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ATP

666: We Have Nothing That Hot

 

00:00:00   I'm happy to report that all of my wood cutting and wood hanging and shelf hanging is complete.

00:00:04   Hooray!

00:00:05   Yep, I figured out a bunch of stuff.

00:00:07   I actually had to go to the hardware store twice, of course, because I ran out of wood

00:00:12   because I needed more than I thought.

00:00:14   Otherwise, it all went well.

00:00:16   I didn't injure myself too badly at any point.

00:00:19   Good.

00:00:20   I did probably, as predicted, probably used way too many screws and probably dramatically

00:00:25   overbuilt things.

00:00:27   That's fine.

00:00:29   I was happy to figure it all out, and it worked out great.

00:00:33   And Tiff was very pleased with it, and we're all very happy with the results.

00:00:37   Did you do any sanding?

00:00:38   What was I supposed to sand?

00:00:41   So you're cutting pieces of wood, and when you have the cut end, it's kind of like sharp,

00:00:45   you know, sharp corners on the cut end?

00:00:47   Oh, yeah, they're a disaster.

00:00:48   You didn't want to like sort of sand?

00:00:50   You could sand those edges down a little bit so they're not so spiky and splintery?

00:00:54   That would have been better.

00:00:57   Instead, I just left them spiky and splintery because I'm like, I'm not going to touch that.

00:01:00   It's full splinters.

00:01:00   I mean, they're all like most of these pieces of wood are so high off the ground that you

00:01:07   can't really reach them without some kind of stepping device from the ground anyway.

00:01:11   So like it's not really an issue.

00:01:13   And they're not really in places that you'd be reaching without looking.

00:01:17   You should send some pictures.

00:01:18   You should put them in Slack.

00:01:19   We'd love to see your handiwork.

00:01:20   All right.

00:01:21   Yeah.

00:01:21   That's true.

00:01:21   You can see my...

00:01:22   And now keep in mind, the disclaimer here is that I did nothing to reduce the amount of

00:01:28   stuff.

00:01:29   All I did was put it all up on the wall.

00:01:32   I know.

00:01:33   This looks great.

00:01:33   You did a good job.

00:01:34   So we still have a huge amount of stuff and that has not changed and will take longer

00:01:41   to change.

00:01:42   At least now it is off the floor.

00:01:46   What are the brackets made out of?

00:01:47   The ones that hold up the shelves?

00:01:48   Yeah.

00:01:49   They're metal.

00:01:50   They're like Amazon shelves.

00:01:51   I've had a few other copies of these shelves around the house for a couple of years.

00:01:55   Oh, I see.

00:01:55   So the shelves, what we're just looking at is the wood backing that you described for getting

00:01:59   around your stud issue.

00:02:00   Yeah, exactly.

00:02:01   And I did find every stud and screwed each board into every stud.

00:02:07   And there are three 2x4s holding up each shelf because I originally had planned two.

00:02:13   This is why I had to get more wood.

00:02:14   I originally had planned two, but the spacing of the screw holes on those shelf brackets

00:02:18   was such that it would have been, like, they would have been mounted very close to the

00:02:23   edges of the 2x4s.

00:02:25   And I didn't like the security of that.

00:02:28   And so I went back and I made them all three boards and I had to get more wood.

00:02:32   Well, there you go.

00:02:33   Now I feel like you're looking at this picture.

00:02:35   I feel like the weak link is your Amazon shelves and not your wood on the wall.

00:02:39   Definitely.

00:02:39   The wood will be secure.

00:02:41   The wall and those brackets are going to snap in half from the weight.

00:02:43   Yeah.

00:02:44   Like, I mean, the shelves, like, they're not, like, massive heavy.

00:02:47   Like, I wouldn't store lumber up there.

00:02:48   But it's good enough for, like, bins of household crap.

00:02:51   They're rated for, like, you know, 300 pounds each.

00:02:55   I don't think they would actually hold that.

00:02:56   But certainly in their current configuration, the metal of something would bend before they

00:03:02   would fall out of the wall.

00:03:03   Yeah.

00:03:04   And I was thinking you were making the shelves themselves, which is why I was worried about

00:03:06   the sanding the edges.

00:03:07   But these things being against the wall, I mean, sanding them still would have been

00:03:10   nicer, but it's fine.

00:03:12   All right.

00:03:13   Let's do some—oh, wait.

00:03:14   I was going to say follow-up, but I forgot a step.

00:03:15   Thankfully, John has put it in our internal show notes in a purple font with a yellow background,

00:03:22   which I think is deliberately hideous, but it served its purpose because I almost forgot

00:03:27   to mention we have a new member special.

00:03:29   We have ATP Diamond Dogs Talk Me Out of It 2.

00:03:32   Marco, would you like to talk about this, please?

00:03:35   If you recall, members—there was a member special, what was it, about a year ago, maybe

00:03:39   a little more?

00:03:40   Something like that.

00:03:40   When the idea was basically John had an idea for an app, and he wanted us to talk him out

00:03:46   of making it.

00:03:47   This member special is a similar kind of thing, except this time I had an idea for an app

00:03:53   that I might want to make, and I was basically coming to the Diamond Dogs, the advisory group

00:03:59   here, and asking John and Casey to talk me in or out of making this app.

00:04:03   So I think it's pretty interesting, and if you're into that kind of thing, I think you

00:04:09   want fun of the stream, too.

00:04:10   Yep.

00:04:11   The last one was October 16 of 2013, for what it's worth.

00:04:14   What?

00:04:15   Yeah.

00:04:16   2013.

00:04:17   Oh, is that what I said?

00:04:19   Sorry, 2023.

00:04:20   This is what I mean, not what I say.

00:04:22   I was like, why is that startling?

00:04:23   That's perfectly—no, that's not reasonable at all.

00:04:25   My apologies.

00:04:26   There you go.

00:04:27   When I said 2013, I meant 2023.

00:04:29   We'll fix it in post.

00:04:30   It's fine.

00:04:30   Anyways, so yeah, a couple of years ago now that we convinced John to do or maybe not to

00:04:37   do something, and now it's our turn to convince Marco to do or not to do something.

00:04:40   And lots of members who have already listened to it, they have offered their opinions about

00:04:45   whether you should make the app, and they were all saying, Marco, please make it because

00:04:47   I want an app like that.

00:04:48   So if you want to hear what kind of app they're clamoring for and whether or not Marco's going

00:04:52   to make it and or whether or not he'll ever redistribute it to them, check out the special.

00:04:56   Yeah, and for whatever it's worth, I have done some feasibility studies in the meantime

00:05:02   to see, like, if I do this, could I—you know, what would it take and, you know, certain

00:05:10   kind of tech demo efforts of like, oh, well, let me just see if this API works the way I

00:05:16   think it does, or let me see if I can work around this limitation of this API.

00:05:19   And so far, the demos are all pretty positive.

00:05:22   I still don't know if I should do it, but now I know that I can do it.

00:05:26   That's a good first step.

00:05:27   And I still don't have a name.

00:05:28   Oh, you've got lots of names.

00:05:30   I got lots of bad names.

00:05:31   You've got the one we talked about on the member special, and you've got many suggestions after

00:05:35   that from other people.

00:05:36   Oh, yeah.

00:05:37   They're rough.

00:05:38   I'll tell you that.

00:05:40   It's rough.

00:05:40   Nothing could be worse than Face Blash.

00:05:43   That's all I'm saying.

00:05:43   All right, let's do some follow-up.

00:05:45   Jared Counts writes, with regard to Diamond Dogs, the Diamond Dogs and Ted Lasso are actually

00:05:49   a reference to an album by David Bowie in which the Diamond Dogs are a gang of kids.

00:05:54   Granted, I only know this because of the show The Venture Brothers, in which an elite squad

00:05:57   of villains is called the Diamond Dogs and is led by either David Bowie himself or a shapeshifter

00:06:01   who likes looking like him.

00:06:02   Yeah, I mentioned at the top of the member special that we had called ATV Diamond Dogs because

00:06:06   of the time we made that special.

00:06:08   Ted Lasso and particularly the episode where the Diamond Dogs were convened was kind of in

00:06:12   pop culture memory.

00:06:13   But now as time passes, that leaves our memory.

00:06:16   And it turns out Diamond Dogs were actually predate that.

00:06:18   We might have mentioned this before in an earlier episode, like after the first Diamond Dogs,

00:06:21   but I've forgotten.

00:06:21   Anyway, it turns out this reference is even older from a David Bowie album, although I

00:06:25   will say that the David Bowie album and the gang of kids and everything isn't the same

00:06:31   as the Diamond Dogs and Ted Lasso, which is very explicitly a group of friends who convene

00:06:35   to offer advice to each other.

00:06:37   And that's what we're referencing in the title.

00:06:39   So I guess every time we make one of these episodes, every two years or so, we will remind

00:06:42   you why it's called ATP Diamond Dogs.

00:06:44   They won't have to all be talking me out of it.

00:06:47   It just so happens that these first two have been about, should I or shouldn't I make this

00:06:51   app?

00:06:52   Indeed.

00:06:52   Because we're us.

00:06:53   Because we are us.

00:06:54   Johnny Decimal Noble writes, listening to you talk about the nanotexture iPads, it struck

00:06:59   me that for years we had nanotexture.

00:07:00   We just called it matte.

00:07:02   Then it went away and now it's back.

00:07:04   And it costs hundreds of dollars?

00:07:05   Seems like a terrific marketing trick by an evil genius.

00:07:07   What's up?

00:07:08   Well, in all fairness, it was not always free in the past.

00:07:12   So there used to be, right before the Retina transition in the laptops, the outgoing 15-inch

00:07:19   MacBook Pro before that had what we called glossy or glass screen.

00:07:24   And it also had a matte, no, I think it was before glass.

00:07:26   So it was glossy and it was matte.

00:07:27   The matte option, I believe, cost like $100 more back then.

00:07:32   And wasn't it like marginally higher resolution?

00:07:34   Not wildly higher, but I think it was lightly higher.

00:07:37   I don't know about, well, because they changed, they tweaked the resolution like in the very

00:07:41   last year of it to be a little bit higher.

00:07:42   So that might have been what you're thinking of.

00:07:43   Maybe that's what I'm thinking of.

00:07:44   But yeah, it was, it was an option for a matte screen and it was a little bit more money.

00:07:48   But generally speaking, what happened was like everything, I don't think it was like, you

00:07:53   know, a marketing thing to first go glossy and then make us pay later.

00:07:56   Basically, everything went to glass fronted screens instead of before it was, I think, like

00:08:03   a plastic layer in front of LCDs before.

00:08:05   Right, John, was that?

00:08:06   Well, although I think the area you're talking about with the matte option for extra money

00:08:11   was in the era before there was glass in front of the screens, the history of sort of flat

00:08:18   screen monitors.

00:08:19   Oh yeah, there was plastic glossy too.

00:08:22   Right.

00:08:22   Yeah, the flat screen monitors wore a matte finish for a very long time.

00:08:29   RTs were basically glass cathode ray tubes and some of them had anti-glare coatings on them

00:08:34   and stuff like that.

00:08:35   But in the era of LCD flat panel monitors, very, very often from the beginning, pretty much

00:08:40   all of them had some kind of, I don't know, hazy piece of plastic on the front.

00:08:45   Some of it was for light dispersion, you know, but it was, it was, they were matte.

00:08:48   What we would describe now is matte.

00:08:49   The quote unquote innovation was glossy displays.

00:08:53   That happened very late before the transition to glass screens on Mac laptops, like toward

00:08:59   the tail end of the LCD, PC maker said, you know what?

00:09:02   If this, if we put, if the piece of plastic on the front of this LCD is really, really shiny

00:09:08   plastic, shiny things attract consumers.

00:09:10   Like there are those birds that are attracted to shiny things.

00:09:13   Magpies is it?

00:09:13   Maybe they just collect stuff.

00:09:14   Anyway, shiny people like shiny things.

00:09:16   So let's put really, really shiny plastic on the front of our LCD panels.

00:09:22   And that became known as the glossy displays.

00:09:24   And they were all over the PC market.

00:09:26   Apple was quote unquote behind here because they didn't put shiny plastic on their LCDs,

00:09:32   but they couldn't stay away forever.

00:09:34   And eventually maybe they couldn't even get many matte screens.

00:09:36   And Apple transitioned to putting a shiny piece of plastic on the front of their LCDs instead

00:09:40   of a cloudy piece of plastic, and then offered the cloudy slash matte piece of plastic as

00:09:45   an extra cost option.

00:09:46   Then eventually Apple went glass for their screens, where the surface that you would touch with

00:09:52   your finger was made of glass.

00:09:53   And that's where we are today.

00:09:55   But, um, that's, that's the origin.

00:09:58   Like everything was matte for a really, really long time.

00:10:00   And then there was the glossy plastic error, which I didn't like.

00:10:03   Cause we, I thought they looked awful and I thought it looked like there was too much

00:10:06   glare and refractions and it was plastic.

00:10:08   So it was kind of like wavy and disgusting.

00:10:09   Anyway, I didn't like it.

00:10:10   Then Apple still said, well, for the people who still want that matte look, we offer this.

00:10:15   And then Apple went glass.

00:10:16   Nanotexture is the return of matte in the era of glass because nanotexture does not take

00:10:22   a glass front on a screen and put a thin film on it, which you can do.

00:10:26   Lots of screens do that.

00:10:27   Lots of displays do that.

00:10:28   It's a piece of glass and they put like this sticky film on it.

00:10:30   That is the matte film.

00:10:31   Instead, it is various ways of etching the glass to make the glass itself have a fuzzy

00:10:37   and less smooth surface.

00:10:38   Why does it cost more now?

00:10:40   I don't know.

00:10:41   Inflation.

00:10:41   It's probably more complicated to etch that surface onto glass, especially when it's very

00:10:46   fine etching versus rough etching.

00:10:47   Again, Apple uses, I think, three different methods to etch the Pro Display XDR, the iPad

00:10:53   and the laptop displays.

00:10:55   So anyway, there you go.

00:10:56   That's a brief history of matte versus glossy.

00:10:59   I think the only one I really, really didn't like was glossy plastic because it was like

00:11:04   the worst of all possible worlds.

00:11:06   Yeah, that was the worst one.

00:11:07   Yeah.

00:11:08   And matte plastic was better.

00:11:09   I do like the glass displays of today without the nanotexture and then nanotexture has lots

00:11:16   of fans like Marco who really like that.

00:11:17   So there you go.

00:11:18   Yeah.

00:11:18   And to be clear, like if you look at when people today say why they don't like nanotexture,

00:11:24   you can see why, like the reason why everyone switched to glossy was not just, you know, a

00:11:29   fad.

00:11:30   It's because the glossy front screens had less diffusion in the surface of the image.

00:11:37   You know, the way that matte and nanotexture, you know, textures work is they diffuse the light

00:11:43   as it reflects off.

00:11:45   So, you know, they have some kind of bumpy surface on some level or a grainy or something.

00:11:49   There's something in the surface or on the surface that diffuses the reflection.

00:11:52   So it scatters those light beams.

00:11:54   What that also does is scatter the light beams from the image itself in from the display.

00:12:00   So it does slightly blur the image.

00:12:02   Now, back in the olden days before retina, the pixels were so big.

00:12:06   No one cared.

00:12:07   Uh, it like it didn't matter.

00:12:09   But now it was very, and also those matte plastic screens, the texture was very fine.

00:12:13   It was like on the protospatial, very, very fine, uh, texture.

00:12:17   It wasn't, um, it wasn't like it was blurring it.

00:12:20   Like if you put like a paper-like, uh, thing on top of an iPad screen, like that's much worse.

00:12:24   Yeah.

00:12:25   Oh, definitely.

00:12:26   Um, and the reason why the, like, and the paper-like is way more diffuse than nanotexture because to have that kind of the, the paper-like texture, you need a decent amount of thickness and you need a decent amount of friction.

00:12:39   So like the grain of the surface has to be like, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a coarser sandpaper type.

00:12:45   It's like, you need like a higher grain to be like more friction, you know, and that higher grain blurs the image more.

00:12:52   Nanotexture is a very, very, very fine grain.

00:12:55   So it still scatters a light, but it blurs the image a lot less than most of the other options, uh, but it still blurs the image more than clear glass would.

00:13:04   And so as we went into the era of higher resolution, brighter, more saturated color screens, people wanted to see the full effect of that.

00:13:13   They wanted to see all those super sharp retina pixels.

00:13:16   They wanted to see all those super bright saturated colors.

00:13:19   Well, they wanted the contrast.

00:13:20   Like that's the matte finishes raised black levels in TV parlance, which means that if you have a totally black screen, it looks a little bit gray because light coming from literally anywhere and hitting your screen, some of it will bounce into your eyes because the matte surface scatters it in every possible direction.

00:13:33   Whereas if you have a glossy screen, you'll, you'll see like light reflecting from like a light overhead as a clear reflection on your screen, but the parts that don't have the light on it, they'll be black, the blackest of black.

00:13:44   So if you want maximum contrast, you want glossy.

00:13:47   If you don't want to see a mirror, like incredibly sharp, bright reflections of light sources, you want matte of some kind.

00:13:54   Yeah.

00:13:55   So I actually, I said, I believe in the last episode, how I had tried a nanotexture iPad pro in a store and I tried the pencil on it and it did feel more textured than the flat glass iPads.

00:14:08   Like when writing with a pencil, but it's not even close to as textured as the paper, like film feels.

00:14:15   So, you know, you're optimizing for different things.

00:14:17   An iPad with the paper, like film or like my, my preferred one is the, the Astro rock paper pencil, um, which is very similar in qualities to the paper, like brand, except it's, it sticks on magnetically.

00:14:28   And so it's, it's way easier to install and remove and reinstall if you want to.

00:14:32   Um, cause it, which is always a pain with the actual paper, like sticky films.

00:14:36   Um, but an iPad with one of these paper texture films, um, the picture quality takes a significant hit.

00:14:44   It does have worse contrast.

00:14:46   It does have less brightness.

00:14:48   It is more blurry.

00:14:49   Like it takes a significant hit.

00:14:51   But if you are optimizing for, you know, a, a, a textured paper-like feel, that might be a valid trade-off for you.

00:14:59   Um, nanotexture I find is, is a nice middle ground between the two.

00:15:03   If you want a little bit of friction, but you do not want to sacrifice almost any image quality, that's nanotexture.

00:15:09   And if you don't care about pencil friction at all, and you want the best image quality to watch movies in John's bed, get the OLED iPad and have glass front.

00:15:17   And so we kind of have all those options now.

00:15:19   We are sponsored this episode by Skims.

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00:15:53   And if I'm honest, I think it looks amazing too.

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00:16:04   And it makes you therefore feel good because you know that you look amazing.

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00:17:09   With regard to the Steam machine, David Schaub writes in citing a Eurogamer article,

00:17:18   the Steam machine doesn't have an APU with an integrated GPU like other consoles.

00:17:21   It is more like a gaming laptop with a discreet GPU.

00:17:25   The CPU is a semi-custom AMD Zen 4, 6-core, 12-thread, up to 4.8 gigahertz, 30 watts.

00:17:32   What is TDP again?

00:17:33   I'm drawing a blank.

00:17:34   Total design power, is it?

00:17:35   Something like that.

00:17:36   GPU, semi-custom AMD.

00:17:37   Thermal design power?

00:17:39   Semi-custom AMD RDNA 3, 28 CUs, 2.45 gigahertz sustained clock, 110 watts TDP, 8 gigabytes of GDDR6.

00:17:51   Also, Valve has told YouTubers that it will be priced more like a PC than a console.

00:17:55   Yeah, it's kind of disappointing they didn't have a combined CPU-GPU like the PlayStation 5 has,

00:18:01   but it probably would have cost a lot more money to develop one of those because they're kind of custom

00:18:06   and they're not going to just get the one from the PS5 or whatever.

00:18:08   So it turns out it's more like a fancy gaming laptop with a huge heat sink.

00:18:12   But then you can see the power distribution.

00:18:13   It was 30 watts just for the CPU and it's 110 watts for the GPU.

00:18:18   Again, it doesn't matter if this is not a laptop.

00:18:19   It's plugged into the wall.

00:18:20   It's a little six-inch cube, but there you go.

00:18:23   It's more like a small gaming PC with a discrete CPU and GPU.

00:18:27   The PlayStation 5 OS is based on free BSD, not Linux, thanks to Jesus Santiago Navarez for pointing this out.

00:18:37   From Wikipedia's BSD, or Berkeley Software Distribution page,

00:18:40   code from BSD's open descendants have themselves also been integrated into various modern platforms,

00:18:45   including the system software for the PlayStation 5.

00:18:48   From the psdevwiki.com website, the PlayStation 5 kernel is based on free BSD 11.0.

00:18:54   That's correctly my mistake.

00:18:55   I was saying how they PlayStation is an example of a non-Windows platform playing PC caliber games.

00:19:01   Because I said it was based on Linux.

00:19:03   It's not.

00:19:03   It's BSD.

00:19:04   The kernel, anyway.

00:19:05   I mean, who knows what the user space is like on those things.

00:19:08   I'm sure PS5 devs know.

00:19:09   Fair enough.

00:19:10   The Steam Frame, their quote-unquote Vision Pro.

00:19:13   Michael writes, the Quest 2 and 3S use Fresnel lenses.

00:19:16   Fresnel.

00:19:17   That's what I said.

00:19:19   Fresnel lenses.

00:19:19   The Quest Pro and Quest 3 have pancake lenses.

00:19:23   Pancake.

00:19:24   Just like the Vision Pro and Steam Frame.

00:19:26   James Laughlin writes, the Steam Frame is, the Steam Frame is very similar in display and optical stack as the MetaQuest 3.

00:19:33   Both have pancake lenses.

00:19:35   Both are roughly 2K per eye and use LCD panels with similar backlighting.

00:19:39   They're likely to be in the same ballpark in terms of price.

00:19:41   The Snapdragon 8 chip on the Steam Frame is slightly newer and more powerful than the Quest 3's XR 2 Gen 2 chip.

00:19:48   James also writes, here's a handy chart and a great website for comparing specs, which is vrcompare.com.

00:19:53   We will link it in the show notes.

00:19:54   Also, I believe they'll sell a top strap for the Steam Frame separately, including knuckle straps like Index Controller Style.

00:19:59   Curious what other accessories will ship.

00:20:01   Here's an image from Upload VR.

00:20:02   Put a link to that in the show notes.

00:20:04   Yeah, their top strap looks kind of like Apple's old top strap.

00:20:06   Like just a, like a, well, there's his Velcro, I think.

00:20:09   But just a basic strap that goes along the top and you have to adjust kind of manually by, you know, undoing the Velcro and redoing it.

00:20:16   So, it's still kind of clunky, but again, the Steam Frame has all sorts of potential options because that whole front part disconnects from it.

00:20:25   So, they can refine the ergonomic setup without changing the compute part.

00:20:31   And the divide on the, like, cheaper headsets between, like, it's confusing because of the names.

00:20:35   Like, the Quest 2 and 3S have Fresnel lenses, which are cheaper and smaller.

00:20:41   But the Quest Pro and Quest 3 have the pancake lenses, which are not.

00:20:46   Do you guys know what Fresnel lenses look like?

00:20:48   I think I described them last time as, like, circular ridges, like on a ruffled potato chip, but in circles.

00:20:54   It's like if you took a regular sort of, like, lens that's, you know, shaped like a lens in your eyeball and sliced it into a million concentric circles and then laid those concentric circles flat.

00:21:04   That's literally what it is.

00:21:05   Have you ever been to visit a lighthouse and they take you to the very top and they show you the thing that's in front of the light to magnify it?

00:21:12   And it's this kind of ridgy glass thing.

00:21:14   That's a gigantic Fresnel lens.

00:21:16   The smaller one, it's a way to magnify things without having a big, thick lens.

00:21:20   Because, again, it takes the big, thick lens, slices it into rings and squishes the rings.

00:21:24   Takes out the middle part of the lens.

00:21:26   But it does blur things up a little bit.

00:21:28   And so pancake lenses are more like what you would imagine a traditional lens looks like inside a camera lens or a telescope lens or whatever.

00:21:35   Anyway, there you have it.

00:21:38   I was trying to look up some specs and see what's saying, oh, pancake lenses block a lot of light.

00:21:42   Every lens blocks some amount of light.

00:21:44   The specs I saw that I looked up were more optimistic than the person who posted.

00:21:49   They said that, like, pancake lenses don't allow 15% of light transmission.

00:21:53   But the thing I said, the thing I found by Googling was, like, a particular pancake lens in a particular headset was allowing 25% light transmission.

00:22:01   But, you know, all lenses cut down on light transmission.

00:22:04   I think there's no getting around it when you have to project the image from these screens into our eyeballs in some way.

00:22:09   You need some kind of lensing system.

00:22:10   So, yeah, that's why screens of all types need to be bright inside headsets to make their way through the lenses that are in front of them.

00:22:17   Then Ian Walls writes, want to stream games from Steam to an Apple Vision Pro?

00:22:21   Yep, you can do that with ALVR.

00:22:22   You'll need a PC and controllers, but it works well enough for people to beat expert-level Beat Saber.

00:22:27   One John Syracuse found a guide on Reddit, which we'll link in the show notes.

00:22:30   Yeah, lots of people are talking about this, like, you have to go to, like, a GitHub page and download a thing.

00:22:34   And it's a little bit of an involved setup, but it basically lets you stream VR games to your Vision Pro.

00:22:41   I guess you would use the PlayStation VR controllers with your Vision Pro and stream them there.

00:22:45   So, you know, it's a way to use your $3,500 headset as merely a streaming display for a game that is running on a PC.

00:22:53   But, you know, you can do it if you want.

00:22:55   I mean, in all fairness, what most people who like the Vision Pro tell us they use it most for is as an expensive display for some other kind of computer.

00:23:02   That hurts.

00:23:03   Or watching content that's downloaded directly to the Vision Pro.

00:23:06   Like, it's a good television watching device as well.

00:23:08   Although that could be streamed from another place if you wanted to as well, but it's not.

00:23:13   It's coming from the device.

00:23:14   More from David Schaub this time with regard to Steam OS.

00:23:17   It does not yet support arbitrary PC hardware.

00:23:20   It just lets you try it.

00:23:21   That's the PC way.

00:23:22   Might work.

00:23:24   Try it.

00:23:24   The Apple way would be to not let you try it.

00:23:27   Also fair.

00:23:28   Saul and Magnus writes, Steam Machine is a great step forward for those that don't want to build something themselves.

00:23:32   But there are at least two Linux distributions that deliver Steam OS-like experience.

00:23:36   Bazite?

00:23:37   B-A-Z-Z-I-T-E.

00:23:38   I didn't look up pronunciation for this one.

00:23:40   I kept saying Bazite when I read it.

00:23:41   I honestly have no idea how it's pronounced.

00:23:43   Like Bazel?

00:23:43   Right.

00:23:44   I mean, it's B-A-Z-Z-I-T-E.

00:23:46   How do you want to say it?

00:23:47   Bazite.

00:23:48   Bazel.

00:23:48   Is it a mineral?

00:23:50   Bazite?

00:23:51   I don't know, man.

00:23:52   And Tech EOS.

00:23:53   These make an effort to include Valve's patches and updates for the best compatibility and offer images that launch into Steam's big picture interface.

00:24:00   Steam Machine itself has some hardware features for TV use like CEC, but 95% of the experience can be replicated today with low to mid-range gaming PC.

00:24:11   Julian Torres writes, many of the biggest multiplayer PC games, typically FPS games, actually require Microsoft Windows because of cheat detection software that is deep ties into the Windows kernel.

00:24:21   Without it, some games just straight up won't run or even when the game itself would work just fine on Steam OS.

00:24:27   For what it's worth, we note that the Windows anti-cheat stuff is also an issue on the Mac when you're using Crossover or similar adapter software.

00:24:36   Yeah, a lot of people were suggesting, you know, I was talking about gaming on ARM and, you know, thinking of my ARM Mac future and, like, you should try Crossover.

00:24:45   And then my immediate question was, does it work with anti-cheat?

00:24:47   So I'm familiar with this because Destiny has some anti-cheat stuff in and so do a lot of competitive, I don't know, multiplayer games where cheating is a problem.

00:24:57   Where if you were to run some software locally on your PC or whatever, you could try to change the game such that you have an unfair advantage.

00:25:07   Like making walls invisible or auto-aim things that automatically put your crosshair on people's heads and, you know, cheating stuff.

00:25:14   And in multiplayer games, that ruins the game for everybody if you tried to join a multiplayer game and some people are cheating.

00:25:19   So the anti-cheat stuff has to do a thing that Apple OSes are familiar with from a security standpoint, which is stop someone from doing something to the software that's running on their machine.

00:25:30   And the way lots of Windows gaming anti-cheat stuff does this is with deep, deep hooks into the kernel, into the Windows kernel to, you know, detect if anything is changed or modified or whatever.

00:25:44   It's these anti-cheat things themselves are sort of scary software because they're like running inside your kernel and doing stuff.

00:25:50   But it's the only way that they can stop other they can either detect or stop this cheating software from running locally on people's PCs.

00:25:59   And as far as I'm aware, that Windows anti-cheat stuff, we don't have a way, nobody's figured out a good way to make that anti-cheat stuff work when those games are running on Linux.

00:26:08   Because obviously it's running the Linux kernel, not the Windows kernel.

00:26:10   And I know there's adapter layers for all the DirectX ATIs and there's emulation and so on and so forth.

00:26:15   But down at the kernel level, apparently this is a nut that hasn't been cracked.

00:26:19   Maybe they put them in a Windows virtual machine somewhere or something like that.

00:26:22   But even then, it's not quite the same thing as, you know, again, if those games were allowed to run on Linux, that seems like another venue for cheaters.

00:26:30   Because they could find a way to defeat the anti-cheat software that thinks it's running on Windows, but it's really running on Linux because you're able to fake it out.

00:26:38   Anyway, it's a complicated problem, but it does mean that some of the most popular games won't work on Linux, SteamOS, and also won't work for Mac users who are trying to run Windows games with Crossover or with Apple's Gameporting Toolkit or stuff like that.

00:26:54   Continuing from Julian, I'm not aware if this is something Valve is already working on, but I bet that they are.

00:26:59   These big games have a lot of mindsharing gamers' heads, which ends up keeping a lot of people on Windows.

00:27:03   I think that when that domino falls and Valve can essentially emulate those systems or maybe become popular enough to come up with their own anti-cheat system that's compatible with Linux, Microsoft might wake up to the Steam threat.

00:27:13   Yeah, and we'll get to a little bit more of that in a second, but, like, that's, you know, if Valve is able to convince people, like, these big game makers who are making, like, Call of Duty or even, like, Destiny or whatever,

00:27:24   hey, I know you're using this, usually they're using, like, a third-party anti-cheat thing that has deep hooks into the Windows kernel,

00:27:29   but, like, here's what you should do to make an anti-cheat system that works in SteamOS on Linux,

00:27:36   or maybe they'll vend their own third-party anti-cheat service and then get, you know, convince game makers to install that in their game.

00:27:45   Like, Microsoft should already be waking up to the threat of these, but if they're able to convince game makers,

00:27:50   you know the Windows game you're making, add a bunch of complication to it so that it can run on Linux with all the anti-cheat protection that you desire.

00:28:01   And if any game, any big game makers say yes to that, Microsoft should absolutely wake up because, like, they're stealing your market.

00:28:06   But maybe not, we'll see in a moment or two.

00:28:10   Then Nathan Edwards writes on The Verge today, screw it, I'm installing Linux.

00:28:14   Valve's hard work getting Windows games to run well on the Linux-based Steam Deck has lifted all boats.

00:28:19   Gaming handhelds that ship with Windows run better and have higher frame rates on Bazite, a Fedora-based distro, than they do with Windows.

00:28:26   And after reading about the upcoming Steam Machine and fellow Verge writer Antonio's experience running the Bazite on the framework desktop, I want to try it.

00:28:32   Yeah, one note for Nathan.

00:28:34   I think if you're going to say that Valve's hard work getting Windows games to run well on Linux-based Steam Deck has lifted all boats,

00:28:39   you've got to put Tide somewhere earlier in that sentence.

00:28:41   Is a Tide that has lifted all boats?

00:28:43   You can't use just half of the common saying.

00:28:45   I think the editor should have caught that one.

00:28:48   Anyway, a lot of people sent that in, whatever this recent, well, there's a link to it in the article,

00:28:52   of, like, whatever this recent test was showing higher frame rates when I'm running a Windows game on Linux than you get on Windows.

00:28:58   Again, Microsoft should wake up.

00:29:00   That is a sign that things are not going the way you expect.

00:29:05   With regard to strategy, how many people are running Steam games on ARM?

00:29:09   Well, we can answer that, sort of.

00:29:10   Store.steampowered.com slash hwsurvey.

00:29:13   Lars Boris writes, according to the Steam Hardware Survey, about 95% of users are on Windows, 3% on Linux, and 2% on macOS.

00:29:22   Not a perfect source, but still quite interesting.

00:29:24   And Ava adds, and of that 3% that's Linux, only 27% is running SteamOS.

00:29:29   Yeah, so it's obviously, it's still mostly Windows gaming.

00:29:33   Like, this is interesting because they're getting a foothold.

00:29:35   And obviously the Steam Deck has existed for a while, but that is a handheld gaming PC,

00:29:40   which is a category that the Steam Deck essentially, you know, pioneered, if not the Switch pioneering,

00:29:46   like sort of handheld PC caliber gaming.

00:29:48   But still, it's not that big of a market, even though there are more people entering it.

00:29:53   The Steam machine may or may not change that.

00:29:55   Like, previously it was like, okay, well, what if I don't want to play handheld?

00:29:58   Is it easy for me to get a SteamOS powered desktop caliber gaming thing?

00:30:03   And the answer up until now was, oh, you could build one and there's some small phone factor PCs.

00:30:07   But this one being blessed by Valve is a little bit of a big deal.

00:30:10   But maybe Valve is not going to promote the Steam machine that hard because, again, they make all their money from the store.

00:30:15   So maybe it will just be a curiosity.

00:30:17   Maybe these numbers won't move much.

00:30:19   But there was a story, a couple of stories recently, that even though the numbers are small, that Linux percentage has grown a lot recently.

00:30:26   Now, granted, it's still only 3%, but if it was 1.5% six months ago, it has doubled.

00:30:32   So, you know, the trend line is interesting.

00:30:35   But Microsoft doesn't have to worry too much that they're going to, that their gaming dominance is going to disappear overnight.

00:30:41   But I do think they should be paying attention.

00:30:44   Charles E. Smith writes, Valve is not publicly traded.

00:30:46   It can do a lot of things that Sony, Microsoft, or Apple would never do because it doesn't have to answer to anyone but Gabe Newell, the president and co-founder of Valve.

00:30:52   It's worth noting the other founder, Mike Harrington, sold a stake in Valve to Newell in 2000 and left the company.

00:30:58   Charles continues, Valve is already effectively a monopoly in PC gaming.

00:31:02   But unlike the App Store, the Steam store has only gotten better.

00:31:04   They have already played the hell out of the long game and they can do that with this as well.

00:31:09   And why does Steam get better?

00:31:10   Because you can buy games not on Steam.

00:31:13   Game companies have their own terrible stories usually.

00:31:15   There's the Epic store.

00:31:16   You can buy directly from the game maker.

00:31:19   Like, it's not the only store in town.

00:31:22   It's not the only game in town.

00:31:23   Not the only game store in town.

00:31:25   See what I'm doing, Nathan?

00:31:26   I'm trying to work in the saying and the...

00:31:28   Oh my gosh.

00:31:28   So, it has been forced to get better.

00:31:32   And it has.

00:31:33   And there's, you know, Steam has earned its position by being a valuable product.

00:31:37   And the entire time they've had to compete with not Steam, which is the whole rest of the PC gaming market.

00:31:43   And as for, you know, Valve, Valve is very much sort of like a founder-led, founder-controlled company where they are willing to do things without having to explain how this is going to pay off over the long term.

00:31:55   And they've done lots of stuff.

00:31:57   And I bet if you had seen them experimenting with making game controllers and selling Linux machines that run Windows games and VR headsets, you'd be like, this is just a boondoggle for a company that became famous for making a couple of good games in a store.

00:32:08   And now they're just like, this is the company that runs the store.

00:32:10   Why are they doing this other stuff?

00:32:12   They do it because Gabe Newell apparently wants to do it.

00:32:15   And by the way, we got through that whole previous episode without referencing the extremely common off-sited nickname for the Steam machine, which is a six-inch cube that is a gaming PC, kind of like a gaming console that runs SteamOS.

00:32:29   Anyway, the Gabe Cube.

00:32:31   G-A-B-E-C-U-B-E.

00:32:33   Wow.

00:32:34   But now I realize lots of people might not have been born when the Nintendo GameCube was released.

00:32:37   But that's what it's referencing, the game, the Nintendo GameCube, the Gabe Cube.

00:32:42   There you have it.

00:32:43   With regard to the M5 having the best single-core performance ever, Stephen OptiBeck writes,

00:32:50   this is a recent ranking of single-thread performance in an artificial benchmark across all types of CPUs.

00:32:55   This is CPUBenchmark.net.

00:32:57   And sure enough, ARM Apple M5 10 cores all the way at the top.

00:33:01   Yeah, so same caveats about benchmarks and who knows what they're doing or whatever.

00:33:05   But it's worth noting that I believe Apple chips are the top five, one, two, three, four, five of the top 10.

00:33:12   So that's a strong showing in single-core performance.

00:33:15   So number one is the M5.

00:33:16   Number two is the A19 Pro in the phone.

00:33:19   Number three is the M3 Ultra 28-core.

00:33:22   Number four is the M3 Ultra 32-core.

00:33:24   And number five is the plain old A19.

00:33:26   Only at position number six do you see the first non-Apple chip,

00:33:30   which is the Intel Core Ultra 9 to 85K.

00:33:34   Again, if you go to Geekbench, you'll see all sorts of CPUs with ridiculous single-core scores

00:33:41   because I'm assuming they're massively overclocked and, like, cooled by some exotic system or whatever.

00:33:46   But I think this one is just, like, you know, non-exotic, non-overclocked system.

00:33:51   And the other thing to note is that if you look at the top 10,

00:33:53   there's a gradual slope from number 10 to number two.

00:33:55   And then from number two to number one, there's quite a change.

00:34:00   That could just be because maybe the M5 finally fits some part of this benchmark into its L2 cache or something.

00:34:06   So it's hard to tell with benchmarks.

00:34:07   But Apple's marketing claim or the common phrase that you'll see in a lot of reviews that the M5 is the highest single-core performance ever,

00:34:16   there is some foundation to that.

00:34:17   Yep.

00:34:19   Finally, we have some real-time follow-up from Adam1.

00:34:21   The MacBook Pro 2010 to 2012 model years with a 15-inch screen non-retina

00:34:28   had a matte option that was $150 more expensive than the regular resolution glossy screens.

00:34:33   The matte monitor's native resolution was 1680 by 1050 pixels,

00:34:37   and the glossy was 1440 by 900 pixels.

00:34:40   Casey was right.

00:34:42   Yeah, and the 150, I think, is not so much because the matte monitor costs more,

00:34:47   but just because it was so rare.

00:34:48   Like, at that point, everybody had wanted glossy.

00:34:50   But I do remember all the nerds in our circle saying,

00:34:53   and, of course, I got the matte option because everyone was very much getting glossy in those days.

00:34:58   And as a bonus, getting high-res.

00:35:00   Well, the way I remember phrasing this, maybe this was a Casey-ism, but I don't think so,

00:35:04   was high-res anti-glare is what I believe we all called it at the time.

00:35:08   Yes.

00:35:09   Or probably what Apple called it, right?

00:35:11   Yeah, you're right.

00:35:12   There was one generation, I think, one or two, right before Retina on the 15-inch MacBook Pro,

00:35:16   where there was, that's when it went from 1440 to 1680, I think, across.

00:35:21   Yeah, yeah.

00:35:22   Yep, that's exactly right.

00:35:23   So, I would just like to state for the record that one time in 2025, I actually remembered something.

00:35:28   Look at me go.

00:35:29   That's a good one, though.

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00:37:30   I've really thought about bringing up a bottle of vodka and doing the thing I would never ever

00:37:38   do again because I have a feeling you're not going to need me for the rest of this episode

00:37:44   because someone, probably John, put in the show notes, in our internal show notes, the Mac

00:37:49   ProColon, don't believe.

00:37:51   Oh, this is quite a capper too.

00:37:54   I mean, I kind of covered it in the last episode.

00:37:55   A lot of people are writing to me online asking me what I think about this and what I'm going

00:37:59   to do.

00:37:59   I think I actually did cover that in the last episode.

00:38:02   I'll repeat it again here.

00:38:03   But just FYI, it's not as if this is a shock.

00:38:06   I've been increasingly sort of histrionic about the complete lack of any news about future

00:38:12   Mac Pro products for a long time now.

00:38:14   All these rumors I've been reading about, all these other products, this product's going

00:38:17   to have this chip and this year going to do this thing and that.

00:38:20   And nothing about the Mac Pro, just nothing.

00:38:22   Or like if there'd be something, we'd put it in there.

00:38:24   And the next week they'd say, actually, let me take the hot air.

00:38:27   Let me deflate that rumor.

00:38:29   That was a misinterpretation of a thing.

00:38:30   Don't get your hopes up.

00:38:31   That's not a real thing.

00:38:32   And so, like I said in the last episode, you know, I was supposed to get a new Mac this year

00:38:37   as soon as I figured out what they were doing, the Mac Pro.

00:38:40   Apple did nothing with it.

00:38:42   And by the time it became clear, they were going to do nothing because I kind of had to wait

00:38:45   until like the October event just when they, you know, do much stuff.

00:38:48   That came on, now it's too late in the year.

00:38:49   Now I can't do what was my early in the year plan, which is like, let me just get an M4 Max

00:38:54   Max Studio or something.

00:38:55   But with the M5 out now, I can't do that.

00:38:57   So the new tentative plan as of last episode was next year, I'll get an M5 Max Max Studio

00:39:03   and or unless Marco convinces me to get an M5 Ultra Max Studio, assuming the M5 Ultra exists,

00:39:08   which is a separate issue.

00:39:10   So that was my plan and that continues to be my plan.

00:39:15   But now finally, we have some news about the Mac Pro.

00:39:18   The news is not good.

00:39:19   No.

00:39:19   I mean, it's better than no news.

00:39:20   I will say that.

00:39:21   Uncertainty was killing me.

00:39:22   But the certainty in this case is bad.

00:39:24   Righto.

00:39:26   You want to read this guy?

00:39:27   Do you want me to do?

00:39:28   I can.

00:39:29   Yeah, I feel like you should.

00:39:30   It hurts me too much.

00:39:31   All right.

00:39:32   I will take this one for the team.

00:39:33   I'll read Colin's thing after.

00:39:34   Do you want me to do it so you don't have to?

00:39:36   No, no.

00:39:36   I don't mind.

00:39:37   I just feel like I'm stabbing my friend in the back.

00:39:40   Mark Gurman writes, there's no longer an M4 Ultra in the works.

00:39:42   A Mac Pro to support it was also next.

00:39:44   And the next high-end desktop chip will be the M5 Ultra.

00:39:48   So far, Apple has only focused on a new Max Studio for the processor.

00:39:51   That suggests the Mac Pro won't be updated in 2026 in a significant way.

00:39:55   From what I've heard inside the company, Apple has largely written off the Mac Pro.

00:39:59   So the sentiment internally is that the Mac Studio now represents both the present and

00:40:03   future of Apple's professional desktop strategy.

00:40:06   Yeah, we noticed, Apple.

00:40:07   We noticed.

00:40:08   I mean, it's got an M2 Ultra in it.

00:40:10   And even that took so long for them to take it off of Intel.

00:40:13   And when the M3 Ultra came out, they didn't update it.

00:40:16   Even though it would have been dumb, they could have, but they didn't.

00:40:18   And there was going to be M4 Ultra, but now apparently not.

00:40:21   And now they're saying there's going to be M5 Ultra, but it's not going to the Mac Pro either.

00:40:24   And I know this is not a thing that Apple does.

00:40:27   I know Apple doesn't come out and tell you like when they're not going to do something

00:40:31   or like about their future plans in any way.

00:40:33   But interestingly, one of the few times in recent history that Apple has ever told you

00:40:39   about a thing they're going to do in the future, it was the Mac Roundtable.

00:40:43   They said, we're going to make a new modular Mac Pro that's not going to suck.

00:40:45   And they did.

00:40:46   They made a new modular Mac Pro that didn't suck.

00:40:48   It took in the next several years, however long it took.

00:40:50   So it would be kind of nice for them to say, we're not doing the Mac Pro anymore.

00:40:54   Just put us out of our misery.

00:40:56   Just tell us you're not doing it instead of pretending you're going to, but then never

00:41:01   ever updating it because it's just an embarrassing machine.

00:41:03   It's a Mac Studio in a giant box with card slots that have very limited usefulness with an increasingly

00:41:08   ancient processor.

00:41:09   It's just an embarrassment.

00:41:11   I mean, even though I would have complained if they had put the M3 Ultra in it, at least

00:41:15   they would have been like, well, this dumb product that you made, it is now an up-to-date

00:41:19   dumb product.

00:41:20   But not doing anything with it.

00:41:22   It seems like they should like announce an end of life or just say like, we're not making

00:41:27   that anymore.

00:41:28   Now, part of me thinks this, the case on the 2019 Mac Pro, the Intel 2019 Mac Pro, that case

00:41:35   is big and expensive and fancy.

00:41:37   And we knew they would keep it because you got to make your money back.

00:41:41   It's a low volume product.

00:41:42   It's not like they're going to change the case for the R1 and lo and behold, they didn't.

00:41:45   Even though they did change the case for some of their other more popular products, how long

00:41:49   do they have to keep making and selling something called the Mac Pro before they're satisfied

00:41:54   that they've made up the money that they spent to develop it?

00:41:57   That's the only reason I think this product still exists for sale.

00:42:00   It's going to become like the trash can where they were selling it for years after it was

00:42:03   just a total embarrassment, I guess, just to recoup the cost of the factory that only made

00:42:09   this one product.

00:42:10   So anyway, it's sad.

00:42:12   I'm sad.

00:42:13   But this is at least, I mean, I know this is an official announcement, but German giving support

00:42:18   to the idea that, you know, if there ever was any kind of internal battle inside Apple

00:42:24   about should we or shouldn't we do the Mac Pro, apparently the we shouldn't team is winning.

00:42:28   And again, as we can see from the outside, but here's some rumored confirmation from a

00:42:33   somewhat reliable source that things are not going well internally.

00:42:36   And again, he's vague here.

00:42:39   This suggests it won't be updated in 2026.

00:42:42   If it is updated and it gets an M5 Ultra, all it's doing is it's like putting the M5 in

00:42:46   the Vision Pro.

00:42:46   You haven't changed the product in any way.

00:42:48   Whatever problems the product had, it still has.

00:42:50   And the problem being it's thousands of dollars more expensive than the Mac Studio.

00:42:54   but it is absolutely no faster because it literally has the same chip in it.

00:42:57   It doesn't make a lot of sense.

00:42:59   Colin Cornaby, who is a fellow Mac Pro fan, writes in to clarify that this is not a, you

00:43:08   know, it's like, who cares?

00:43:09   No, no big deal.

00:43:10   Nothing was lost, right?

00:43:12   Not entirely true.

00:43:13   As Colin points out, this is a thing from a toot.

00:43:17   The M3 Ultra has finally caught up to the Radeon 6900 XT in my 2019 Mac Pro.

00:43:23   And that's an old GPU at only a fraction of the power of something like a GeForce 5090.

00:43:27   Apple is really behind on GPU performance.

00:43:29   Even if I wanted to upgrade today, it would be a side grade or a step back.

00:43:33   I'm hoping M5 Ultra is better, but I was really hoping for an M5 Extreme or the mythical 2X Ultra

00:43:39   Mac Pro.

00:43:39   And I had to look this up just to confirm.

00:43:42   I looked up Geekbench metal scores for the Radeon 6900 XT, which you can put in a 2019 Mac Pro.

00:43:49   That's a 231K.

00:43:52   And the M3 Ultra is 225K.

00:43:54   So, and the Radeon 6900 XT is a video card that was released in December 2020.

00:44:01   So, Apple's current best GPU, the M3 Ultra, fastest GPU Apple sells today in the end of 2025,

00:44:10   is just about as fast as a five-year-old GPU that you could get with the Mac Pro.

00:44:17   And I think you might have been able to put two of these in the Mac Pro, but I'm not sure.

00:44:19   But I'm not going to, don't quote me on that.

00:44:21   You might have been able to get a dual card or something.

00:44:22   But anyway, Apple is very, very behind in absolute GPU performance.

00:44:28   When I was talking about, back in the M1 days, the possible sort of like, you know,

00:44:33   M1 Extreme that's like two M1 Ultras stuck together, the back of the calculations were

00:44:39   that that Ultra, that sort of, you know, two Ultra quad type of thing, would be competitive

00:44:45   with the fastest single GPU available back when the M1 was out.

00:44:48   Still, that calculation may be valid for a theoretical 2M5 Ultra stuck together.

00:44:54   But the thing is, Apple has never made that chip.

00:44:57   They never have, and their current best Ultra is two generations behind.

00:45:02   The M3 Ultra is the best Ultra, but the M5 is out now.

00:45:06   So not only have they never made a quad one, even their double one is two generations behind,

00:45:10   which is why the very fastest GPU you can get in a Mac is as fast as a five-year-old GPU.

00:45:17   And not just any five-year-old GPU, a five-year-old GPU that you could put in an incredibly slow

00:45:21   Intel 2019 Mac Pro, setting aside like today's current fastest GPUs in the PC space.

00:45:27   Now I know, who cares about GPU?

00:45:29   It's all about AI and much faster, wider memory bandwidth for the unified memory architecture.

00:45:36   And who cares?

00:45:37   That GPU is garbage for anything except running games.

00:45:40   And the M3 Ultra would beat it in any modern benchmark that did AI and yada, yada, yada.

00:45:45   But the thing is, graphics and games are, in fact, a possible use of lots of computing power.

00:45:52   We just got done talking about all that Steam stuff and that market for, you know, PC games

00:45:57   and gaming hardware.

00:45:58   And Apple has massively raised the floor on their GPU system, on their systems in terms of GPU.

00:46:03   We talked about this over and over again in the Apple Silicon era.

00:46:06   All of Apple's products now have non-embarrassing GPUs.

00:46:09   For the amount of power that these things use, they have amazing performance.

00:46:14   But Apple has basically abandoned the high-end, even in their supposed high-end products.

00:46:19   So maybe I'll make, like, a Mac Pro rest-in-peace shirt or something like that when Apple finally

00:46:26   signs off on the thing.

00:46:27   But it's not as if nothing was lost.

00:46:29   Nothing was lost for people who don't care about GPU power or gaming on the Mac at the

00:46:34   high-end.

00:46:34   But for people who do, something was definitely lost.

00:46:38   Something is currently lost and will continue to be lost because it's very difficult to get

00:46:43   high-end GPU performance in a box size like the Mac Studio.

00:46:47   Look at the Steam machine.

00:46:48   It's a six-inch cube.

00:46:49   It does not have high-end gaming PC power.

00:46:52   It's not supposed to.

00:46:52   It also doesn't cost as much as the Mac Studio, I hope.

00:46:55   But the high-end does exist.

00:46:59   When we were looking at the iPod sock videos last week, looking at that Apple phone strap

00:47:05   thing that I've already forgotten the name of, I think it was in that video or maybe in,

00:47:09   like, one that YouTube recommended or similar.

00:47:11   It was like, maybe it was even that thing.

00:47:13   Steve Jobs was there on stage doing a thing that he'd done so many times before, bragging

00:47:19   that Apple had the world's fastest personal computer.

00:47:22   He's said that on stage many times.

00:47:24   Whether or not it has always been true, he's wanted to say it because it's bragging rights.

00:47:30   We have the world's fastest personal computer.

00:47:32   Apple hasn't been able to say that in a long time, and it doesn't look like they're going

00:47:36   to for a long time.

00:47:37   They can say they have the world's fastest single core performance, maybe, which they

00:47:41   did say.

00:47:41   But I'm not sure who's interested in that.

00:47:44   And people who are interested in the high-end are interested, maybe they're interested in

00:47:46   AI, and Apple can say we have the world's best AI thing that's not an NVIDIA card that costs

00:47:50   as much as a car or some other thing.

00:47:52   I just miss the days when Apple was, you know, shooting for the stars and producing the world's

00:47:57   fastest personal computer, the world's most powerful personal computer, the world's most

00:48:01   whatever.

00:48:01   They could still say that with an M5 Ultra Mac Studio.

00:48:04   This is the world's most powerful AI workstation or something like that, if they can come up with

00:48:08   something to back it up.

00:48:09   I'm not saying it has to be gaming performance.

00:48:11   It's like it has to be, you know, frame rates in some popular game or whatever.

00:48:14   But just even the trash can, I feel like they were shooting for something impressive.

00:48:19   They missed, but they were shooting for it.

00:48:21   And it just disappoints me to see them given up on trying to shoot for this particular kind

00:48:26   of bragging, right?

00:48:27   Yeah, I think what ultimately has killed this version of the Mac Pro has been a combination

00:48:34   of decisions they've made and factors that have changed over time.

00:48:38   I mean, as much as John hates this, I think they do not care about a number of the markets

00:48:43   at all that used to be pretty well served by that machine or something like that machine.

00:48:48   So for instance, like by going to Apple Silicon, they totally gave up Windows, Bootcamp, Parallels,

00:48:58   gaming, now gaming, like those things have always kind of been like side benefits.

00:49:02   Like Apple did not switch to Intel to get gaming and to get Windows compatibility.

00:49:07   They switched to Intel because at the time those were the best chips and the chips they were

00:49:11   on were nowhere near the best and they needed to switch for just for competitive performance

00:49:15   reasons.

00:49:16   And so they did switch and it was a big deal, but it was not, it wasn't to get those markets.

00:49:21   Those markets kind of came along as bonuses and they helped Apple a lot.

00:49:24   The effort they put into Bootcamp was actually kind of surprising.

00:49:26   Remember the kind of shock?

00:49:27   I'm like, oh yeah, you can boot Windows in it.

00:49:28   We'll support it with this thing.

00:49:29   Like Bootcamp itself is sort of from another era of Apple where they were saying, here's

00:49:36   a thing we know you're probably going to want to do with your machine and here's a first

00:49:39   party solution for it.

00:49:40   And they, and they supported that pretty much to the end of the Intel era, which was

00:49:43   impressive and interesting.

00:49:44   And that shows that someone somewhere in Apple had enough clout to say, look, it's, we're

00:49:50   so close to doing it and a few people will want to run Windows games.

00:49:53   Why don't we just let them boot Windows?

00:49:54   And they said, sure, fine, do it.

00:49:55   And they did it and they did it for all the Intel era.

00:49:57   So I do appreciate that.

00:49:58   Yeah.

00:49:58   But that was, you know, that was like a side bonus.

00:50:00   And, you know, and, and there was, you know, at the time also in the Intel transition,

00:50:05   especially early on, Apple was still, you know, very much trying to get people to switch

00:50:09   over from Windows.

00:50:10   And so Windows compatibility through, you know, bootcamp secondarily, but I think primarily

00:50:14   things like parallels.

00:50:15   I think that helped them a lot, gain some of that market share, kind of give, giving people

00:50:19   like some training wheels to bring their Windows software along for the ride as they slowly

00:50:22   switch to Mac.

00:50:23   Because it could run natively.

00:50:24   And I experienced that in me getting Macs into the workplace during that era to say, oh,

00:50:29   we can run Windows software at full speed because it could, like, as long as you have

00:50:32   enough RAM to run the virtual machines, you know, I'm not running a games, but you could

00:50:35   run Microsoft out.

00:50:35   You could run full fledged Windows right there in your Mac.

00:50:38   It was great.

00:50:38   Yeah.

00:50:39   But, you know, the move to Apple Silicon dropped all the Windows support, basically.

00:50:43   I mean, there are small ways around it, but nothing that anyone's really doing because

00:50:46   they're not very good or don't work very well or very slow or whatever.

00:50:49   Or because Microsoft's Windows on ARM strategy is not compatible with what Apple's doing.

00:50:53   There's no technical reason those two crazy kids couldn't get together and let you run

00:50:56   Windows on ARM, except that Windows on ARM kind of sucks.

00:50:58   Yeah.

00:50:59   And God knows what Microsoft is doing these days.

00:51:01   They're doing AI is what they're doing.

00:51:03   Yeah.

00:51:04   I don't think they're caring that much about Windows.

00:51:05   Um, so anyway, so they, you know, the gaming market is something that Apple has institutionally

00:51:12   never really tried for in a meaningful way or understood.

00:51:17   And most PC gamers hate Apple for lots of reasons, some of which are very good reasons.

00:51:23   So like Apple and Apple and gamers, with the exception of John as the only person in the

00:51:28   middle of these Venn diagrams, Apple and gamers do not get along in either direction and they

00:51:32   don't care about each other's markets.

00:51:34   Um, and so, you know, you're left with like high end or specialty high end production,

00:51:39   maybe like video, audio production.

00:51:42   3D.

00:51:42   Remember they demonstrated Maya on the trash can, like that kind of sort of high end 3D

00:51:46   that requires high GPU, but it's not a game.

00:51:48   Yeah.

00:51:49   And you have like some scientific computing applications and things like that.

00:51:51   But most of those markets are markets that Apple has let go over the years, um, either

00:51:58   through outright neglect or just kind of the markets themselves moving because Apple was

00:52:04   clearly not serving them very well.

00:52:05   Most of those markets now use, you know, different hardware, you know, PC hardware, Linux, uh, cloud

00:52:11   stuff on premises, like servers and like they, they're, they're moving on to lots of different

00:52:16   hardware.

00:52:17   They're mostly not using, you know, Mac pros.

00:52:20   And then the AI revolution comes along.

00:52:23   What powers the AI revolution is NVIDIA accelerators and Apple and NVIDIA do not get along at all.

00:52:31   Apple stuff has not included NVIDIA components for a very long time.

00:52:35   Um, and the entire world of NVIDIA and CUDA is totally separate from Apple.

00:52:41   Like Apple has no foot in that market.

00:52:43   And so these markets have either been abandoned by Apple or have left Apple or have developed,

00:52:50   outside of Apple completely.

00:52:51   And Apple has never been part of them.

00:52:52   So at the same time, Apple Silicon is a huge benefit to the markets Apple holds onto and

00:53:00   cares about the most and has the most success in.

00:53:03   It's also very good at AI.

00:53:04   I mean, coincidentally or not, like Apple Silicon, the, the SOC with the unified memory architecture

00:53:09   and the, it's extremely good at AI workloads.

00:53:12   It just so happens that it's not the market leader because they're not selling $30,000,

00:53:16   you know, GPUs for the data center.

00:53:18   But for running AI things locally, Apple Silicon is amazing for that.

00:53:22   Yeah, absolutely.

00:53:23   Um, but that's, you know, but so Apple Silicon benefits Apple's core markets substantially.

00:53:30   And we've talked about how amazing it's been for the iPhone, the Mac, like it's, it's been

00:53:35   amazing for Apple's core markets there.

00:53:37   But Apple Silicon is just fundamentally not friendly with the idea of external GPUs.

00:53:43   And so when you take out GPUs from the reason for the Mac pro to exist because of Apple Silicon

00:53:49   transition, it's like, well, what else is it for?

00:53:52   And it has some answers.

00:53:54   It, you know, there are certain like audio video, um, IO cards that are used pretty frequently,

00:54:00   um, in this kind of scenario.

00:54:01   Setting aside the cards though, what it's really for is the thing that Apple has never made.

00:54:05   It's the case, the Mac pro 2019 Mac pro case, which again, they're not going to redesign

00:54:10   anytime soon because it costs a lot of money to make and it has low volumes.

00:54:13   It's very good at cooling.

00:54:14   It has a tremendous cooling capacity, has huge fans, huge volume for a huge heat sinks for

00:54:20   a huge amount of air to go through.

00:54:21   So you can put in there a thing with an integrated GPU, some monster chip that gets really hot,

00:54:27   that gets hotter than you could fit in a Mac studio case that goes faster and is more powerful.

00:54:32   And Apple has simply never made that every chip they've made that has been powerful has

00:54:36   been in the Mac studio.

00:54:37   So it's had to be designed to fit within the power envelope of a Mac studio cooling system.

00:54:41   So forget about the card slots, just view the Mac pro case as a thing that can cool

00:54:47   something that's too hot to fit in a Mac studio.

00:54:49   But Apple has never made that despite all the rumors and the attempts and they were going

00:54:53   to make it and then they weren't.

00:54:54   And remember the long time ago, the rumor is like, it's not on the roadmap anywhere until

00:54:57   at least after the M seven or something.

00:54:58   So tune in in a few years to see if that thing ever comes true.

00:55:02   But that was a thing that we mentioned in the show ages ago, but that's what this case

00:55:05   is for.

00:55:06   Yes, it has card slots, but it's, but it's like, it can cool something hot that won't

00:55:10   fit in your small cases.

00:55:11   And Apple's like, we have nothing.

00:55:13   We have nothing that hot.

00:55:14   Yeah.

00:55:14   We could get something that hot.

00:55:15   It would do more work.

00:55:16   It would be more powerful.

00:55:17   It would be faster because the faster you go and the more transistors you put on there,

00:55:21   the more heat you generate.

00:55:22   It's like, oh, we can't handle all that heat.

00:55:24   It won't fit in a laptop.

00:55:25   It won't fit a Mac mini.

00:55:26   It won't fit in a Mac studio.

00:55:27   It'll fit in this case.

00:55:29   Those huge fans are begging for something to blow on.

00:55:32   Well, but yeah, but like, you know, they, they have this machine and it has dropped most

00:55:40   of its markets.

00:55:40   And at the same time, Apple is not helping by never updating it.

00:55:45   And by the fact that the cheapest one is $7,000, like they, when they launched it, I don't

00:55:51   think they were intentionally trying to kill this product line over time, but you could,

00:55:57   I could see why people might assume that based on how they've executed on it.

00:56:00   Right.

00:56:01   Right.

00:56:01   It's like, it's almost as if like the enemies of this thing within the company have like subverted

00:56:07   it intentionally that like there's, there's obviously proponents and enemies and the proponents

00:56:10   like we're winning, we're shipping a product.

00:56:12   And the enemies are like, we're making sure that whatever you ship is garbage.

00:56:14   Yeah.

00:56:14   We're going to make sure that no one buys this.

00:56:17   So that way we can say, look, no one buys this.

00:56:19   We can stop making it.

00:56:20   Yeah, that's exactly.

00:56:21   It's self-fulfilling prophecy.

00:56:22   So, you know, like I would love to see the back and forth on this, but it's probably just,

00:56:26   you know, this type of thing, even just look at the iMac, such a storied name.

00:56:31   And yet I'm sure it was a battle to say, can we actually make a decent iMac again?

00:56:36   And that battle was one with those colorful ones.

00:56:38   And now it's like, okay, but you can't do anything with them for another, for like six years

00:56:41   besides bump the CPUs, which is fine.

00:56:42   But like, it's like these sort of boom and bust cycles.

00:56:46   And to be clear, I mean, the iMac is obviously, it's not a laptop, so it's not Apple's bread

00:56:50   and butter anymore.

00:56:51   But it is a very, it is a higher profile product name than the Mac Pro, let's say.

00:56:55   Like iMac still has some cache, even though nobody buys desktops anymore.

00:56:59   And it took such a long time for Apple to finally give that product its worth with that colorful

00:57:06   redesign, which was great.

00:57:07   And I'm glad they're updating it with the new SOCs and it's still a pretty good computer.

00:57:10   But, you know, every five or seven years, it would be nice if they maybe like made the

00:57:14   screen a little bit bigger or, you know, did something else fancy with it or rethought some

00:57:18   of the compromises that they put into that particular computer.

00:57:21   Yeah, but like, you know, the Mac Pro, like, you know, the iMac still has a strong market.

00:57:26   It's not, it isn't what it used to be, of course.

00:57:29   I mean, laptops took over most of the consumer market, but the iMac is still like, if you

00:57:33   want like a stationary computer, especially if you care for it looking nice in like an office

00:57:37   or something, the iMac is a great choice for that.

00:57:40   That's just not as big of a market it used to be, but it's not no market.

00:57:43   And Apple, I think, does a very good job serving that market with the iMac.

00:57:49   The Mac Pro, you know, the world has moved in a direction that has shrank its market, but

00:57:58   Apple, by their own choices, shrunk, shrunk, shrunk, shrunk it so much further by their own,

00:58:07   you know, choices and neglect, which is a choice.

00:58:10   And so it isn't that like, even if Apple did a great job and kept this updated and it was

00:58:16   very capable, it would still be a very small market today.

00:58:19   But Apple has exacerbated this by, by their execution and their choices.

00:58:24   And the other thing is that the iMac market is much more tolerant of like skipping a year

00:58:28   and not being on the cutting edge, but it's not a cutting edge computer.

00:58:30   Like the people who buy the iMac don't care if it's like, you know, you know, nine to 12 months

00:58:36   behind on the fastest SOC, but the market for something like the Mac Pro, they do care.

00:58:41   Not that they want it to be changing constantly, but they want it to not fall behind because

00:58:45   part of the reason they spend all this money on this big computer is a, they want something

00:58:49   that only a computer this big with this many fans can do, which Apple has not offered in

00:58:52   the Apple Silicon era.

00:58:53   And B, they want to feel like, oh, I spent all that money, but I'm getting the best.

00:58:58   I'm getting the fastest.

00:58:59   And Apple has been like, it'll be the fastest for like, well, in the case of the M2 one,

00:59:04   never, it will never be the fastest.

00:59:06   But like, say they had put the M3 Ultra into it, the Mac Pro before the other things, it

00:59:10   will be the fastest for a little bit, but like the phone will be faster in two years.

00:59:13   So sorry about the $7,000 you spent on this thing.

00:59:17   Also, like when you look at the Apple Silicon scaling story, the CPU scaling is not good once

00:59:26   you get past like the, the max, like the ultra, even like going from, from the base through

00:59:32   the pro through the max, you don't get linear CPU scaling with core count.

00:59:36   And that's true of any architecture, but Apple Silicon, like you, you definitely see like

00:59:40   in the cores they've made so far, you can see like there's a clear ceiling and, you know,

00:59:45   going from base to max, you get a pretty decent jump, but not 2X.

00:59:50   And then going from, you know, max to ultra, you get another jump that's nowhere near 2X.

00:59:56   GPUs scale very well.

00:59:59   GPUs have scaled almost linearly.

01:00:01   Although they did screw that up with one, I forget which one, but they did screw that up

01:00:04   with one of them.

01:00:05   And part of that, part of the non-linear CPU scaling, the argument there is that it's

01:00:08   the, the, uh, silicon interposer, like the fact that they try, they, they made them out

01:00:12   of two maxes stuck together, that, that is the, if you had, if you simply built a dedicated

01:00:17   one with that same number of resources, it would be better than trying to take two maxes and

01:00:20   get this economy of scale and only have to do the max design plus the interposer.

01:00:25   Like that's the argument that, yeah, I mean, and there's other bottlenecks I'm sure too.

01:00:29   Like, you know, it's, it's like scaling CPUs is complicated, but, but in particular,

01:00:33   like setting aside when they screwed up the GPU thing by under-resourcing some buffer or

01:00:36   something, the fact that they insist on building their ultras out of two maxes is, it's a clever

01:00:41   idea if it had worked out for them.

01:00:43   But I think that hurt the scaling more than anything else.

01:00:46   Whereas if they had made the dedicated chip, it wouldn't, but if they made a dedicated chip,

01:00:49   they would, they can't justify the expense.

01:00:51   That's been a little thing with the extreme, like, you know, with the quad thing, they can't

01:00:54   justify the expense.

01:00:55   We're not going to sell, we're going to sell this many of them and it's going to cost this

01:00:58   much to make.

01:00:58   It'll be our most expensive, you know, like Intel had this problem to some degree, but not

01:01:02   really because they would sell to server farms and everything like this chip, this, whatever,

01:01:07   this high-end chip is going to cost the most and be the most complicated chip that we make.

01:01:12   And we're going to sell a tiny, tiny fraction of the number we sell of our other chips.

01:01:17   Like, why are we doing this again?

01:01:18   And I would point them to my case for a true Mac Pro successor article and saying, you're,

01:01:23   you know, Mount Everest, you're climbing it because it's there, blah, blah, blah, blah.

01:01:25   But Apple doesn't, Apple doesn't have that.

01:01:27   They don't, they don't have that in them.

01:01:29   They can't justify it.

01:01:30   Someone comes down and says, cost, benefit, no.

01:01:32   Yeah.

01:01:34   So I think ultimately the Mac Pro as we know it today, not only is very obviously doomed and

01:01:44   abandoned, but I think, I think that's been, that's been clear for a very long time.

01:01:47   But I think as I've argued on the show before, the Mac Studio is the Mac Pro.

01:01:52   Like when you look at what is, what happened to the Mac Pro and the Apple Silicon era, if

01:01:57   the tower version was never released, you would look at the Mac Studio, it would probably, it

01:02:02   would, the Mac Studio would probably be called Mac Pro and we would just say, that's the Mac

01:02:07   Pro for Apple Silicon.

01:02:08   I wouldn't say that because Mac Pro is the computer Apple produces and says, this is the world's

01:02:12   fastest personal computer.

01:02:13   And they never said that about the studio because it's not true and it's also not expandable.

01:02:17   So it has none of the qualities of Mac Pro.

01:02:19   Now, I agree with you that Apple probably would have called it Mac Pro, but saying the Mac

01:02:24   Studio is the new Mac Pro is only true in the sense that it is the fastest computer from

01:02:27   Apple you can buy.

01:02:28   But it's not the world's fastest personal computer.

01:02:30   It is not, let's see how fast we can make things go, you know, cost almost no object.

01:02:36   It's not, it's not that.

01:02:36   It's just not there.

01:02:37   It's not the concept car.

01:02:38   It is just their most powerful desktop, but it is so clearly constrained by trying to

01:02:44   keep it, you know, queued and contained and kind of a big brother Mac mini and don't be

01:02:48   too obtrusive.

01:02:49   And that's something that has never been a concern for the Mac Pro.

01:02:51   Being obtrusive is what it does.

01:02:54   That's, I mean, that's true.

01:02:55   But the Mac Studio, I think when you look at, okay, the Mac Pro in the Apple Silicon era

01:03:01   can't solve high-end GPU needs because of the design of, you know, the architecture.

01:03:06   So there's no external GPU.

01:03:08   So it can't solve GPU, high-end GPU needs, at least that high-end.

01:03:12   But it could have had a quad.

01:03:13   Again, back of the envelope, it could be as fast as a single, well, you know, they just

01:03:16   never made it.

01:03:17   Right.

01:03:17   But like, so, you know, you look at like the GPU market is lopped off.

01:03:21   Also because of the Apple Silicon architecture, the very high amounts of RAM market has also

01:03:27   been lopped off.

01:03:28   It used to be 1.5 terabytes in the Intel era.

01:03:30   Now I think we're, where are we now?

01:03:33   512 maybe?

01:03:34   I forgot.

01:03:35   Let me see.

01:03:35   Yeah, 512 is the max now.

01:03:36   It's not reaching for the same extreme heights.

01:03:40   But on the other end of the resources, the processing power is way better.

01:03:46   Like the CPU power, way better.

01:03:49   Any kind of, you know, neural and ML stuff might be better depending on how it's architected.

01:03:53   But like CPU processing, it's way ahead of the Intel era and way ahead of everything else,

01:03:59   just not by a linear amount, but way ahead of everything else they make if they keep it updated.

01:04:04   And then, you know, things like throughput and Thunderbolt bandwidth, they probably have

01:04:07   advantages there because it's newer.

01:04:09   And so like there are areas in which the Mac Studio is the Mac Pro of today.

01:04:15   It just isn't all areas.

01:04:16   But the tower covered almost no additional ones than the Mac Pro did.

01:04:21   Only due to Apple's choices.

01:04:22   Like again, it's sitting there waiting for something bigger, faster, hotter.

01:04:25   Hell, they could have just put an overclocked M3 Ultra in there and just overclocked it and

01:04:29   said, well, it's overclocked, but the extra heat produces moved away by these giant fans.

01:04:32   But they're just they're just not into that.

01:04:35   They're just not interested in doing anything advanced.

01:04:38   The M2 Ultra Mac Pro kind of proved that and the complete lack of updates since then proved

01:04:43   it further.

01:04:43   So I'm sad, but it's good to have some kind of rumor based closure for this and M5 Max Max

01:04:50   Studio.

01:04:50   Let's see if they can put that out at WWDC and make me at least somewhat happy.

01:04:54   You're taking this better than I thought, John.

01:04:56   I'm proud of you.

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01:06:54   In 2021, Tim Cook was talking to Kara Swisher for the New York Times, and we discussed this

01:07:00   in ATP 425.

01:07:02   Kara Swisher said, are you going to be at Apple in 10 more years?

01:07:04   And Tim Cook said, 10 more years?

01:07:06   Eh, probably not.

01:07:07   But I can tell you that I feel great right now, and the date's not in sight.

01:07:11   But 10 more years is a long time, and probably not 10 more years.

01:07:15   And you glided over this in the quote, but I double-checked it.

01:07:17   In the transcript, because this is a podcast, you can listen to the podcast, Tim Cook says,

01:07:21   10 more years, I probably not.

01:07:23   He's like, 10 more years, I, and then he interrupts himself and changes course on that sentence.

01:07:28   So he does say, I probably not.

01:07:29   But you said, eh, probably not.

01:07:31   Anyway, the point is that Tim Cook, who is a very careful speaker, managed to not carefully

01:07:37   speak in a sentence and started one sentence and decided to turn in a different direction

01:07:41   mid-sentence and go to probably not.

01:07:43   But anyway, there was, we talked about it on the show, this was merely a cap.

01:07:47   It's like up to, you know, whatever megahertz or gigahertz.

01:07:52   Because Kara set the, Kara Swisher set the boundary.

01:07:57   Will you be at Apple 10 more years from 2021?

01:08:01   So in 2031.

01:08:03   And he just said, 10 more years, probably not.

01:08:05   He didn't even say definitely not.

01:08:06   He said probably not.

01:08:07   But let me reiterate, 10 more years is a long time, probably not 10 more years.

01:08:11   So all he said was, 2031, I probably won't be there.

01:08:16   But we have some news on that front.

01:08:17   So on the 14th of November of this year, the Financial Times wrote under a four-person byline,

01:08:23   Tim Bradshaw, Steve Morris, Michael Acton in San Francisco, and Daniel Thomas in London.

01:08:27   Apple is stepping up its succession planning efforts as it prepares for Tim Cook to step

01:08:31   down as chief executives as soon as next year.

01:08:33   Several people familiar with discussions inside the tech group told the Financial Times that

01:08:37   its board and senior executives have reasonably intensified preparations for Cook to hand over

01:08:41   the reins.

01:08:42   John Turnis, Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering and former best friend

01:08:46   best friend of John Syracuse, is widely seen as Cook's most likely successor, although no

01:08:51   final decisions have been made.

01:08:52   People close to Apple say the long plan transition is not related to the company's current performance

01:08:57   ahead of what is expected to be a blockbuster end-of-year sales period for the iPhone.

01:09:01   The company is likely to name a new CEO before, excuse me, unlikely to name a new CEO before

01:09:07   its next earnings report in late January, which covers a critical holiday period.

01:09:10   An announcement early in the year would give its new leadership team time to settle in ahead

01:09:15   of its big annual keynote events, its developer conference in June, and its iPhone launch in

01:09:20   September, the people said.

01:09:21   These people said that although preparations have intensified, the timing of any announcement

01:09:26   could change.

01:09:26   So Gruber's take is, I don't think there are many people, if any, outside of Apple's top

01:09:31   executive team and board of directors who have any insight into Cook's thinking on this.

01:09:35   That, quote, several people, quote, spoke to the Financial Times about this, says to me that

01:09:39   those sources, members of the board, did so with Cook's blessing and that they want this

01:09:43   announcement to be no more than a little surprising. I would also bet that Cook moves into the role

01:09:47   of executive chairman and will still play a significant, if not leading role for the company

01:09:51   when it comes to domestic and international politics, especially with regard to the monster-in-chief.

01:09:56   Sorry, with regard to Trump.

01:09:58   All right, so Joe Rosigdon, from MacRumors, writes,

01:10:03   Apple's current chairman is Arthur D. Levinson, who turned 75 on March 31st of 2025.

01:10:08   Apple's corporate governance guidance, excuse me, guidelines say a director may not stand for

01:10:14   reelection after age 75, but need not resign until the end of his or her term.

01:10:18   Apple is unlikely to name a new CEO before its next earnings report in late January, according

01:10:23   to the Financial Times, but it said an announcement could happen early in the year.

01:10:26   There's one potential wrinkle. Apple typically releases the proxy materials for a shareholder

01:10:30   meeting in mid-January, and that filing would need to indicate that Cook is up for election

01:10:34   as chairman. That would be before Apple's next earnings report in late January, so the specific

01:10:39   timing of how this might all play out remains to be seen. It is unclear if Cook would become

01:10:44   chairman or executive chairman in the former role. He would focus more on managing the board

01:10:47   and corporate governance. In the latter role, Cook would remain more involved in Apple's

01:10:51   day-to-day operations and decision-making, which could help ease the transition to a new CEO.

01:10:55   Alternatively, Apple could opt out, excuse me, could opt to exempt Levinson from the age policy

01:11:02   as it did for the now 77-year-old director Ron Sugar last year. Apple could also elect someone

01:11:07   other than Cook as chairman.

01:11:08   This, I feel like, is actually some of the most disappointing news for this week, even worse

01:11:15   than the Mac Pro thing. Not Tim Cook leaving. I'm all for that, as we know.

01:11:18   Wow.

01:11:18   The idea that every article I've seen, Gruber, the Mac Rumors, everybody's saying,

01:11:23   oh, Tim Cook might step down with Zoey's next year, and let's talk about the timing, let's

01:11:26   talk about the 75 years old, blah, blah, blah. The idea that he would step down, and I talked

01:11:30   about this the last time we talked about Ternus transition, that he would step down, but stay

01:11:34   on as chairman. That's the last thing I want. And I understand. I understand why people are

01:11:42   talking about that, because it makes sense. Here's the thing. When you are going to take over

01:11:47   as the new CEO of a company, if a company is doing terribly, you have a lot of political

01:11:54   capital to make lots of changes. Like Steve Jobs at Apple in 1997. The company is practically

01:11:59   bankrupt. He cancels a million programs, changes everything radically. Obviously, he was the

01:12:04   co-founder coming back, so that gives you a lot of political capital. But also, when things

01:12:07   are bad, people are willing to do things radically different. Apple, as all these things report,

01:12:12   is about to have its best quarter ever. iPhones are sounding like crazy.

01:12:17   Like, the company is not doing poorly financially. So you get a new CEO in there. And what I want

01:12:23   is that new CEO to do many, many things different than Tim Cook. But if Tim Cook, I think he should

01:12:30   retire to an island and just forget about Apple and just go away. But if he's like, no, I'm going to be

01:12:35   on the board for 10 years because I'm 65 and I could be there until I'm 75. In fact, I'm going to be the

01:12:39   chairman of the board. I'm going to be overseeing lots of things, especially our interactions with the

01:12:42   government. I want to say, no, Tim, go away. Let somebody else make different decisions.

01:12:49   Now, I have no idea if John Ternus agrees with everything Tim Cook has done or hates all of it

01:12:53   or like, I have no idea. But I do know that if you're the new CEO and the old CEO that took your

01:12:58   company from like $350 billion to like $4 trillion is still there as the executive chairman and is still

01:13:04   having like an active role in day to day things, it is next to impossible to come in and day one and

01:13:08   say, guess what? We're doing a lot of things different around here, everybody. And let me tell

01:13:12   you, we're doing this, this, this and this. And Tim is like, like, I don't know how like the the

01:13:18   corporate structure works in terms of the balance of power between the board and the CEO. That's

01:13:23   different in every company. And I'm not familiar with the intricacies. But I do know if he hangs around

01:13:28   and is on the board or as chairman of the board or as executive chairman of the board,

01:13:32   I'm still going to be in this program saying Tim Cook should go. Should he leave a CEO? He already

01:13:37   did that. He needs to leave Apple so that we can have different decisions be made. And this is more

01:13:42   upsetting to me than the Mac Pro. Really? Yeah, because the Mac Pro, it's like, you know, products

01:13:47   come. First of all, John Ternus is supposedly a fan of the Mac Pro, but you think he's going to bring

01:13:51   the Mac Pro back with Tim Cook staring over his shoulder and saying, no, I saw the spreadsheets,

01:13:54   no Mac Pro, John. But that's again, that's the least that's the least of our concerns about Tim

01:13:59   Cook. I want so many things that he did need to be exactly reversed, totally the opposite. And you

01:14:05   can't come in and say, well, our previous CEO is like the best CEO we've ever had in terms of financial

01:14:09   return, but I'm going to do everything differently. That's not that's hard to do. So I'm sad about this.

01:14:16   I am actually very, very happy about this. I have a different take. All right. So obviously,

01:14:23   I agree with John that, yeah, I want Tim Cook out. I've been very vocal about that. And I think

01:14:28   he should go go play golf somewhere or football. He can buy an island. So many things he could do.

01:14:32   Yeah. And we know Tim Cook is such an exciting character. He's going to do none of those things.

01:14:36   He does like football. He could go pay out the contract for that. Did he already do that? Sorry.

01:14:41   Whatever he wants to happen with Auburn football, he can go do that. So first of all, I definitely

01:14:47   agree with John Gruber that like the way this is sourced and the way this is coming out on the

01:14:53   Financial Times with four different people bylining it with a lot of sourcing for something that's

01:14:58   probably a very internal discussion, almost certainly a planned leak like by Apple.

01:15:04   It's very much in the way Tim Cook does things with big decisions.

01:15:07   Exactly. I think this is very likely to be true. And that's very exciting for me. Now,

01:15:13   the good thing about a leadership transition is that it shakes stuff up and that it isn't always going

01:15:19   to be good. It isn't always going to be smooth, but it shakes stuff up. Now, I do agree with John that

01:15:26   like Tim staying on for a long time in a powerful position is not good. And it's not good for the next

01:15:35   CEO. And let's say for the sake of argument that they're right that it is John Ternus.

01:15:40   If I were John Ternus in that situation, like you don't want to be undermined by the old CEO still

01:15:45   being very involved and very powerful. But Tim Cook also is a very carefully planned and measured person,

01:15:54   somewhat to a fault maybe. And so I actually wouldn't worry about that being very likely.

01:16:01   I think if Cook, if the rumor is that Cook might step down into some kind of board chair position,

01:16:07   whether it's executive or non-executive chairman of the board, I think it's more likely that that

01:16:13   would really just be to ease Wall Street in the same way. That's what Steve Jobs did when he handed

01:16:19   the reins over to Tim Cook. The idea was, look, we're going to make this look like everything is

01:16:26   just smoothly transitioning. And it might be, but I don't think that would be a long-term plan for Tim

01:16:32   to stick around until he's 75. I don't think that's very likely.

01:16:36   I don't want to have to wait an extra two years of him sitting there to ease. I agree with you about

01:16:39   the easing transition. That's totally, I mean, they did the same thing with Jeff, easing Jeff Williams out

01:16:43   and apparently easing the CFO out or maybe even easing JG out. Like that's how they work. With

01:16:49   the exception of the forestall thing, Tim Cook's leadership has been very sort of easing the

01:16:53   transition. But what it does mean is that Ternus can't come in on day one and do seven decisions

01:16:58   that are the exact opposite of what Tim Cook was doing. But that's what he needs to do to get out.

01:17:03   Like, I don't want to wait two years to like, oh, investors are happy now. So now you turn it like,

01:17:09   and also it's like, it would be an embarrassment for Tim Cook. Like here's the, do you remember the

01:17:12   speech Jobs gave to Cook as, as retold by, I think, Cook? Just do what's right. He's talking to,

01:17:17   uh, he's talking to Steve Jobs on like his deathbed or whatever. And Steve Jobs is like,

01:17:21   never ask yourself what I would do. Just do the right thing. Uh, and for better or for worse,

01:17:25   uh, eventually that's what Tim Cook did. He clearly started doing things that he thought were the right

01:17:30   thing. He certainly never worried about what Steve Jobs would think. Right. In the beginning,

01:17:34   in the beginning, Tim Cook was a little, like, it was a little bit shy of like making radical movies.

01:17:38   In the beginning, I feel, I feel like he lived under the shadow of Steve Jobs for a while,

01:17:42   but eventually he started making Tim Cook moves, which is what Jobs said to do. But that's,

01:17:47   that's one of those monkey's paw curses. Like, don't worry about what I would do. Just do what

01:17:52   you think is right. But what, if what you think is right is not right, then that's advice for you to

01:17:56   say, well, I, nothing constrains me. I'm the CEO and this is what I think we should do. Therefore,

01:18:00   we should do it. And you just live and die by your own thing. There is something to be said for

01:18:04   having some consideration of the legacy of the company when making decisions to try to keep you

01:18:09   grounded in some way, to not say we're going to be, we're going to sell, you know, homemade yogurt or

01:18:14   something. Now it's like, well, we're a computer company. It's like, well, I feel like the yogurt

01:18:17   thing is the right thing to do. It's like, well, there's a right and a wrong answer sometimes and

01:18:20   yogurt ain't it. So, and you know, Tim Cook didn't sell yogurt, but he did a lot of things, especially with

01:18:26   the app store and the political stuff. And again, specifically calling out, I think he'll hang

01:18:30   around to, to interface with the administration. That's the job he's worst at. And in my personal

01:18:35   opinion, maybe not in wall street's opinion, maybe not in Tim Cook's opinion, but like,

01:18:39   wouldn't you like to see on day one an entirely different policy towards the U S government? But

01:18:43   that is absolutely not going to happen. All right. See, and this, this is where I think you're not

01:18:48   considering the reality of the situation. I don't think, even if Tim Cook was, I was going to say

01:18:56   hit by a bus, but the given that this is episode six, six, six, I don't want to put that out there.

01:18:59   Yikes.

01:18:59   Even if Tim Cook was immediately, he immediately retired and was not part of the board at all.

01:19:04   I still would say no way can the next CEO come in swinging because this is Apple in 2026 or whatever

01:19:14   it will be. Apple is a financial juggernaut. They represent a huge, they represent trillions of

01:19:22   dollars. They are massive. No one is going to walk into that company and start swinging and making

01:19:29   massive changes like that in their first few months. It's the line that everyone's been putting in their

01:19:33   articles about this. What good is having F you money? If you never say F you, that's the, that's the

01:19:37   cliche. This will be the cliche of our times. If anybody has F you money, it's Apple. Who's going to,

01:19:42   who's going to, this is, I'm making your argument for you. Who's going to stand up and be the one to

01:19:46   say F you. It should be Apple. It's not currently with new leadership. It could be, I agree with you.

01:19:51   It probably won't be, but like Tim Cook hanging around and looking over people's shoulders. There's

01:19:56   no way the new CEO is immediately going to do things that essentially embarrassed the former CEO,

01:20:00   not just because it would spook Wall Street, which it would, but also because like you don't get to be

01:20:05   next in line to be CEO without having some kind of a relationship with the current CEO,

01:20:09   which is such that you would never do that to them.

01:20:11   Even if Ternus is the new CEO and he gets in there and Tim Cook says, do whatever you want,

01:20:15   man. And Ternus walks in, he still can't, you know, for example, some of the things you're,

01:20:20   that you're suggesting, which I agree with things like, you know, app store policy. If you walk in

01:20:25   there on day one and you make major changes there, you could cost yourself pretty big in the next

01:20:30   quarterly earnings for things like high growth areas, like your services area. If you screw that up,

01:20:35   or if you are too, too quick or too sudden or too rash about it, you could cost the company billions

01:20:41   of dollars in a high growth area that can tank the stock significantly. And then think about all the

01:20:46   rich people who are going to lose a bunch of money as a result of all that. Like, so when you think

01:20:50   about like the pressures on this job, it is a juggernaut of a company in a juggernaut of a

01:20:57   financial system. Anyone who gets into that job is going to have to very slowly turn that wheel.

01:21:04   They're not going to, it's like trying to turn a cruise ship on a dime. Like you're not going to do

01:21:10   it. It needs time and space to make changes. They have to very slightly course adjust. Like it's not

01:21:16   going to be somebody coming in there and doing anything noteworthy in a one year time span.

01:21:22   The problem with the political stuff in particular is that any turning of the wheel,

01:21:27   this is what I talked about in the episode where I was bemoaning the limitations of the appeasement

01:21:31   policy. If you do literally anything that is not pleasing to the administration, it is as if you

01:21:37   have done everything against them. Because that's what appeasement is. You keep them happy and they

01:21:42   can get unhappy really quickly. So let's say John Ternus declines to go to the state dinner with the

01:21:48   murdering guy from Saudi Arabia. That would be front page news headlines, stock would tank. And

01:21:53   it's like, I just didn't go to a dinner. How slowly can I turn the wheel on this giant ship? It's like,

01:21:58   sorry, with the appeasement policy, if you do literally anything except for appease them,

01:22:03   we've decided you are, you are no longer a friend to the administration because that's how

01:22:06   authoritarianism works. And so that's why I say like on that particular issue, there is no avoiding the

01:22:11   FU. So just do the FU, but they're probably not going to, which means that this is one of the,

01:22:16   the, the timeline wise, one of the hopes. And one of the things that I have discussed is that

01:22:21   Tim Cook could stay out the rest of the Trump term and eat all of the crap and put all the sin on him

01:22:27   and then have the sin leave with him. And the new person can get a clean slate. You know what I mean?

01:22:31   Now that's not going to happen if this happens next year. So it necessarily taints the incoming CEO

01:22:37   who seemingly has no choice, but to continue the stupid appeasement policy. Otherwise, you know,

01:22:46   the stock tanks and blah, blah, blah. And I think they should do that. Like again,

01:22:49   a few money, like they should say a few, but I agree with you that they probably won't,

01:22:53   especially if Tim Cook is still there. So, um, I just, I guess I just hope that Tim Cook wrote out

01:22:59   these last few years, however long Trump sticks around and then cleanly transitioned after that and

01:23:05   really got the hell out of the company and let a new person go in and do entirely new things.

01:23:10   But it looks like that's not happening.

01:23:11   I don't know. I mean, and I do think like, you know, the dynamics with Trump could,

01:23:15   could be playing a role here. Um, but keep in mind, like Tim Cook's actions suggest that he is a Trump

01:23:24   supporter and that he uses Trump to get what he wants. So let's, let's not try to pretend that like

01:23:30   Tim Cook is trying to like minimize, like make a plan to minimize Apple's exposure to Trump. No,

01:23:34   Tim has put Apple directly into Trump so that they can get Trump to do things that are convenient for

01:23:40   them. Like, I don't think it's like a, a minimize the damage plan. I think it's, you keep Tim around

01:23:45   to keep cozying up to Trump, to keep getting things that benefit Apple. Like it's not about harm

01:23:50   reduction. It's about opportunistically getting what they want. Like look at all the preferential

01:23:56   treatment Apple gets as a result of this cozying up. It's, this is not Tim quietly saying,

01:24:02   screw you to Trump in the background and then, you know, going and doing the minimum required.

01:24:06   This is Tim stepping up to get favors and it's working. Tim Cook is a Trump supporter. I hate

01:24:13   to tell everybody. Anyway, it isn't an angle of like, let's try to, you know, strategically plan out

01:24:18   Trump, but, and I will gladly say Trump's name as much as possible on episode six, six, six,

01:24:23   hoping for things like that to happen. Um, nice. I'm, I'm hoping that what happens here is Tim Cook

01:24:29   sticks around long enough to keep being the, the Trump sink. He is the Trump agent. He takes all the

01:24:37   hate about Trump from people who believe in facts and decency. Do you think he still goes to these,

01:24:43   the dinners with the murderers while John Ternus doesn't have to, even though John Ternus is the CEO?

01:24:48   I think so. I agree. This is not necessarily guaranteeing that Cook is stepping down next

01:24:54   year. It's more like Cook might step down as soon as next year, you know, so.

01:24:58   Or sometime next year, if not like January of next year.

01:25:01   Right. And so like maybe, maybe they can swing it such that Cook sticks around for the rest of Trump's

01:25:06   term. And then maybe John Ternus takes over after that. That, but that's probably at least a few

01:25:10   years out. So like, that's probably not within this timeline. So I don't know what's going to go on

01:25:15   there, but I'm hoping that once Cook is no longer CEO, I'm hoping that that gives Ternus or whoever,

01:25:25   sounds like Ternus, a new chance to, to have a new take on that relationship and, and not,

01:25:30   and actually support Apple for what its core values really seem to be for most of its life and not

01:25:36   what it has been this past year. Um, that being said, so setting aside all, all that BS,

01:25:42   thinking about a CEO transition at Apple, I don't know that much about John Ternus. We certainly

01:25:49   don't know what he would be like as a CEO because he has not been a CEO. We do know that he, he leads a

01:25:56   very successful division at Apple, the hardware, hardware engineering division. He, like his division

01:26:01   is just the rock stars of Apple right now. They are, they execute well. And if you look back, like

01:26:08   when Tim Cook was made CEO, he came from operations. And at that time operations was the rockstar

01:26:15   division of Apple. They were doing great. They were bringing the company forward. And that's what

01:26:20   John Ternus's hardware division has been doing. They are top of their game, executing great, you know,

01:26:25   bringing great products out and making the company very successful with their advances, you know,

01:26:30   among other things, things happening. So I'm actually very excited to see like the next chapter

01:26:35   of Apple, if it's led by John Ternus, even though I don't know what kind of CEO he would be, I'm a lot

01:26:40   more excited about somebody who seems to like love computer hardware than somebody who seems to love

01:26:46   spreadsheets and football and Donald Trump. All right. Leave football out of it, but otherwise I agree.

01:26:51   And so like Apple needs a product leader. And ever since Jobs passed away, they haven't had one.

01:26:58   Ternus might be that. He certainly has a much better chance of being that than anyone in the

01:27:04   Cook regime ever was. What's also interesting, and I think a little bit exciting, and I don't,

01:27:10   I don't want to be mean to the people I'm about to mention because I don't intend it.

01:27:15   What also tends to happen in a CEO transition is a bunch of other turnover happens near the high

01:27:20   ranks. I would expect a lot of other people of the old guard to retire or, or move on to a different

01:27:28   company. Jeff Williams already did. Jeff Williams already did. I would expect we would probably lose

01:27:33   at least Phil Schiller, probably also Craig Federighi. No, I don't think Craig is going.

01:27:41   Well, so there's a number of ways that could go. Number one, you know, and, and I don't think this

01:27:47   would be like on day one, but you know, what tends to happen in a transition like this is certain people

01:27:53   who were, who were not promoted to CEO either are upset that they weren't and, you know, might leave

01:27:59   as a result of that, or maybe they just don't really want to work for the new person or, you know,

01:28:06   like dynamics change.

01:28:08   Or they just think it's a good time to leave because things are in transition. I was thinking

01:28:11   you're retiring anyway. Now's a good time, right? This is look, that's what happened when we went

01:28:14   from jobs to cook. A lot of, a lot of people shuffled around. You had the forced all versus

01:28:19   I've problem. And then forced all was forced out. Like there was all, you know, things happen like

01:28:23   that. And while I'm not like wishing in particular for any of these other people to go, because I

01:28:27   actually like a lot of their work, I am excited about the prospect of turnover because these,

01:28:34   these are people who have been in this upper echelon of Apple leadership for a long time.

01:28:38   They're all nearing retirement age, although not super close to it. Like Federighi is, I think like in

01:28:44   his late fifties still, Schiller is like 61 or 62, something like that. So like, we're not super close

01:28:49   to like, you know, you know, cook is 65. So that's like, that's a lot closer to retirement age. But

01:28:55   I think what we will see is in the next one to five years, I think we're going to see a lot of

01:29:01   people on that apple.com slash leadership page, retire, and those positions will turn over.

01:29:07   We've already started to see that. It's not just Jeff Williams. It's that CFO that I can't remember

01:29:10   the name of, JG getting shuffled around for cause. And like, there's been like, as those people age,

01:29:16   they're coming up again. This is definitely an inflection point for people to rotate out. Like

01:29:20   that's the thing with new CEO, especially we don't even know who it is. We can attach all our hopes and

01:29:23   dreams to it. And, uh, regardless of how we think the forced all and I have transition went,

01:29:29   you always hope that these transitions are going to take place and that the new person in that

01:29:33   position will be better than the old in the ways that you care about, but sometimes they're worse.

01:29:37   And so it's always a risky period. Like on the other hand, like I do always feel like the,

01:29:41   the jobs to cook transition, it was like, I don't think anyone minded because we kind of like the

01:29:49   direction jobs was taking things, but I always felt kind of disappointed that it took like,

01:29:53   three years for Apple to look like it had a new CEO. You know what I mean? Like, and again,

01:29:59   no one complains about that, but it's like, but we liked what jobs is doing. So we liked that Tim

01:30:02   Cook continued down that road, even though, even though we kept quoting jobs saying, just do what

01:30:05   you want to do. He totally didn't. He did what jobs wanted to do for years. Uh, and again, when that's,

01:30:12   when that's something mostly you agree with, it seems fine, but I hope it doesn't take that long this

01:30:16   time. I hope I don't feel like Tim Cook's Apple sticks around for four more years because the new CEO is too

01:30:22   cautious to do anything different. I know the big ship turns slowly. Don't spook wall street,

01:30:25   yada, yada, but I hope it does something new. And obviously attaching my hopes and dreams,

01:30:29   Hey, uh, get someone in user interface design who knows anything about user interface design.

01:30:34   Uh, you know, update your products more often, be more decisive about your, your products. Uh,

01:30:40   you know, bring back the Mac pro like all my play the hits, right? I got all the things that I want

01:30:43   change the relationship with the app store, unify your operating system across all the regions to be

01:30:47   more open because everyone's making you do that. So why are you fighting in every possible,

01:30:50   like there's so many things, but there's no guarantee that any of those decisions from a new CEO will go

01:30:56   our way. And maybe new CEO will come in and screw something else up. Like say, Hey, podcast, let's

01:31:01   screw that up now. So please don't, you know, this, I think I'm just the, I'm pessimistic because the

01:31:06   times we're living in, but like, I do have lots of hopes and dreams for a new CEO. Lots of things they

01:31:11   could do differently. If I could sit down with a new CEO, I could do it like a 10 bullet point thing,

01:31:16   do these 10 things in the next five years, but they have their own stuff they're going to do.

01:31:21   And maybe it has zero overlap with mine. And it's a scary, it's a scary time. Like as, as much as we're

01:31:26   annoyed with Tim cook, it's Tim cook's apple is such a known quantity at this point, uh, that they're,

01:31:31   you know, going completely into the unknown. It's like, well, surely it's got to be better,

01:31:35   right? Surely things have to improve. And it's like, well, it could make certain things worse.

01:31:39   And we'll see how, like the fact that he did a great in hardware, that just makes me,

01:31:43   it's like the Peter principle. Like, great. Keep that guy in charge of hardware. He's doing

01:31:46   great. It's like, but actually he's going to be in charge of the whole company. It's like when they

01:31:48   put Ive in charge of, of hardware design and user interface design, it's like, well, I mean, he's

01:31:54   made some great products, but does he know anything about user interface design? It turns out not

01:31:58   really. No, he didn't. So like making, making the hardware guy, again, like there's no one person

01:32:04   who embodies everything, right? You know, jobs couldn't do a whole bunch of these things too. They all

01:32:08   have specific skills, right? So it's just a question of like figuring out, like we always

01:32:13   talk about like, does, does cook know how to figure out whether a high level executive is going to be

01:32:19   good. And especially early on in cook's career is a bunch of like hires that flamed out a couple of

01:32:24   them in retail. That one was that paper master guy and like Silicon, like it's hard. It's hard to do

01:32:30   that. Like no one, you know, even jobs hire people who turned out not to be great and whatever. Like,

01:32:34   so it's just, it's just such an unknown. So I'm, I'm, I think I'm, I mean, obviously I'm

01:32:39   excited for cook to leave, but I'm kind of more scared about what the future holds because not

01:32:43   because I want, don't want things to change because I do, but I fear that they're going to change for

01:32:47   the worst, which would just totally be such a 2025 thing to happen.

01:32:50   Yep. Really. Honestly, I find this very exciting. I think the Tim cook era is surprisingly to me

01:33:00   almost over. I really thought that he would at least last through the Trump term and this is

01:33:05   looking like he's probably not going to. And, and I hope, you know, look, I don't wish ill on the man.

01:33:10   I hope he's not like sick or something. Um, but I am happy for his era of leadership to be passed

01:33:16   along to somebody else because I think he has taken Apple as far as he can. He's had a number of pretty

01:33:21   big things that I wish they didn't do a number of big directions that they, that they didn't go in

01:33:26   and should have a number of big directions that they did go in and shouldn't have.

01:33:30   It was like game of Thrones where it seemed like it was going real good until the end.

01:33:34   I don't want it. I didn't see it. So I don't know, but it's a series that, uh, that everyone loved

01:33:38   until like the final season when everyone was like, and this feel like this is the final season of King

01:33:42   cook and Tim cook and everyone's like, I mean, that's like many TV shows to be honest, um, including

01:33:46   some of my favorite TV shows. But anyway, I'm excited to see turnover because we've had the same

01:33:51   leaders for a very long time and you're right. Turnover is scary because it is risky, but what

01:33:56   it also tends to bring is fresh perspectives, new blood, new excitement, new directions, and new ideas.

01:34:03   And that's something that Apple could use. You know, they are very successful financially and many of

01:34:10   their products are great, but they could use some new ideas and some fresh blood and some fresh leadership.

01:34:15   So I find this very exciting, even though it is risky. Yes. You know, do things that are scary. Like it is risky.

01:34:23   It does scare me a little bit, but I'm ready to see who and what is next at Apple.

01:34:29   I should do a series of blog posts called Apple turnover. Isn't that a good pun? And then maybe Apple turnaround after that.

01:34:34   Yeah, maybe.

01:34:35   All right. Thank you to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Delete Me and Skims.

01:34:41   Thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the perks of ATP membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic.

01:34:51   Every single week, we bring you extra content just for members in Overtime, in addition to our monthly specials and things like that.

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01:35:05   You can join to listen atp.fm slash join. Thanks, everybody. We'll talk to you next week.

01:35:11   Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause it was accidental.

01:35:20   Oh, it was accidental.

01:35:23   John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.

01:35:29   Cause it was accidental.

01:35:31   Oh, it was accidental.

01:35:33   And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.

01:35:40   And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.

01:35:49   So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-

01:36:19   Let me back up a smidge. When I was in school, in grade school, we've talked about this in bits and parts throughout the years. Several of the schools I went through used Macs. And I thought they were very cool and very pretty. I didn't want one, but I thought they were fun.

01:36:39   And at some point or another, presumably somebody pointed out to me or maybe I stumbled upon HyperCard. And HyperCard to a 10-year-old was, this is a way to make a choose-your-own-adventure game, right? And it was amazing. It was incredibly cool.

01:36:56   HyperCard to this day, even as someone who never really used a Mac growing up other than in school, is one of my favorite pieces of software I've ever used. It was just so cool and so approachable, even for a 10-year-old.

01:37:09   Well, Declan has apparently discovered, quote-unquote, HyperCard. And by that I mean, I noticed that he's been obsessed with doing something on his Chromebook recently. I'm like, what's going on there, bud?

01:37:23   He said, well, I forget exactly the words he used to describe it. But he said, I'm making a rage bait game. This is apparently what the grade schoolers think is the funniest thing in the world, is making people grumbly and upset and angry by, you know, doing, by asking silly questions and doing convoluted things.

01:37:43   But what he's doing is, well, actually, let me ask. John, what is HyperCard for Declan?

01:37:48   Did he use the word HyperCard or are you just using this?

01:37:51   No. Oh, goodness, no. No.

01:37:52   All right. Because you wrote it in the show notes without a capital C, which I corrected.

01:37:55   So I was wondering if there was a new product called HyperCard with a lowercase c.

01:37:58   Nope, nope, nope. Oh, can I guess?

01:37:59   Anyway, intercaps. Intercaps were big in the early Mac days. Capital H, Hyper, capital C, card.

01:38:04   Anyway, what is HyperCard for kids these days? I'm not up on the – I mean, unless he's using, like, whatever Google's PowerPoint equivalent is to essentially make a slideshow.

01:38:16   That was my guess. Google Slides.

01:38:18   That's it. Google Slides. That is his HyperCard. That is his HyperCard.

01:38:23   I mean, that's selling HyperCard pretty short, but okay.

01:38:26   It is. It is. It is. And I don't mean any offense by that. I truly don't. As I said, I loved HyperCard. This is a very different animal.

01:38:33   But in the end of the day, what he's basically doing is making a HyperCard – what was it? Stack? Is that right?

01:38:40   Mm-hmm. Yeah.

01:38:41   Making a HyperCard stack. It's a stack of cards.

01:38:42   Yeah. So he's making a HyperCard stack – again, my words, not his – in order to mess with his friends.

01:38:48   And it's just so funny to me. A, there's a little bit of, like, life finds a way.

01:38:54   B, there's a little bit of, like, everything old is new again.

01:38:58   See, it's similar to what I would have done at the time. I think I was a little less nefarious, but that's okay.

01:39:05   But I just – I really thought it was adorable that here he is. He's spending hours building up this choose-your-own-adventure rage-baity HyperCard stack.

01:39:16   Again, my words, not his. And I just thought that it was very adorable and very funny.

01:39:19   Is there a programming thing in Google Slides, or is he just using links to other slides? Like, is there the equivalent of HyperTalk?

01:39:24   No, I don't think so. I think it's just links to other slides.

01:39:26   Links to other slides, yeah. I mean, what is – I'm not sure if the HyperCard is the analogy.

01:39:31   He's basically making web pages without web technology because he was just linking from one slide to the other.

01:39:35   That's fair, yeah. But I guess the vibe of it just felt like HyperCard to me because he's drawing buttons, you know.

01:39:41   No, because it's not – it's a GUI editor, and you're not – he's not writing markup.

01:39:45   Right, and he's kind of drawing buttons, and then he yells at me every time because I see, you know, a big rectangle or round rect, really, as a button.

01:39:53   And so I'll tap anywhere on that button, and then –

01:39:56   You have to tap on the Word.

01:39:57   You have to tap on the Word, and he gets cranky at me every time because I always forget.

01:40:00   That's going to be new in iOS 27. I think they're going to add that change.

01:40:04   Mm-hmm. But anyways, I just thought it was very, very funny that here it was, the same sorts – vaguely, if you squint –

01:40:12   the same thing that I was doing in, what, the early 90s is effectively happening again in 2025.

01:40:19   Slightly different tech, but same idea.

01:40:21   I was doing rage bait things, I think, in HyperCard as well.

01:40:24   I remember a HyperCard stack I had that I would use to troll my PC-using friends.

01:40:28   I remember at one point I drew a cave, and, like, in the black mouth of the cave,

01:40:32   there was, like, a malevolent pair of eyes and a C – like, a C-drive prompt.

01:40:36   It's making fun of drive letters and DOS, you know.

01:40:40   I forget what it was called. I should dig it out.

01:40:42   But it was basically, like, a Macs are better than PCs because PCs don't have GUIs HyperCard stack,

01:40:47   really driving the point home.

01:40:48   That I got my friends play and click around, and they'd get angry.

01:40:52   Yep.

01:40:52   That was an adorable child.

01:40:54   No, I can tell.

01:40:55   Did you play the stack and see if it did make you enraged?

01:41:00   Yes, to a degree.

01:41:01   Is it because it used young person slang that you didn't understand?

01:41:04   Some.

01:41:05   Some of it was, like, one of the slides had a series of eight colors,

01:41:11   and each of these colors was a button, and there was no label whatsoever,

01:41:15   and you just had to guess which one was the way to go forward.

01:41:18   This is – yeah.

01:41:19   So my kid has also made games – especially when he was, like, a little bit younger,

01:41:24   so this tracks – games like that that basically it's, like, just kind of random failure and death,

01:41:31   and you have to just memorize the correct path through.

01:41:34   It's the old-school gaming and also the riddles in the dark from The Hobbit,

01:41:39   where Bilbo can't think of any of our riddles, and he says,

01:41:41   what have I got in my pocket?

01:41:42   That's his riddle.

01:41:45   It's like, which color should you click?

01:41:46   I don't know.

01:41:48   Try one.

01:41:48   Nope, wrong.

01:41:49   Ha-ha.

01:41:50   Beep, beep, beep.