼   ► And maybe everybody has the expectations of this happens every two years instead of every

01:17:50 ◼   ► year.

01:17:51 ◼   ► I could see that something like that happening.

01:17:54 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:17:55 ◼   ► That's exactly what I've been thinking.

01:17:58 ◼   ► So, you know, famous last words, who knows what will come out first, this podcast or me

01:18:01 ◼   ► writing about it.

01:18:02 ◼   ► But there's a chance that by the time this podcast comes out tomorrow that I will have

01:18:07 ◼   ► written about it.

01:18:08 ◼   ► But what you said is exactly what I'm thinking.

01:18:09 ◼   ► And in the same way, by all accounts, certainly looking at TSMC's processes, there's the new

01:18:17 ◼   ► three nanometer process.

01:18:19 ◼   ► And the A-17 Pro is on the first chip on the A-7 is on this process.

01:18:25 ◼   ► And then the M3 is on the same process as the A-17 Pro.

01:18:30 ◼   ► But because it's the first three nanometer process, it's got lower yields and it's more

01:18:35 ◼   ► expensive.

01:18:36 ◼   ► And there's blah, blah, blah.

01:18:38 ◼   ► And that's why, for example, it seems to be why the iPhone 15, not Pro, didn't get an A-17

01:18:51 ◼   ► chip, it stuck with the A-16 from the year before.

01:18:55 ◼   ► And only the A-15 Pro got the A-17 Pro because this new process was finicky, blah, blah, blah.

01:19:02 ◼   ► And oh, now that they've gone to the second gen three nanometer process, it's better, it's

01:19:08 ◼   ► higher yields, it's more predictable, it's faster, something, something.

01:19:12 ◼   ► So they want to move everybody, A-18 for everybody on the iPhone side and M4s, let's get rid of

01:19:19 ◼   ► these M3s.

01:19:20 ◼   ► Well, I don't know.

01:19:21 ◼   ► Maybe it's like they built out all of that first gen three nanometer process and it's as

01:19:28 ◼   ► finicky and first gen as it is.

01:19:30 ◼   ► They're still coming out with new devices.

01:19:32 ◼   ► The iPads are M3s.

01:19:34 ◼   ► Now we've got Mac Studios that are M3 Ultras.

01:19:37 ◼   ► But I do wonder, in that same way that you can say, and it seems to be true, that the A-17

01:19:45 ◼   ► Pro and the M3 are sort of in the same family, that they're the same process, and that in some

01:19:53 ◼   ► sense, the M3 is an A-17 that's bigger, or just very broad layperson's terms, right?

01:20:00 ◼   ► But they got a different brand, because it's on a different schedule and it's meant for different

01:20:05 ◼   ► things.

01:20:05 ◼   ► I'm thinking the same thing is true for these Ultras.

01:20:08 ◼   ► And if they wanted to make something beyond Ultra, an extreme, that it would be, call it

01:20:14 ◼   ► P, call it X, because X is the coolest letter of the alphabet, right?

01:20:18 ◼   ► This is the new X one.

01:20:19 ◼   ► Not totally, in some cases.

01:20:21 ◼   ► Well.

01:20:23 ◼   ► Like social networks.

01:20:24 ◼   ► But that's why he freaking named it that, right?

01:20:28 ◼   ► I'd get my dig in there.

01:20:28 ◼   ► Right?

01:20:29 ◼   ► He names everything X, because he thinks X is the coolest.

01:20:31 ◼   ► He thinks he's cool, right?

01:20:34 ◼   ► He's putting a stink on the letter X.

01:20:36 ◼   ► It really does.

01:20:37 ◼   ► Somebody's got to fight back, though, for the letter X, which should be the coolest letter,

01:20:41 ◼   ► right?

01:20:41 ◼   ► Mac OS X with the X, XServe.

01:20:45 ◼   ► It is a cool letter.

01:20:47 ◼   ► iPhone X.

01:20:48 ◼   ► Right.

01:20:48 ◼   ► So whatever they wanted to call the chip.

01:20:52 ◼   ► I do think, though, that there's something to that.

01:20:54 ◼   ► If it had, instead of calling it the M number Ultra, if it was instead the P and give it its

01:21:03 ◼   ► own number.

01:21:03 ◼   ► It would eliminate the raised eyebrows, right?

01:21:06 ◼   ► And then, like, that is the processor chip that has the fusion technology, too, right?

01:21:12 ◼   ► Right.

01:21:12 ◼   ► It's like it's the one that's doubled up, right?

01:21:15 ◼   ► It's like twice as good.

01:21:17 ◼   ► Right.

01:21:17 ◼   ► And it would also signal, I think, more of a difference in terms of the name alone signifying

01:21:25 ◼   ► to users how to start their conceptual framework of what they need.

01:21:31 ◼   ► It is more of a break, right?

01:21:35 ◼   ► And then I actually...

01:21:37 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:21:37 ◼   ► It's like with the iPads, right?

01:21:39 ◼   ► It's like, do you need an iPad with an A processor or an M processor?

01:21:42 ◼   ► Well, do you need a Mac with an M processor or a PX processor?

01:21:46 ◼   ► And then for the M series, you'd effectively have three tiers.

01:21:50 ◼   ► Good, better, best.

01:21:51 ◼   ► The classic Steve Jobs, good, better, best.

01:21:54 ◼   ► There's the M4.

01:21:56 ◼   ► The M4 Pro, better.

01:22:00 ◼   ► M4 Max, best.

01:22:03 ◼   ► For a standard Mac user scenario, you got good, better, best.

01:22:09 ◼   ► And it's better in ways that correspond to what people just understand.

01:22:15 ◼   ► More cores, faster performance, each tier up going from regular to pro and then from pro

01:22:21 ◼   ► to max supports, has more base memory if you just get the base of that chip name, and it

01:22:27 ◼   ► has a much higher range at the maximum end, especially the M Max.

01:22:32 ◼   ► Yeah, there are totally going to be price expectations for this stuff as well, right?

01:22:36 ◼   ► You're not going to get a P processor for under $5,000, right?

01:22:41 ◼   ► In fact, Sebastian DeWitt the other day showed an order for the new M3 Ultra maxed out.

01:22:49 ◼   ► It's $11,000, not including taxes, right?

01:22:53 ◼   ► That's a chunk of change.

01:22:55 ◼   ► But if you need it, you need it.

01:22:59 ◼   ► If you're charging a customer $10,000 to encode some video for them, that's dropping a bucket.

01:23:08 ◼   ► If you need the Ultra, if you really know you need the Ultra or would make good use of it,

01:23:13 ◼   ► like your life, your day-to-day life, working life would be better with an Ultra chip than

01:23:18 ◼   ► a Max chip, your needs are so outside the bounds that the regular spectrum of Mac user needs that

01:23:27 ◼   ► you kind of need, I think it would actually be more, the marketing would be more conveying

01:23:33 ◼   ► the sense of that than just picking a new adjective, pro, max, ultra, extreme, ultra extreme, right?

01:23:43 ◼   ► Just adding an adjective is good for good, better, best, but let's just say they called

01:23:49 ◼   ► them the M5 good, the M5 better, the M5 best.

01:23:54 ◼   ► Ultra is like trying to say bestest, bestester, right?

01:23:59 ◼   ► More better.

01:24:00 ◼   ► Right.

01:24:01 ◼   ► M5 more better.

01:24:03 ◼   ► Right?

01:24:04 ◼   ► If you went to somebody 20 years ago or somebody who doesn't work in our industry but is a very

01:24:12 ◼   ► fluent English speaker and said, what do you think is better, the pro, the max, or the ultra?

01:24:18 ◼   ► I think you could probably guess that the max and ultra are both better than the pro just

01:24:28 ◼   ► linguistically, but max is the max, right?

01:24:33 ◼   ► It should be, right?

01:24:34 ◼   ► Like, they've already run into, like, it's, max obviously doesn't stand for maximum because

01:24:41 ◼   ► it's not the maximum.

01:24:43 ◼   ► The ultra is the maximum.

01:24:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:24:44 ◼   ► Right?

01:24:45 ◼   ► And if they're going to come out with a chip.

01:24:48 ◼   ► When are we going to get some AirPods ultras, right?

01:24:51 ◼   ► Right.

01:24:51 ◼   ► Maybe that's the plan.

01:24:54 ◼   ► Maybe, I honestly have no, and again, marketing names are the holiest of holies at Apple.

01:25:00 ◼   ► The 16e barely leaked.

01:25:03 ◼   ► I guess some people are saying that there were some leaks beforehand.

01:25:05 ◼   ► But for the most part, everybody was referring to the iPhone 16e as the iPhone SE, the new

01:25:12 ◼   ► SE until it came out.

01:25:13 ◼   ► And they don't print the names on the boxes often.

01:25:16 ◼   ► If you buy an iPhone 16e, it just says iPhone on the box.

01:25:20 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:25:20 ◼   ► And it's got a picture of the device.

01:25:22 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:25:22 ◼   ► They can keep stuff like that.

01:25:24 ◼   ► And then it's a sticker that they put on that says iPhone 16 with whatever color and whatever

01:25:30 ◼   ► cellular config for your region.

01:25:32 ◼   ► Well, and you know how much memory it's got and all the other stuff, right?

01:25:36 ◼   ► Right.

01:25:36 ◼   ► It's the basic box.

01:25:37 ◼   ► They want to print up one basic box and then just...

01:25:40 ◼   ► But I do think that's...

01:25:43 ◼   ► I really do think that's the way to think about.

01:25:45 ◼   ► And I'm not making excuses for Apple.

01:25:47 ◼   ► But I think that anybody who's thinking, oh, Apple, it's a sad trombone sound that they've

01:25:56 ◼   ► introduced this embarrassing M3 generation chip in 2025 isn't understanding how complicated

01:26:05 ◼   ► these ultra chips are engineering-wise, how long it really does take them.

01:26:10 ◼   ► Even if there are no mistakes or hiccups in the development process, it really does seem

01:26:15 ◼   ► to take a lot longer, like more than a year.

01:26:19 ◼   ► Do you think they expected this kind of pushback, this kind of confusion with the M3 Ultra introduction?

01:26:29 ◼   ► Yeah, I think so.

01:26:30 ◼   ► I mean, was there any indications from product marketing that they kind of, they knew this

01:26:34 ◼   ► was going to happen?

01:26:34 ◼   ► Yeah, I think so.

01:26:36 ◼   ► It's very hard to tell because on, you know, these calls, and that's one of the reasons...

01:26:42 ◼   ► I'm glad they didn't, you know, and I often say to people that Apple is very properly

01:26:48 ◼   ► respectful of people's time and so media people's time.

01:26:54 ◼   ► So they don't have us flying to Cupertino needlessly or even going to New York when they

01:27:02 ◼   ► hold regional things on the East Coast, which for me is easy breezy to take a train from Philly

01:27:07 ◼   ► to New York.

01:27:07 ◼   ► You know, I bet this one was a borderline call for them.

01:27:11 ◼   ► Would they have had, should they have had something in New York and Cupertino for the West Coast

01:27:16 ◼   ► people?

01:27:17 ◼   ► But what are you going to see?

01:27:18 ◼   ► You know, they demonstrate stuff and it's like, what, a video export takes less time.

01:27:24 ◼   ► And the case looks the same.

01:27:26 ◼   ► Here's a photo of the die, right?

01:27:28 ◼   ► You know, it's like, look, it's got two cores on it or two chips.

01:27:32 ◼   ► I do find it easier to suss out things that aren't in the transcript of the conversation,

01:27:42 ◼   ► but the body language or the look on somebody's face in person.

01:27:45 ◼   ► That's what I was asking.

01:27:46 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:27:47 ◼   ► If they felt like they had a problem there, that's a lot more incentive for them to come

01:27:53 ◼   ► up with new branding for this thing.

01:27:55 ◼   ► And it does seem to both of us like it's a different thing.

01:27:59 ◼   ► It's something unique.

01:28:01 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:28:01 ◼   ► And they were ready for it.

01:28:02 ◼   ► And I think it's like, what do they want to do?

01:28:05 ◼   ► They want to keep big announcements secret.

01:28:07 ◼   ► And they did, but because they kept it secret, it landed like a lead balloon because it sounds

01:28:15 ◼   ► like they've introduced this $4,000 going up to 15, 16, $17,000 configs with 512 gigs of

01:28:25 ◼   ► RAM and 16 terabytes of SSD.

01:28:28 ◼   ► Very expensive, super workstations that sound from a lay person's perspective, like it's

01:28:35 ◼   ► using year and a half old silicon generation.

01:28:38 ◼   ► Right.

01:28:39 ◼   ► It's last year's model.

01:28:40 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:28:41 ◼   ► Here.

01:28:41 ◼   ► I looked this up.

01:28:42 ◼   ► So the original M1s came out in November of 2020.

01:28:47 ◼   ► The MacBook Air, the low end MacBook Pro 13 and a Mac mini.

01:28:52 ◼   ► And then they didn't come out with the Mac M1 Pro until a year later in October of 2021.

01:28:58 ◼   ► They came out with the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Pro 16 with the M1 Pro and the M1 Max came out

01:29:06 ◼   ► at the same time in October, 2021, a year later.

01:29:10 ◼   ► The M1 Ultra, which was only in the studio, came out in March of 2022.

01:29:16 ◼   ► So that's what, a year plus, a year and a half, almost a year and a half after or no?

01:29:25 ◼   ► No, no, no, no, no.

01:29:26 ◼   ► It's like six months.

01:29:28 ◼   ► No, I'm saying from the M1 though.

01:29:31 ◼   ► Oh, from the M1, yes, yes.

01:29:33 ◼   ► And then six months after the M1 Pro.

01:29:36 ◼   ► But that is, you know, then the M2s, I think, is the generation that threw us all off expectation-wise.

01:29:44 ◼   ► The original M2s came out in the MacBook Air in June of 2022.

01:29:48 ◼   ► That's the WWDC I was talking to about earlier.

01:29:52 ◼   ► The M2 Pros came out in January of 2023.

01:29:57 ◼   ► And I think those were late, and the schedule works out this way.

01:30:02 ◼   ► I think that that was while they were still trying to get to the annualized schedule where

01:30:06 ◼   ► they want those MacBook Pros to come out around the end of October.

01:30:10 ◼   ► I think they were, for whatever reason, a little late, came out in January the next year.

01:30:14 ◼   ► M2 Max came out at the same time, January 2023.

01:30:19 ◼   ► And then the M2 Ultra came out at WWDC in June that year.

01:30:26 ◼   ► So just five or six months after the M2 Pro and the M2 Max, the M2 Ultra came out.

01:30:35 ◼   ► And that's still the only Apple Silicon Mac Pro.

01:30:38 ◼   ► They updated the Mac Studio, and the Mac Pro came out five or six months later.

01:30:43 ◼   ► And I think that's thrown us off expectation-wise, where we think, okay, five or six months after

01:30:49 ◼   ► the Pro and the Max, we get an Ultra.

01:30:52 ◼   ► But now here we are.

01:30:54 ◼   ► The M3 Pros came out in October 2023.

01:30:58 ◼   ► A year goes by, they come out with M4s, and everybody thinks, I guess they're skipping the

01:31:04 ◼   ► Ultra for the M3 generation?

01:31:06 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:31:06 ◼   ► But now here we are another six months later, and now we finally get the M3 Ultra.

01:31:11 ◼   ► Now, maybe there was an engineering fiasco behind the scenes, and it really was supposed to come out

01:31:19 ◼   ► last year sometime, WWDC last year.

01:31:22 ◼   ► There could have been constraints on the supply line.

01:31:31 ◼   ► There could have been regulatory things.

01:31:35 ◼   ► Talk about stuff like that.

01:31:36 ◼   ► Something comes up to works.

01:31:37 ◼   ► The rumor mill, the Germans and Ming-Chi Kuo's and Wayne Ma, the Informations of the World, aren't focused on Mac Pro components and Mac Studio components the way they are, the iPhone and iPads.

01:31:52 ◼   ► So they could keep a lid on an engineering setback.

01:31:56 ◼   ► This is going to be like, this is going to set us back nine months or a year longer than we were planning.

01:32:03 ◼   ► What do we do?

01:32:05 ◼   ► Do we cancel it?

01:32:06 ◼   ► Or are we still far enough along that we might as well push through because it's going to come out before we would have an...

01:32:12 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:32:13 ◼   ► Those are tough decisions.

01:32:14 ◼   ► These chips are not getting any simpler, architecture-wise, right?

01:32:19 ◼   ► You're doubling the die.

01:32:23 ◼   ► Maybe you're not just doubling the amount of work to get those to fix together.

01:32:30 ◼   ► And they get double the memory bandwidth.

01:32:32 ◼   ► So if you're doing something that is super constrained on the memory bandwidth, writing back and forth to it, that it's...

01:32:39 ◼   ► It really...

01:32:40 ◼   ► And again, if it was so easy to just double it, well, then they'd quadruple it and tuple it too, right?

01:32:47 ◼   ► If you can just keep gluing them together, well, then there'd be an extreme and an...

01:32:51 ◼   ► Back them up.

01:32:52 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:32:52 ◼   ► It obviously doesn't work like that.

01:32:55 ◼   ► So who knows?

01:32:56 ◼   ► But I thought that the two interesting things they did say...

01:32:59 ◼   ► Again, I can't quote it, but other people heard the same thing in the same briefings.

01:33:04 ◼   ► The Ultra does take a lot...

01:33:06 ◼   ► It's their longest development time.

01:33:08 ◼   ► And they said they may not have Ultras every generation.

01:33:12 ◼   ► Well, they had one for the M2, and they had one for...

01:33:17 ◼   ► Now they have one for the M3.

01:33:18 ◼   ► If they don't have one every generation, does that mean we shouldn't wait for an M4?

01:33:26 ◼   ► Ultra?

01:33:26 ◼   ► And they're going to, you know...

01:33:28 ◼   ► Or, yeah.

01:33:28 ◼   ► Is it going to be in the M5 timeframe?

01:33:30 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:33:30 ◼   ► Who knows?

01:33:31 ◼   ► Right.

01:33:31 ◼   ► That the timeline is sort of, hey, maybe it's like odd number generations will get Ultras going forward.

01:33:39 ◼   ► I don't know why they said that, but that was actually more of a hint that it...

01:33:46 ◼   ► I always say...

01:33:46 ◼   ► Yeah, there's a lot to read between the lines there.

01:33:49 ◼   ► Being in the Apple media business is reading a lot into tiny little crumbs of clues, but that was a definite crumb.

01:33:57 ◼   ► I mean, and it was definitely a canned response to the question.

01:34:01 ◼   ► Like, he was ready to say that.

01:34:03 ◼   ► It wasn't something that slipped.

01:34:04 ◼   ► I think that's really interesting.

01:34:06 ◼   ► But if not, if there is an M4 Ultra coming, well, then what the hell is he talking about?

01:34:12 ◼   ► What?

01:34:12 ◼   ► That they already know there's not an M5?

01:34:14 ◼   ► That's...

01:34:15 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:34:15 ◼   ► I kind of feel like that...

01:34:17 ◼   ► I take it to mean no M4 Ultra?

01:34:20 ◼   ► Like, I know some people are thinking maybe this means the M4 Ultra will come out in a couple months at WWDC and it'll only be in the Mac Pro, and then there's an argument for why the Mac Pro and the Mac Studio are different products.

01:34:33 ◼   ► But that doesn't make sense.

01:34:35 ◼   ► I don't think that makes sense at all.

01:34:37 ◼   ► I just don't.

01:34:38 ◼   ► I mean, it's kind of weird.

01:34:40 ◼   ► But I think that if they just called it the P chip or the X chip or whatever, then it could come out on a different 18-month or 24-month cycle, and people would get used to that, and they wouldn't be waiting for it, and it wouldn't seem weird.

01:34:55 ◼   ► Well, the people that are going to be spending 15 to 20K on a Mac, right, they're going to budget it, right?

01:35:02 ◼   ► They're going to have their own constraints for this thing.

01:35:06 ◼   ► And, you know, if somebody like Adam Lizagor, you know, Sandwich, you've got this many clients, you know, you're going to have this many jobs, you're going to need this kind of hardware, let's budget out 20K per person for this hardware that we know is going to happen sometime mid-2027, let's say.

01:35:24 ◼   ► So you just deal with it that way.

01:35:27 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

01:35:29 ◼   ► And it really is where it's left us is we still, I don't know, I mean, nobody seems to know what to guess the future of the Mac Pro is, right?

01:35:37 ◼   ► I think a perfectly reasonable, defendable guess for what the future of the Mac Pro could range from Apple's going to cancel it and just say, you know what, the Mac Studio is our highest-end Mac, to, oh, they're planning something really good for the future of the Mac Pro, and it's going to make the Mac Studio look slow and cheap.

01:35:59 ◼   ► The full range of options seems plausible, given what we know, but that just shows you how little planning anybody could make.

01:36:08 ◼   ► Like you said, like somebody who has a budget for $40,000 or $50,000 worth of high-end, professional-grade workstations for video production work and wants to spend it soon, but you don't need it right now today, what should you do?

01:36:25 ◼   ► I don't think there's a good answer.

01:36:28 ◼   ► See, that's the thing, too, is that the Mac Pro exists so that you can put cards and stuff in it, right?

01:36:33 ◼   ► And I suspect that these machines that people are buying, the cards probably cost as much as the machine itself.

01:36:40 ◼   ► Yeah, often do, yeah.

01:36:41 ◼   ► Right?

01:36:42 ◼   ► So we're not talking about a $20,000 machine.

01:36:44 ◼   ► We're probably talking about a $40,000 or $50,000 machine.

01:36:46 ◼   ► Right.

01:36:47 ◼   ► And these people, a little bit of predictability, yeah, Apple doesn't want to give away anything.

01:36:53 ◼   ► They never do.

01:36:54 ◼   ► But a little bit of predictability could go a long way.

01:36:58 ◼   ► Right.

01:36:58 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, this new Mac Pro is coming.

01:37:00 ◼   ► It's going to have a P-chip in it.

01:37:02 ◼   ► It's going to be super wonderful.

01:37:04 ◼   ► Wow.

01:37:05 ◼   ► And I can put my old cards in it if I need to, or I can upgrade, budget new cards, whatever.

01:37:10 ◼   ► All right.

01:37:12 ◼   ► Moving on.

01:37:13 ◼   ► You mentioned it already, Tapestry, the Icon Factory's new app.

01:37:16 ◼   ► I know it.

01:37:19 ◼   ► I've been beta testing it for months.

01:37:21 ◼   ► When did I start beta testing it?

01:37:23 ◼   ► Yeah, it's something that's been in the works for a couple years, actually.

01:37:29 ◼   ► Right.

01:37:29 ◼   ► Yeah, start from the beginning.

01:37:31 ◼   ► Where'd the idea, I guess it starts with Twitterific, really.

01:37:35 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:37:36 ◼   ► I like to say it's the scariest app we've ever made, right?

01:37:42 ◼   ► There were so many things that were unknowns about this thing.

01:37:48 ◼   ► And this is for everybody, right?

01:37:50 ◼   ► This was a hard product to build.

01:37:53 ◼   ► And yeah, it all started off when, in January of 2023, I guess it was, when they cut off our API access.

01:38:04 ◼   ► Was it only 2023?

01:38:06 ◼   ► Yeah, I guess it was 2023.

01:38:07 ◼   ► Yeah, it's like two years ago.

01:38:10 ◼   ► A little over two years ago.

01:38:11 ◼   ► We lost a third of our revenue there, right?

01:38:14 ◼   ► And we had the whole refund situation with Apple.

01:38:17 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, I remember.

01:38:19 ◼   ► We took a financial hit there, right?

01:38:20 ◼   ► It was, that's the first part that was scary, right?

01:38:23 ◼   ► Right.

01:38:23 ◼   ► It's like, oh, shit.

01:38:24 ◼   ► We're a company that's been around for 30 years next year.

01:38:28 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:38:28 ◼   ► We've been around a while.

01:38:30 ◼   ► And we were all like, is this the end?

01:38:32 ◼   ► Right?

01:38:33 ◼   ► It was a dire situation.

01:38:38 ◼   ► It's one of the great stories of our developer community that you're friends with the guys at TapBots, makers of TweetBot.

01:38:44 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

01:38:45 ◼   ► And there was sort of a camaraderie.

01:38:47 ◼   ► And it was two different Twitter clients with very different takes on it that appealed to different audiences.

01:38:53 ◼   ► But both companies were in the same situation where you had sold your annual subscriptions to the app.

01:39:02 ◼   ► And now the app stops.

01:39:05 ◼   ► And in some jurisdictions, you have to give them back.

01:39:07 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:39:07 ◼   ► Right.

01:39:07 ◼   ► And the app stopped working.

01:39:09 ◼   ► You're pre-selling.

01:39:09 ◼   ► Right.

01:39:10 ◼   ► And it's like, huh.

01:39:12 ◼   ► And it's, again, you wrote about it at the time.

01:39:15 ◼   ► To Apple's credit, they went out of their way to make it so that people could say, no, I don't want a refund.

01:39:20 ◼   ► Right.

01:39:21 ◼   ► Right?

01:39:21 ◼   ► I like these guys.

01:39:23 ◼   ► They've given me an app that I enjoy, and I don't need a refund.

01:39:27 ◼   ► Right.

01:39:27 ◼   ► I mean, that is not something that Apple has done ever.

01:39:31 ◼   ► And will they do it again?

01:39:33 ◼   ► Who knows?

01:39:34 ◼   ► But it was definitely a situation where Paul and Mark and us were just in the same boat.

01:39:42 ◼   ► That's Paul Haddad and Mark Jardine.

01:39:44 ◼   ► Yeah, Paul Haddad and Mark Jardine at TapBots.

01:39:47 ◼   ► All right.

01:39:47 ◼   ► So, yeah, we were just kind of looking at it as like, are we going to make it?

01:39:52 ◼   ► And I wasn't going to let that shithead get the better of me.

01:39:57 ◼   ► It really came down to that.

01:40:00 ◼   ► I started prototyping and thinking about things we could do.

01:40:05 ◼   ► And this whole notion of a universal timeline is something that had been kind of rattling around in my brain for a while.

01:40:13 ◼   ► A couple of interesting things is that when Twitter shut down, there was this bot that posted every day, the Nancy comic at GoComics.

01:40:23 ◼   ► And I love that.

01:40:24 ◼   ► Right?

01:40:24 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:40:25 ◼   ► And all of a sudden, I didn't have it.

01:40:26 ◼   ► I also noticed that there were some websites that I kept tabs open that I would refresh periodically.

01:40:32 ◼   ► Your site, Kotki.

01:40:34 ◼   ► I follow Michael Sy's blog for tech news and developer news.

01:40:39 ◼   ► And it was right after that time that we'd been working with Brent Simmons and Matt and Reese on the JSON feed stuff.

01:40:49 ◼   ► So it's like kind of all of these things where it's like there was some sort of commonality there.

01:40:55 ◼   ► JSON feed was Manton and Brent, I think, are the two.

01:40:59 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:41:00 ◼   ► Maybe it's the lead author.

01:41:01 ◼   ► But basically, it was a way to do a spec to do something like RSS, but instead of with XML as the underlying tech format, use JSON instead.

01:41:14 ◼   ► Do RSS type things encoded as JSON.

01:41:18 ◼   ► How should you do it?

01:41:19 ◼   ► And how can we make a spec that people could follow that would be, hey, let's not assume it's a blog.

01:41:25 ◼   ► Let's not assume it's something like Twitter.

01:41:27 ◼   ► It could be anything that fits in a feed.

01:41:29 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

01:41:30 ◼   ► Manton wanted to use it for the feeds for users at microblog, right?

01:41:35 ◼   ► Brent's obviously looking at it.

01:41:37 ◼   ► How's it going to work in a newsreader?

01:41:39 ◼   ► Right.

01:41:39 ◼   ► That kind of thing.

01:41:40 ◼   ► To me, it was like, okay, feeds are starting to become relevant again, right?

01:41:46 ◼   ► And this, you know, missing Nancy, right?

01:41:48 ◼   ► This bot was essentially a feed, right?

01:41:52 ◼   ► Your website has RSS feed.

01:41:55 ◼   ► So does Kotki, right?

01:41:56 ◼   ► Why am I looking at it in Safari?

01:41:58 ◼   ► Right.

01:41:58 ◼   ► Especially when some sites, I'm not going to name names, don't look great in a browser on a mobile device.

01:42:07 ◼   ► Right.

01:42:07 ◼   ► I hear you.

01:42:08 ◼   ► That's my tapestry ad.

01:42:14 ◼   ► Yeah, well, you know, and you've told me before, right?

01:42:16 ◼   ► You look at it and be, be at it.

01:42:18 ◼   ► You read Daring Fireball in a different environment than everybody else.

01:42:20 ◼   ► Well, but that's not why it's not updated.

01:42:23 ◼   ► It's more lethargy and inertia.

01:42:26 ◼   ► Having better things to do, right.

01:42:28 ◼   ► Well, or, yeah.

01:42:30 ◼   ► I wouldn't put it that way because I think it's at a certain point.

01:42:35 ◼   ► I think it's letting the urgent override the important for too long.

01:42:41 ◼   ► Like, I should have a perfect looking mobile look on the iPhone on Daring Fireball by now.

01:42:48 ◼   ► But I don't, and who knows when I will.

01:42:50 ◼   ► But I should, and I don't have a good excuse.

01:42:53 ◼   ► I don't want to make it sound like I think there's a good excuse for it.

01:42:55 ◼   ► And it's not just persnickety holding on to an old way of the way it looks, although that's the way it feels at this point.

01:43:03 ◼   ► But anyway, keep going.

01:43:04 ◼   ► Well, it's also a harder problem than people realize, right?

01:43:07 ◼   ► What's the markdown spec going to look like on a mobile device where it needs some width?

01:43:13 ◼   ► And I've actually looked at your site and looked at your markup and thought, how would this be?

01:43:18 ◼   ► Oh, it's possible.

01:43:20 ◼   ► I mean, there's solutions to it.

01:43:23 ◼   ► But because I want to, and the other thing is because I want to do it myself, I would want, or I want to be involved at least, it would need me to divert attention.

01:43:32 ◼   ► I could spend writing stuff today, tomorrow, doing a podcast with you today to doing that, right?

01:43:39 ◼   ► But anyway, keep going, because I feel like talking about my site.

01:43:43 ◼   ► So there were all of these motivations for a universal timeline, right?

01:43:48 ◼   ► I wanted all these things to be in one place, in one app.

01:43:52 ◼   ► And one day, I stumbled across this article at NSHipster, which is a developer blog, talking about this thing called JavaScript Core, which is something that's on all Apple platforms.

01:44:02 ◼   ► It's basically Apple's JavaScript engine that they use in Safari.

01:44:07 ◼   ► And having done several versions of a Twitter app, one of the hard problems is mapping the data that comes over the wire in an API request.

01:44:19 ◼   ► It's a big blob of data, and you don't need all of it.

01:44:22 ◼   ► You need to pick parts of it, and you need a username, you need to get the date, that kind of thing.

01:44:28 ◼   ► That's kind of a pain in the butt.

01:44:29 ◼   ► But since all this data is arriving in a JSON format, doing it in JavaScript is really easy, right?

01:44:38 ◼   ► It's JSON.

01:44:39 ◼   ► Right.

01:44:40 ◼   ► It already is JavaScript.

01:44:42 ◼   ► The native format for JavaScript.

01:44:43 ◼   ► Right.

01:44:44 ◼   ► So that's kind of where this idea of, okay, I could build these things called connectors.

01:44:49 ◼   ► I called them plugins at that point.

01:44:51 ◼   ► But it was basically that these things could exist to map data from whatever happens over the network to what the app needs.

01:45:00 ◼   ► Pull out a standard title.

01:45:02 ◼   ► Pull out a standard date.

01:45:03 ◼   ► Pull out a standard body.

01:45:04 ◼   ► And I started working this idea, and that's when this Muxer prototype kind of came down.

01:45:13 ◼   ► Muxer was a terrible name.

01:45:16 ◼   ► How did you spell it?

01:45:17 ◼   ► M-U-X-E-R.

01:45:20 ◼   ► M-U-X-E-R, right?

01:45:20 ◼   ► Everybody who heard it was like, ugh.

01:45:22 ◼   ► But it was one of those things.

01:45:24 ◼   ► It's like, I know the name's going to change.

01:45:26 ◼   ► You know what's funny?

01:45:27 ◼   ► It's a multiplexer.

01:45:27 ◼   ► It's a cool name, but it's not a pleasant name, right?

01:45:32 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:45:33 ◼   ► It's not a product name, right?

01:45:35 ◼   ► It's like I told the designers the name of it, and they're going, ugh.

01:45:38 ◼   ► But basically what you were thinking is how do you send, how do you filter various streams of input into one timeline?

01:45:50 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:45:51 ◼   ► That was the idea, and it worked, right?

01:45:58 ◼   ► You know, I had this prototype, but at the same time, it was like people get excited about products.

01:46:04 ◼   ► They don't get excited about protocols.

01:46:06 ◼   ► And this was very much a protocol kind of thing, right?

01:46:08 ◼   ► I had built this thing to map data from one point to another point, and it's like I wasn't even sure it was a good demo, right?

01:46:14 ◼   ► This whole thing is a part of it being scary, right?

01:46:18 ◼   ► It's like if I had this thing, it worked, but was it a product?

01:46:23 ◼   ► And I got some encouragement from some people.

01:46:25 ◼   ► I mean, I remember Cable Sasser heard about it and got all excited about it, and there were definitely some signs that this could be a thing.

01:46:33 ◼   ► But, yeah, it took us about a year to work this concept through to get to the point where we could actually talk about it on a Kickstarter pitch.

01:46:41 ◼   ► And by that time, the money situation was even more scary.

01:46:45 ◼   ► Right.

01:46:46 ◼   ► So, you know, we're making this pitch and kind of flying by the seat of our pants, right?

01:46:52 ◼   ► We had this idea.

01:46:52 ◼   ► We had this notion, and it wasn't fully formed.

01:46:58 ◼   ► We had some imposter syndrome because of that, right?

01:47:01 ◼   ► Everything else we'd done in the past, we'd been very confident about.

01:47:05 ◼   ► We knew what we were going to build, and this was kind of a lot of question marks.

01:47:09 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:47:10 ◼   ► The best you could say is that we knew what we didn't know.

01:47:14 ◼   ► Right.

01:47:15 ◼   ► You guys have, like you said, Twitterific was like 30% of the companies.

01:47:22 ◼   ► Revenue, about a third.

01:47:23 ◼   ► Some of your other big products are, I'm not sure which ones are bigger hits than others.

01:47:28 ◼   ► I know which ones I use.

01:47:31 ◼   ► I use Xscope, but maybe that's not big.

01:47:34 ◼   ► Xscope is one of our mid-range products.

01:47:38 ◼   ► You've got some games.

01:47:39 ◼   ► Linnea right now is the big one.

01:47:41 ◼   ► Which one?

01:47:41 ◼   ► Linnea, the sketching app.

01:47:44 ◼   ► Well, as I say it, Linnea.

01:47:45 ◼   ► A lot of artists love it and use it, including our own.

01:47:48 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:47:49 ◼   ► You talked about it last time you were on the show.

01:47:50 ◼   ► Linnea is a good one.

01:47:51 ◼   ► Tot is another one that a lot of people love.

01:47:56 ◼   ► I use Tot every day, every single day.

01:47:59 ◼   ► And, again, just to revisit just really quickly, your whole thing with me and me being sort of a mess, the you only get eight Tots in Tot, is it's a forcing function to keep me from piling up and turning it into a full-fledged notes app, right?

01:48:18 ◼   ► That I've got eight scraps of paper in notes, in Tot, and that's it.

01:48:23 ◼   ► And that's actually a feature, not a limit, you know, for me.

01:48:27 ◼   ► But, anyway, yeah.

01:48:27 ◼   ► So, you've got other apps, but you're looking to fill the void that Twitterific left.

01:48:33 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:48:34 ◼   ► So, and we'd gotten to the point where we felt pretty comfortable with the concept and how we could pitch it.

01:48:43 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:48:43 ◼   ► So, when was that?

01:48:45 ◼   ► When the project got funded, it was a blessing, right?

01:48:48 ◼   ► It's just, in fact, we are still so grateful to the backers, right?

01:48:51 ◼   ► They really kind of saved our ass there.

01:48:53 ◼   ► In fact, we got all sorts of little goodies in the app for the people that backed us.

01:48:58 ◼   ► Kickstarter's sort of gotten, it's been around long enough, and you guys have done several of them.

01:49:03 ◼   ► And it's, there have been some high-profile Kickstarters over the years that never shipped.

01:49:10 ◼   ► And that is part of, it's been a part of the premise from the beginning, right?

01:49:14 ◼   ► That it is sort of speculative, and it's sort of like user-funded venture capital, right?

01:49:20 ◼   ► Not venture capital, V.C., and it's the official, go meet somebody on Sand Hill Road and have a pitch deck or whatever.

01:49:27 ◼   ► This is a venture.

01:49:28 ◼   ► It is like an ad venture.

01:49:32 ◼   ► Well, yeah, when you press the button on Kickstarter, it says there are no guarantees, you know?

01:49:42 ◼   ► This is not, this may not result in anything.

01:49:45 ◼   ► You're flying with a promise here.

01:49:50 ◼   ► And it is, it is, tapestry is exactly the sort of project, I mean, you could, the angel investors, you can always find a rich person who, if you knew, you know, somebody who was interested in this, somebody who's got silly amounts of money could fund it, right?

01:50:10 ◼   ► So, and again, that's how the Medicis commissioned all the art back in the Renaissance.

01:50:16 ◼   ► You know, rich people can always pay to have things made, which I'm not putting down.

01:50:20 ◼   ► Right, I mean, but the benefit to us, at least, with having a group of people, you've got an immediate community, right?

01:50:29 ◼   ► Right, and you don't have to answer to one person.

01:50:30 ◼   ► You're not beholding to one person.

01:50:32 ◼   ► Right.

01:50:33 ◼   ► You're not beholding to some guy with deep pockets.

01:50:35 ◼   ► You're talking about a bunch of people that want the same thing.

01:50:39 ◼   ► As beneficial and as nice as your rich uncle moneybags, who might have single-handedly funded the development of tapestry, could be, unless it's literally like your grandfather or somebody who's like, here, I'll just give you the money.

01:50:56 ◼   ► I don't even know what you're talking about.

01:50:57 ◼   ► I don't even want to see it.

01:50:58 ◼   ► But if they're giving you the money because they do want to see it, you're kind of building it for them, right?

01:51:03 ◼   ► Right.

01:51:03 ◼   ► They're going to say, I want the icon to be purple.

01:51:05 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:51:06 ◼   ► You're going to make the icon purple, even if you don't want it.

01:51:09 ◼   ► You'll try once to talk them out of purple, but then it's like, if they say purple again, you're like, okay, I guess it's going to be purple.

01:51:16 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

01:51:17 ◼   ► So when was that?

01:51:18 ◼   ► When was the Kickstarter?

01:51:18 ◼   ► About 14 months ago.

01:51:20 ◼   ► And we got funded and super happy, but also kind of scary because we had the idea, we had the concept, but we also knew there was going to be a ton of work.

01:51:33 ◼   ► It seems to me as a casual, a friend of yours and a beta tester, but from what I remember, the plan, it seems like it took about as long as you thought it would.

01:51:43 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:51:44 ◼   ► No, we said during the Kickstarter, it would take nine to 12 months.

01:51:47 ◼   ► Which kind of never happens.

01:51:49 ◼   ► When does that ever happen?

01:51:51 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:51:51 ◼   ► No.

01:51:52 ◼   ► Well, this is not the first app we've ever built.

01:51:55 ◼   ► I know.

01:51:55 ◼   ► Not the first kind of social timeline thing.

01:51:57 ◼   ► We knew what we were in for.

01:51:59 ◼   ► And that, again, is part of the scary part, right?

01:52:01 ◼   ► It's like, this is a totally different thing.

01:52:03 ◼   ► It could.

01:52:06 ◼   ► We're trying to take all these different various sources on the internet, which are just like, it's like a whole smorgasbord of stuff and present it all in a nice, beautiful way.

01:52:16 ◼   ► Right.

01:52:17 ◼   ► Get and Anthony and Talos and the developer.

01:52:21 ◼   ► It is beautiful.

01:52:22 ◼   ► They did a great job of cleaning the thing up.

01:52:25 ◼   ► Yep.

01:52:26 ◼   ► Right.

01:52:27 ◼   ► It simultaneously looks new and different than anything before it does not.

01:52:33 ◼   ► Nobody's going to open it up and think, oh, it's Twitter-rific.

01:52:36 ◼   ► But it also does look Icon Factory-ish, right?

01:52:40 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:52:40 ◼   ► It's us.

01:52:42 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:52:42 ◼   ► Right.

01:52:42 ◼   ► And it's got our personality in it as well, which I think is very important.

01:52:48 ◼   ► You know, we could have gone with some sort of least common denominator bullshit, right?

01:52:52 ◼   ► That is not us, right?

01:52:54 ◼   ► You're right.

01:52:57 ◼   ► In a way, it's like Twitter-rific on steroids, right?

01:53:00 ◼   ► Super Twitter-rific.

01:53:02 ◼   ► So anybody out here who's listening and hasn't tried it yet, what is the intended experience?

01:53:08 ◼   ► Okay.

01:53:08 ◼   ► Joe and Jane, listener of the talk show, are hearing us.

01:53:12 ◼   ► They're like, this sounds interesting, but what's the basic idea?

01:53:14 ◼   ► I go to the App Store.

01:53:16 ◼   ► I get Tapestry.

01:53:17 ◼   ► I open it.

01:53:18 ◼   ► And then what?

01:53:18 ◼   ► You are in control of what is in your feed.

01:53:24 ◼   ► It's one feed that looks like a Twitter-type feed.

01:53:27 ◼   ► It can be multiple feeds.

01:53:28 ◼   ► You can slice and dice the feed.

01:53:30 ◼   ► But there's one continuous chronological flow of information that comes from blogs.

01:53:36 ◼   ► It comes from Blue Sky.

01:53:38 ◼   ► It can come from Mastodon, Tumblr, all these different services, different parts of these services.

01:53:45 ◼   ► There's a connector for Go Comics, so I get my Nancy comic.

01:53:49 ◼   ► Right.

01:53:50 ◼   ► One of the first ones I wrote.

01:53:52 ◼   ► And Calvin and Hobbes, right?

01:53:55 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:53:55 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:53:56 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:53:56 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:53:56 ◼   ► Calvin and Hobbes.

01:53:58 ◼   ► There are some comics that I just love to see every day.

01:54:02 ◼   ► And those just appear in my timeline, and it's kind of a happy moment when I scroll across them.

01:54:07 ◼   ► And the comics are an interesting one, and it's one of my favorite parts of Tapestry, because I see them now regularly in a way that I never used to with Twitter before.

01:54:17 ◼   ► Even though, like you said, you could follow those things on Twitter before, and I'm sure they're posting to Blue Sky and other places.

01:54:23 ◼   ► But I see them every day in my Tapestry feed, because my Tapestry feed is not overwhelming getting Twitter in the last 10 years.

01:54:35 ◼   ► Mastodon isn't like that for me, and that's why I spend more time on Mastodon.

01:54:41 ◼   ► But Blue Sky has already shot up in popularity to the point where it's like getting the phone book delivered every day.

01:54:47 ◼   ► And I can open it.

01:54:48 ◼   ► You know, I can scroll for a couple minutes and find interesting stuff and find links and find some commentary I like.

01:54:53 ◼   ► But the idea of seeing everything from the people I follow, it's untenable.

01:54:58 ◼   ► I mean, I'd go from waking up in the morning to midnight, and still, having done nothing else all day, I still wouldn't complete it.

01:55:07 ◼   ► It's a fire hose, right?

01:55:10 ◼   ► Whereas my Tapestry feed is not.

01:55:12 ◼   ► My Tapestry feed is like a nice little personal newsletter.

01:55:16 ◼   ► Yeah, that's a really good way to look at it.

01:55:19 ◼   ► It's your best of.

01:55:21 ◼   ► It's like one of the first things I added in the Muxer was Daring Firewall.

01:55:26 ◼   ► The next thing was Kotki, right?

01:55:28 ◼   ► And I had my Go Comics Nancy there.

01:55:31 ◼   ► But is it all of your Blue Sky?

01:55:33 ◼   ► Like, you just turn on your Blue Sky feed, just shows up, melded into Tapestry?

01:55:38 ◼   ► Yeah, you can do that if you want.

01:55:40 ◼   ► There's some people that want to do that.

01:55:41 ◼   ► I personally do not.

01:55:42 ◼   ► I just want to, you know, I don't want to see the replies from people on Blue Sky and Tapestry.

01:55:47 ◼   ► I just want to see what individuals say.

01:55:50 ◼   ► And in the next release, we're going to have the ability to actually follow a single account.

01:55:55 ◼   ► So, like, if you just want to see the Brimley Cocoon line account.

01:55:58 ◼   ► Which I, if I could give you any, you know, and I probably should have because I was beta testing and I'm your friend, so forgive me.

01:56:06 ◼   ► That would have been my one feedback, is that for two reasons.

01:56:10 ◼   ► A, I think you did the hard thing first, which is digesting more, right?

01:56:16 ◼   ► So, in some sense, maybe that was the right way to tackle it.

01:56:20 ◼   ► Engineering-wise, it's better to do the hard thing first than the easy thing, because maybe the hard thing is so hard you won't get it done.

01:56:28 ◼   ► Well, yeah, we had to go figure out what kind of stuff is in these different feeds.

01:56:34 ◼   ► Right.

01:56:34 ◼   ► The feed that you get from Macedon is very different than the feed you get from Blue Sky.

01:56:39 ◼   ► But it's not what I want in Tapestry.

01:56:42 ◼   ► And so, just selfishly as a user who has this app now on my first home screen and really likes having it there, not just because you're my friend and not just because I wanted you on my show,

01:56:52 ◼   ► this app is satisfying itch or a desire or satiating me in a way that there is no other app quite like it.

01:57:03 ◼   ► But I don't want to use it as a client for Blue Sky and Threads or Mastodon, because I have clients for those things.

01:57:11 ◼   ► And the fact that those things are so overwhelming, even though I try to, I don't willy-nilly follow people on Blue Sky, but already my Blue Sky feed is too much.

01:57:23 ◼   ► I don't want that.

01:57:23 ◼   ► You know, like if it's a weather service that once every three hours posts to Blue Sky, that's more like an RSS feed, right?

01:57:33 ◼   ► And I want that.

01:57:35 ◼   ► And it doesn't, the fact that it's a Blue Sky feed doesn't make any more difference to me than if it's an RSS feed or an Atom-formatted XML feed.

01:57:44 ◼   ► That's just an implementation detail.

01:57:46 ◼   ► That's, you know.

01:57:48 ◼   ► Right.

01:57:48 ◼   ► It's good to hear that you're using it this way, because that's kind of the way that it was designed.

01:57:53 ◼   ► We've had people, you know, start using the app, and the first thing they do is they load 300 of their RSS feeds from an OPML file.

01:58:02 ◼   ► And it's like, yeah, then we hear a little bit later, it's like, oh, I've gone and trimmed stuff back, right?

01:58:07 ◼   ► It's using, it's like your personal newsletter, right?

01:58:10 ◼   ► It's like the things that generally interest you and you want to stay on top of.

01:58:16 ◼   ► And it's better to build it up than to have a fire hose and trim it down, I think.

01:58:21 ◼   ► Right, right, right.

01:58:22 ◼   ► One of the things that was really core to the design is that we were putting the user in control of this stuff, right?

01:58:30 ◼   ► Number one, it's chronological, and it's stuff that you pick, right?

01:58:35 ◼   ► It's not, there's no kind of algorithm out there saying, hey, here you go.

01:58:39 ◼   ► We think this might interest you.