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ATP

474: That's Where the Magic Happens

 

00:00:00   - We don't have, there's no pre-show anywhere.

00:00:02   I can't make anything out of this.

00:00:04   - Why?

00:00:05   No, you absolutely can't.

00:00:06   - I think you're just revealing that your ferry service

00:00:08   is just slightly more distant.

00:00:10   - Yeah, I think that's the point.

00:00:11   - It's plenty of a pre-show,

00:00:12   'cause I have no idea about that.

00:00:13   And I'm just angry at how worried it was for you trapped.

00:00:17   It's just--

00:00:18   - So much hardship has been stolen.

00:00:19   (electronic beeping)

00:00:21   All right, let's move on.

00:00:22   Let's start with some follow-up.

00:00:23   And it's everyone, who knows what the pre-show was?

00:00:26   We don't, and we just recorded it extensively.

00:00:29   But we're gonna start with some follow up.

00:00:30   Andrew Wade said, "Hey, Marco said the nice thing

00:00:33   "about the iPad Pro versus the Air was that

00:00:35   "the Pro had stereo speakers while the Air did not."

00:00:37   I thought he was right, but that changed

00:00:39   when the Air had its square sides upgrade

00:00:41   and from the spec sheet, you can see that it clearly

00:00:44   labels speakers on the top, or speaker, or speakers,

00:00:47   I think speakers on the top and on the bottom.

00:00:50   - Yep, I was totally wrong about this.

00:00:51   Yeah, the iPad Air used to have just one speaker.

00:00:53   The only way to get, like if, so what I want

00:00:56   out of an iPad is when you hold it in landscape,

00:00:59   which I think is really the default iPad orientation

00:01:02   for most people.

00:01:03   When you hold it in landscape,

00:01:05   you want a speaker on the left and speaker on the right.

00:01:06   And I thought only the iPad Pro line offered that,

00:01:09   'cause it used to only be the Pro line that offered that.

00:01:11   But yeah, turns out I was wrong.

00:01:12   Thanks Andrew Wade for pointing out that the Air,

00:01:15   when it went to USB-C in the square sides,

00:01:16   it switched over to a speaker on top and speaker on bottom.

00:01:19   Now the Pro has four speakers.

00:01:23   It basically has like, you know, kind of one per corner,

00:01:25   although they're on the short sides only.

00:01:26   but so that way like the Pro can do stereo left right sound

00:01:30   no matter what orientation you're holding it in,

00:01:32   whereas the Air can only do left right separation

00:01:34   in landscape, but either way,

00:01:36   you know when you compare the specs,

00:01:38   and I did this a little bit on last show,

00:01:40   but like so it came time to choose like you know

00:01:43   what should our next iPad for our kid be.

00:01:47   I went through everything and went with the iPad Pro,

00:01:51   actually the 11 inch iPad Pro,

00:01:52   because when you compare, I mean everyone's doing this

00:01:55   'cause I think the Air embargo dropped this morning

00:01:57   or something, but you look at the new Air,

00:02:00   the distance between the Air and the Pro

00:02:02   is very, very small.

00:02:04   There is very little difference between them right now.

00:02:07   And maybe that'll change, you know,

00:02:08   the Pro is probably due for an update

00:02:10   like later this year maybe, so maybe that'll change

00:02:13   when the Pro gets updated, but for right now,

00:02:15   the gap between them in both specs and features

00:02:20   and price is very small.

00:02:23   'cause we're not gonna get just the 64 gig.

00:02:26   Like, you know, there's a lot of video capture going on,

00:02:29   you know, capturing videos and photos

00:02:32   and recording games, stuff like that.

00:02:34   So like, we get 'em, you know,

00:02:36   I think we usually go with 256

00:02:37   for our configurations for him recently.

00:02:40   And so, when you compare the prices of 256

00:02:44   versus Air and Pro, the difference is not big.

00:02:47   It's like 150 bucks.

00:02:48   And so, what you do get with the Pro,

00:02:51   again, it's not significant anymore

00:02:52   depending on what you're doing.

00:02:53   But what you get, in short, Thunderbolt instead of USB-C,

00:02:56   so connectivity for certain types of peripherals

00:02:59   and monitors, that's probably never gonna be used here,

00:03:01   but just worth putting out.

00:03:03   You get four speakers instead of two,

00:03:05   okay, a little bit better.

00:03:07   You get the wide angle camera and the LiDAR sensor,

00:03:09   so it's a two camera array with LiDAR, and a flash.

00:03:14   Whereas the Air, I believe, has no flash

00:03:16   and it's just the one camera.

00:03:17   And then the big one, I think, or the big two are Face ID

00:03:21   and 120 hertz promotion.

00:03:24   And that's about it.

00:03:26   There's not a lot of other differences,

00:03:28   but Face ID also brings more advanced front camera stuff.

00:03:32   You could do the portrait mode on the front camera and stuff.

00:03:34   So there's that kind of stuff.

00:03:35   So it's not, what you get between the Pro and Air

00:03:38   is not nothing, but it's not a lot.

00:03:41   But the price difference is also not a lot

00:03:43   when you compare spec for spec.

00:03:45   So went with Pro.

00:03:47   We'll see if I regret that, I probably won't.

00:03:49   Oh, and the other downside is the Pro

00:03:50   only comes in boring colors.

00:03:52   Whereas the Air comes in colors that were interesting

00:03:57   before they were diluted so much to be more muted

00:04:00   and tamed to fit the aluminum.

00:04:02   - John, tell me about the MacStudio HDMI port.

00:04:05   - It's still 2.0, surprise.

00:04:07   I mean, it should have been expected

00:04:08   'cause if you squint at the MacStudio,

00:04:10   it's like a MacBook Pro in a much bigger case.

00:04:13   And that one also has HDMI 2.0

00:04:15   and I think the same UHS-II SD card slot.

00:04:20   So there's another potential upgrade opportunity

00:04:22   for the next revision of this machine as well.

00:04:24   It would be nice if it's gonna have an HDMI port

00:04:27   that eventually it'll get upgraded to HDMI 2.1,

00:04:29   which is admittedly quite a leap

00:04:31   considering all the features that are included in HDMI 2.1

00:04:34   if they try to support them all.

00:04:35   But hey, for, you know, 4,000/8,000 dollars,

00:04:40   HDMI 2.1 would be nice.

00:04:42   - So what does 2.1 bring?

00:04:43   Just what are a couple of highlights?

00:04:45   - Variable refresh rate, higher frame rates.

00:04:49   Is it a better bit depth maybe as well?

00:04:53   A bunch more video output options.

00:04:56   There's like a laundry list of them.

00:04:57   You don't have to support them all to get HDMI 2.1.

00:04:59   In fact, I think the HDMI consortium changed it

00:05:01   so that you can say HDMI 2.1 even if you only

00:05:04   support the 2.0 subset of it.

00:05:05   I think they learned by watching USB.

00:05:08   If USB can make their names meaningless, we can do that too.

00:05:12   So literally, you can have just the 2.0 subset of features,

00:05:16   but still say HDMI 2.1 because technically that's

00:05:18   part of the spec.

00:05:19   Anyway, it's silly, but I feel like the higher refresh rate,

00:05:23   if Apple, you know, well, hey, you can get a gaming monitor

00:05:26   in theory, right, and maybe it's a gaming monitor

00:05:28   than HDMI port, it's a HDMI 2.1 gaming monitor,

00:05:31   which are more common these days now

00:05:32   that the game console supported.

00:05:34   If you hook that up to your Mac,

00:05:35   you can't play games at 120 hertz or whatever.

00:05:38   - All right, moving right along.

00:05:40   I need a hug, because apparently there's

00:05:45   a 27 inch Studio Display Pro coming,

00:05:47   if we're to believe these rumors.

00:05:49   I can't handle this, guys,

00:05:50   but this rollercoaster of emotion.

00:05:52   I am trapped in a glass cage

00:05:54   that is sitting on a rollercoaster of emotion.

00:05:56   But display analyst, Ross Young.

00:05:58   - That's precarious. - I'm mixing some metaphors

00:05:59   here, yes.

00:06:01   27 inch, I'm a Studio Display Pro

00:06:03   with mini-LED and ProMotion could launch in June.

00:06:06   Ross Young says, "Still expecting a 27 inch mini-LED display

00:06:09   from Apple in June.

00:06:10   Guess it might be a Studio Display Pro.

00:06:11   Have confirmed it with multiple companies

00:06:12   in their supply chain."

00:06:14   If I have this damn studio display for like four months,

00:06:18   I'm gonna be real upset.

00:06:20   - Well, so think of it this way.

00:06:21   Like, first of all, this is just a rumor.

00:06:22   I don't know how.

00:06:23   I just threw this in there because the rumor, like,

00:06:24   landed immediately after the event.

00:06:26   It was like, oh, and by the way,

00:06:27   there's a, you know, mini LED promo.

00:06:30   It's just like, wait, what?

00:06:31   Like, just after your event, you're saying it's coming?

00:06:33   And in June, June is not that far from now.

00:06:36   But the way to think about this,

00:06:38   if this actually does come true,

00:06:39   is imagine the event had come

00:06:40   and Apple had launched two 27-inch monitors,

00:06:43   one that's like the one we got, and then one that has the fancy features, high refresh,

00:06:47   HDR, mini LED, right?

00:06:50   Obviously the high refresh HDR mini LED one would be more expensive.

00:06:53   You know, again, looking at a 6K display, scale it down to 5K, because it's basically

00:06:59   the same feature set they're saying it would be mini LED, which is more or less what the

00:07:02   XDR is, and high refresh, well the XDR doesn't even have high refresh, it would be better

00:07:07   than it in some ways, right?

00:07:09   It would be more expensive.

00:07:10   And if they put both of those out at the same time,

00:07:12   would you have chosen to spend an extra probably

00:07:16   thousand dollars for these features?

00:07:17   Or would you have still gotten the Apple Studio Display

00:07:20   that you ordered now?

00:07:21   - I would really think about it,

00:07:25   'cause I really would love high refresh.

00:07:28   And was it you, Jon, that convinced me

00:07:31   that HDR may have been,

00:07:33   may be something I would be interested in,

00:07:35   just so I could see pictures from my iPhone?

00:07:37   - Obviously you want the features,

00:07:39   but for an extra probably thousand, maybe $1,500,

00:07:42   I think you would've thought twice about it.

00:07:45   - I don't think there's any chance in hell

00:07:46   you would've paid the premium,

00:07:47   'cause again, we don't know how big this premium is,

00:07:49   or will be when this thing comes out.

00:07:51   Also, I mean, for whatever it's worth,

00:07:53   there has been some back and forth

00:07:54   with the rumorologists about this

00:07:56   that make it sound like it's either coming

00:07:58   in June or next year.

00:08:00   (laughing)

00:08:00   - Right, yeah.

00:08:01   So rumors are very vague.

00:08:03   - This thing, if it comes out,

00:08:04   who knows when it's gonna come out,

00:08:07   but I think if it's gonna be offering a similar,

00:08:12   assuming it's the same size, 27 inch 5K,

00:08:15   but also adds some kind of micro LED and variable refresh,

00:08:20   I don't see how it's under $3,000 and it's probably more.

00:08:24   And so I don't think there's any chance.

00:08:27   If both these options would've been released

00:08:29   on the same day, I don't think you would've

00:08:31   bought the other one, Casey, I really don't.

00:08:33   I think you would've stuck with the one you got.

00:08:35   And it's still an open question of how inexpensive they can make this, because we thought maybe

00:08:39   this would be the time where we would show that, like, oh, because, you know, because

00:08:43   the 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pro displays are apparently reasonably priced enough to be

00:08:49   unreasonably priced laptops that maybe the previously established baseline for what does

00:08:54   it cost to have a big retina res HDR display, that baseline is no longer valid, and we actually

00:09:01   we could do a bunch cheaper.

00:09:02   So far, that's not true.

00:09:04   baseline we have is is as it ever was that if you want to have fancy features

00:09:08   at a large size at high DPI it costs an arm and a leg because you can buy these

00:09:12   monitors in the PC world not 5k ones but even just 4k ones and they cost a ton of

00:09:17   money like thousands three thousand five thousand six thousand dollars they're

00:09:21   like XDR type prices for XDR type technology by the time this comes out if

00:09:27   it comes out next year maybe that will have changed by then but the real thing

00:09:32   that is making me doubt this rumor is,

00:09:34   Apple launched two such similar products,

00:09:40   one in March and one in June.

00:09:42   That just seemed like, unless there was some reason

00:09:44   that it was accidentally delayed

00:09:46   and they just couldn't get it out at time,

00:09:47   or one of them comes late,

00:09:48   I don't see them having a planned release to release

00:09:51   after whatever, five years, six years or whatever,

00:09:54   finally release a monitor, everybody buys it.

00:09:56   And then by the time the last person gets their shipment

00:09:58   that they ordered on launch day or something,

00:10:00   you release a new one that's better.

00:10:02   That just seems too tight of a timeline for me.

00:10:04   I mean, it would be like Apple introducing

00:10:07   the new MacBook Pros, and then three months later,

00:10:10   introducing a totally revised, better version

00:10:13   of the same products.

00:10:14   It just doesn't seem like an Apple thing to do.

00:10:16   - Yeah, I would suspect that if this is a thing,

00:10:18   which I'm really skeptical, and admittedly,

00:10:21   it's in my own self and best interest

00:10:24   to believe it's skeptical, but if this is real at all,

00:10:27   I don't see it happening this year.

00:10:28   I think it would be next year at the earliest,

00:10:30   But we shall see.

00:10:32   Jon, I know you have been dying to tell us

00:10:36   about the origins of Fivehead.

00:10:37   After copious amounts of research,

00:10:39   which by the way you're not supposed to be doing,

00:10:40   what have you discovered?

00:10:42   - Yeah, I thought it was a Seinfeld episode

00:10:43   'cause it sounds like a Seinfeld.

00:10:44   I mean, there's even the one with the Elaine.

00:10:46   Elaine's got the big head, you know,

00:10:47   the bird flew right into her head.

00:10:49   It's like you couldn't avoid it.

00:10:50   It reminded me of a Seinfeld episode,

00:10:53   but it wasn't apparently.

00:10:55   And after the show, many people sent me suggestions

00:10:57   of what they thought it might be.

00:10:58   Someone pointed out that it was probably the flophouse and dug out the actual episode

00:11:02   And now I will put in the link so you can hear it. It is in a flophouse episode 94

00:11:07   Which was a long time ago in 2012

00:11:09   Around 29 minutes and 46 seconds. We will put a timestamp link in the show notes. You can hear steward wellington

00:11:17   uh

00:11:18   I'm, not going to say inventing five head

00:11:20   But that's probably where I heard it because i've listened to the flophouse and that's probably where I got it from

00:11:25   And I think it comes up in subsequent years

00:11:27   on the flop house as well.

00:11:29   Other people pointed out Victor Borg,

00:11:31   is that how you pronounce his name?

00:11:32   Victor Borg, this is just like--

00:11:34   - I don't know.

00:11:35   - Inflationary language where he just takes

00:11:39   any common English phrases with numbers

00:11:41   and increments them by one and he also says five head

00:11:43   and will put a link, that's obviously much older

00:11:44   than the flop house, so maybe Stuart got it from this thing

00:11:47   that he watched when he was a kid or something.

00:11:49   So both of those links will be in the show notes

00:11:51   with timestamps.

00:11:52   - I feel so much better now.

00:11:54   - You should, and now a five head is part of your life.

00:11:57   And now when you go to London,

00:11:59   you can talk about the five head building,

00:12:00   the one that melted cars and stuff.

00:12:02   You know that one?

00:12:03   - What?

00:12:04   Was it like the curve reflection thing?

00:12:06   - Yeah, there's a building in London

00:12:07   that looks like it's got a five head

00:12:08   'cause it gets like bigger at the top,

00:12:10   it looks like it has a big bulging forehead,

00:12:12   and the sun reflected off it in such a way

00:12:15   that it was like melting things that were in front of it

00:12:16   during a certain time of day,

00:12:17   so they fixed it by putting a giant like sunshade inside it.

00:12:20   - All right, moving right along,

00:12:21   Tell us about your Marco Christmas present.

00:12:24   - Alex Poulianis says that the A7 III

00:12:26   does have animal eye detection,

00:12:27   you just need to update the firmware.

00:12:28   Many other people sent this in to me,

00:12:30   but Alex was the first one.

00:12:32   And so I was excited by this,

00:12:33   and I went and looked at the camera,

00:12:35   and the latest firmware from Sony for those cameras

00:12:38   version 4.0.1, and what was installed on it was 2.0.

00:12:42   So I did update the firmware.

00:12:44   - You should send it back for a refund.

00:12:45   - Yeah, I did update the firmware.

00:12:48   I went to the Sony website, Sony Software,

00:12:50   is so awful.

00:12:52   I mean, their iOS software is not great,

00:12:53   but at least it works,

00:12:54   but their Mac software is just next level bad.

00:12:57   I downloaded a thing for a Mac

00:12:59   that was ostensibly supposed to be a thing

00:13:00   that lets you update the firmware in your Sony camera.

00:13:03   Yeah, just flat out did not work.

00:13:05   Like it was the most confusing Byzantine interface.

00:13:09   I thought I must not be understanding

00:13:11   what it wants me to do or why,

00:13:12   'cause it would be like unplug the camera,

00:13:14   don't have your camera plugged in,

00:13:15   plug it in and turn it on and do it.

00:13:17   It just absolutely did not work.

00:13:19   It might be because like Mac OS has clamped down security

00:13:23   since it was written and they never updated,

00:13:24   who the heck knows?

00:13:25   So Windows to the rescue, I booted into Windows

00:13:28   and the Windows version of the software is also awful,

00:13:30   but actually works when you follow the instructions.

00:13:32   So I booted into Windows, updated my firmware

00:13:34   and now my A7 III can do pet eye detection

00:13:37   and I took many doggy pictures.

00:13:39   - So just to add insult to injury

00:13:42   with your Mac Pro being truly terrible

00:13:45   by any reasonable measure at this point, right?

00:13:48   Apparently the base model Mac Pro has gotten a spec bump,

00:13:50   just to make yours feel even more inadequate.

00:13:52   - New.

00:13:53   - Mine's already, mine already surpasses the spec bump,

00:13:56   but it's interesting that they are,

00:13:58   like, whenever you see a spec bump like this,

00:14:00   what do they do?

00:14:01   Do they bump the storage from 128 to 512?

00:14:06   Like, kinda hard for me to believe that it was 128.

00:14:08   - Was it 256?

00:14:09   - 256, yeah.

00:14:10   - Yeah, all they're doing is making

00:14:13   the base level configuration have

00:14:15   what used to be add-on options.

00:14:17   and the kind of bumping everything down like one step.

00:14:20   So it isn't that there's like new hardware available,

00:14:23   you just get more on the base model than you got before

00:14:26   of the same choices that were already available.

00:14:27   - Oh yeah, it was 256, sorry.

00:14:29   It's hard to believe that you'd buy this $6,000 computer

00:14:32   and it would come with a 256 gigabyte SSD in it.

00:14:34   It's just ridiculous, right?

00:14:35   And when they do things like this,

00:14:37   especially they bump the graphics card

00:14:39   from the Radeon Pro 580X,

00:14:42   which was a terrible graphics card,

00:14:45   to the W550X, which is considerably better,

00:14:49   it makes me think they can't get the 580X anymore

00:14:52   'cause it's so old, right?

00:14:54   It's like, yeah.

00:14:55   Like since when does Apple,

00:14:57   Apple doesn't have a reputation for essentially reducing

00:15:01   the price of configurations of computers as they age.

00:15:03   They just don't.

00:15:04   I mean, they're still selling the Apple TV HD

00:15:06   for some obscene price.

00:15:07   They're like, just because the computer has been around,

00:15:10   look at the iMac Pro.

00:15:12   Did that price ever go down

00:15:13   in its third year of life or whatever

00:15:15   because it was ancient stuff, no, it didn't.

00:15:18   So I always think they're running out of parts

00:15:19   when they do this, but it's nice

00:15:21   that they're still revising it.

00:15:22   This is not an exciting update, but there you have it.

00:15:24   But hey, if you need to boot into Windows

00:15:26   to update your Sony camera,

00:15:27   it's good to have one of those Intel Macs.

00:15:30   - Realtime followup, Marco, that new comment,

00:15:34   it went right over my head,

00:15:35   but that was a much better joke

00:15:36   than I gave you credit for, so well done.

00:15:37   - Thank you.

00:15:38   We are sponsored this week by Collide.

00:15:41   Collide is a new take on endpoint management that asks the question, "How can we get end

00:15:46   users more involved?"

00:15:47   In contrast to old school device management tools like MDM, which lock down your employees

00:15:51   devices without considering their needs or even attempting to educate them about the

00:15:55   security of their laptop.

00:15:57   Collide is built by like-minded security practitioners, who in the past saw just how much MDM was

00:16:03   disrupting their end users, often frustrating them so much they'd throw their hands up

00:16:06   and just switch to using their personal laptops without telling anyone.

00:16:09   And in that scenario, everyone loses.

00:16:11   So Collide, on the other hand, is different.

00:16:14   Instead of locking down a device,

00:16:16   Collide takes a user-focused approach

00:16:18   that communicates security recommendations to your employees

00:16:21   directly on Slack.

00:16:23   After Collide, device security turns

00:16:25   from a black and white state into a dynamic conversation.

00:16:28   This starts with the end users installing the endpoint agent

00:16:30   on their own through a guided process that

00:16:33   happens right inside their first Slack message.

00:16:35   From there, Collide regularly sends employees recommendations

00:16:38   when their device is in an insecure state.

00:16:40   This can range from simple problems like the screen lock not being set correctly to hard

00:16:44   to solve and nuanced issues like asking people to secure two factor backup codes sitting

00:16:48   in their downloads folder properly.

00:16:50   And because it's talking directly to employees, Collide is also educating them about the company's

00:16:54   policies and how to best keep their devices secure using real, tangible examples, not

00:16:59   theoretical scenarios.

00:17:01   So that's Collide, cross-platform endpoint management for Linux, Mac, and Windows devices

00:17:06   that puts end users first for teams that slack.

00:17:09   Visit collide.com/ATP to learn more and activate a free 14-day trial today.

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00:17:30   Visit there today.

00:17:31   Thank you so much to Collide for sponsoring our show.

00:17:38   Moving right along, oh, we should probably spend a minute

00:17:41   talking about Masquerade.

00:17:42   The launch went well-ish, like it went fine.

00:17:48   Sales have been okay.

00:17:51   I'm going to forever blame the two of you

00:17:53   for your just incredible sales pitch a couple episodes back,

00:17:56   and that's why it happened.

00:17:57   (laughing)

00:18:00   - I feel so bad, I'm so sorry.

00:18:03   First, you invite me to beta test this app

00:18:05   for like three months and I do almost no testing.

00:18:08   - Well, to me, it makes you feel better.

00:18:10   So I haven't watched what you sent me.

00:18:12   So Marco sent me like a 20 or 30 minute video.

00:18:14   So in your defense, I have not had the time yet

00:18:16   to watch what you've sent me.

00:18:17   So I have saved it, it exists, it is on the to-do list,

00:18:20   but I haven't done it yet.

00:18:21   - Yeah, so then we did our launch show

00:18:24   and I kind of crapped all over your schedule for doing it,

00:18:27   which I didn't mean to be a jerk about it

00:18:30   and I'm very sorry about that.

00:18:32   So then I'm like, you know what, I feel so bad.

00:18:35   Let me help out my friend or at least try to--

00:18:38   - By telling him all the other things

00:18:39   that are wrong with his app?

00:18:40   - Yeah, so I set up my phone, I set up one phone

00:18:44   shooting video of another phone,

00:18:46   and I did a whole walkthrough of the app.

00:18:48   Like, here's from launch, first launch,

00:18:50   going through, here's the purchase, here's everything else.

00:18:52   Here's what I think of every single part of this app,

00:18:54   one by one.

00:18:55   So my present to you was a 24 minute video,

00:18:59   which is basically giving somebody a problem.

00:19:01   Like here, I'm gonna, as a gift to you,

00:19:03   I'm gonna give you this giant time commitment

00:19:05   that you have to sink into.

00:19:07   - You might as well have given me a puppy.

00:19:08   - Yeah, right? (laughs)

00:19:10   No, puppies are better.

00:19:12   But yeah, so anyway, so I'm sorry both

00:19:14   for the lack of testing and for breezing over it too much

00:19:16   when you announced it, and then also for giving

00:19:19   a big time commitment as my makeup gift

00:19:22   for those first two anti-gifts. (laughs)

00:19:24   But I-- - You too could have

00:19:25   a friend like Marco Armey.

00:19:26   - Yes, right. - Get a lot of you.

00:19:27   - I'm a great friend to have.

00:19:29   So yeah, so I honestly do wanna hear like,

00:19:31   you know, how's it going?

00:19:32   'Cause one thing I have, you know,

00:19:34   the only reason we didn't talk about it last week

00:19:36   was 'cause it was an event week,

00:19:37   but I was very surprised and in a way I was humbled

00:19:42   by like, for my lack of imagination.

00:19:45   There were just so many people who wrote in to Casey

00:19:47   to say like, hey, I have this use case

00:19:50   and it's great for that.

00:19:51   And there were so many of those

00:19:53   that I just could not think of at all at first.

00:19:57   'Cause I thought it was just like,

00:19:59   here's an app for people who wanna do what Casey does.

00:20:02   That's it, period.

00:20:02   Like, an app for people who wanna put emoji

00:20:05   on their kids' faces on Instagram.

00:20:06   And there's so many more use cases for it than that,

00:20:09   and everyone's been telling you all about that,

00:20:10   and that's pretty great.

00:20:12   - Yeah, it's been surprising for me too.

00:20:13   I'd love to be all smug and be like,

00:20:15   "Oh, of course, Marco, I knew this all along."

00:20:17   But no, I did not.

00:20:18   And so a lot of very interesting use cases have come up.

00:20:22   Some of the more popular ones I've seen is foster parents.

00:20:27   And this is not a world that I'm a part of, but I'm slightly embarrassed that I didn't think about this.

00:20:32   But foster parents in most places, my limited understanding is they are legally, I guess, obligated to obscure the faces of the children that they're fostering.

00:20:41   Because most states don't seem to think it's their right to post photographs of the faces of the children that they're fostering.

00:20:47   And so they have to obscure them.

00:20:48   And so, yeah, so foster parents have been really, really enthusiastic about this.

00:20:52   And boudoir photographers who want to keep things safe for work apparently are interested

00:20:59   in putting maybe some eggplants all over the photographs or something along those lines,

00:21:05   which was something I was very surprised to read, but I mean, hey, makes sense.

00:21:09   And it actually got even more risque from there, but I'll leave that for another time.

00:21:14   Coming back to the less risque options, teachers, which is something I did think about, and

00:21:18   certainly I've told friends of Erin's and mine that are teachers, you know, if

00:21:22   you want to post a picture of your classroom, you may have social media

00:21:25   releases for your kids. Some school districts do that, some don't. But

00:21:29   nevertheless, it's easier perhaps to just obscure their faces. And so teachers, any

00:21:34   of them that I've spoken to about it, seem really enthusiastic about it.

00:21:38   Amusement park ride photos, somebody tweeted, I think I retweeted, a picture of

00:21:42   like Splash Mountain or something like that at Disney World where they put like

00:21:45   little screamy or smiley faces or whatever on all of the ride participants except them

00:21:51   and their family or maybe it was just that single individual which I got quite a kick

00:21:54   out of.

00:21:57   Protesters or perhaps even military personnel.

00:22:00   Again we stand with Ukraine but obviously there's a lot of really awful and terrible

00:22:04   things going on over there and there are plenty of reasons why you might want to obscure faces

00:22:09   or something like that so that's an example.

00:22:13   just plenty of different things. A few people have taken to putting pig noses on the nose

00:22:20   of their dog. So they got a little pig snout, snoot, whatever, which is quite funny to see.

00:22:25   I saw a few of those fly by. I think I retweeted one or two of those, which were very, very,

00:22:28   very good. And I liked those quite a bit. So yeah, there are a lot more use cases here

00:22:34   than I expected. And as much as I, when we were recording a couple episodes ago, I felt

00:22:41   like both of you guys were being a little tunnel visioned about it, but certainly this

00:22:46   is more eye-opening than I would have expected even, so I can't entirely fault you for it.

00:22:53   In general, a couple of other observations. I got a lot of generally friendly flak, but

00:22:58   flak nevertheless, about the fact that the app doesn't prompt for permission before opening

00:23:07   a photo and a lot of people were like, hey, what are you doing?

00:23:14   This doesn't seem right at all.

00:23:17   And at first I was like, what are you talking about?

00:23:18   What is this as an API?

00:23:19   And it occurred to me that, that for better or worse, the nerds, at least

00:23:23   have been trained to only trust when they see a permissions prompt.

00:23:28   And honestly, that's probably for the best.

00:23:31   That being said, as of shoot, uh, last year, no, two years ago, God,

00:23:35   what year is it?

00:23:36   Times a flat circle.

00:23:37   - Yeah, doesn't matter. - In 2020,

00:23:39   they released a new API,

00:23:41   and it is the pH Picker View Controller.

00:23:44   And the advantage of the pH Picker View Controller

00:23:47   is that it allows you to load images

00:23:52   without having to have any sort of prompt.

00:23:54   And so basically by calling into Apple's code

00:23:59   using this specific view controller,

00:24:02   I can ask for one or more photos,

00:24:04   and it will handle what it needs to handle on its end,

00:24:08   I don't have to ask for permission or anything.

00:24:09   It'll just do it,

00:24:11   and then it will come back to me with the results.

00:24:13   And so the only thing I have access to

00:24:16   are the specific images that the user,

00:24:18   or in my case image, that the user has selected.

00:24:22   They don't give me any sort of access to anything else.

00:24:25   And that's really cool.

00:24:27   And for me, it was perfect.

00:24:28   It was exactly what I wanted,

00:24:29   but it was funny and interesting to me

00:24:31   that a lot of people were like, "Hey man, what you doing? Because this doesn't seem right at all."

00:24:38   But that was very fascinating. In terms of sales, it's okay. It hasn't lit my financial

00:24:46   world on fire. It's not bad, but it's not spectacular. So there's that. But I'm having

00:24:54   fun with it, which is good. I've already released one release, and earlier today I

00:24:59   Sent to TestFlight for review, but it hasn't been approved as far as I know.

00:25:03   Another release, one of the things that people asked for the most was a

00:25:08   way to get a photo from other apps into Masquerade, which is a

00:25:12   completely reasonable thing to ask for and something I was planning on. I tell you what, maybe I'm just a dummy, but the

00:25:20   namespace for things that interact with the share sheet has been so polluted with like

00:25:26   generic terms like action extension, which you can find in like a billion different computer science related context

00:25:34   there are so many different ways to

00:25:36   skin this cat and it took a lot of help from random people on Twitter to get me to the exact point I wanted to

00:25:43   But I think I have a version of that working that should be out in another week or so

00:25:48   Where you can be in photos you can open the share sheet

00:25:51   It'll appear in the second row, you know, where you will like peer to messages and things of that nature

00:25:56   Well, if you add it, you know, because you have to first add it as one of the options that are available there

00:26:01   But in the second row beneath contacts, you'll see a masquerade icon and then it will prompt you

00:26:07   Hey, do you want to edit this masquerade and then it will pop over to masquerade and it'll

00:26:11   It'll let you edit it right there and assuming

00:26:14   the testers

00:26:17   assuming the testers think that it works okay,

00:26:20   then hopefully, like I said,

00:26:22   I'll have that out in a week or two.

00:26:24   - You know, if you watch my 24-minute video,

00:26:26   there's a couple, there's a bunch of like, you know,

00:26:27   really quick hit kind of things in there

00:26:29   that you could do pretty quickly in the next video.

00:26:30   - No, and I do, all kidding aside, I do need to.

00:26:33   The problem is is I have this like--

00:26:34   - For instance, that bug about the selection rectangle,

00:26:36   I found that bug during the video,

00:26:37   and I've told you how to fix it.

00:26:38   I reproduce it 100% of the time.

00:26:40   - Oh, good.

00:26:41   Well, I was briefly looking at that earlier today,

00:26:42   so I guess I should stop procrastinating on the video, but--

00:26:44   - I can tell you exactly how to fix it.

00:26:46   - In SwiftUI?

00:26:47   - Oh no, screw that.

00:26:48   - Yeah, see, see.

00:26:51   'Cause remember that app up until this update with,

00:26:53   so for the update for the share sheet,

00:26:56   I had to write Objective-C.

00:26:58   That's how much I'm going through for you, the purchaser.

00:27:02   - Why did you have to do that?

00:27:04   - Okay, so do we, no, so I think this is worth talking about.

00:27:07   - Honestly, 'cause they both interoperate

00:27:10   and it's a Swift application and why?

00:27:13   What did you have to do that for?

00:27:13   So, I don't wanna make this long,

00:27:17   and I don't wanna be super specific

00:27:18   because I'm doing something that's not shady,

00:27:20   but not entirely on the up and up, but--

00:27:23   - Are you swizzling something?

00:27:24   - No, I'm not swizzling, no, no, no, no.

00:27:25   But I needed to, let's just say I needed

00:27:29   to walk the responder chain,

00:27:30   and that is something that's considerably easier to do

00:27:34   in the way in which I was trying to do it

00:27:36   with some of the other things that were happening around it

00:27:38   in Objective-C than it was in Swift.

00:27:41   And you can do this in Swift, it's fine,

00:27:43   like please don't write me, it's totally fine.

00:27:46   I'm not upset really that it happened,

00:27:48   but it was funny having to write Objective-C

00:27:50   for the first time in a long time

00:27:51   and remembering that like, oh, semicolons are a thing.

00:27:54   I forgot about that, you know?

00:27:56   So yeah, so anyway, but all in all,

00:27:59   I'm pleased with the app.

00:28:00   There's definitely problems with it.

00:28:02   Apparently 25 minutes worth of problems with it

00:28:03   if you're Marco Arment,

00:28:04   but there's definitely problems with it.

00:28:07   I think it's good and I think it's getting better

00:28:10   and that pleases me, but sales have been meh,

00:28:14   and that's pretty disheartening.

00:28:15   So you win some, you lose some.

00:28:18   - I still don't know how to find exactly the people

00:28:21   who use this app for you.

00:28:23   - That's the crux of the issue, isn't it?

00:28:25   - Right, what's good is that you have a lot more groups

00:28:27   that you can target here.

00:28:29   This is something that I've had to learn so many times.

00:28:32   I really don't know how to reach people

00:28:36   I'm not already reaching.

00:28:38   I never have been good at this with my own apps.

00:28:40   If you look at the things I've made,

00:28:42   the things that have succeeded are things

00:28:44   that appeal to the audience I already have.

00:28:47   The things that have not succeeded

00:28:49   are when I try to appeal to other groups.

00:28:51   Like when I make stuff that is not really that useful

00:28:54   to a lot of tech nerds, I tend not to succeed.

00:28:58   I don't know how to reach out to this audience.

00:29:00   I have no idea.

00:29:01   I've tried a couple of, you know,

00:29:03   like ads and things here and there,

00:29:04   but not, never at a large scale,

00:29:06   and never like to a super targeted group,

00:29:08   never doing things like going on Facebook or Google

00:29:11   and like buying really targeted demographic kind of stuff.

00:29:14   I've never done any of that stuff.

00:29:15   But that is probably something to look at.

00:29:19   How you might feel about that, that's a different story

00:29:21   and I certainly have my feelings about that kind of stuff

00:29:23   and that's one of the reasons I haven't done it.

00:29:25   But I've also benefited from my businesses

00:29:29   mostly targeting the audience that I already have

00:29:33   and that I can already reach.

00:29:35   I'm really good at making tools for nerds.

00:29:37   Ultimately, and this isn't gonna help you

00:29:40   with this particular problem,

00:29:41   but ultimately, I think if you wanna really blow out

00:29:45   your indie app career, start making tools for nerds like you.

00:29:49   - Yeah, yeah. - Look at this stuff

00:29:51   people ask you about all the time.

00:29:52   Make a friend for FFmpeg to do a bunch of common stuff.

00:29:55   There's so many apps that are basically that.

00:29:57   (laughing)

00:29:58   That's the kind of thing you could do.

00:30:00   Make something that makes people's synologies more useful.

00:30:05   You know, like make something that is really good

00:30:07   that integrates with Plex.

00:30:08   Like the things that you're already a big nerd about,

00:30:11   I feel like you would at least have a better chance

00:30:13   of selling your existing audience on that kind of stuff

00:30:16   and you get more people that way.

00:30:17   'Cause when you're making an app that's trying to reach out

00:30:20   to parents with certain needs,

00:30:22   that's some of the people who listen to our show,

00:30:24   that's some of your existing audience,

00:30:26   that's some of your blog audience,

00:30:27   but it's not gonna be as much of that audience

00:30:30   as something that appeals to nerds who run FFmpeg.

00:30:34   It's a very, very different market.

00:30:36   And again, I'm only speaking from experience here,

00:30:38   that I've only succeeded when I've targeted nerds

00:30:41   in a broad way, and I have not succeeded

00:30:44   when I've tried to step out of that.

00:30:46   - I take what you're saying, and honestly,

00:30:48   there have been a couple either FFmpeg

00:30:51   or FFmpeg adjacent things that I've been really,

00:30:53   really kind of thinking about.

00:30:55   Part of the reason that I haven't done it

00:30:57   is because I don't have anything against

00:30:59   being a Mac developer, but I have no interest in learning AppKit, which I know is like blasphemy

00:31:07   for many of our friends, but I just, I don't. I just don't have any interest in it. And

00:31:11   going catalyst is an option, but it's got its own challenges. Doing SwiftUI is an option,

00:31:17   but it's got its own challenges. And then the other thing, again, I take your point, but

00:31:23   like if you're a nerd who knows enough to know what FFmpeg is, are you going to pay like 20, 30,

00:31:29   40, 50 bucks for what is effectively just a GUI

00:31:31   in front of FFmpeg, you know what I mean?

00:31:33   Like, why wouldn't you just-- - I have, people do.

00:31:35   - I have.

00:31:35   - There's like 20 different apps out there that are that.

00:31:38   - I just used one recently.

00:31:39   I was using, what was I using?

00:31:41   I think Permute is just an FFmpeg front end.

00:31:43   A lot of my, I think a lot of my player apps

00:31:47   are FFmpeg front ends.

00:31:48   I find out when you look in the packages

00:31:49   and you see they bundle their own copy of FFmpeg

00:31:51   or some of them that I have in the preferences window

00:31:53   ask you to locate your copy of FFmpeg

00:31:55   and then you realize how many of these apps

00:31:56   are just front ends or FFmpeg.

00:31:58   Yeah, and I use them because I don't want to have to Google

00:32:01   for the command line every time.

00:32:02   I just wanna use a Google app.

00:32:04   - Yeah, fair.

00:32:05   I don't know, it's worth thinking about.

00:32:07   I think for now, my intention is to get rid of some

00:32:12   of the things that bother me about masquerade,

00:32:15   which is generally speaking things that bother other people

00:32:17   about masquerade, like for example,

00:32:18   not having a share extension.

00:32:20   But I'd like to spend another month or two

00:32:23   trying to get through those.

00:32:24   And I feel like I've been making pretty quick progress

00:32:25   of a lot of them.

00:32:27   And then once that's done,

00:32:30   I think I might spend a little time

00:32:33   spit polishing "Peak of You."

00:32:34   We should talk about that in another episode,

00:32:36   'cause I don't know if it's worth my time or not,

00:32:37   but I feel like a little spit shine would be nice.

00:32:40   And then I'm not sure what's coming next,

00:32:41   to be honest with you.

00:32:42   I've really thought about doing just my own spin

00:32:45   on an FFmpeg front end like you've described.

00:32:48   I really, really, really wanna make a nicer way

00:32:52   to put chapters into videos,

00:32:54   which is like an esoteric part of an esoteric market,

00:32:58   but the options that exist today I'm not in love with.

00:33:00   And so I'm really considering doing something like that.

00:33:03   For all I know, maybe both of these things

00:33:04   could be the same app, I don't know.

00:33:06   But one way or another,

00:33:08   I don't know what's coming after Masquerade.

00:33:10   But, oh, and to go back a step,

00:33:12   I have thought very hard,

00:33:14   and I don't know if I'm gonna do it,

00:33:16   but I've thought very hard about taking the meager earnings

00:33:18   that Masquerade has already got

00:33:20   and pumping a lot of that into advertising for it.

00:33:25   And I don't know exactly what that would look like.

00:33:27   I don't know, honestly, I don't know really anything

00:33:30   about how to pay for people, to pay for advertising

00:33:34   that will hopefully get people to not only install your app,

00:33:36   but convert and purchase the IAP.

00:33:39   I don't know what I'm gonna do.

00:33:40   I think I'm going to try it at least a little bit.

00:33:43   I don't know if that means Instagram.

00:33:44   I don't know if that means Facebook.

00:33:45   If I'm smart, it probably means Facebook,

00:33:47   as gross as that is.

00:33:48   But I think I'm gonna at least give it a shot.

00:33:51   - Honestly, I would go Instagram.

00:33:53   'Cause you figure like that's where people are.

00:33:55   You know, like you could show a picture

00:33:57   with the emoji already on it as the ad.

00:34:00   - But at that point I'm asking you to do something

00:34:02   that Instagram already does, right?

00:34:04   So, or you know, to pay for something

00:34:06   that Instagram already does.

00:34:07   I don't know, again, I'm happy to talk about this

00:34:10   in a general sense.

00:34:10   I think in the interest of time,

00:34:11   since we have a lot more to cover,

00:34:12   I think we should put it,

00:34:14   we should put it in the parking lot for now.

00:34:16   but we can put in parking lot and circle back later.

00:34:19   But I don't know what I'm gonna do about this,

00:34:23   but if there's interest both with you two

00:34:26   and with the listener for me talking through this

00:34:28   as I work through it over a month or two from now,

00:34:32   then I'm certainly happy to bring it to the show

00:34:33   and talk it over.

00:34:34   But I feel like my gut sitting here tonight

00:34:36   is that I think a little bit of Facebook

00:34:38   and maybe Instagram advertising is worth exploring.

00:34:41   And maybe I put 10% of what I've earned

00:34:46   from Masquerade into it, which is frustratingly

00:34:49   not 30 million dollars, which is what I was hoping for,

00:34:51   but certainly did not expect.

00:34:54   But put 10% of what I've earned into it

00:34:56   and see if I can get any traction from it.

00:34:58   And I don't know, we'll see what happens.

00:35:00   But I appreciate anyone who has bought it for sure.

00:35:04   I appreciate anyone who has told friends

00:35:06   or family about it, doubly sure.

00:35:09   And if you haven't checked it out, I would encourage it.

00:35:11   And not only is it, I think it's pretty good today

00:35:13   and it's certainly gonna get better.

00:35:15   and after I weep from all the feedback

00:35:17   that Marco's given me, I will be making

00:35:19   presumably many of the changes that he's suggested

00:35:21   and hopefully it'll get better still.

00:35:24   - I will agree with slightly that it's going to be

00:35:26   a lot of removal of some text.

00:35:28   - Well, that is not surprising.

00:35:30   - Little less text than you have,

00:35:31   but not a lot less, still Casey, still very Casey.

00:35:35   - Gotta get that file size down,

00:35:36   gotta remove those characters.

00:35:37   - Yeah, I actually am blowing out the file size

00:35:41   ever so slightly, I think it's only like two or three megs

00:35:43   to download right now, but I'm adding a photo of me,

00:35:48   a small photo of me in it because, oh, one of the features

00:35:50   I'm adding in the forthcoming version is you can have like

00:35:53   a sort of effectively a multiplier on how big the emoji is

00:35:58   once it's put on a face.

00:35:59   So if you think about the way this works is, you know,

00:36:01   I get from an API, oh, the face is at such and such

00:36:04   rectangle, well, you have the option coming up,

00:36:07   you will have the option of saying, well, make that rectangle

00:36:10   120% bigger than it normally is, you know,

00:36:12   of the size that the API gave me,

00:36:14   so you have a better likelihood of it covering

00:36:17   the whole head rather than just the face.

00:36:19   Well, in order to do that, I put a picture of me in there,

00:36:22   and then you can slide left and right

00:36:24   to make the emoji bigger or smaller over my face.

00:36:27   So that's in, I don't know if you can get it in TestFlight

00:36:31   right this minute, but as soon as Apple gets around

00:36:33   to testing the TestFlight version, you can get it,

00:36:36   'cause it's pending, it's waiting on Apple.

00:36:38   And so I added a picture of me,

00:36:39   that was like a meg in total across all three sizes.

00:36:43   And then the welcome screen, the image, the icon,

00:36:48   the masquerade icon at the top,

00:36:50   annoyingly, even for the 13 Pro Max,

00:36:53   the biggest icon that Apple packages within the bundle

00:36:57   of their own volition is like 72 by 72 at 2X

00:37:00   or something like that.

00:37:00   It's like an iPad size at 2X.

00:37:03   And I felt guilty adding another copy of the same thing

00:37:06   to the bundle in order to get a more retina-friendly

00:37:09   version of the icon and I've been called on it enough times that I've decided, you

00:37:13   know, what's the real difference between like a 4 meg app and a 5 meg app

00:37:17   or whatever. So I've added another copy of the masquerade

00:37:21   icon so it looks a little cleaner on the landing page. So it's getting a little

00:37:24   bit bigger I'm sad to say, but I guess Marco is gonna help me offset that.

00:37:27   That's what it is. I'm offsetting it. You know, just like you offset caloric

00:37:31   intake by exercise. Well Marco's giving me my exercise, if you will, so I can

00:37:35   offset the bloat of my app.

00:37:37   There you go.

00:37:38   So it's a team effort.

00:37:40   - I'll save you tens of bytes.

00:37:42   - Tens of bytes, I tell you.

00:37:44   All right, well, again, I'm not trying to shut down

00:37:47   the conversation on a general level.

00:37:48   I think we should move on for today,

00:37:49   but if listeners or if you two are interested

00:37:53   in anything that's going on,

00:37:54   I'm happy to talk about it in future episodes.

00:37:55   - I am.

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00:39:36   Thank you so much to Linode for being an awesome web host

00:39:38   and for sponsoring our show.

00:39:40   [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:39:43   And now, this is the part where I go to sleep for a little while.

00:39:47   Let's talk about the Mac Pro.

00:39:49   It's been a little bit of an emotional roller coaster after the event.

00:39:52   I mean, I talked through this in the last episode,

00:39:54   but the things they said in the event could lead to various futures that would not make

00:40:01   me particularly happy or that don't make a lot of even sense to me.

00:40:05   So in one of my emotional low points since last week, I was thinking about a future ARM-based

00:40:14   Mac Pro that would be in keeping with everything Apple has said and everything that we know,

00:40:21   And it would also be extremely confusing and disappointing.

00:40:24   And it's this.

00:40:25   And I mentioned some of this in the last show,

00:40:27   but putting it all together after the show,

00:40:29   it's like, they could do this.

00:40:30   And it would fit with what they said.

00:40:33   So first is that it would just have the M1 Ultra in it.

00:40:36   That would fit with what they said,

00:40:37   because what they said is this is the last M1 chip, right?

00:40:41   And they also seem to be saying that their transition

00:40:45   is gonna complete more or less on schedule.

00:40:47   And it seems kind of unlikely that there's going to be

00:40:50   gigantic 40 core m2 based chip ready during that schedule again who knows but

00:40:55   it just seems unlikely at this point so yeah you could just have the m1 ultra

00:40:59   why is that disappointing well we've already got a computer with the m1 ultra

00:41:03   and it's called the Mac studio and you're gonna release a Mac Pro and it's

00:41:06   got the exact same chip in it that's not very pro it's like okay well then maybe

00:41:10   so let's flush out the rest of this machine I have PCI slots but in keeping

00:41:16   with Marcos pessimism, you have PCI slots,

00:41:18   but you can't put GPUs in them.

00:41:19   So the PCI slots would just be there for other things.

00:41:23   You can do lots of stuff with PCI slots,

00:41:25   but if you can't put GPUs in them, it's weird.

00:41:28   And of course, if it's got an M1 Ultra in it,

00:41:30   that means the max RAM is 128 gigs,

00:41:32   'cause that's the maximum of the M1 Ultra.

00:41:35   And then if it's the Mac Pro and not the Mac Studio,

00:41:38   it would probably be more expensive,

00:41:39   'cause it's the top-end machine.

00:41:41   and that Mac Pro, M1 Ultra only, max 128 gigs of RAM,

00:41:46   PCI slots with no GPU support,

00:41:48   bigger and more expensive than a Mac Studio,

00:41:50   that's not a good Mac Pro.

00:41:52   This is kind of a sad Mac Pro.

00:41:55   And it's a nonsensical, confusing Mac Pro

00:41:57   because how would Apple even advertise that Mac Pro?

00:42:01   Here's our new most powerful computer.

00:42:04   Buy this one for more money than this other one

00:42:08   and do everything at exactly the same speed

00:42:13   because it has the same system on the chip,

00:42:15   the same amount of RAM, no more GPU power,

00:42:18   but I guess you can put internal SSDs and stuff.

00:42:22   Or audio interface cards, which people tell me

00:42:25   they aren't even a thing anymore, but who knows?

00:42:28   That would be super disappointing,

00:42:29   and yet it would fit with all available information.

00:42:32   And so I was thinking about that and thinking,

00:42:34   God, I hope they don't do that.

00:42:35   And that led me down to dig myself out of that

00:42:38   sort of pit of despair of this just,

00:42:40   because what I'm basically describing is,

00:42:42   it's a Mac Studio, but bigger and more expensive

00:42:45   with card slots that are useless to everybody.

00:42:47   Almost everybody.

00:42:48   Card slots that are useless to almost everybody,

00:42:50   because honestly, what goes in the card slots?

00:42:52   Like afterburner card, which you don't need anymore

00:42:54   because they have that stuff on the system on a chip.

00:42:57   Tons of GPUs, if you look at what did Apple sell you

00:42:59   that you can put in those slots in the Mac Pro?

00:43:02   They sell tons of GPUs.

00:43:03   You can put four giant GPUs and everybody

00:43:05   to add two dual cards with the huge amounts of,

00:43:07   Like that's what Apple sells you to put in there.

00:43:09   And you can put other stuff in there like PCI,

00:43:12   PCI SSD cards, U.S. cards with more USB slots in them,

00:43:16   the aforementioned mythical audio interface cards.

00:43:20   There are other things you can put in there,

00:43:21   but GPUs are one of the big ones.

00:43:23   So to get myself out of this funk,

00:43:25   I said this, that can't be it.

00:43:26   There's gotta be something more,

00:43:29   there's gotta be something more to the Mac Pro.

00:43:32   And I was trying to convince myself

00:43:33   that maybe like a big M2 will be ready.

00:43:35   'cause the low end M2s will come out around

00:43:38   the middle of the year with the new MacBook Air

00:43:40   and maybe the new Mac Mini will have an M2

00:43:44   and then new MacBook Pros maybe.

00:43:46   So maybe by the end of the year, maybe they will have an M2.

00:43:48   I just couldn't convince myself.

00:43:49   I couldn't convince myself that by the end of this year,

00:43:51   there's gonna be like a 40 core M2 base chip.

00:43:54   I may be wrong.

00:43:54   Again, all of my expectations are trained

00:43:57   based on like public Intel roadmaps

00:43:59   and the history and stuff like that,

00:44:00   but it just seems less likely to me.

00:44:03   So I was looking for something,

00:44:04   anything to make me feel better about the possibility of a Mac Pro that isn't stupid.

00:44:11   And luckily I was saved by another good video from Max Tech, as a YouTube video, we'll put

00:44:15   it in the show notes.

00:44:18   And it had a bunch of information.

00:44:19   Some of it was old that I thought was interesting and some of it was like possibly leading us

00:44:24   to some scenario where we could have a better Mac Pro.

00:44:29   So the first bit of older info is a patent that we'll put a link to in the show notes.

00:44:33   I couldn't find a good link for the patents.

00:44:35   I'm sure there's like a .gov site that has patents on it,

00:44:37   but I ended up going to patents.google.com

00:44:39   'cause they had reasonable URLs

00:44:40   and it was easy to search, surprise.

00:44:42   So this is a patent describing how the M1 Pro and Max

00:44:47   and Ultra work, like chips we already know about.

00:44:53   And if my/max text understanding of this patent is correct,

00:44:57   there's one wrinkle to what we have discussed in the past.

00:45:01   So there's a photo associated with the patent.

00:45:04   You'll be able to look at it if you follow the link.

00:45:06   And it's like a big silicon wafer, which is a circle.

00:45:09   And then it's got little squares cut out.

00:45:11   And each one of those squares is basically jade seed dye.

00:45:14   And it shows how they'll print as many of those squares

00:45:18   as they can fit in the circle,

00:45:20   which is kind of a shame that silicon wafers are a circle.

00:45:22   I'm sure there's some important reason

00:45:23   they are having to do with manufacturability,

00:45:25   but the chips aren't circles,

00:45:25   so there's lots of wasted space.

00:45:26   But anyway, you got all these little squares.

00:45:29   And what they do with them is the way they get an ultra

00:45:33   is the two Jade Sea dyes that are next to each other

00:45:38   have to both be working.

00:45:40   So to get an ultra with all the stuff working,

00:45:42   it's not just that you need two maxes

00:45:44   with all the stuff working,

00:45:45   you need two maxes that were next to each other

00:45:48   on the wafer.

00:45:49   So apparently the interposer thing,

00:45:51   like they have to be next to each other.

00:45:52   - Wait, so does the interposer,

00:45:54   is the interposer being printed between all of them?

00:45:57   - I don't know the details,

00:45:58   So my understanding is what they're saying in the patent

00:46:01   that even if it's a second process or a second pass

00:46:04   or a third pass or whatever,

00:46:05   but they do actually have to be next to each other.

00:46:07   You can't just take these two random ones.

00:46:09   Like the video shows these two little things coming together

00:46:11   and being weaved together,

00:46:11   but that's just fanciful graphics things.

00:46:14   They have to actually be next to it.

00:46:15   Maybe they do try to print it between all of them,

00:46:17   or maybe they just look at which ones are good

00:46:20   and then print it on the ones that are good.

00:46:21   But either way, that explains a little bit

00:46:23   of why it's so much more expensive

00:46:25   to get an ultra with everything working on it,

00:46:30   because it's not just enough to have two maxes

00:46:32   with all the parts working.

00:46:33   They have to be two maxes that happen to be next to each other

00:46:35   and the odds of that are a lot lower.

00:46:36   You can look at this little diagram and do the math

00:46:38   if you're good at probability and figure out,

00:46:40   percentage-wise, how much less likely that is to happen.

00:46:43   And then of course, if you just have one of the squares

00:46:46   where everything works, that's a max where everything works.

00:46:48   If you get a square where only some of the stuff works,

00:46:49   that's a max with some cores missing.

00:46:51   And if you get a square with a whole bunch of stuff

00:46:52   that's screwed up, in theory, that's a pro

00:46:55   where they just remove the bottom part of it

00:46:57   and you don't even, I don't know if that's true.

00:46:58   I think they might print the pro separately,

00:46:59   but I might be wrong about that.

00:47:01   But either way, this was enlightening.

00:47:03   It doesn't make me feel that much better

00:47:05   about the increase in cost.

00:47:06   Like, oh, if I want all the GPU cores working,

00:47:09   it's an extra $1000, but I do have a little bit

00:47:11   more sympathy for the yields they must be getting.

00:47:13   But the other thing, looking at this,

00:47:15   is how clever the system is for cost control,

00:47:18   where you design one thing, you print it the best you can,

00:47:22   and then every single wafer, you get X number of maxes,

00:47:25   X number of pros, and X number of ultras,

00:47:28   and there's very little waste, right?

00:47:30   You don't have to throw anything out,

00:47:31   because if you have two ultras

00:47:32   and some part of it's screwed up,

00:47:34   maybe that's two maxes, maybe that's one max

00:47:36   with some stuff missing in a pro.

00:47:38   Every square on it, you're trying to get the best

00:47:41   that you can possibly get out of it.

00:47:42   And if you win the ultra lottery

00:47:43   and a bunch of ultras come out of a wafer, great,

00:47:45   but if not, you don't have to throw a lot of stuff away.

00:47:49   So I thought that was interesting.

00:47:50   So second patent vaguely related to that,

00:47:52   like this one as well, is,

00:47:55   again, I don't understand enough this to know,

00:47:57   Max Tech seemed confident in their interpretation.

00:47:59   I read it and my eyes glazed over.

00:48:01   I mean, jeez, I should make Casey,

00:48:03   to keep Casey awake, I should make him read this.

00:48:05   Can you, Casey, can you please read the highlighted portion

00:48:07   and see if this makes any sense to you whatsoever?

00:48:11   - What?

00:48:12   Sorry, did you need something?

00:48:13   - Yes.

00:48:14   - A communication path that travels up and down

00:48:15   between the first package level and the second package level

00:48:17   wherein a first group of one or more dies

00:48:19   and the first plurality of dies.

00:48:21   Function is both functional dies and stitching devices

00:48:25   for two or more of the second plurality of dies

00:48:28   and a second group of one or more dies.

00:48:30   And the second plurality of dies,

00:48:31   function is both functional dies and stitching devices

00:48:33   for two or more of the first plurality of dies.

00:48:36   I would not have been able to make heads or tails of this,

00:48:38   but I did do my research and I watched the Max Tech video

00:48:41   and it was very good.

00:48:42   And what Max Tech is saying, or their theory is,

00:48:47   you take two ultra, or you take one ultra,

00:48:50   which is itself two maxes,

00:48:52   and then below it, you put a second ultra.

00:48:56   So you have a total of four,

00:48:57   this is sounding familiar,

00:48:59   two above, two below.

00:49:00   What's better than 2D?

00:49:01   3D, baby.

00:49:03   And so the theory is that they would,

00:49:06   they would be able to get around some of the problems

00:49:10   of things being physically distant from each other.

00:49:12   So to back up a half step,

00:49:14   let's say you had four M1 maxes laid in a row,

00:49:18   serially, if you will,

00:49:19   if you have to get data from the leftmost one

00:49:22   to the rightmost one, that actually takes some time

00:49:25   and you would potentially have to go via the other ones

00:49:28   to get that data across through all these different ties.

00:49:33   So what they're saying is,

00:49:34   and what MaxTech is theorizing is,

00:49:36   well, if we put them two on top of two,

00:49:38   then maybe we could make these

00:49:40   physically proximally closer

00:49:43   and we can stitch them together in such a way

00:49:47   that we get a Jade, what was it,

00:49:49   4C die or something like that.

00:49:51   So it's a theory and it does make sense

00:49:54   to someone who does know a little bit about electronics,

00:49:58   but nothing about chip design.

00:49:59   So it's possible.

00:50:02   - Yeah, I mean, part of the problem with the Jade C die

00:50:05   is as far as we're aware of that whole,

00:50:06   like the place where the interposer is,

00:50:08   that's just on one edge.

00:50:10   There's other stuff on the other edges

00:50:11   that do other important things, right?

00:50:13   So if you try to put four of these down, if you just take an ultra and it's got the interposer

00:50:18   between them, where do you put the second ultra?

00:50:20   If you put it alongside, then it's not connected to the first ultra, right?

00:50:24   If you put it underneath, then the interposers are on top of each other.

00:50:27   And this patent is about connections made from one thing downwards to another.

00:50:32   All this weird patent language with plurality of dies and the weird language you have to

00:50:36   do, it's like Li Li is mixed with techno stuff.

00:50:39   If you ever read a patent, it doesn't read like a normal thing.

00:50:42   And I'm sure all that language is there for some important historical reason that this

00:50:46   is the way you have to do it for it to be well understood in the world of patents because

00:50:51   they use a certain language to do stuff.

00:50:53   But it just makes it confusing to try to read and figure what they're talking about.

00:50:57   Now tons of chips that Apple makes have various 3D layers and stacking like the TSMC makes

00:51:03   or whatever.

00:51:04   So that's not a new thing.

00:51:05   And it could be that this whole patent is just talking about that and has nothing to

00:51:08   do with taking two ultras and putting them on top of each other is just yet another system

00:51:11   for making layered integrated circuits, I don't know enough to know. But the reason I bring this

00:51:17   up is the idea that you could have two ultras that talk to each other relies on solving the problem

00:51:23   of "yeah, but how?" and the MaxTech video where I was thinking of letting them end to end, that

00:51:27   doesn't make any sense because there's nothing on the other ends to talk to each other at all.

00:51:32   Forget about the distance, which is a whole separate issue. There's nothing there to connect

00:51:37   or talk as far as I'm aware.

00:51:39   So it would have to be one on top of the other

00:51:41   or something slightly different.

00:51:43   But anyway, that would make a Mac Pro that is not stupid

00:51:48   because hey, it's two M1 Ultras

00:51:51   and that's twice as much stuff

00:51:52   and obviously you'd charge way more money for that

00:51:55   but it would also be able to do twice as much stuff

00:51:57   if you have a workload that can use all its execution units.

00:51:59   So that would be great.

00:52:00   That would make me feel a lot better

00:52:01   even if it still didn't use external GPUs, right?

00:52:04   Now, the final bit here related to this,

00:52:07   We're getting increasingly sketchily sourced rumors, right?

00:52:10   This is from Manjin Boo, I think this was on Twitter.

00:52:14   Yeah, I don't know this person's rumor history or whatever.

00:52:19   But the tweet says, "Based on what my resource reports,

00:52:22   "here is some official information on the new Mac Pro 2022.

00:52:26   "This is the bridge that connects two and one ultra together

00:52:29   "and will be found in the new 2022 Mac Pro."

00:52:32   And there's an image in the tweet that you can look,

00:52:35   hopefully the tweet is still up.

00:52:36   So what the image is showing is

00:52:40   like a blueprint-ish looking diagram.

00:52:43   In the upper right corner,

00:52:44   there is a diagram that clearly looks like two M1 ultras

00:52:49   next to each other, side by side,

00:52:51   with a strip going down in the middle

00:52:53   where I guess that's where the magic happens,

00:52:55   where somehow there's this big vertical strip between them

00:52:58   that lets them talk to each other.

00:53:00   How?

00:53:01   I don't know, but there's a bunch of this,

00:53:03   The diagram's talking about daisy XL sub zero,

00:53:06   daisy XL sub two, and some other texts explaining

00:53:11   that daisy is the interconnect between the things.

00:53:13   It's basically saying, we can put them side by side,

00:53:16   and we'll put a strip of this magic stuff here,

00:53:18   and the magic stuff makes them talk to each other.

00:53:19   Et voila, you've got a four square M1 Ultra X2.

00:53:24   And according to this, the processor name is Redfern,

00:53:29   and it's coming in Mac Pros this September.

00:53:31   So there's a timeline, there's a code name,

00:53:34   there's a diagram with a topology.

00:53:36   It will be easy to assess which one of these rumors

00:53:40   is correct because eventually a Mac Pro will come out.

00:53:43   And the first thing to look at is,

00:53:44   does it have more in it than an M1 Ultra?

00:53:46   Like does it have two M1 Ultras in it, right?

00:53:49   If it doesn't, then everyone will be sad.

00:53:51   If it does have two M1 Ultras,

00:53:53   how are they physically laid out?

00:53:55   Are they on top of each other or are they side by side?

00:53:57   And that will sort of let us know

00:54:01   which one of these people was closer to reality.

00:54:03   But I, and the reason I did all this digging,

00:54:05   'cause I just wanna believe that there's gonna be

00:54:07   two M1 Ultras in there.

00:54:08   'Cause M1 Ultra makes sense,

00:54:11   two M1 Ultras make sense to me,

00:54:12   and Apple can paper over it by saying,

00:54:16   we didn't lie when we said this was the last M1 chip,

00:54:18   it really is, and now you have two of them,

00:54:20   two of the, but.

00:54:22   - Yeah, that's exactly what I was gonna say,

00:54:24   and I don't recall if we talked about this last episode,

00:54:26   but it is not entirely unreasonable for them to say,

00:54:29   look, we told you that what makes an M1 Ultra so ultra and amazing is that it is perceived

00:54:36   to be one chip by the operating system and so on and so forth. Well, this, you know,

00:54:42   M1 Ultra, Mega, Max, you know, Voltron, whatever, this is two, this is two chips. So we didn't

00:54:50   lie. It's two chips. It's perceived to the OS as two chips. But you know, we've been

00:54:55   doing this on and off for years. So it's, it's something we're used to. And now it's

00:54:59   It's almost like having two whole computers in one.

00:55:00   And I don't think that's necessarily unreasonable,

00:55:04   especially if, like I said,

00:55:06   this is perceived by the operating system

00:55:07   as being two different processors.

00:55:09   - Well, you still got the NAMA thing, though.

00:55:11   So you can say this is two different processors.

00:55:13   We made dual processor computers before.

00:55:15   That's not a big deal.

00:55:17   At no point did each one of those processors

00:55:19   have its own private pool of memory that was attached to it.

00:55:23   And this diagram, by the way, doesn't address that.

00:55:25   The second diagram that shows the two M1 ultras

00:55:27   right next to each other,

00:55:28   Where's the RAM in that picture?

00:55:30   Because if you look at an actual M1 Ultra,

00:55:32   it's not just the two maxes attached to each other,

00:55:35   it's two maxes attached to each other,

00:55:37   flanked on both sides by RAM chips.

00:55:39   Where are the RAM chips in this diagram?

00:55:41   Where did they go?

00:55:42   'Cause this looks like it would be addressable as one chip

00:55:44   and the RAM would be around it or something.

00:55:45   And then how can Apple get it,

00:55:47   we were calling that two M1 Ultras?

00:55:49   When it, it's really confusing and upsetting to me

00:55:54   and I don't know how this is gonna turn out.

00:55:56   What it's making me think is,

00:55:58   is no matter how this turns out,

00:56:00   that it's either gonna be a crappy computer

00:56:02   that I don't wanna buy,

00:56:03   or it's gonna be something that's just too much money

00:56:06   and I'm gonna end up getting a MacStudio.

00:56:09   - I mean, so the RAM thing I think might help

00:56:14   steer this one way or the other,

00:56:15   because what if,

00:56:18   I wouldn't say it wouldn't have unified RAM,

00:56:21   but what if it has RAM slots?

00:56:23   Because I, you know, looking at the gap

00:56:27   between the current Mac Pro and the Mac Studio.

00:56:31   In certain areas, the Mac Studio is already way past it.

00:56:34   In certain areas, the Mac Studio can't compete with it yet.

00:56:38   Like it doesn't, it can't reach those levels.

00:56:41   And I think the area that has the biggest discrepancy

00:56:44   is not GPU performance, it's the RAM ceiling.

00:56:48   And you know, the current Mac Pro has a RAM ceiling

00:56:49   of 1.5 terabytes, right, isn't that right?

00:56:52   The Mac Studio maxes out at 128 gigs.

00:56:55   - Mm-hmm.

00:56:57   - That's a pretty big gap.

00:57:00   And I can't imagine that by going from two dies to four,

00:57:05   we would somehow multiply the RAM ceiling by 10.

00:57:11   I don't see how that works with keeping everything

00:57:15   made the same way that it's been made.

00:57:17   Now, I am as big a skeptic as they come

00:57:22   about the next Mac Pro being super expandable.

00:57:25   You know, I don't think there's going to be a lot of, you know, slots or GPU, like I it

00:57:31   would be surprising to me if there was ever the support for a slotted GPU, for instance,

00:57:37   I don't think that's going to happen. However, I do think there might be RAM slots, because

00:57:43   I don't see how they keep the same memory packaging strategy with all the other M1 family

00:57:51   while replacing the Intel Mac Pro

00:57:53   without having severe ramifications for its use

00:57:57   in things like scientific computing,

00:57:59   which is, I don't know how big this market is,

00:58:01   but among people who buy the current ridiculous

00:58:04   Intel Mac Pro, that is some part of that group,

00:58:08   and that's some part that, look,

00:58:09   if you need a terabyte of RAM,

00:58:11   or even just more than 128 gigs of RAM in a Mac,

00:58:15   right now you have no option except that Mac Pro,

00:58:18   and to get rid of that option in the future,

00:58:20   I think without having something that could replace,

00:58:23   that could even come close to that ceiling of resources

00:58:27   in this one area, I think that would be kind of crappy

00:58:31   for the lineup and for the specialty needs that need that.

00:58:36   So I think we are very likely to see something different

00:58:41   about the next Mac Pro that does not follow

00:58:44   the restrictions of the other MX series up to this point.

00:58:49   to this point.

00:58:50   And I think RAM slots are the most likely thing to see.

00:58:53   That again, I'm not super optimistic about card slots,

00:58:58   especially not for GPUs.

00:59:00   As you mentioned, the various options

00:59:04   for whether it has card slots or not,

00:59:05   one of them doesn't have card slots at all.

00:59:08   Honestly, I think that's the most likely.

00:59:10   And one of them is it has card slots

00:59:11   that don't support GPUs.

00:59:13   I think that's second most likely.

00:59:15   And then I think the least likely is the support GPUs

00:59:19   like we have them now. I don't see that happening. But I do think that, you know, what we have

00:59:26   in terms of RAM with the M1s, I don't see how we reach one and a half terabytes with the current

00:59:34   architecture unless the Mac Pro version of it supports socketed RAM. Now, I think they could

00:59:40   still do unified RAM because the RAM that is next to the package in the M1 or in package, I guess,

00:59:47   or whatever it is, that's not some like magical RAM type

00:59:50   that doesn't exist in the rest of the PC world.

00:59:52   Isn't it just like DDR5 something, whatever?

00:59:54   - No, it's HBM2 or something.

00:59:56   I think it's the high bandwidth memory.

00:59:58   Like it is, that's the thing.

01:00:00   Like a lot of the amazing performance of the M1 series

01:00:03   has to do with that unified RAM.

01:00:05   It is very fast, it is very close,

01:00:07   and obviously it's shared between the CPU and the GPU.

01:00:12   As soon as you go to external pools of it,

01:00:15   it gets more distant, physically speaking,

01:00:17   and metaphorically speaking, the bandwidth goes down

01:00:20   or becomes much more expensive

01:00:21   to try to maintain the same bandwidth,

01:00:23   because as they said in the thing,

01:00:24   like 800 gigabytes per second is like 10 times a high-end PC

01:00:28   and I think you lose a lot of the performance.

01:00:31   Like, I mean, what I keep thinking about this machine is,

01:00:33   Apple has to say something to sell it.

01:00:35   They have to say, here's this machine,

01:00:36   here's why you should buy it.

01:00:37   And they've made their job hard

01:00:38   by putting out the Mac Studio,

01:00:40   because to sell this machine

01:00:42   that presumably will be more expensive than the Mac Studio,

01:00:46   It has to do something better than the Mac Studio.

01:00:49   Now you mentioned the RAM ceiling.

01:00:50   Let's say it has slots and it has a bigger RAM ceiling on it.

01:00:54   Are there applications that Apple cares about

01:00:57   or would mention in an advertisement

01:00:58   or are common enough where they would say,

01:01:01   you couldn't do this on a Mac Studio

01:01:02   because it won't fit in RAM, but on this machine

01:01:04   it will because we can have 768 gigs of RAM or whatever.

01:01:08   Because I don't think many people

01:01:09   are buying the 1.5 terabyte except for a few rare instances.

01:01:12   But I think there are use cases that won't fit in 128,

01:01:16   but I think that the number tails off real fast

01:01:19   when you go up to 256 or maybe even 512.

01:01:21   Because I think you're mostly limited

01:01:25   for the RAM on these systematic chips

01:01:26   by the max size of that little square chip

01:01:29   you can put in there.

01:01:30   And that does go up over time.

01:01:32   So even though you can only fit 128 around it now

01:01:34   using the best available little RAM chippy thing

01:01:36   that fits in the thing, eventually that number might double.

01:01:39   Right, so I am wondering,

01:01:42   I don't think they would sacrifice memory bandwidth

01:01:47   and latency for capacity unless there was some use case

01:01:52   that we already know about where capacity is super important

01:01:55   because again, they have to advertise this somehow.

01:01:57   And I think that machine that you described

01:01:58   with external RAM plots would do almost everything worse

01:02:01   than the Mac Studio.

01:02:02   - I don't know, I mean, it wouldn't,

01:02:04   again, I haven't followed like what the different

01:02:06   PC RAM specs are these days.

01:02:08   So I don't know what's available and what's not.

01:02:10   But it wouldn't surprise me to glue two M1 Maxes together,

01:02:15   they invented their own custom interconnect.

01:02:18   What if they had their own custom RAM socket protocol

01:02:21   and controller, I don't know.

01:02:23   I wouldn't put it past them at this point.

01:02:25   - Yeah, Chatter I'm saying that it's actually LPDDR5

01:02:28   and not HBM, but it's just very wide.

01:02:30   The fact that it's just sort of wired next to the thing

01:02:33   and has the massive bandwidth,

01:02:34   because it's got these multiple,

01:02:35   and the thing about the bandwidth,

01:02:36   it's got multiple memory controllers,

01:02:39   and each time you add a memory controller,

01:02:40   you have that much bandwidth,

01:02:41   and so it's not like it has that much bandwidth

01:02:43   to every piece of memory, I think.

01:02:44   I think that's how much bandwidth it has in aggregate

01:02:47   across all the chips that are wired up.

01:02:48   Not that it really matters,

01:02:49   'cause it's not like you're physically

01:02:50   addressing memory anyway,

01:02:51   but just keeping that in mind,

01:02:53   that the reason the bandwidth keeps going up

01:02:54   is because when you add a second max,

01:02:57   that second max also has its own memory interfaces

01:02:59   to its own private memory,

01:03:01   and the whole making it look like one chip

01:03:02   is the magic that, you know,

01:03:03   instead of it just looking like

01:03:04   one max with 400 gigabytes per second

01:03:06   and a second max with 400 gigabytes,

01:03:08   it looks like one chip that has 800,

01:03:09   but really the lower Max has 400 to its RAM,

01:03:12   and you know, it's not its RAM, you know what I mean.

01:03:14   - Yeah.

01:03:15   - Like that is kind of magical,

01:03:16   but I don't see how you weave two of them together,

01:03:19   and say with the straight face of the M1 Ultra

01:03:22   was your last thing, unless they're just gonna say,

01:03:23   just kidding, ha ha, remember we said it was our last one,

01:03:25   well surprise, it's not.

01:03:28   But how can it be a surprise,

01:03:29   you told us the Mac Pro was coming, like.

01:03:30   - Well they didn't say the Mac Pro

01:03:31   was gonna have M1 series chips in it.

01:03:33   - Yep, I know, I mean, obviously I said it,

01:03:35   the M1 is anything Apple says,

01:03:37   you can just call it the X1, you're like,

01:03:38   Problem solved, see, we just did a different letter.

01:03:41   - One line of dialogue.

01:03:42   - Yeah, marketing solves all these problems too.

01:03:45   But I keep thinking, is it plausible

01:03:48   for an M2 based thing to, 'cause the thing about the M2 is,

01:03:51   I think the rumors of it is having slightly more

01:03:53   execution units, more cores, right?

01:03:55   'Cause it's three nanometer instead of five,

01:03:57   so you can fit more cores in the same power envelope.

01:04:00   And which would mean that the biggest size,

01:04:03   like the M2 Ultra would have more cores than the M1 Ultra,

01:04:05   and there again is your differentiation.

01:04:07   You could say, oh, well, how is this better

01:04:08   than the Mac Studio?

01:04:09   Well, it's got more cores.

01:04:10   But the real problem is if you can make

01:04:13   like an M2 based, you know, ultra for the new Mac Pro,

01:04:18   you can also make it for the Mac Studio.

01:04:20   Now there you are again with no differentiation.

01:04:21   Like what makes the Mac Pro different than the Mac Studios?

01:04:25   The big mystery that is weighing on my mind.

01:04:28   - You're very worked up about this, Jon.

01:04:30   - I am, 'cause it's potentially my next computer, or not.

01:04:32   Like, I mean, here's the thing.

01:04:33   If I wait around and the thing comes out

01:04:35   and it's disappointing or it's too expensive

01:04:37   or whatever, then I just end up buying a MacStudio.

01:04:40   It's like, well, then why did I wait a year

01:04:41   to buy a MacStudio?

01:04:42   - Because you're trying to get a lot of use

01:04:44   out of your existing $15,000 Mac Pro?

01:04:46   - I know, I know.

01:04:47   (laughing)

01:04:48   - Too soon, too soon.

01:04:50   I don't know, so if you were to buy a MacStudio today

01:04:55   for you, how do you think you would spec it?

01:04:58   - It should be delivered in approximately November.

01:05:00   - Well, there's that.

01:05:01   - The dates on the MacStudios are ridiculous at this point,

01:05:03   but all right, so how would I configure it?

01:05:05   - Yeah, like can we, you wanna walk through it real quick?

01:05:07   I'm curious, if you were to buy one,

01:05:10   how would you configure it for you?

01:05:12   - I mean, honestly, I think my cheapness and patience

01:05:16   would kick in and I would say,

01:05:18   my Mac Pro's fine for me for a while.

01:05:19   - I know, I know, but work with me on this, please.

01:05:21   I know you love hypotheticals.

01:05:23   - If I was forced to do it, if someone stole my Mac Pro

01:05:25   and I had to buy a new computer,

01:05:26   I wouldn't obviously buy another Mac Pro.

01:05:28   I'd be very sad about it being stolen.

01:05:30   But anyway, I would probably max it out,

01:05:32   'cause I would like, I would get 128,

01:05:35   I would get the M1 Ultra.

01:05:37   I wouldn't get the terabyte SSD, I'd get four terabyte SSD.

01:05:40   Those are basically the only options, right?

01:05:41   - Maxed out GPU cores?

01:05:43   - Yes.

01:05:43   I mean, 'cause I don't, and it would be very expensive,

01:05:46   but like, and I don't know, I don't quite know

01:05:48   what I would do with those GPU cores,

01:05:50   'cause I wouldn't be able to play Windows games

01:05:52   on it anymore, but I would be like,

01:05:53   well, something will use them.

01:05:55   Like, there are some Mac games, even Apple Arcade does it.

01:05:59   Sometimes I forget that Apple Arcade stuff

01:06:00   is all available on the Mac.

01:06:01   I spent a while on Apple Arcade on my Mac the other day

01:06:03   thing. These games that I play on my phone and my iPad, can I play them in 6K? And the

01:06:09   answer to a lot of them is, yeah, you can. And you can't play them on 6K on your phone,

01:06:14   so there's things that Macs can do with GPU cores. But yeah, I would probably get everything

01:06:18   maxed out. So if I'm doing this right, looking at the

01:06:20   website, that's $6,800, which is like half the cost of your existing computer, and like

01:06:26   twice as fast. And I don't have to buy a monitor.

01:06:28   And you don't have to buy a monitor. That's the important part. It's so cheap. I should

01:06:31   buy an upgrade every year now.

01:06:33   Just keep using the same monitor with all these computers.

01:06:35   - Yeah.

01:06:36   - Honestly, there's something to be said for that.

01:06:38   I know that's not your style,

01:06:39   but there's something to be said for that.

01:06:40   I've actually wondered a lot,

01:06:42   since I love my MacBook Pro, if you will,

01:06:46   I just adore this machine so much.

01:06:49   Hi, Steven Hackett, I know you love that.

01:06:52   - I'm just hearing, I'm feeling the collective groan

01:06:56   from all of our audience when they hit this point

01:06:57   and hear that.

01:06:58   - Let me tell you, so I don't change the name

01:07:00   of Macintosh HD, but my computer name is Casey's Maxbook Pro.

01:07:05   And you know it, and you love it.

01:07:06   But anyway, I love this thing so much.

01:07:09   And I've wondered to myself, when this M2 comes out,

01:07:14   would I pull a Marco and upgrade this less than a year old,

01:07:18   or perhaps a year old 14-inch Maxbook Pro?

01:07:21   And I don't think I would, mostly because I'm cheap.

01:07:24   But if the M2 was that compelling,

01:07:27   Would I start to get myself on a yearly or every other year plan?

01:07:32   I don't think I'll ever get to the point of as often as I change my underwear like Marco, but I could see myself

01:07:38   you know money notwithstanding, which is a big if, I could see myself wanting to upgrade my laptops

01:07:45   more frequently than I used to in the past if the gains continue to be as big as they have been.

01:07:50   And I think the question I need to, or the thing I need to look into to answer this, which I haven't done, is

01:07:55   is what's the difference between the A14 and the A15, right?

01:07:58   Because the A14 core is what's powering the M1,

01:08:02   if I'm not mistaken, and we're up to A15 this year, right?

01:08:07   So maybe even the A16 would potentially, probably not,

01:08:10   but potentially be in the M2.

01:08:12   So what are those differences?

01:08:14   And I can look into this.

01:08:15   I'm not asking for feedback,

01:08:16   but I think it's something that I've asked myself,

01:08:20   would I be on a far more regular upgrade cycle

01:08:23   than I ever have been because the chips might be getting

01:08:27   that much better every year or every other year.

01:08:29   - I don't think the chips would make you upgrade.

01:08:31   I think it's the chips are not gonna give you the bump

01:08:33   you just got from going from Intel to this.

01:08:35   What would make you upgrade is if like,

01:08:36   and I don't think this is gonna particularly happen,

01:08:38   but if it did happen, this would make you upgrade.

01:08:40   It would be like, "Oh, it's got cellular and face ID,"

01:08:42   or something like that, or "No more notch," right?

01:08:44   Those are the type of things that are gonna get you

01:08:46   in the door, not compile 15% faster,

01:08:48   'cause after a year, I don't think you're gonna have

01:08:51   complaints about this.

01:08:52   "Oh, my computer feels so slow."

01:08:53   Like, it's not, you know, that's not gonna happen.

01:08:56   - I would insta-buy for either,

01:08:59   I don't know if I would for Face ID actually,

01:09:00   but I would absolutely insta-buy for cellular,

01:09:02   without question.

01:09:03   - Yeah, I probably would too.

01:09:04   That's a big deal. (laughs)

01:09:07   But I'll have to decide which laptop would get it.

01:09:09   Hmm. (laughs)

01:09:11   - Oh no, now I'm miserable like John, no!

01:09:14   No! (laughs)

01:09:15   - No, and this is,

01:09:18   Despite my reputation here,

01:09:22   I actually don't usually upgrade my Macs that frequently

01:09:27   outside of like, the butterfly keyboard

01:09:30   is destroying my life, maybe this next one will be better.

01:09:33   And then, oh, then architecture changes.

01:09:35   It's been a frequent update cycle for me recently,

01:09:38   but usually I get a few years out of my Macs,

01:09:39   especially my desktop Macs.

01:09:42   Those tend to last a while.

01:09:43   And because really, year to year,

01:09:46   Mac updates are not that different.

01:09:48   Year to year, when the new iPhones come out,

01:09:51   and we're all, they've tried out all these cool features,

01:09:55   and we're all wowed by the marketing.

01:09:57   I'm like, oh my God, I have to have that new camera.

01:09:59   Oh, I have to have this new thing.

01:10:01   It's a huge difference, and it's palpable,

01:10:04   like how much you want that.

01:10:06   Usually, when a Mac update comes out,

01:10:08   that is generally just like a spec bump update,

01:10:12   you don't usually have that, oh my God,

01:10:14   I have to have that right now,

01:10:16   because the one I have from last year or two years ago

01:10:19   is so much worse.

01:10:20   Like no, it's usually, it's like okay,

01:10:21   you can buy this new one and it might be like 15% faster

01:10:24   or something, it's not gonna be like a huge, huge difference.

01:10:28   You know, right now we're going through this period

01:10:30   of turmoil where you know, the architecture transition

01:10:32   and everything, it's a big deal, we're getting big gains

01:10:34   and big changes, but that's about to slow down,

01:10:37   I think to a pretty large degree.

01:10:39   - Yeah, I think you're probably right.

01:10:41   - And also phones are only like a thousand bucks,

01:10:42   which is a lot for a phone, but it's nothing for a Mac.

01:10:45   And phones, especially after one or two years,

01:10:48   the batteries start to get a little cranky,

01:10:50   whereas even a laptop battery tends to not fall off a cliff

01:10:53   the way phones can do if you use them hard for a few years.

01:10:57   So the urge to upgrade to a new phone is easier to give into

01:11:02   and it makes a little bit more sense than buying,

01:11:04   especially it's not like we're buying,

01:11:06   none of us are buying $1,000 Macs,

01:11:07   even though you can buy $1,000 Mac,

01:11:09   those aren't the ones that we're buying.

01:11:10   So being on an annual upgrade cycle

01:11:12   for something that expensive for a 15% gain

01:11:14   doesn't really make much sense.

01:11:17   That's fair.

01:11:17   But it's a fun thing to think about.

01:11:19   Until Marco dropped that, what Mac does cellular go in?

01:11:22   Oh my gosh.

01:11:23   Can you imagine if they did like a cellular--

01:11:25   the only Mac that gets a cellular modem

01:11:28   is like the adorable round two.

01:11:30   So somehow it's like slower than dirt.

01:11:32   I mean, I don't know why it would be slower than dirt,

01:11:34   but hypothetically, you know.

01:11:35   So it's like this complete compromised machine,

01:11:37   but it's got cellular, baby.

01:11:38   Oh, it'd be so sad.

01:11:39   I don't think you have to worry about it,

01:11:40   because I don't think Apple's ever

01:11:41   going to add cellular to a Mac.

01:11:42   See what I'm doing, Apple?

01:11:43   - Making you do it to prove me wrong.

01:11:45   Look at this sound clip.

01:11:46   You said they would never do it.

01:11:47   (laughing)

01:11:49   I don't know if that or another psychology will work,

01:11:51   but something's gotta work,

01:11:52   'cause it just seems like they have no interest

01:11:53   in ever doing this.

01:11:55   - I think it's one of those things

01:11:56   like on a very long time scale,

01:11:57   I think they probably will on an infinite time scale.

01:12:00   They probably will do it,

01:12:02   but they're gonna take their sweet time,

01:12:03   because they're probably waiting

01:12:05   until they don't have to pay Qualcomm some royalty thing.

01:12:07   - Yeah, oh yeah.

01:12:08   - Oh, that's a really good point.

01:12:09   - Well, but you say that,

01:12:11   but they eat that cost on iPads, for crying out loud.

01:12:14   They can't eat that cost on a $5,000 MacBook Pro,

01:12:16   it's because it's a percentage of price

01:12:17   of the product or whatever?

01:12:18   - Maybe, 'cause, yeah, we've heard that that is

01:12:21   like the rumor that it was percentage of price,

01:12:23   but like, I don't know, I mean, they've charged,

01:12:25   you know, they charge 120 bucks or 130 bucks for it

01:12:28   on the iPad from the very first $500 iPad

01:12:31   all the way up to the, you know, whatever,

01:12:34   what's the biggest iPad, like $1,500 now?

01:12:37   Like, you know, they charge basically

01:12:38   the same price for all that, so, I mean, yeah,

01:12:40   If they charge 200 bucks on a Mac, great.

01:12:43   I'd still buy it, like that would be great.

01:12:45   - Yeah, I mean you would, but you know, anyway.

01:12:47   The Apple, I don't know if this is,

01:12:48   if the upcoming iPhone is at the year

01:12:50   when Apple's 5G chips are gonna be ready

01:12:52   or are we waiting one more year?

01:12:53   I haven't kept track of it.

01:12:54   We've talked about this in the past in the show,

01:12:56   but Apple is 100% making its own cellular radio chips.

01:13:00   It just takes a long time 'cause it's really hard.

01:13:01   But the second they can do it, rest assured,

01:13:04   they will be off Qualcomm and onto their own chips.

01:13:06   I just, I like that they're taking their time

01:13:08   because I don't want them to rush out the door

01:13:10   with a crappy chip that's worse than the Qualcomm ones.

01:13:13   So yeah, take your time, make sure you get it right.

01:13:16   Test it really well, test it directly

01:13:17   against the Qualcomm competition.

01:13:18   When it is as reliable, but you own it

01:13:21   and don't have to pay royalties,

01:13:22   then please ship on every single device you make.

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01:15:27   - So in the last few days,

01:15:33   all the betas are no longer beta,

01:15:35   and now they are out, what is this, 15.4?

01:15:38   Is that right?

01:15:39   I don't even remember anymore, something like that.

01:15:41   In the new version of whatever ridiculous California name

01:15:44   we're on, God, I am a mess.

01:15:45   What are we on, Monterey?

01:15:46   So it's 12.3 and 15.4.

01:15:48   And now we can do universal control,

01:15:51   which I have played with very briefly.

01:15:54   Jon, I think you played with at least a little bit,

01:15:57   and Marco, you haven't had a chance to play with it yet,

01:15:59   is that right?

01:16:00   - Honestly, I don't really keep an iPad

01:16:03   next to me on my desk.

01:16:04   And I typically don't either.

01:16:06   - Actually, at the moment I don't have an iPad.

01:16:07   That's a whole separate issue.

01:16:08   - Well, let me talk to you about it.

01:16:10   Let me tell you the good word about it.

01:16:12   So Casey mentioned that the things are out of beta.

01:16:13   What he means is that Mac OS and iOS and iPad OS

01:16:16   are out of beta, but Universal Control,

01:16:18   which ships in the non-beta version

01:16:20   of those operating systems, is itself still beta

01:16:22   with a tiny little beta tag next to all the little things

01:16:24   just to let you know this might not work.

01:16:26   So yeah, Universal Control, the thing demoed so long ago

01:16:29   that people might have forgotten about it.

01:16:31   Drag your cursor off the edge of the screen

01:16:32   and watch it burst through the edge of your iPad screen.

01:16:35   I don't keep an iPad near my Mac either.

01:16:37   I keep it in a whole different room in the house,

01:16:40   but I brought the iPad down here to try it out.

01:16:43   It's super cool and it works magically just like they said.

01:16:46   Performance is great.

01:16:47   I did cause the crash, that's fine, it's beta.

01:16:50   All right.

01:16:50   But I had an actual task I was doing.

01:16:54   I was filing a bug against the version of Apple Podcasts

01:16:56   that's on iPad OS.

01:16:57   I was like, oh, how am I gonna get a screenshot

01:17:00   off of my iPad over to my Mac?

01:17:02   have to airdrop it and you know it's like but wait this is a great opportunity

01:17:05   to use universal control I'll just take the screenshot on my iPad and then just

01:17:09   yank my cursor for my Mac over there grab the photo and pull it over to my

01:17:13   Mac and on the second try it worked and that was cool and I like the little

01:17:18   animations this is also the first time that I have had any extended period of

01:17:22   time to use iPads iPad OS cursor support which I know has been out for years now

01:17:26   but I haven't really ever used it besides briefly my wife's got the little

01:17:30   What is it called the weird keyboard foldy thingy for the iPad Pro?

01:17:34   What is that called?

01:17:35   The foldy one?

01:17:36   Is it smart?

01:17:37   Is it magic?

01:17:38   Does it have a trackpad or not?

01:17:39   It has a trackpad.

01:17:40   It's the magic.

01:17:41   Okay.

01:17:42   It's the magic smart pro max.

01:17:43   Yes.

01:17:44   Okay.

01:17:45   It costs as much as the small iPad.

01:17:46   Other than playing with that, I hadn't done it.

01:17:47   But now using my actual mouse and keyboard was cool.

01:17:50   But the thing I will say is that, and I haven't tried this myself, but it just occurred to

01:17:54   me watching a conversation in another Slack.

01:17:57   It says this right in the documentation too, I think.

01:17:59   Universal control doesn't just let you drag your cursor from your Mac screen onto your

01:18:03   iPad, it also lets you drag your cursor from your Mac screen onto another Mac screen.

01:18:09   And I think more people might potentially have a laptop and a desktop on the same desk

01:18:13   kind of area.

01:18:14   Yeah, and I think that is even more useful use case.

01:18:17   Now there have been third party products that have done this in a while.

01:18:19   For a while, what was the popular one?

01:18:21   It was called like Synergy or something.

01:18:24   And before that, there was another one that I'm not remembering.

01:18:26   There's a bunch of these things for Linux.

01:18:28   But there's something about, for someone with my kind of philosophy of these things, there's

01:18:32   something about it being a first party OS integrated thing versus a third party product

01:18:38   that makes me more likely to use it just because there's nothing to install, I have some faith

01:18:42   it will be supported and work well.

01:18:45   And maybe that's not true.

01:18:46   Maybe like the third party one is actually better than the Apple one because it's less

01:18:49   buggy, they had a long time to work out the things, but that means the third party software

01:18:52   has to be installed and all the different things and it's another thing for you to mind

01:18:55   intend and make sure that it doesn't have some sort of problem that spins out of control

01:18:59   or a security flaw or whatever.

01:19:01   This may be incorrect thinking in my head, but it's the way I think about it.

01:19:04   Every third-party product is just a little bit of an extra burden of me to just keep

01:19:07   track of and make sure it's not going wonky, whereas things that go wonky in the OS I have

01:19:11   no control over anyway, so I might as well just forget about it.

01:19:15   But we talked on a past show how annoying it is that file sharing is so terrible and

01:19:20   I just two Macs are in the same room and I don't want to grab a file from one and bring

01:19:23   it to the other.

01:19:24   I have to say that the fastest way to do that now is probably to use universal control to go over to

01:19:31   My wife's desktop grab the file and bring it back now unfortunately for me

01:19:35   I can't see both of the screens at the same time particularly comfortably and

01:19:39   Secondly unfortunately if she's logged in as her and I'm logged in as me

01:19:43   That's not gonna work because you have to be logged into the same app ID and everything

01:19:45   But this had made me has made me think a lot more about essentially virtual kv

01:19:51   what do they call product tech synergy

01:19:52   and universal control, virtual KVM, right?

01:19:54   Like the idea of having multiple computers on your desk,

01:19:58   but one set of input devices, one keyboard and one mouse,

01:20:00   but you're controlling multiple computers,

01:20:02   that's what universal control is essentially.

01:20:04   It works with iPads, it works with Macs.

01:20:07   If it worked with a phone, that'd be really cool too.

01:20:10   It's making me think a lot more about

01:20:12   what I can do with the desk space that I have.

01:20:15   Not that there's much room with this giant monitor on here,

01:20:17   but maybe there might be room for in the future,

01:20:19   let's say a laptop somewhere in my life.

01:20:21   When my children take all,

01:20:23   my children already have taken all the laptops,

01:20:25   so my children finish commandeering

01:20:26   every single laptop in the house

01:20:28   because they don't know what desktops are.

01:20:30   If I ever need something portable to bring with me somewhere,

01:20:33   I may have to get a laptop.

01:20:34   And literally the only way I would ever bother

01:20:36   using that laptop is if I could do it using my big keyboard

01:20:40   and my big mouse on my desk,

01:20:41   because I don't like smushing myself onto a laptop.

01:20:43   It's bad for my RSI, I just don't like it.

01:20:45   I feel all hunched over and gross.

01:20:46   Laptops are gross.

01:20:48   But if I just had it on my desk,

01:20:50   and especially if it's one of the new laptops

01:20:52   with a really fancy monitor that can hang with my XDR,

01:20:55   I might think about that.

01:20:58   - I played with universal control very briefly

01:21:00   and it worked surprisingly well.

01:21:03   And it was pretty fluid for the most part.

01:21:06   I was doing most of this on my screen and porch

01:21:09   where the wifi is good but not spectacular.

01:21:12   And so there were a couple of times

01:21:13   there was definitely some latency and lag and whatever.

01:21:15   But generally speaking, it worked very well.

01:21:17   And what was absolutely bananas was I sat my iPad Pro,

01:21:21   which is four years old now or something like that.

01:21:23   I sat my iPad Pro to the left of my,

01:21:26   my MacBook Pro is previously covered.

01:21:28   And I just kept pushing the mouse

01:21:30   to the left edge of the MacBook Pro.

01:21:33   And sure enough, pink, all of a sudden,

01:21:35   my cursor was over on the iPad.

01:21:37   It was very, very cool.

01:21:39   I look forward to playing with this more.

01:21:41   Again, I don't, I think I get probably more use

01:21:44   out of sidecar than I,

01:21:45   which is the thing where your screen is expanded to be on your iPad, then I expect to out of

01:21:50   your universal control. But back when I had the iMac Pro and my MacBook Pro, which often

01:21:56   was on my desk as well, this would have been amazing at that point when I had the two computers

01:22:02   on my desk. That would have been so great. But even still, it's extremely well done from

01:22:07   the limited use I've had with it and very, very cool.

01:22:10   Yeah, I feel like the killer feature is the unification of input.

01:22:15   Because getting things from the world of the iPad onto the Mac has just always seemed cumbersome.

01:22:21   Direct manipulation, even if it's just copy on the Mac, paste on the iPad, right?

01:22:25   That's just so much easier than like, oh, I can do things like I'm going to put this

01:22:28   in Apple Notes, which I guess is a testament to Apple Notes.

01:22:31   I need to transfer some piece of information from my iPad to my Mac.

01:22:34   It's text.

01:22:35   I'll just make a new note, I'll paste it in, I'll go over to my Mac, I'll open up notes,

01:22:38   and it will be synced, I'll pull it out, right?

01:22:40   That's dumb, right?

01:22:42   You know, why don't you just AirDrop it?

01:22:43   Why don't you email it to yourself?

01:22:44   Like, there's a million different ways to do it.

01:22:46   - Universal Clipboard, baby.

01:22:48   - Yeah, yeah, no, Universal Clipboard,

01:22:49   I don't need Universal Control for that.

01:22:51   Although Universal Clipboard for me is not as reliable

01:22:54   as Universal Control has been so far.

01:22:56   And like, this is another thing I have to say

01:22:58   about Universal Control.

01:23:00   Like Universal Clipboard, there's not a lot of exposed knobs

01:23:04   and buttons and machinery for either one of these features.

01:23:06   They either work or they don't.

01:23:07   And if they don't, you just shrug,

01:23:10   ah, eh, like why isn't it working?

01:23:12   I copied here and I paste,

01:23:14   why is universal clipboard not working?

01:23:15   There's not a lot of feedback about it,

01:23:17   there's not someplace where you can look,

01:23:18   there's not a button you can press

01:23:19   to say reset universal clipboard.

01:23:21   Same thing with universal control.

01:23:22   It just so happens, I think I'm in the honeymoon period

01:23:24   of universal control, with the exception of one crash,

01:23:27   it has always just worked for me.

01:23:29   And if it just works, I don't care about the knob.

01:23:31   So the second it stops working, I get cranky

01:23:33   'cause there's nothing I can do about it.

01:23:35   But I am thinking about how, like,

01:23:39   I do wanna use my iPad as an iPad.

01:23:40   There are apps that are on the iPad

01:23:42   that I don't have on my Mac.

01:23:43   I don't have an M1 Mac, so I can't run the iPad apps

01:23:46   on my Mac, right?

01:23:47   - Aw, you should get an M1 Mac.

01:23:49   - I know. - It's all right.

01:23:50   It kinda, I mean, it sucks.

01:23:52   Like, doing that is not fun.

01:23:54   - Yeah, I mean, I have to say, like,

01:23:55   I haven't done this, but I'm assuming when you do that

01:23:57   on your, it's gotta be, when you do it on your Mac,

01:23:59   you don't get the iPad cursor experience, right?

01:24:01   - No.

01:24:02   - And I think that experience is super cool with iPad apps.

01:24:05   fits for me. I've always thought that was one of the best UI things Apple has ever done,

01:24:08   is cursor support on iPad OS, because it is cursor support reimagined for the iPad instead

01:24:12   of just putting a stupid Apple arrow cursor on the iPad screen, which would look weird.

01:24:18   I think that fits so well, and now I can do that using my actual mouse instead of that

01:24:23   tiny little trackpad or whatever on the Magic Smart Pro Keyboard Max.

01:24:28   (laughing)

01:24:30   - All right, let's do some Ask ATP.

01:24:32   Let's start with Ryan Petriello who writes,

01:24:35   "Even though the DTK was never going to be a machine

01:24:37   "that was released to the public,

01:24:38   "was it an appropriate harbinger

01:24:39   "of what the M1 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro,

01:24:42   "and Mac Mini would be?"

01:24:44   I'd never had one, so I don't feel like

01:24:46   I really have much I can say about this,

01:24:48   but it was almost underwhelming, wasn't it,

01:24:53   compared to how incredible these machines are?

01:24:55   And we always, and we all thought it was pretty great

01:24:57   from the get-go, so I don't know, you guys actually had one.

01:25:00   Let's start with Marco, what do you think?

01:25:02   - I actually barely ended up using mine,

01:25:05   in part because it was a Mac Mini,

01:25:07   and at the time, I didn't have an external monitor with me,

01:25:11   and so I use it exclusively through screen sharing.

01:25:15   And also, keep in mind that the dev kit

01:25:20   did not have Rosetta, and so you could only run

01:25:25   Apple, Silicon compiled, ARM compiled stuff.

01:25:28   And at that time, it was very hard

01:25:31   to get any other third party apps that were ARM compiled.

01:25:34   And so there was really not a good way for me to move into it

01:25:38   or set it up as mine, really.

01:25:40   And so it was only ever a machine

01:25:42   that I used through screen sharing,

01:25:44   and I would run Xcode and compile a few things here

01:25:47   and there and test some things here and there.

01:25:49   But I never really got a feel for it.

01:25:50   That being said, it was also an A12Z in there,

01:25:55   which is two pretty big processor generations

01:26:00   behind the A14 cores that made up the M1.

01:26:04   And it had different resources and didn't

01:26:07   have the unified memory stuff.

01:26:08   So it was a very different experience

01:26:11   than using the actual M1 Macs for lots of reasons,

01:26:14   mostly due to the lack of Rosetta

01:26:17   and the much older chip.

01:26:19   It did have unified memory.

01:26:20   They all have uni-- there was no separate--

01:26:21   Oh, yeah, you're right.

01:26:22   Never mind.

01:26:22   Yeah, I was wrong about that.

01:26:23   But yeah, it was the A12Z.

01:26:24   and it was, yeah, and for me, yeah,

01:26:26   not having Rosetta and me not having a monitor

01:26:30   really made it so I never really use it as a user.

01:26:34   Like pretty much only as a developer building my stuff.

01:26:37   - So Ryan's question is was it appropriate?

01:26:39   I think it was because, for two reasons.

01:26:41   One, even though it was just an A12Z,

01:26:44   it showed to developers that ARM-based chips

01:26:49   running Mac OS are fine performance-wise.

01:26:52   There are some things that the A12Z did faster

01:26:55   than my Intel Macs at the time,

01:26:56   like these weird little parts of the OS

01:26:59   are just interacting with your Mac

01:27:00   that are just shockingly faster on ARM-based Macs.

01:27:03   The fact that that was true on an A12Z

01:27:07   when the M1 would be based on A14 cores,

01:27:09   let developers know, this is just for developers,

01:27:13   don't worry about, oh, the ARM Macs are gonna come

01:27:16   and your app is gonna be super slow

01:27:17   'cause ARM chips are wimpy.

01:27:19   That's not gonna happen,

01:27:20   because look how well your app runs on this thing

01:27:22   and this thing has an A12Z in it, right?

01:27:26   And the second thing is, because it was an A12Z

01:27:29   and an older chip, that is the appropriate thing

01:27:31   for people to do their dev work on,

01:27:33   because you don't want them to do dev work

01:27:35   on some monster chip, and then the real ARM Macs come out

01:27:38   and they're slower.

01:27:39   What you want to happen is they do their dev work,

01:27:41   they get the performance of their application

01:27:43   to be adequate on the A12Z, then the real ones come out

01:27:47   and it's even faster than that's exactly what happened.

01:27:49   So I think it was absolutely perfectly appropriate.

01:27:51   It was 100% usable, performed really well,

01:27:54   showed developers what it was gonna be like

01:27:56   in the ARM world, and also was the slowest ARM Mac

01:27:59   that Apple ever released.

01:28:01   - All right, Peter Wagner writes,

01:28:03   "I currently use two 30-inch cinema displays."

01:28:05   How old are those displays now?

01:28:07   - They are amazing, though, they just aren't retina.

01:28:09   - So they're not amazing.

01:28:11   "I currently use two 30-inch cinema displays

01:28:13   "with a maxed-out 16-inch 2019 MacBook Pro.

01:28:16   "I'm considering switching to two Apple Studio displays.

01:28:20   I will use every ounce of power of my machine

01:28:22   for creative work while upgrading my resolution

01:28:24   from 2560 by 1600 to 5K in each display,

01:28:28   put a noticeable additional strain on my CPU or GPU.

01:28:30   I don't wanna upgrade my displays

01:28:31   only to downgrade my overall computing experience.

01:28:34   I don't know, but I can't imagine

01:28:36   it would be noticeable, would it?

01:28:38   - Well, it's four times the pixels, roughly.

01:28:40   That's enough that it would give me pause,

01:28:43   especially with a laptop driving it.

01:28:45   It's not like in a Mac Pro, like Jon has,

01:28:47   if you really had a GPU issue,

01:28:48   you could upgrade the GPU and maybe add a second one

01:28:52   and you could probably alleviate that stress.

01:28:54   But driving four times the pixels

01:28:56   is gonna be a significant increase.

01:28:59   Now, whether it's going to be noticeable,

01:29:01   that's a different story.

01:29:02   I don't know what the headroom is like

01:29:03   when driving two 30 inch displays versus two 5K displays.

01:29:08   I mean, it could be, maybe it doesn't matter, I don't know.

01:29:12   But I would say when you're driving

01:29:15   multiple external monitors,

01:29:17   especially from an Intel MacBook Pro,

01:29:20   you're already kind of, you know,

01:29:21   you're pushing the bounds of like heat and noise probably.

01:29:26   And so I would expect increasing the pixel load

01:29:30   by a huge amount of pixels would probably run the risk

01:29:33   of either noticeable slowdowns

01:29:35   or increased heat and noise or both.

01:29:38   - Yeah, I would say the heat and noise is your big concern

01:29:40   'cause modern GPUs are really good at pushing pixels.

01:29:43   If you're not running games on those two, five, 12 things,

01:29:45   you're just displaying the UI with a bunch of windows,

01:29:48   it's probably fine performance-wise,

01:29:50   'cause when are you gonna see performance,

01:29:51   like assuming it supports it at all,

01:29:53   which I'm assuming the best GPUs on the 2019 16-inch do,

01:29:58   it should be fine, but it is going to use more power,

01:30:01   and I think the extra heat and noise produced by it

01:30:05   will be more annoying to you than any kind of like,

01:30:08   you know, stutter or anything,

01:30:10   up to the point that like I would say

01:30:12   The heat could be so much that you get heat-based GPU

01:30:16   glitching, which can happen in laptops and desktops,

01:30:18   for that matter.

01:30:19   And eventual failure, more likely.

01:30:21   Yeah.

01:30:22   And I only say all these scary things,

01:30:24   because this is an Intel laptop.

01:30:27   It's the Intel 16-inch.

01:30:28   I don't remember which generation of the 2019s

01:30:31   were the ones that got super hot,

01:30:33   and the GPUs are really pushing the thermal limits or whatever.

01:30:36   That's going to be your main constraint.

01:30:37   If you had a desktop computer and you wanted to do this,

01:30:41   I would say any GPU is fine.

01:30:42   If it says it supports it, you're fine,

01:30:44   'cause they just have cooling to spare.

01:30:45   But a laptop, you're gonna be pushing it.

01:30:48   So the good thing, though, is that if you get

01:30:51   studio displays, when you get rid of that junky laptop,

01:30:54   the studio displays will be there and waiting

01:30:55   for your much better one that will be able

01:30:57   to drive those displays without breaking a sweat.

01:30:59   - Yeah, it's the wonder of having good external monitors

01:31:02   from Apple that they make every computer modular.

01:31:05   It's wonderful, and they outlive your computer.

01:31:08   - Wouldn't it be terrible, Marco, if your monitor

01:31:09   and your computer were inextricably linked,

01:31:12   like you couldn't just separate the two.

01:31:14   Who would want an all-in-one that's like that?

01:31:17   That would be terrible, wouldn't it?

01:31:19   - I can't tell you how many, it just,

01:31:21   it killed me thinking back.

01:31:22   Now that, I know we already talked about this,

01:31:24   but now that they have released what is basically

01:31:29   the 5K monitor's screen in an external monitor,

01:31:32   and the specs on it as a monitor are basically the same,

01:31:37   It kills me thinking about how I have discarded, basically.

01:31:41   I mean, I've sold them or given them away,

01:31:43   but I've basically discarded, I think,

01:31:44   three of those over the last eight years.

01:31:49   - I think that might be in the same boat, yeah.

01:31:51   - Plus tips, that's just mine alone,

01:31:53   mine where I think three of them.

01:31:54   And it kills me to think,

01:31:56   I could have had three perfectly good 5K monitors,

01:32:00   or just bought one and kept it this whole time,

01:32:03   but oh, what a waste.

01:32:04   - Yep.

01:32:06   Wade writes, and this is either gonna be three minutes

01:32:09   or 30, so buckle up.

01:32:10   Wade writes, "What are the top three ugliest max

01:32:13   of all time?"

01:32:15   No particular reason for the timing.

01:32:18   Maybe you can limit it to the time since the iMac

01:32:20   to make it fair for Marco and Casey.

01:32:22   Plus, we don't want it devolving

01:32:25   into just a list of quadras.

01:32:27   So I don't know how you wanna handle this.

01:32:29   I have been frantically doing my research

01:32:32   as we've been recording, coming up with a list.

01:32:35   I actually came up with four, so I'm quite proud of myself.

01:32:38   But, well, so, see, we're going in true top four spirit

01:32:42   in every measure of the word,

01:32:43   'cause we've got four and we're not following the rules.

01:32:46   So I assume, Jon, you have exactly three.

01:32:49   Would you like to start,

01:32:50   or would you rather critique our selections first?

01:32:53   - I can start.

01:32:54   I think I only have two,

01:32:56   but I think some of the ones that you pick might be mine.

01:32:58   I was trying to pick ones that you probably wouldn't pick.

01:33:00   So the actual right answer that old timers know,

01:33:05   I think pretty much everyone would agree on this one

01:33:09   and you will as soon as you see it, is the molar.

01:33:11   The tooth mac, you know what I'm talking about?

01:33:13   - I know of what you speak, but I can't picture it in my head.

01:33:15   - I'm putting some links to Steven Hackett's website

01:33:19   where he's got some pictures of it.

01:33:19   Just two angles of this computer.

01:33:21   Please, please to look at these now.

01:33:23   - That is not attractive.

01:33:25   - The front is a real problem just right off the bat.

01:33:29   The front is just this terrible mess.

01:33:31   It is not particularly nice looking.

01:33:33   The face that the drives and everything make,

01:33:36   the way the drive cutouts--

01:33:37   - It's like a flat face.

01:33:39   - It just looks like there's some sort of

01:33:41   grievous skin injury.

01:33:43   Even just the cutouts around the floppy drives.

01:33:46   The proportions, the way the speaker grills are set in,

01:33:48   the way it curves, but then you start rotating around.

01:33:51   That top, by the way, is translucent.

01:33:52   It's one of the early translucent plastics.

01:33:53   That's clear translucent up there with holes in it.

01:33:57   This thing is just a mess from top to bottom.

01:34:00   - Oh, God. - Gotta be the ugliest Mac.

01:34:02   Look at the Apple logo, the horrendous translucent

01:34:04   Apple logo shoved up into the corner of the weird side.

01:34:07   So bad, just the ugliest thing you have ever seen.

01:34:11   - Yeah, this is pretty bad.

01:34:12   - This was mostly seen in education.

01:34:14   That's why most people haven't seen this Mac

01:34:15   or even heard of it.

01:34:16   It was the actual official name, I believe,

01:34:19   was, let me get Mac Tracker up here, I closed it.

01:34:22   I think it was the Power Macintosh G3 all-in-one.

01:34:27   Is that what it's called?

01:34:28   Yeah.

01:34:29   Paramark-G3 parentheses all in one.

01:34:31   Hyphenated.

01:34:32   From 1999.

01:34:35   That is the ugliest Mac I've ever made.

01:34:37   The second one might surprise some people.

01:34:39   There's a bunch of computers that look like this.

01:34:42   Let me see if I can find a good...

01:34:43   All right, let's pick the LC580.

01:34:46   It's not this particular computer.

01:34:48   They made a bunch of computers in the same case,

01:34:49   including, by the way, the Apple TV,

01:34:51   which you may have heard of.

01:34:52   No, not that Apple TV, or the Macintosh TV, sorry.

01:34:55   That's not the Apple TV.

01:34:56   It was also made in this case, but at least it was black.

01:34:59   This case is just a confusing stack of rectangles.

01:35:04   It uses a lot of the good design language

01:35:06   of the Macs of the day,

01:35:08   but whoever, it was like they took that design language

01:35:11   and they threw it into a blender

01:35:12   and out popped this ungainly thing where it's just,

01:35:14   it's just an awkward stack.

01:35:16   It looks like almost like it's upside down.

01:35:18   It's like an awkward stack of rectangles.

01:35:20   It looks like an AI created it.

01:35:21   It's like, we know we have floppy drives

01:35:23   and we know I have optical drives

01:35:24   and we know we have these features and these smooth things

01:35:26   and these stripes and then just like,

01:35:28   computer, make me a computer out of that.

01:35:30   And it's like, how about this?

01:35:31   No, it's terrible.

01:35:32   It's just so ungainly, so hideous.

01:35:36   It shares so many individual details

01:35:38   with its good looking computers

01:35:40   that were around at the same time,

01:35:41   but this one gets everything about it wrong.

01:35:44   Those are the two that I find the most offensive.

01:35:47   And I felt like I'm ignoring the modern ones,

01:35:49   whatever you guys are gonna say

01:35:50   about the modern computers, whatever,

01:35:51   I think these two are worse than the absolute values

01:35:55   and also in particular worse compared to their contemporaries

01:35:58   because they just took a design aesthetic

01:36:01   that was actually pretty nice for what it was

01:36:04   and totally misfired on it.

01:36:06   - That's probably the right answer.

01:36:07   Now Casey, let's give them the wrong answers.

01:36:10   - All right, I don't have, I went by years

01:36:13   but I didn't write down what years these were from.

01:36:15   I think my first one was from roughly 2006, 2008,

01:36:19   somewhere in that neck of the woods.

01:36:21   And coincidentally it was my very first Mac.

01:36:23   But I don't think it aged well.

01:36:25   I don't think it was ever particularly good looking

01:36:27   and it is the poly book, the polycarbonate MacBook.

01:36:30   - The white plastic one?

01:36:32   - Specifically the white plastic one.

01:36:33   - Yeah, you're talking about like the 2007-ish,

01:36:37   launch it was six, but you probably had the 2007-ish version.

01:36:39   - I had, I think it's 2008 version,

01:36:41   but yes, we're saying the same thing.

01:36:43   - Yeah, I actually loved, I own the same computer,

01:36:46   but I own the 2006 version.

01:36:47   I actually loved the way that computer looked.

01:36:49   'Cause mine never had like the weird yellowing

01:36:52   on the polymerase that some people, a lot of people had.

01:36:54   Mine never had that, and so I just had

01:36:56   like just a nice white map, and actually,

01:36:58   later on, I think they really perfected it

01:37:00   when they made like the plastic unibody-ish kind of one

01:37:04   toward the end of its life.

01:37:05   - That is true, that is better.

01:37:06   - But yeah, I actually, I really enjoyed that design,

01:37:08   and I think it actually looked,

01:37:10   I have some modern Macs on my list

01:37:13   that were contemporaries around this era,

01:37:16   and I actually did not say this was an ugly one,

01:37:19   'cause I actually enjoyed it.

01:37:20   - No, this is not out of the computer.

01:37:21   - You're wrong, good try.

01:37:23   Next guy.

01:37:24   - Okay, wait, wait, did you have three, John?

01:37:26   You had the Molar Mac, the LC580?

01:37:28   - I just had the two.

01:37:28   I was gonna take one of yours,

01:37:30   but so far you're over one.

01:37:32   Try again.

01:37:33   - All right, so my next one,

01:37:34   it was actually going back in time, Flower Power.

01:37:36   Just no, just absolutely no.

01:37:38   - Aw, really?

01:37:39   - Absolutely no.

01:37:40   - I mean, it's not pretty.

01:37:41   That's an easy one.

01:37:44   That's the one that people know about.

01:37:45   Remember when Apple made that funny computer

01:37:46   with they forget about the Polkadot one, right?

01:37:49   'Cause there was Flower Power,

01:37:50   and what was the other one called?

01:37:51   Dalmatian or something like that. Yeah, there you go Dalmatian and arguably the flower one was worse than Dalmatian because I went back and forth

01:37:57   But yeah in your face. Yeah, but those are those are

01:38:00   reasonable picks it it's interesting that

01:38:03   They decided to make like IMAX like towards the end of the IMAX

01:38:07   Hey, let's just do something fun and they made not they didn't just make one of them a two and that's what they picked

01:38:12   like, you know

01:38:13   They have like 50 different choices of like what are we gonna do in the background?

01:38:15   And these are the ones they picked and it's just it totally looks like

01:38:19   You know not that gonna blame it on Steve Jobs, but when you see a decision like that from a big company

01:38:23   It's like well

01:38:24   They probably had a lot of different options and it came down to one person who's in a position to make this decision

01:38:30   They said I like that one in that one

01:38:32   Like literally one person

01:38:34   Steered the course of this entire product line because you don't have people vote on it one person and probably for all we know it was

01:38:38   Steve Jobs saying that one hour and everyone else in the room is like

01:38:45   You're the boss, those are the ones you want.

01:38:47   'Cause how else do you pick something like that?

01:38:49   Like you've already decided

01:38:50   that you're gonna do something fanciful and fun.

01:38:52   And it's not like, you know,

01:38:54   you're not gonna do design by committee

01:38:55   and just have everybody vote on it or something.

01:38:58   You're just gonna go with what the boss says.

01:39:00   And the boss usually has good taste

01:39:01   except for when everything was coated in leather.

01:39:03   But, you know, you end up with a flower-prouded Dalmatian.

01:39:07   I think like the leather contacts in "Find My Friends"

01:39:10   were worse than that computer, but similar idea.

01:39:14   - All right, the original look of the iMac,

01:39:19   the 2004 era iMac with the just mountain of chin

01:39:24   and white plastic.

01:39:26   - Wait, you're talking about the 17 inch iMac G5?

01:39:29   - Yes, yes. - I have that on my list,

01:39:31   my number two. (laughs)

01:39:32   - See, there you go, see, now we're onto something.

01:39:36   So yeah, the 2004-ish iMac G5.

01:39:39   So this is, imagine the general gist

01:39:42   of a modern day iMac, but super duper thick,

01:39:47   and with just like a third of the front of it is chin.

01:39:51   And it's just, it's chin for days.

01:39:54   It's a five head of chin is what it is.

01:39:56   And it's just not good looking at all.

01:39:59   - Yeah, I am with you on this.

01:40:00   It's my number two, because yeah, just the proportion,

01:40:03   like, 'cause it came in a bigger size.

01:40:04   I'm talking about the 17 inch one, like the smaller one.

01:40:07   If you look for, you know, G5 17 inch iMac,

01:40:10   you'll see is ridiculous proportions.

01:40:13   And it doesn't, it has the metal foot,

01:40:15   but then the all white plastic enclosure.

01:40:18   It's not a good, the proportions are all wrong.

01:40:23   And then in the middle of that sea of white plastic,

01:40:25   it has that webcam function at the top,

01:40:27   so you have this big black circle.

01:40:29   It's just a black, squarish thing.

01:40:32   It has terrible proportions.

01:40:33   Yeah, I'm totally with you.

01:40:35   Because I actually took the option here

01:40:37   that was posing the question of,

01:40:39   just for shifting it to the iMac era forward,

01:40:41   because this era that Jon's pulling these ugly things from,

01:40:44   I wasn't even here for that.

01:40:46   So I'm just saying the ones that I actually

01:40:48   ever get to see in person or use.

01:40:51   - And then my final entry, the Trashcan Mac Pro, which--

01:40:55   - What? - No, because it's just

01:40:57   so stupid. - What's ugly about that?

01:40:58   - Okay, it's not really ugly,

01:40:59   which I guess I'm now changing the context of the question.

01:41:01   - That is not the question.

01:41:02   - But it just looks so dumb. - Are you just angry at it?

01:41:05   - It just looks so dumb. - I just picked

01:41:06   the butterfly keyboard.

01:41:07   - Yeah, right?

01:41:08   It's just such a dumb looking computer.

01:41:10   Like it's, I guess it's aesthetically fine.

01:41:12   - Disagreeing.

01:41:13   - It looks like a jet engine, it's cool.

01:41:15   - Honestly, I am a big fan of that computer

01:41:18   for what it, like, before like the GPU failures

01:41:22   started to become noticeable.

01:41:23   - If it worked, it would have been great.

01:41:25   - Yeah, like I actually really liked the design

01:41:27   of that computer in a number of ways.

01:41:29   I mean, the only reason I stopped using mine

01:41:30   was because I wanted to go retina

01:41:32   and it never really had a good desktop retina story

01:41:34   on that computer and they never updated it.

01:41:37   But that computer, during the year or so

01:41:41   it spent on my desk, I really enjoyed looking at it.

01:41:43   - Well, see, but it doesn't look like a computer.

01:41:46   Like, I want a computer to look like a computer.

01:41:48   This looks like a damn trash can.

01:41:50   So, no.

01:41:50   - Oh, so you have a 50% success rate.

01:41:53   It would be good if you were hitting in baseball,

01:41:55   but it's bad if you're picking ugly Macs.

01:41:57   - All right, so Marco, what do you say if you're so smart?

01:41:59   - All right, so my first one,

01:42:02   and this is my honorable mention, my number four,

01:42:05   'cause it asked for the top three,

01:42:07   but I have my number four.

01:42:09   Again, modern era only, which I'm basically defining

01:42:12   as like, you know, like--

01:42:13   - I got modern era is defined when you started using Macs.

01:42:16   - Yes.

01:42:17   - I have news for you, 1998 is not modern.

01:42:19   - Okay, well anyway, so you know, roughly modern era only.

01:42:22   I'm gonna say the first Intel MacBook Pro.

01:42:27   It's not that it was like, you know,

01:42:29   more horrible than the molar, it's just like,

01:42:31   you know, compared to its time--

01:42:32   - What the hell is wrong with you?

01:42:34   This is perfectly fine.

01:42:35   I saw a whole bunch of these in my office around that time

01:42:38   and I used one for a little while and I never liked,

01:42:42   like the top edge really kills it for me

01:42:46   'cause you had those two giant holes for,

01:42:48   I assume microphones, plus the giant webcam,

01:42:51   plus the giant thing next to it.

01:42:53   - Those holes are not for microphones.

01:42:56   - Was it the latch?

01:42:57   - Yeah, do you remember what this was like?

01:42:58   So this, I reviewed this, I remember it

01:43:00   and I actually own one.

01:43:02   This was before Unibody and Unibody made these things

01:43:05   Things look like garbage, right?

01:43:06   But before a unibody, the way they closed was,

01:43:09   they used magnets, but the way the magnets worked is,

01:43:12   there were two very thin metal hooks inside there.

01:43:15   I think there was only two slots in the 17-inch,

01:43:17   maybe only one.

01:43:18   And then you'd bring them towards the magnet,

01:43:19   and the magnet would pull the very thin metal hook down

01:43:22   so that it would hook onto the little latching mechanism,

01:43:25   and then you'd press that button in the front

01:43:27   that would release the little hooks.

01:43:28   But it was literally like little metal teeth

01:43:30   that would come out of there.

01:43:31   So those slots were holding the little metal things

01:43:33   that were on a swivel.

01:43:34   And actually, maybe I should have picked

01:43:36   the 17 inch version of this,

01:43:37   because it made everything even worse,

01:43:39   because you had the giant C around the keyboard.

01:43:43   - The keyboard, yeah, the giant speaker grills.

01:43:45   - Oh, that is true, I had forgotten about that.

01:43:47   I will give you the keyboard.

01:43:48   - Yes, maybe the 17 inch MacBook Pro would be worse.

01:43:49   - The keyboard was real bad, or that whole circus.

01:43:53   - 'Cause they used the same size keyboard

01:43:54   on the 12 inch and the 17 inch.

01:43:55   I also complained about that in my review,

01:43:57   which I will find a link for for notes.

01:43:58   The other thing about the little latchy things

01:44:00   is that little piece of metal that rotated out

01:44:02   was incredibly thin and very easy to bend.

01:44:05   That mechanism was very delicate.

01:44:07   And if the little latchy thing,

01:44:08   like the magnet pulled it down,

01:44:10   but it didn't quite like the tiny, you know,

01:44:12   one eighth of a millimeter thing didn't hook underneath,

01:44:15   it wouldn't stay closed.

01:44:16   It would just pop open and you'd push it down

01:44:18   and it would pop open.

01:44:18   It's like nothing you can do

01:44:19   because it's like the light in the refrigerator.

01:44:22   Like once the thing is closed,

01:44:23   that's when the hook is supposed to come down.

01:44:25   And if it didn't come down,

01:44:26   you can't get it to come down

01:44:27   because you'd have to open it,

01:44:28   but then it can't reach anymore.

01:44:29   It was a bad mechanism.

01:44:31   I didn't mind it so much on my PowerBook G4

01:44:35   because that was before webcams and IR sensors.

01:44:38   And once they added the webcam and the IR sensor,

01:44:41   they just poked so many holes in that case

01:44:42   and it didn't age well into that.

01:44:45   - Oh, that's why it was two latches

01:44:47   'cause the one I reviewed was the PowerBook G4

01:44:49   and it just had the one latch except for on the 17 had two.

01:44:51   But you're right, you couldn't have the one latch

01:44:53   once the camera went there, I think.

01:44:54   - Right, yeah.

01:44:55   So anyway, yeah, just too many things looking at you

01:44:58   and holes in the case and it looked really sloppy in person.

01:45:01   All right, so my number three,

01:45:03   this is gonna anger some people, what a surprise,

01:45:06   the 11 inch MacBook Air.

01:45:09   The 13 inch MacBook Air of this generation

01:45:12   and many others that followed it looked fine.

01:45:14   The 11 inch, the proportions that it had,

01:45:17   especially the screen, that you had a huge wide bezel

01:45:21   around a very short squat screen

01:45:24   on this weird like squat computer,

01:45:26   it just, it did not look attractive.

01:45:27   The proportions were all wrong.

01:45:29   It was impressive for what it did

01:45:30   And I still think we haven't released anything like it,

01:45:35   because the 12 inch MacBook was not like it.

01:45:36   It was a much more compromised machine

01:45:38   than the 11 inch AR ever was.

01:45:40   But the 11 inch AR is not an attractive computer.

01:45:45   - I think it's cute.

01:45:46   I think it's definitely, it's like your dog.

01:45:48   It's weirdly proportioned, but in a cute way.

01:45:51   - All right, fair enough.

01:45:52   All right, my number two was the 17 inch iMac G5,

01:45:55   as Casey said, the big, white, thick, weird thing.

01:45:58   And then my number one,

01:46:00   - You're gonna kill me.

01:46:01   - Oh no.

01:46:02   - The 2019 Mac Pro.

01:46:04   - What?

01:46:05   No, even I--

01:46:06   - I think if you have one in person,

01:46:07   you'd come around on it a little bit more.

01:46:08   - No, even I have to disagree with this,

01:46:10   'cause I was gonna choose that just for the lulz,

01:46:12   but no, I actually think it's a pretty good looking computer.

01:46:14   - I do not like the holes.

01:46:15   I just, and I know, I've seen 'em,

01:46:18   I mean look, I have 'em on the back of my XDR.

01:46:20   I mean, fortunately, I never have to see the back of my XDR,

01:46:22   but like, I don't like the hole pattern,

01:46:24   I don't like the handles, I don't like the feet.

01:46:26   The wheels make it a little bit better,

01:46:28   but like the feet design with those big, flat,

01:46:29   I just, I don't think it's an attractive computer.

01:46:32   I really don't, and that's maybe one of the reasons

01:46:34   why I never wanted to buy one.

01:46:36   Like, I just am not, I don't find that attractive.

01:46:38   And I think, honorable mention to the rack mount version,

01:46:41   which I think is even worse, but--

01:46:43   - No, that's true, I would agree with that.

01:46:45   The rack mount version's pretty rough.

01:46:46   - The only reason, I didn't pick the rack mount version

01:46:47   'cause I thought like that's, you know,

01:46:48   it's such a specialized thing, like I don't,

01:46:50   I've never even heard of anybody buying one,

01:46:51   so it felt like that was kind of off the table,

01:46:53   but the tower version I think is not attractive.

01:46:56   - Well, if the whole thing is bothering you,

01:46:58   maybe you wouldn't get over that,

01:46:59   The whole thing never really bothered me,

01:47:01   but I remember when I first saw it,

01:47:03   it didn't make much of an impression,

01:47:04   but actually having one and looking at it

01:47:06   and sort of, I've taken photos of it,

01:47:08   seeing how the light reflects off

01:47:10   the weird little hole things,

01:47:11   it's definitely grown on me way more than I thought it would.

01:47:13   It is just, it is a nice object, right?

01:47:16   It's setting aside how it looks as a computer.

01:47:18   And like the weird, the weird feety things,

01:47:20   they have a little bit of a Miyazaki look to me,

01:47:23   the little squat suction cup-y little feet.

01:47:26   And I don't mind the little chrome handles

01:47:28   the sharp edge on the top. The only thing that bothers me about this computer is the

01:47:31   seam between the front and the back, but I don't want them to make it even more expensive

01:47:36   by making it one solid thing. But yeah, it definitely grew on me having it in the house

01:47:40   way more than before now. I definitely have a lot of affection for it. But I can understand

01:47:45   people not liking it because the holes are divisive.

01:47:46   Yeah, the holes and the feet, I think. If I got this, I would get it with wheels just

01:47:52   to not have those feet. And the wheels do look good. I think they're

01:47:56   - They're good looking wheels.

01:47:57   - Yeah, but yeah, that's my number one.

01:48:00   I cannot, I do not like the way the computer looks at all.

01:48:03   - Well, if we put a Mueller on your desk,

01:48:06   I think he would run screaming to that 2019 Mac Pro.

01:48:10   - Thanks to our sponsors this week,

01:48:11   Squarespace, Linode, and Collide,

01:48:13   and thanks to our members who support us directly.

01:48:15   You can join at ATP.FM/join.

01:48:18   We will talk to you next week.

01:48:20   (upbeat music)

01:48:23   ♪ Now the show is over ♪

01:48:25   They didn't even mean to begin, 'cause it was accidental.

01:48:29   (Accidental)

01:48:30   Oh, it was accidental.

01:48:32   (Accidental)

01:48:33   John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, 'cause it was accidental.

01:48:39   (Accidental)

01:48:40   Oh, it was accidental.

01:48:42   (Accidental)

01:48:43   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm.

01:48:48   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:48:58   So that's Casey, Liszt, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:49:02   Auntie Marco, Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse

01:49:09   It's accidental (it's accidental)

01:49:13   They didn't mean to, accidental (accidental)

01:49:18   ♪ Tech podcast so long ♪

01:49:21   - Do we have a little time for something

01:49:24   that maybe we'll end up covering again next week,

01:49:27   but if we have a few minutes before we all pass out.

01:49:30   So I bought and I received the CalDigit TS4, right?

01:49:35   - Oh yeah.

01:49:38   - Which actually, I changed my setup this week.

01:49:40   I'm using the CalDigit TS4.

01:49:42   And so far I really like it.

01:49:45   And I am really, really digging the one cable lifestyle,

01:49:50   except apparently--

01:49:52   - Except that one cable costs $130.

01:49:54   - Well, not only that, but no,

01:49:56   apparently the way the LG 5K works

01:49:59   is it's two different streams

01:50:03   of monitor data mashed together.

01:50:06   So I guess if I'm, I am way outside my comfort zone here,

01:50:11   but I think what's happening is

01:50:14   Because this is effectively two monitors in terms of like data,

01:50:19   when I plug in both the LG 5K and my 4K,

01:50:23   I am now using effectively three monitors, sort of, kind

01:50:27   of worth of data, which means I don't have enough bandwidth

01:50:30   to do both on the CalDigit.

01:50:32   Or something about the CalDigit in combination with this

01:50:35   makes it such that it is transmitting 4K to the 5K

01:50:40   and then 4K to the 4K.

01:50:41   But what I can do is I can up sample the 4K to be effectively 5K,

01:50:45   which people with better eyes could probably tell the difference, but I can't.

01:50:48   So it's very weird because I'm running the 5K in scaled mode

01:50:53   at the native 5K resolution, but it's being scaled.

01:50:58   So that means even with my forthcoming

01:51:03   studio display, what I was planning on doing is, you know, moving this,

01:51:07   the 5K to be the accessory display and then just making the 4K like a portable

01:51:11   display if I ever work somewhere else for some reason. And apparently if I want to continue

01:51:16   the one-cable lifestyle, I will always have this 5K scaled. Even though it's scaled to

01:51:22   5K, it's scaled.

01:51:23   I thought they said it was if you used display stream compression and that your current monitors

01:51:27   didn't support it, so the Apple one might.

01:51:30   Right. But the problem isn't with the forthcoming monitor. The problem is this monitor. And

01:51:36   this monitor isn't going away.

01:51:38   Which one isn't going away?

01:51:39   The Ultrafine 5K.

01:51:40   - The LG, oh, oh, well, make it go away.

01:51:43   - Well, I don't want it to go away.

01:51:44   I wanna have two monitors.

01:51:45   I guess I could do that.

01:51:46   - It's interesting that you can't tell the difference.

01:51:47   If no one had mentioned that,

01:51:48   you couldn't tell it was upscaled.

01:51:50   - Well, I knew that I needed to go into system preferences

01:51:52   and fiddle with it, but I didn't really think much about it.

01:51:54   And my eyes, as I've gotten older, have gotten worse.

01:51:56   And so I'm sure somebody could come,

01:52:00   somebody with better eyes could come and be like,

01:52:01   oh, no, no, no, no, such and such icon

01:52:03   or such and such text is blurry.

01:52:04   And I'll be like, oh,

01:52:06   I'm excited to get my new monitor though, I really am.

01:52:08   - I think you should just,

01:52:09   - I think you should try just living with one of them.

01:52:11   I know you have all these monitors,

01:52:12   but you can recoup some of your costs

01:52:13   by passing on the curse slash blushing of the 5K

01:52:16   to someone else and just try the one monitor lifestyle

01:52:19   with your Apple monitor.

01:52:20   - See, and I certainly could, or I could go

01:52:23   and I could keep the 4K as the accessory monitor

01:52:26   and make the ultra fine 5K the portable monitor

01:52:28   since it does so well when I move it around.

01:52:31   But I don't know, it seems like--

01:52:33   - I mean, it does so well standing still.

01:52:35   - Well, that's too shaggy, too shaggy.

01:52:36   - I mean, it's as good as it's ever gonna get now.

01:52:38   this is the perfect time to sell it to somebody.

01:52:40   - Yeah, I could, but--

01:52:41   - That's true, it was just serviced.

01:52:43   - That is true.

01:52:44   You're putting bad, maybe good thoughts in my head.

01:52:46   - Just had the Vano service, I'm sure it'll be fine.

01:52:49   - Can I suggest something?

01:52:51   Don't sell it to somebody, give it to somebody.

01:52:53   'Cause you don't wanna take money for that thing

01:52:55   and then it dies and then it's a problem.

01:52:57   - If you give it to them, it feels more like a curse.

01:52:59   - Oh, that's terrible.

01:53:00   - Pass this curse on to you.

01:53:01   - Anybody who's getting rid of an LG 5K, mail it to Casey.

01:53:04   Just, that should just be what everyone does

01:53:07   their LG 5Ks, just mail them all to Casey.

01:53:10   - That's fine.

01:53:11   - You'll have like six of them trying to figure out

01:53:12   how to hook them all up at once at your desk.

01:53:14   - Yeah, well, I absolutely will.

01:53:15   - No, if you assemble the parts from all of them,

01:53:18   you get one working monitor.

01:53:19   - That's also true.

01:53:20   (laughing)

01:53:22   This is the LG ship of Theseus, thank you very much.

01:53:24   - Yeah, I send John all my Kindles,

01:53:26   the rollers in Casey all there, 5Ks.

01:53:27   (laughing)

01:53:30   - Oh, goodness.

01:53:31   - Can you imagine, what a horrible curse,

01:53:33   like you go outside, like ah, Aaron,

01:53:35   there's a giant box again.

01:53:37   (laughing)

01:53:39   - That would be hilarious

01:53:40   and she would not find it funny at all.

01:53:41   Like Erin is extremely easygoing,

01:53:43   but after like the fourth one of these,

01:53:44   she would be like, I think more than anything else,

01:53:46   where are you putting this?

01:53:47   Where are you gonna put it?

01:53:48   (laughing)

01:53:49   - I feel like when the toasters kept showing up at my house.

01:53:51   - Yeah, exactly.

01:53:52   Just everyone's mediocre LG5 case going to Casey's house.

01:53:56   - Like the mediocre toasters.

01:53:57   - I feel so bad.

01:53:58   Did I ever tell you the story about, I probably did,

01:54:00   the story of how the toasters left my house?

01:54:01   - Yes, somebody like a courier came and got them or something.

01:54:04   - I mean, in hindsight, now I know this was Alex

01:54:07   doing all this, but like Alex Cox was responsible.

01:54:11   But I just kept getting these toasters.

01:54:13   You could, you know, get one and they come in big boxes,

01:54:15   but then the boxes didn't leave.

01:54:17   So they were just stacked in the garage.

01:54:18   They have some photographs of it.

01:54:19   And so the solution was, I was like, look,

01:54:21   these toasters need to leave my house.

01:54:23   So they hired a task rabbit.

01:54:25   I think that's still a thing, like a person to come

01:54:28   and a person showed up at my house,

01:54:30   just a regular person with their SUV.

01:54:32   And those toasters barely fit in the SUV.

01:54:35   We filled the entire trunk, the back seat,

01:54:38   and the passenger seat with just cardboard boxes.

01:54:41   'Cause it was like 12 very large boxes.

01:54:45   And that person showed up and they're like,

01:54:47   "I'm ready to do a TaskRabbit thing."

01:54:49   I'm like, "I'm not sure you were well briefed

01:54:52   "on what's going on.

01:54:53   "I'm picking up toasters, how bad could that be?"

01:54:55   And it was just, you could see her face drop.

01:54:57   It's like, "Sorry."

01:54:59   - So what were they getting mailed or donated or trashed?

01:55:03   - I don't know where they went from the task.

01:55:05   The task of how a person took them out of my house.

01:55:06   Where they went from there, I don't know.

01:55:07   I think they actually got shipped back.

01:55:09   You should ask Alex about it.

01:55:10   They will be able to tell you whether they got shipped back

01:55:12   somewhere or donated.

01:55:14   All I knew was at that point, speaking of wives,

01:55:16   was these toasters needed to get out of my house.

01:55:19   (beeping)