00:00:00 ◼ ► I'd like to give a update on my situation because inquiring minds have not only wanted to know but have asked.
00:00:09 ◼ ► I am here with the lights on and I am not in my sleepy shirt. I'm actually in the very old throwback ATP watch sport edition.
00:00:20 ◼ ► Which you cannot get anymore but is my favorite workout shirt because it's like kind of sort of under armor sort of material.
00:00:30 ◼ ► And so anyway, I am wearing that with the lights on and if you wanted to get some sort of sweet ATP merchandise, I can tell you that now is the time to do it.
00:00:40 ◼ ► Like literally right now because as we record there's a little over a week left or no I'm sorry less than that, less than a week, less than a week.
00:00:51 ◼ ► So just a couple days left for you to go to ATP.fm/store and get yourself some sweet, sweet ATP merch.
00:01:00 ◼ ► We've got new Mac Pro outline shirts with or without wheels and all sorts of other stuff.
00:01:06 ◼ ► We do not have mugs. A lot of people have asked about mugs. We don't have those at the moment.
00:01:11 ◼ ► But we have a lot of great shirts. We've got the hoodie which is extremely comfortable.
00:01:39 ◼ ► So every time somebody non-ironically, non-sarcastically tweets at us, at me, at somebody and says,
00:02:01 ◼ ► And you listeners, you might think that Casey's making this up or that 100% of the people who say that are being sarcastic.
00:02:07 ◼ ► I guarantee you every time there is one or two people at least who honestly, totally not sarcastically say,
00:02:21 ◼ ► So you might be thinking to yourself, "I have a great memory. I know I can't do it right now.
00:02:25 ◼ ► Maybe I'm driving. Maybe I'm walking. Maybe I'm just not at my computer and I'd rather do it on a full-sized computer."
00:02:57 ◼ ► Because as we record this, which is on the 11th, the afternoon of the 11th, you have three more days.
00:03:07 ◼ ► And Marco, would you mind reminding me what the situation is if you happen to be an ATP member?
00:03:26 ◼ ► If you want to become a member, just use this code once and then cancel your membership.
00:03:31 ◼ ► You totally can. That's totally a thing. We hope you don't, but you can and hey, no judgment.
00:03:43 ◼ ► Very often what happens is somebody who listens to the show has someone in their life who would like to get them some ATP merch for, say, the holidays or whatever.
00:03:58 ◼ ► So, if you're listening to the show and you think there's someone in your life who wants to get you a gift and you would like to get one of these gifts,
00:04:06 ◼ ► you have to basically go and tell them, "Hey, if you're thinking of gift ideas for me, you should get something from this store that's closing on the 14th, so hurry up."
00:04:17 ◼ ► If you've been leaving hints, if you've been trying to be subtle or whatever, it's time to cut that out.
00:04:22 ◼ ► You have to say, "Look, if you haven't already bought me something and you're going to get me something, I would like..."
00:04:28 ◼ ► And then just point to the shirt that you want or the pin that you want or the hoodie that you want or whatever and say, "And by the way, this sale ends on the 14th, so order now."
00:04:38 ◼ ► Because we get email from those people too that say, "Oh, is the store open? I don't listen to the show, but my husband or wife listens to the show and I know they would love this, but it seems like your store is closed.
00:04:53 ◼ ► Yeah, we're not sure if it'll make it in time for the holidays. I don't want to make any guarantees in that regard, but it certainly won't make it in time for the holidays if you don't order.
00:05:22 ◼ ► Oh, no, but I have the Apple case too. You're talking about the one that you got? I also got the Apple one.
00:05:26 ◼ ► Oh, that's right. Okay, never mind. Confusion over. We don't have time to do case reviews in this episode. This is an Apple event episode, but rest assured, next episode in the notes.
00:05:35 ◼ ► I'll certainly be reviewing the cases that I've got. By then, Marco, will you have your phone by then?
00:05:41 ◼ ► Maybe. So the way things work here, my phone is going to be delivered on Friday to a ferry terminal.
00:05:49 ◼ ► And if it gets delivered past about 9.30 in the morning, which it almost certainly will, then I won't get it until the next day.
00:06:02 ◼ ► Can you loiter at the ferry terminal all day just to intercept the package when it arrives?
00:06:08 ◼ ► They would probably let me do that, but I'd rather not. That seems a little bit excessive.
00:06:13 ◼ ► So, yeah. I will get my phone a few days later than everybody else. Granted, I have done weirder things to get my phone on launch day, but this year I'm a little bit more chill about it, I think.
00:06:22 ◼ ► So you got a mini for yourself. Remind me what model you were planning to and now have bought.
00:06:27 ◼ ► I did everything John said I would do. So I got the iPhone 12 mini in red/orange/salmon/coral, whatever it really is, in that color.
00:06:39 ◼ ► I got the 256 instead of the 128 because John was telling me in my head, "Just get the 256. There's no way you're going to get the 128."
00:06:50 ◼ ► Don't try to blame me for doing what you were going to do. Yes, I predicted it correctly, but I didn't make you do it.
00:06:55 ◼ ► And easily enough, the store opened up a couple minutes later than it should have, but I got mine for day one delivery.
00:07:03 ◼ ► Tiff at the same time was ordering her Pro Max Blue for day one delivery and there were no problems getting either one of them on time.
00:07:10 ◼ ► And I think even a few hours after sale, I think they were still available for day one delivery.
00:07:15 ◼ ► So it seems like this was actually very well stocked compared to previous iPhone launches.
00:07:25 ◼ ► These are the two lower demand models, right? It's the most expensive model, which has historically lower demand than the less expensive models.
00:07:32 ◼ ► And then the small one, which as much as the people who want it really wanted, is not the way the industry is trending.
00:07:51 ◼ ► But that's almost always because it's the cheapest. And it turns out the cheapest thing of any Apple product lineup is the most successful sales-wise.
00:08:04 ◼ ► And it seems like whatever big demand there is for the small phone is mostly about the cheap phone.
00:08:10 ◼ ► And that seems to get most of it. And so it'll be interesting to see if the mini actually succeeds as a major product that they will continue.
00:08:18 ◼ ► I sure hope it does, because I'm telling you what, seeing this case, I mean, yeah, there's no phone in it yet,
00:08:28 ◼ ► Yeah, I think we did reach a gentleman's agreement that you will not discuss that phone on this program at all, or with me in any capacity.
00:08:40 ◼ ► Because I do really love my 12 Pro, I really honestly do, and I was using the telephoto lens just yesterday.
00:08:53 ◼ ► But I am having some serious FOMO about the mini, and I don't even know, but a couple of people that have, you know, gotten press, or not press copies,
00:09:03 ◼ ► you know, ceded pre-release phones, and I'm already getting jealous and getting scared that I'm going to kind of wish I got that one.
00:09:15 ◼ ► Oh yeah, right, because I forgot also between our last show and now, the press review is all dropped for the mini and the Max.
00:09:27 ◼ ► The gist is basically that the mini is awesome, except that it gets a little bit less battery life than the medium-sized ones, which is to be expected, I think.
00:09:35 ◼ ► And that the Max is really big and really heavy, and the camera is either awesome, which is what most people are saying, or only a little bit better, which is what a few people like MPBHD said.
00:09:48 ◼ ► So it's kind of, it seems like the gain that you get from that bigger sensor in the Max is there, but it's only noticeable in certain challenging circumstances, like low light and stuff,
00:10:01 ◼ ► where the daylight pictures and well-lit pictures, you pretty much can't tell the difference.
00:10:08 ◼ ► But that is, certainly, if I was a person who was at all interested in a big phone, I would get it, because there is a difference, and when you need it, it is great.
00:10:18 ◼ ► But I, like a few times during this ordering period, I've picked up Tiff's Max, and I just, every time, I'm like, "No, I can't do this."
00:10:27 ◼ ► Yeah, I haven't held a Max in my hand in a long time, but certainly, any time I have, I've been like, "Ugh, this is not for me."
00:10:36 ◼ ► And I mean, if it's for you, that's fine. I'm not saying it's bad. It's just, it is not for me. Not at all.
00:10:41 ◼ ► I think what it mostly comes down to is, like, do you keep it in a pants pocket, and do you need to use it one-handed very often?
00:10:48 ◼ ► And if the answer to both of those is no, it's a pretty good sell to get the Max, because it is the best in most ways.
00:10:54 ◼ ► But if you do keep it in a pants pocket and/or use it one-handed frequently, it's challenging.
00:11:00 ◼ ► Yeah, you know, interestingly, I haven't read really any of the reviews, other than Gruber's so far, or watched any of the videos,
00:11:07 ◼ ► but I saw fly by, maybe one of you guys retweeted it, I don't recall, but I saw fly by a tweet from Neelay Patel, who said,
00:11:14 ◼ ► "Here's why I think MKBHD and I had different reactions to the 12 Pro Max camera. I take a lot of photos of a toddler.
00:11:19 ◼ ► For any given light, the Pro Max will generally pick a higher ISO and faster shutter speed, which makes a big difference when your subject never sits still."
00:11:25 ◼ ► Which, not having any experience with this myself, that does make sense, and it certainly is another notch in the belt of why one would want a Pro Max.
00:11:34 ◼ ► But again, every time I picked it up, I would just get nauseous, and I wouldn't want to do it.
00:11:38 ◼ ► You know, there was an Apple event, and you two, even though this is no follow-up, are just talking about the iPhone Pro Max.
00:11:42 ◼ ► If you notice, below the Apple event in our notes, there's a whole section on the Max and the Mini where there are things about the Max,
00:11:47 ◼ ► and then Marco's going to talk about the Mini. But if you want to do it now, that's fine, because I have some tweets about the Pro Max as well.
00:11:52 ◼ ► Matt Panzareno said that the telephoto lens actually gets the 5,000 adjustments per second image stabilization.
00:11:59 ◼ ► That's something that Apple didn't mention, but it's the lens stabilization, not the sensor shift stabilization.
00:12:05 ◼ ► So it's an increase in number of moves per second, not the sensor shift that's in the main lens.
00:12:13 ◼ ► And the other thing he said is that the ISO range of the wide lens, the 1x lens, is larger, which allows for faster shutter speeds with wide apertures.
00:12:23 ◼ ► And he mentions the same thing, as Neil have to tell there, that moving subjects in iffy light is a big jump in quality.
00:12:29 ◼ ► But if you don't have something that's moving, you won't notice that there was a faster shutter, and then you won't notice that you get less blur.
00:12:34 ◼ ► Yeah, it also seems like one of the major improvements for the Max's camera system is in night mode, and any kind of long exposure situation,
00:12:46 ◼ ► So night mode, what this results in is you can have less time, you have to hold still while taking the picture,
00:12:58 ◼ ► Yeah, and I feel like a lot of these reviewers who didn't notice anything about the camera,
00:13:02 ◼ ► if you put the camera on a tripod and take a picture in good light, you're not going to notice much of a difference.
00:13:12 ◼ ► if you look at the pictures people tend to test with, it's like, "Here is my parking lot at night outside of my YouTube studio."
00:13:19 ◼ ► That's a very popular one. "Here is a beautiful person smiling and staying very still."
00:13:28 ◼ ► Right, exactly. Or even if it's in low light, like here's someone outside under a tree at night in the dark,
00:13:33 ◼ ► but they're not a little kid running around. And so that's where I feel like you have to,
00:13:40 ◼ ► I'm assuming he pulled that out of like Halliday or some other app that gives that information.
00:13:44 ◼ ► And seeing, like looking at the picture after it was taken and say, "How long was this shutter open for this shot?"
00:13:49 ◼ ► Versus, "How long was the shutter open for this similar looking shot on another iPhone?"
00:13:58 ◼ ► but the difference does exist and it manifests itself in the way that you would think it would manifest itself,
00:14:04 ◼ ► given the actual physical changes where, you know, larger sensor, larger pixels, you know, all that stuff.
00:14:17 ◼ ► but the sensor's a little bigger and you can hold the shutter open a little bit less time to get adequate light
00:14:21 ◼ ► and that's only going to manifest in situations where that difference makes a difference.
00:14:25 ◼ ► Yeah, two things. Number one, if, there's no question this camera is a big difference in certain circumstances,
00:14:30 ◼ ► and if they somehow sold this camera in the Mini, I would pay any price they wanted for that.
00:14:41 ◼ ► Yes, but well, it would make the bump much bigger. I mean, maybe not the body of the phone, but...
00:14:51 ◼ ► If they put that same camera system in the medium-sized Pro, I would probably have stuck with the Pro line.
00:15:20 ◼ ► Maybe you haven't always thought of socks as the perfect gift or the perfect way to give back,
00:15:28 ◼ ► When you give a pair of super comfortable Bombas socks, you're not only giving someone a gift they'll love,
00:15:37 ◼ ► Because for every pair of socks Bombas sells, they also donate a pair to someone experiencing homelessness across the US.
00:15:53 ◼ ► Bombas are specially engineered to be the most comfortable pair of socks you and everyone on your gift list has ever worn.
00:15:59 ◼ ► They spent years perfecting every detail, like limiting those annoying toe seams that make, you know,
00:16:05 ◼ ► your toes kind of hit them in the inside of a shoe, making sure their socks never slip,
00:16:32 ◼ ► Alright, so Bombas come in tons of different colors and styles, including athletic performance socks,
00:16:38 ◼ ► limited edition holiday socks, dress socks, and my personal favorite, socks made from merino wool,
00:16:44 ◼ ► a natural wonder fiber that's super warm, incredibly soft, and naturally moisture-wicking.
00:16:50 ◼ ► The generosity of Bombas customers has allowed them to donate over 40 million pairs of socks and counting
00:17:01 ◼ ► If you or anyone you give them to aren't happy with them, just reach out to their support team who will issue an exchange or a refund.
00:17:07 ◼ ► So from comfort to kindness and everything in between, Bombas aren't just giveable, they were made to give.
00:17:39 ◼ ► People don't know this, but before we put it on the live stream, we often talk to each other, "Oh, do we have anything we need to discuss?" No.
00:17:44 ◼ ► Apparently, I'm going to--new rule. We always have something to discuss, which is John is going to tell you how the show goes.
00:17:53 ◼ ► I allowed Casey to have one pre-Apple event item just because I didn't know what it was and it looked like it might be funny.
00:18:03 ◼ ► Hopefully, your oops does not take 45 minutes. If it does not take 45 minutes, you may now describe your oops.
00:18:20 ◼ ► If you recall, my 11 Pro, which coincidentally I just got repaired to put in cold storage because I had AppleCare on it, so why wouldn't I repair it?
00:18:31 ◼ ► Anyways, so the 11 Pro, when I first got it, literally the day I got it, I was washing Erin's car for reasons that are uninteresting.
00:18:38 ◼ ► And I was in a rush because the daylight was fading, I was trying to get into the kids and into Erin, and her car is an SUV.
00:18:46 ◼ ► And so I jumped up to just quickly take a swipe at the roof. I don't remember if I was washing or drying at this point.
00:18:57 ◼ ► This again was a year ago. And all of a sudden as I landed, I heard something hit the concrete of my driveway and thought, "Oh no."
00:19:05 ◼ ► And so literally within 12 hours of receiving my 11 Pro, it had a shattered back glass.
00:19:11 ◼ ► Which is, even with AppleCare, considerably more expensive than repairing the front glass.
00:19:15 ◼ ► So anyway, just the other day, I was washing Erin's car and I was on a ladder this time.
00:19:29 ◼ ► And I was swiping across the roof. And by some miracle, in a way that has never happened to me in the however many years I've owned Apple watches,
00:19:44 ◼ ► And I watched the Apple Watch, this is a Series 5, mind you, I still haven't bought a Series 6 yet.
00:19:49 ◼ ► I watched it roll down her windshield, across the like top of the fender, and hit the cement.
00:19:57 ◼ ► And sure enough, I picked it up and it now has a little shatter in the upper left hand corner.
00:20:10 ◼ ► Oh, that's a good point. I see your, I missed, I did not get your point at first. Yeah, you're right, it would have saved me.
00:20:25 ◼ ► I've never in my, you know, what, five, six years, whatever it's been, of owning Apple watches,
00:20:39 ◼ ► And so I swiped the bottom of my wrist against the roof rack in some particularly perfect way that it just went catapulting right off my wrist.
00:20:55 ◼ ► Do you gentlemen know how much it costs to repair the Series 5 watch just to get the display fixed?
00:21:00 ◼ ► The thing that's $30 if you have AppleCare on an iPhone, and I think it's like $100 if you don't,
00:21:08 ◼ ► I'm surprised they repaired those things at all, because I've seen the process of repairing them.
00:21:14 ◼ ► Yeah, it's like, what can, you know, we make this joke about laptops, like when you open them up,
00:21:18 ◼ ► like once you've opened them up once, it's hard to really get them back together quite the same way.
00:21:35 ◼ ► or I don't know what they could do with it, but like actually taking it apart to repair some part,
00:21:39 ◼ ► and then putting it back together so that it stays together seems to me that it's perhaps a money-losing proposition.
00:21:52 ◼ ► Well, I let him have the oops. I let him have one oops, because it's fun to hear about him breaking things.
00:22:01 ◼ ► Yeah, that makes sense, because it's basically full replacement to do any kind of repair for an Apple Watch,
00:22:05 ◼ ► because, like, you know, the parts and stuff inside, I think maybe you might be able to inexpensively and easily replace the battery,
00:22:12 ◼ ► but that would be about it at most, because like most repair at this scale is effectively you replace it,
00:22:23 ◼ ► and as discussed in previous episodes, what you can refurbish out of an Apple Watch is not much,
00:22:29 ◼ ► because typically, especially first-party manufacturer refurbishing, you typically don't refurbish the case,
00:22:39 ◼ ► and usually you don't refurbish batteries either, because you just replace them and recycle the old one.
00:22:57 ◼ ► I would rather not have murdered this one, but, you know, it's frustrating, but it's not the end of the earth.
00:23:04 ◼ ► But golly, $350 to replace the screen on this thing, and for all the reasons that both of you said,
00:23:09 ◼ ► like, I'm not saying that's wrong or it's not reasonable, but holy smokes, that is a lot of money to replace this thing.
00:23:17 ◼ ► And as it turns out, a new one, a new Series 6, I think, starts at $400 if you get the small one like I do.
00:23:22 ◼ ► Oh, yeah, yeah, but I mean, look at it this way. This is an excuse to get the new watch,
00:23:26 ◼ ► which you always want every year. You always want an excuse, and here you just popped off an excuse.
00:23:33 ◼ ► Well, that's the thing, and I wish I could tell you this was all some master plan to just back my way into getting a new one,
00:23:42 ◼ ► And it's funny you say that about the Solo Loop, Jon, because I guess that would have saved me.
00:23:45 ◼ ► But no, I just hadn't gotten around to it because I'm so frustrated by the order process because I'm a petulant whiner.
00:23:52 ◼ ► And so, anyways, I'm going to order one sometime in the next day or two, but I couldn't help but realize that Aaron's car is now murdered at both a phone and a watch.
00:24:03 ◼ ► Is it the car's fault when it causes problems to happen when it is not being operated or moving?
00:24:11 ◼ ► It's like if you ride your bike into a parked car, then you get hurt. Like, is that the car's fault? Like, I don't know.
00:24:18 ◼ ► We're going to go with yes, because otherwise then I have to feel even more responsible than I already do. I don't want that.
00:24:23 ◼ ► All right. So I guess we have to talk about some stuff that happened yesterday or else Jon is going to explode. Is that how this works?
00:24:37 ◼ ► I think you've lost the ability to talk about Jon Ternes's big pitch about Apple Silicon and how great they are.
00:24:57 ◼ ► Yeah, well, I sacrifice. I sacrifice pre-show. I take things and I cut them out of fault. I move them down. I compress.
00:25:03 ◼ ► Anyway, now my sacrifices pay off. And I didn't break any of my hardware, so I didn't have any hoops to talk about.
00:25:09 ◼ ► So this is a call for listeners, because we're bad and we should really have full text search of our episodes, but we don't.
00:25:20 ◼ ► On some past episode of ATP, it could have been literally years in the past, someone, probably Casey, said, "Hey, what do we all think?
00:25:27 ◼ ► Place your bets. What do you think the name of Apple's, you know, ARM chips for the Mac will be?
00:25:32 ◼ ► Will it just be the A series? Will it be X something? Will it be M something? Everybody place your bets."
00:25:39 ◼ ► I would love to know what we all said and which one of us was right, but I have no idea when we talked about that.
00:25:44 ◼ ► So if you know, please write in and tell us. Don't guess. Send us a timestamp, Lincoln Overcast, so you can be super cool.
00:25:49 ◼ ► If nobody knows, then it'll remain a mystery. It's not a big deal. I was just wondering.
00:25:53 ◼ ► Anyway, the reason that comes up is because when we were discussing what they're going to call, you know, the new series of chips in, you know, Apple's ARM-based Macs,
00:26:03 ◼ ► when we talked about them being called M, we said, "Oh, but also, isn't Apple has already kind of used M with the M7 Apple Motion coprocessor that they included in the something or other? I gotta look it up."
00:26:16 ◼ ► Yeah. Anyway, and they've incremented that number apparently, like the M8 was in the phone after, then the M now, and I think they're up to M14 now, right?
00:26:23 ◼ ► So it's like, "Well, they already used M something." But, you know, they can reuse names.
00:26:27 ◼ ► They reused iBook for a piece of hardware in a store where you buy eBooks, and nobody knows the name of the motion coprocessor anymore anyway, and it's all folded into the system-on-a-chip these days, I think, anyway.
00:26:38 ◼ ► No, I think that's kind of why they stopped talking about it, because it used to be a separate chip, and then at some point, it just became part of the A-whatever series system-on-a-chip.
00:26:46 ◼ ► Right. So anyway, we know that Apple decided to call it the M1, which made me think of the BMW M1, which was a late '70s, early '80s mid-engine supercar from BMW, and BMW has a line of cars that we talk about, the M series.
00:27:02 ◼ ► You know, they have a 3 series, 5 series, 7 series, 8 series, so on, and they make an M3, an M5. I think they make an M8 now.
00:27:12 ◼ ► Anyway, BMW made a 1 series, and if they're going to make an M version of the 1 series, it would have to be the M1 to go along with the M3 and the M5 and so on and so forth.
00:27:20 ◼ ► Aha, but BMW said, "We can't use the name M1. We already used that for our supercar in the late '70s, early '80s."
00:27:25 ◼ ► So they called it, frustratingly, non-uniformly, the 1M, a car that Marco owned for a while.
00:27:31 ◼ ► Apple, again, has no such problem. They're calling this thing the M1, despite the fact that six years from now, they're going to put a chip in some Mac called the M7, which will be the exact same name as the motion code processor, but no one will care.
00:27:45 ◼ ► I just thought this was funny. And the M series of chips, I think, regardless of who thought that was going to be, the chip is the obvious choice.
00:27:56 ◼ ► We always talked about it as like the boring choice. Eh, M for Mac, right? I heard someone say it might be M for mobile. No, I think it's M for Mac.
00:28:08 ◼ ► Now, as for the actual chip, we talked at the very end of last week's episode. What is Apple going to do? This is the first time they're doing an ARM chip for a Mac. They could do all sorts of stuff.
00:28:18 ◼ ► They could do three entirely different chips for three totally different Macs, because the rumors were there was going to be a 6 inch, which turned out not to be, and the 13 inch in the air or whatever.
00:28:29 ◼ ► So in the 16 inch, they could have this huge monstrous chip with tons of cores and a giant GPU that's just a massive performance beast that fits within the power envelope allowable in there, all the way down to a very tiny wimpy little chip that they would put in their small laptop that didn't even require a fan.
00:28:43 ◼ ► And on the other side of the spectrum was maybe they just used the same A14 everywhere, I guess, not by name, but like literally, you know, the same little wimpy chip that you see in phones.
00:28:55 ◼ ► Just use that chip everywhere because it's what they have on hand and they don't want to make custom expensive weird variants for every single Mac.
00:29:03 ◼ ► Those are the two ends of the spectrum. What Apple ended up doing is a lot closer to the just use the same chip everywhere, but that same chip is not exactly an A14.
00:29:14 ◼ ► In fact, what it looks like, it looks a lot like if you can imagine what an A14X would look like, that's what the M1 looks a lot like. Maybe a little bit beefier than an A14X.
00:29:24 ◼ ► I think I just read a tweet today that if you look at the part numbers, if you had to guess based on the part numbers and the code names and stuff, you would think the M1 is the A14X because they stick a G at the end of the regular part name and that's the X version or whatever.
00:29:38 ◼ ► But they used this M1 chip, they used the same M1 chip across all of the Macs they introduced today. So we'll get to them in a little bit. It's the Air, the Mini, and the 13-inch MacBook Pro.
00:29:51 ◼ ► And so the idea that Apple would invest a huge amount of money in giant, scary chips right out of the gate for the Mac seems not to have happened.
00:30:04 ◼ ► Which is not particularly surprising, especially given the Macs that they actually introduced.
00:30:08 ◼ ► I'm not going to say I'm disappointed, I'm surprised. Put it this way, I'm surprised that it seems almost like they said, "What kind of chip can we make and what Macs will be best suited to use that chip?" And that's what they introduced.
00:30:27 ◼ ► Yeah, that was their big picture. People don't know what a system-on-a-chip is. They showed all the different chips in a motherboard without any labels on them and said, "Take all these chips and shove them into one thing and it's like a system, but on a chip." It's like, "Yeah, I know."
00:30:44 ◼ ► In terms of size, it's 16 billion transistors, which is 35% more than the A14. Again, kind of like the X things, the A12, A12X, A12Z.
00:30:58 ◼ ► You can add more GPU cores, you can add more CPU cores, a little bit more memory, a little bit more transistors.
00:31:04 ◼ ► So if you're wondering how much bigger is this chip than the chip in my phone, in terms of transition size, 35%. So it's not that much bigger.
00:31:12 ◼ ► There's no T2 in these Macs because you don't need it because the M1 has all that stuff inside it.
00:31:18 ◼ ► In case you're wondering because the 13-inch MacBook Pro has a touch bar, does that touch bar run off a T2? No, it doesn't.
00:31:25 ◼ ► They could have and maybe it would have been more like the old way it ran, but that's not how it works. Apparently it works.
00:31:32 ◼ ► As far as the computer is concerned, the touch bar is just another little miniature screen and just another little input device like the trackpad or whatever.
00:31:43 ◼ ► Unified memory architecture, which is just their way of saying that we don't have dedicated VRAM.
00:31:49 ◼ ► There's just one set of RAM for the GPU and the CPU. Again, like every iPad and phone that's been out there. Not surprising.
00:31:56 ◼ ► What they showed in the keynote and what I think a lot of people weren't aware of before and continue not to be aware of based on the questions I see on Twitter,
00:32:05 ◼ ► is that on Apple's system on chips, the RAM is in the same package as the system on a chip.
00:32:18 ◼ ► I put a picture in the show notes. This is a picture that Apple put up and unlike their other pictures that are just logical diagrams of the bits and pieces,
00:32:28 ◼ ► this appears to be an actual photo of a physical part. So you can see the shot of the M1 die and then in the same package,
00:32:38 ◼ ► meaning in the same thing that we're going to cover with a piece of plastic that says M1 on it,
00:32:47 ◼ ► So it's near millimeters from the thing, in the same package, connected by little interconnects, not wires or anything.
00:32:59 ◼ ► And so people were wondering, like, why, you know, we'll get to the RAM specs in a second, but why are the RAM limits the way they are?
00:33:09 ◼ ► Well, the amount of RAM you can put in an M1 Mac is the amount of RAM you can fit in the package in those two little spots.
00:33:15 ◼ ► Now there's no reason an ARM-based Mac can have RAM external to the system on a chip, but this one doesn't.
00:33:21 ◼ ► So, so there, right? I believe this is the first die shot that Apple has given, at least in recent memory.
00:33:29 ◼ ► Meaning a photo of what the actual M1 silicon chip looks like, presumably under some kind of microscope.
00:33:37 ◼ ► If you've ever seen one of these photos, they're always kind of like shimmery and multicolored because of the way the tiny features, you know, bend the light and reflect off it.
00:33:46 ◼ ► And you can look at them and it looks kind of like a city viewed, a multicolored city viewed from very high above in a satellite or something.
00:33:52 ◼ ► And you can identify different regions based on the sort of patterns of regularity, right?
00:33:59 ◼ ► If you compare to Apple's logical diagram, you can kind of see, oh, I see how they, when they draw like the GPU and they draw a bunch of rectangles, I kind of see what they're drawing.
00:34:06 ◼ ► Because here, that looks kind of like that. But as you can see in the real die shot diagram, Anatec has a good article where they put outlines around the parts and they try to label them.
00:34:15 ◼ ► It's not as neatly arranged as their diagrams are. It is. It's more like a city that has evolved over time.
00:34:22 ◼ ► And by the way, when I wrote die shot into the notes, this reminded me of a game from, a classic Mac game called Sky Shadow by Cassidy and Green.
00:34:33 ◼ ► And it had a sound effect. It must have been like a, you know, 22 kilohertz sound effect of some British person saying nice one when you went over a power up.
00:34:42 ◼ ► Right. But with the British accent and the sort of garbled nature of the recording, when I was a kid, me and my brother would debate, is he saying, is he saying die schwatt?
00:34:57 ◼ ► So every time I hear die shot, I think die schwatt, which is not a real thing. If you would like to hear that sound effect, we will put a link to it in the show notes.
00:35:06 ◼ ► It's funny what sticks in your head after all this time. And not just you, John, like the royal you. It's funny what will stick in your head.
00:35:11 ◼ ► Someone just did, speaking of that, I don't know what the word for this is. Someone will tell us.
00:35:14 ◼ ► But there was some video of a news reporter being heckled and he turns around to the person behind him.
00:35:21 ◼ ► And like it's a video, meme video on YouTube and it's captioned. Right. So you can watch it with the sound off on your phone.
00:35:27 ◼ ► And so the heckler is behind the reporter. The reporter turns around to the heckler and the caption says F off.
00:35:35 ◼ ► But if you close your eyes and don't read the captions and listen, the reporter says buzz off.
00:35:41 ◼ ► But because the captions say F off, you hear F off in your head, even though he says buzz off. I think we've done that with the...
00:35:52 ◼ ► I know. Watch it again with your eyes closed and you'll hear him say buzz off. It's like the, what was it, the green needle and the brainstorming green needle one. That's another one.
00:36:01 ◼ ► Oh, yeah. And the purple. Well, that was visual, but the purple green dress or whatever it was. I forget exactly what it was. Purple gold, something like that.
00:36:11 ◼ ► Anyway, Dash what? Let's talk about this CPU. Eight cores. I can't remember. What does the A12Z have? I should have put this in the notes.
00:36:20 ◼ ► We're doing a little bit of a scramble to get the notes. But anyway, I mean, this is sort of in keeping with what I said before.
00:36:24 ◼ ► Like bottom line, 16 billion transistors, 35 percent more. Where are those 35 percent of transistors being spent?
00:36:30 ◼ ► They mostly got spent in having more of a certain thing, the more, you know, more execution units, more CPU cores, more GPU cores or more RAM. Right.
00:36:40 ◼ ► The eight cores has got four high performance cores and four high efficiency cores. The AnandTech article labels these as Firestorm and Icestorm, which presumably are the real code names that they extracted from some technical doc somewhere.
00:36:58 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah, that was really wild. I rewatched the video this morning to enter way too much information in the show notes so we would have it handy.
00:37:10 ◼ ► It's like of all the things to give us, especially since they don't give us things like the clock speed, which seems like it'd be more higher level than...
00:37:19 ◼ ► Anyway, so they give the cache sizes. And it's only interesting to say, like, for example, the shared 12 megabyte L2 cache.
00:37:27 ◼ ► This is an L2 cache that shared just among the high performance cores, as far as I can tell. It has 12 megabytes. The A14 has eight megabytes.
00:37:35 ◼ ► So again, this is the Amelan is like a slightly scaled up A14. It has more cores. It has more cache to feed those cores.
00:37:47 ◼ ► You know, I'm assuming these are the same cores in the A14 that are high efficiency, similar, slightly larger cache sizes, so on and so forth.
00:37:53 ◼ ► Apple's bragging that this is the best CPU performance per watt, the fastest CPU in the world.
00:38:00 ◼ ► Casey was upset about the charts they provided to demonstrate this. I'm assuming that's you put this in here and said call it a Bezos chart.
00:38:11 ◼ ► There's no units. It's performance. Higher is better. Power consumption. Lower is better.
00:38:16 ◼ ► I would generally have a problem with the use of Bezos charts, but when you're trying to communicate in a PR commercial, performance.
00:38:25 ◼ ► That's a really hard thing to generalize into one graph because performance has so many different aspects.
00:38:35 ◼ ► So the fact that they're using hand wavy things here doesn't really offend me that much.
00:38:39 ◼ ► I thought these charts were good in that what they were trying to show, like they eventually did label and put numbers on what they were trying to show, which is relative performance.
00:38:48 ◼ ► Now if you just look at the chart with nothing labeled, you're like, well, that can't be relative performance because I have no idea where zero is.
00:38:54 ◼ ► So these two lines could be point zero zero zero zero one whatever units from each other.
00:38:59 ◼ ► And they're just showing me a real zoomed in portion so it looks like they're far apart. Right.
00:39:02 ◼ ► But when they labeled them, they said, look, we are, you know, twice the speed at half the wattage and they put like or they put like a 10 watt line down the vertical line down things.
00:39:11 ◼ ► So they did show, oh, we're not fooling you by zooming way in on what is actually a small difference.
00:39:17 ◼ ► They came out and said, we are, you know, this much faster, this much less power, so on and so forth.
00:39:25 ◼ ► And this is their version instead of showing benchmarks. They used to say, here's a common task and here's how long that common task takes.
00:39:32 ◼ ► They just they're going with more synthetic benchmarks here. Like we're this much faster per watt on whatever it is that we're deciding we're measuring.
00:39:39 ◼ ► Same thing with the GPU. They didn't even label. This is another theme. They didn't say Intel anywhere.
00:39:50 ◼ ► Like we know what they mean. We all know they're talking about Intel. They are, in fact, also talking about all of their own products,
00:40:01 ◼ ► But what they're saying is M1 performance really good, which is not shocking considering how much faster the A14 is than every Mac that Apple sells.
00:40:17 ◼ ► It's got an eight core GPU cores and GPU parlance is weird because I don't know how Apple counts cores.
00:40:28 ◼ ► You know, how many like you can break it down into smaller and smaller pieces and say we have, you know, five thousand of these little execution things.
00:40:41 ◼ ► they're only comparable between Apple's own chips because GPU cores don't have a sort of agreed upon meaning.
00:40:47 ◼ ► And it really depends on how big a block of your GPU you decide to look at. But anyway,
00:40:52 ◼ ► it's a GPU cores, which is the same as the A12Z in terms of number of cores, whatever that means.
00:40:58 ◼ ► Seven GPU cores on some of the models, which we assume is exactly the same situation as the A12X and the A12Z,
00:41:04 ◼ ► where they make a chip with eight GPU cores. And for some of those chips, one of the GPU cores doesn't work.
00:41:10 ◼ ► And they just disable that core and say, no, it's a seven core GPU because GPU cores in general is just, you know,
00:41:16 ◼ ► not infinitely, but very easily horizontally expandable. You're going to keep adding more cores, depending on what your budget is for transistor space.
00:41:33 ◼ ► I would love to know a breakdown of what they consider a core. If you look on the chip, you can see kind of a shape that's repeated eight times.
00:41:39 ◼ ► And I'm like, well, I guess that's the core because you can look at it and it looks like the same shape a couple of times.
00:41:46 ◼ ► And the boast Apple makes is the when it comes to personal computers, the M1 has the world's fastest integrated graphics.
00:41:53 ◼ ► Probably does. I mean, that wouldn't be hard. Like Intel's integrated graphics attempts are not great historically.
00:41:59 ◼ ► I mean, what they're well, see, here's here's the other modifier you're missing here is when it comes to personal computers.
00:42:05 ◼ ► Did you put this quote in here, Casey? Is this actually a quote? Yeah, sorry, I didn't put the literal quotation marks around it.
00:42:10 ◼ ► But yes, that was a verbatim quote, if I recall correctly. Yeah, they have to put personal computers because the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X exist,
00:42:16 ◼ ► which also have integrated GPUs, technically speaking. Casey put the big technology slide in here where they have the big slide with a bunch of little boxes all around the M1 saying all the stuff that it has.
00:42:27 ◼ ► Is there anything in that slide in particular that jumped out to anybody? I don't think so. They do.
00:42:35 ◼ ► I know it's a different slide, actually, that they were talking about, like video encoding and decoding. But no, I thought that this was relatively straightforward.
00:42:41 ◼ ► H.G.R. imaging is on there. Oh, there it is. I'm sorry. High performance video editing. Oh, no editing, not encoding, decoding.
00:42:47 ◼ ► I don't know. It was there was nothing that remarkable now. There's one little bit here that was interesting. Always on processor.
00:42:53 ◼ ► Oh, I didn't even notice that. I guess that has to do with the Bowchicka Bow Wow that Craig was talking about later on.
00:42:59 ◼ ► That's a great way to put it. Which, by the way, was easily my favorite moment of that entire presentation by a mile.
00:43:05 ◼ ► Craig has a sexual harassment case against Apple. Don't always sexualize Craig. He's a technologist first and a heartthrob second.
00:43:14 ◼ ► Right. But yeah, the always on processor, I think, you know, I'm glad that, you know, even though it was kind of cringy, I'm glad that they called out the instant wake because that's something that just the architecture and the realities of Intel based PCs makes that really hard to do.
00:43:33 ◼ ► And when Apple can control so much more of everything with using their own everything, basically like they are here, they can make stuff like that better.
00:43:41 ◼ ► And that's one of the one of the ways that I am so happy that they attacked that as a as like a thing that the, you know, Apple silicon. I'm so glad we can stop saying that the M based Max can actually improve on in like a meaningful day to day way because a lot of this stuff.
00:43:56 ◼ ► I mean, a lot of people don't push their computers very hard. A lot of people don't use their batteries that heavily. And so a lot of people aren't going to see like incredibly noticeable differences in day to day use. But something like that, like instant wake and having it wake up reliably every single time.
00:44:14 ◼ ► That's something that we can see. And something like an always on processor probably maybe enables things like background push notifications to background update apps, you know, things like that. We'll see how that works out. But like that could be a really meaningful thing in just day to day niceties that we couldn't have before.
00:44:32 ◼ ► And this goes all the way back to the old Steve Jobs thing where he had like a MacBook Air. So the story goes and talk to the Mac team and said, when I wake up my iPad, it's ready to go instantly. Why isn't the MacBook Air like that? So it took a while, but it seems like we finally got there.
00:44:48 ◼ ► And imagine if you started your MacBook Air or what have you and you didn't wait five minutes for the last 24 hours of iMessages to come in. Like that would be a neat change. That's the thing. Like, you know, I mean, we're lucky that we have like computers that we don't use very often that we occasionally wake up after after like, you know, a week of sleep.
00:45:07 ◼ ► And yeah, it sucks having to wait for everything to roll in. And iOS devices don't work that way. iOS devices are always on until you manually power them off. But if it's just in sleep mode, then it will keep receiving background updates and keep updating the apps periodically.
00:45:19 ◼ ► And so it's never that out of date when you turn it on. Whereas Macs don't work that way so far. And so to have this have an always on processor and instant wake and everything, that's probably going to be a really nice improvement.
00:45:30 ◼ ► And we'll see how much the software supports that. It might take a few years of software evolution to be able to get things like background updates reliably working on the Mac. But it's really nice in the iOS world. And I think this brings us closer to that reality on the Mac.
00:45:43 ◼ ► One tweet somebody had about one funny tweet someone had about this diagram is off to the side. There's one of the squares says cryptography acceleration. And they joked, hey, will this make expanding an Xcode zip any faster? Again, XIP zip. Unfortunately, I doubt it because that that task is almost certainly IO bound, but I'll be happy to be proven IO bound and I think non multi threaded. So if they just multi threaded, it would really
00:46:09 ◼ ► Well, and also cryptography acceleration is nothing new in modern CPUs like that. What they probably are getting this from partly is bringing the T2 in chip because the T2 had acceleration for disk encryption.
00:46:21 ◼ ► Even the previous Intel chips and all the previous a series chips have had hardware accelerated cryptography instructions at the chip level. So that itself is nothing particularly new. It's nice, but it's not new.
00:46:31 ◼ ► The way to think about the T2 is they took stuff out of their iPad and iPhone chips and put it into a little chip that they call the T2. So anything that T2 is able to do, that's stuff that their iPad and iPhone chips have already been able to do the H.264 or 265 decoding encoding hardware, the the IO processing, that's all system on chips had to do that themselves because, you know, that's they dealt with their own, you know, flash storage on the phones and everything like that.
00:46:57 ◼ ► So pretty sure the T2 was just sort of like the opposite of that diagram we saw at the beginning where a bunch of chips merge together into one that T2 was like a tiny chip ejected from Apple's phone chips and landed on our Macs. Now we don't need anymore because all that crap is in the M1.
00:47:14 ◼ ► I mean, it's probably something that already exists in phone and iPad chips. It's some kind of audio, you know, it's like the image signal processing thing they have for the camera, right? But for audio. It could be like hardware accelerated DSP, but they already had that in the CPUs.
00:47:27 ◼ ► I mean, here's the thing about Apple not really telling us all the details of their system on a chip. So even if you look at the Zantec article, they're trying to guess what's inside the CPU, like how many execution units, how deep are the pipelines, how many reorder buffers, you know, what is the dispatch with, but they have to guess because Apple doesn't tell you, right? So they have to run these tests that try to experimentally determine these answers.
00:47:46 ◼ ► If you look in the system on a chip with the, you know, the die shot that we had earlier, they have labeled regions. There's also a lot of regions that are not labeled and that stuff does something. What is it? And so you're like, oh, well, there are instructions in the CPU for doing this type of stuff.
00:48:01 ◼ ► And you know, the neon instruction set, the SIMD instruction set that ARM supports, that's in there too. But for any given task, and this is part of Apple system on a chip design, if there's a thing that you need to do, you have a lot of choices.
00:48:14 ◼ ► You could do it on the CPU, like think of just audio processing, you just do it on the CPU, you could do it on the CPU with SIMD instructions. If you have some kind on the GPU, sometimes you use GPU to general purpose compute stuff, right?
00:48:26 ◼ ► And then you get into these other things that this chip may or may not have, what if I'm encoding or decoding video, I could do that on 10 different places. But if this chip has dedicated hardware for this codec, I could also use that image single processing audio processing, if there's some region on the chip that has a separate little minute, either miniature CPU or miniature CPU,
00:48:43 ◼ ► or miniature set of execution units just for this specific task. Apple has a lot of flexibility to dole out the workloads to just the part of the chip that will do that job in the most power efficient manner, and also the fastest, right?
00:48:58 ◼ ► That's why the M1 is so much more than a CPU and a GPU. That's why all these other little labeled blocks are in there. And that's what makes like their ability to tie these things together so important because Apple does tons of work to figure out what is it that our devices
00:49:12 ◼ ► and apps are actually doing when somebody uses them. Someone uses an iPad over the course of the day, how much are this corner of the chip used? How much do we use the integer units? How much do we use the floating point units?
00:49:24 ◼ ► The NN Tech article has an interesting thing about the fact that this, the M1 can apparently do like, what is it, dispatch, do four floating point operations per cycle or something like that, which is wider than even like the biggest Intel chips.
00:49:38 ◼ ► And like, why would Apple care so much about being able to crank through floating point instructions? And they speculate it's because in JavaScript, every number is a floating point number. And that's why Apple's things could do so well in JavaScript benchmarks, right?
00:49:51 ◼ ► Who knows? Like, they're just speculating. But the whole idea is that Apple figures out what their devices actually do. And then they say, look, we're spending a lot of time, for example, doing audio processing on the CPU, and the CPU is a relatively large thing to keep powered up and cranking.
00:50:06 ◼ ► So maybe if we fed, you know, whatever that audio API is to a dedicated tiny unit that just does that one function, we could keep the larger CPU asleep. Even the high efficiency cores can be less efficient, because you've got to turn all the machinery of, you know, instruction decode and everything instead of those things go to this dedicated unit.
00:50:24 ◼ ► I have no idea how much of that is happening in the M1. But if you look at the results in terms of we'll get those in a little bit, what is the performance? What is the supposed battery life? Or just look at the results on iPads and our current phones, right?
00:50:37 ◼ ► Clearly, they're doing a really good job of not burning electricity, doing everything, you know, with the CPU, right? So every one of these little blocks in this diagram is not an execution unit. It's just a bunch of words on a slide.
00:50:52 ◼ ► But some of them might be some of them might be in that sort of unlabeled region of the chip, we just don't know.
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00:52:20 ◼ ► Alright, so what else we got? Performance. We don't have any benchmarks yet because nobody has these things and we just have those Bezos charts.
00:52:30 ◼ ► But everyone wants to know what is this thing going to be like. Anetax, again, keep referencing this article, they don't have one either, but they're saying look, we do have an A14 and we do know how the A14 runs and let's compare the A14 to a bunch of other chips.
00:52:45 ◼ ► And it's already like the fastest chip out there. And this is going to be better because it has more execution units and a bigger GPU and so on and so forth.
00:52:52 ◼ ► So concrete M1 performance numbers, this is from @davidsmith_ on Twitter who is an Apple employee.
00:53:01 ◼ ► He says, "Fun fact, retaining and releasing an NSObject takes 30 nanoseconds on Intel, 6.5 nanoseconds on an M1, and 14 nanoseconds on an M1 emulating Intel."
00:53:15 ◼ ► So, an Intel app running an emulation for this one tiny little operation which is retaining and releasing an NSObject was just incrementing and decrementing a number.
00:53:30 ◼ ► Yeah, I think we need to take just a quick pause here. So when you're doing stuff in code, you need to keep things in memory and then eventually let them go and give that memory back to the operating system.
00:53:40 ◼ ► And there's a million different ways to handle this problem, but the way that Apple technologies handle it is by saying, "How many people care about this memory?"
00:53:47 ◼ ► And then when, and just keep a count, keep a number. And when that number falls down to zero, which means nobody cares about it, then that memory can be given back to the operating system.
00:54:01 ◼ ► That you're saying, "Ooh, I care about that. Ooh, don't care about that. Ooh, I care about this. No, don't care about that anymore."
00:54:05 ◼ ► And it's just nonstop. And so for this to be considerably faster can make a tangible difference in the speed of your computer.
00:54:13 ◼ ► So it's, you know, and again, it's not, this is what getting back to what I was saying before. It is not shocking that this operation is very fast on Apple's hardware.
00:54:20 ◼ ► Because Apple has a platform that does reference counting on all of its memory and all of its programs and has for years and years.
00:54:28 ◼ ► So all of the iPhone chips and the iPad chips, like when they were, you know, saying, "What does the CPU spend most of its time doing?"
00:54:34 ◼ ► A huge chunk of its time surely is spent retaining and releasing things and sending messages.
00:54:42 ◼ ► So this is not like just the M1 is doing this. The M1 is standing on the shoulders of every chip that came before it, including, of course, the A14.
00:54:50 ◼ ► And, you know, it's just saying, "Just FYI." Like, this is probably true of the A14 as well.
00:54:59 ◼ ► And an M1 running Intel code in emulation is twice as fast as an Intel, in this one particular tiny operation, as an Intel chip doing this sort of thing.
00:55:09 ◼ ► Because no one at Intel is optimizing their chip architecture around Apple's need to call retain and release on, you know, in their Objective-C and Swift code. Right?
00:55:19 ◼ ► I mean, this is one of the benefits Apple gets of having, like on the App Store, they have all code that runs on the platform passing through their hands.
00:55:28 ◼ ► On the Mac, you now have notarization. So they're getting the same benefit now on the Mac.
00:55:33 ◼ ► And when you have all of the third-party code out there passing through your hands, or at least most of it, you know, the Mac doesn't have to say all of it because you have things like, you know, things that aren't notarized, going through open source stuff or whatever.
00:55:45 ◼ ► But for the most part, you have almost all the code that is being run out there on your platform passing through your hands.
00:55:53 ◼ ► And you can really have a really good idea of what kind of instructions are being used most often.
00:56:00 ◼ ► And how can we design our silicon to optimize for the entire world of third-party software out there.
00:56:07 ◼ ► And you can have even more, you know, advancements when you consider things like bitcode.
00:56:12 ◼ ► Where with bitcode, code that was originally not written to take advantage of certain instructions, maybe, that you'd later add to your instructions set, can be automatically recompiled to take advantage of those instructions.
00:56:27 ◼ ► So you can retroactively improve performance of apps as you improve your silicon through your own distribution channels.
00:56:34 ◼ ► Like, that's a pretty powerful thing. That's something no one else in the industry has.
00:56:38 ◼ ► And as much as a pain in the butt as it is for us developers, it gives Apple a huge advantage in performance design.
00:56:45 ◼ ► David Smith warns that this boost in speed comes at the cost of potentially exposing certain multi-threading bugs.
00:56:53 ◼ ► So he suggests using thread sanitizer on your apps to make sure you're not making a threading mistake.
00:57:04 ◼ ► They're like huge. Like, the reorder buffer is like, these CPUs don't execute instructions in the order that they are in the program.
00:57:12 ◼ ► They're out of order execution. And they do parallel dispatch. They're executing multiple instructions at once.
00:57:17 ◼ ► And so they have this buffer where they keep some window of instructions, some big bag of instructions.
00:57:23 ◼ ► And they pull from that bag and say, "Okay, well these four instructions are going to go together.
00:57:32 ◼ ► But it needs that bucket because if you're just given four instructions, maybe you can only execute one of those and the other three have to wait.
00:57:40 ◼ ► And so the bigger the bucket is, the more you can sort of pick and choose, "Oh, now we've built up enough instructions that I can say,
00:57:45 ◼ ► 'Okay, this set can go together, and this set can go together, and that set can go together.'" CPUs are very complicated.
00:57:49 ◼ ► Anyway, the reorder buckets on these CPUs, according to Anatec's analysis, are hundreds of instructions.
00:57:56 ◼ ► They're bigger than even they are, again, than they are on the biggest Intel CPUs, right?
00:58:01 ◼ ► And that lends itself to the idea that Apple has determined in its own real programs, it is advantageous to have big caches, big reorder buffers, and wide execution.
00:58:17 ◼ ► It is frustrating how much of this is speculation, because Apple doesn't want to talk about or brag about these things.
00:58:27 ◼ ► Not really, but they would tell you for each instruction what the latency is and what instructions can be dispatched with other instructions.
00:58:34 ◼ ► And they would have conferences where they would tell you about their instruction decoder and how it works.
00:58:42 ◼ ► Anyway, so that's the M1. This chip that I described, eight cores, the 8-core GPU, I know less about, but it's very similar to the GPU that's in the A14.
00:58:52 ◼ ► Four big, four little cores, eight core GPU, all the rest of the stuff you'd expect it to have from the phone and iPad chips,
00:59:02 ◼ ► Skuir Enclave, all the stuff the T2 did, image signal processing, yada yada yada. It's all in there.
00:59:07 ◼ ► This one chip powers all of the Macs they introduced. The only difference is maybe clock speed, but they won't tell us, and we'll find out as soon as we get the hardware.
00:59:24 ◼ ► We talked about it on the last show. I didn't talk about it earlier today. I think people know about binning, right?
00:59:42 ◼ ► So in many ways, this seems like the love child of the adorable in the existing MacBook Air to me,
00:59:52 ◼ ► It has more than one port, which is excellent, and so you've got the no fan from the adorable and the more than one port from the Air.
01:00:10 ◼ ► Most laptops sold are not fast, because by definition, the fast ones are at the edge of the bell curve.
01:00:19 ◼ ► I don't think that I'm bragging about how this is faster than X percentage of PCs that are sold.
01:00:26 ◼ ► I don't know why they do that. They should just say that it's really, really fast and compare it to a fast laptop.
01:00:33 ◼ ► I don't know if they don't want to compare it on price because they'll fall down on it.
01:00:44 ◼ ► The only way you can make that chip not insanely fast is to just clock it really, really low.
01:00:51 ◼ ► But we already know, in a fanless iPad, a lesser version of this same chip, much lesser for the A12Z,
01:00:59 ◼ ► two generations old thing with fewer CPU cores and similar GPU cores, is insanely fast.
01:01:07 ◼ ► This MacBook Air, again, unless it's a clock lower than the iPad, which I can't possibly imagine, is going to be very, very fast.
01:01:16 ◼ ► I don't think it's a love child of anything. I think it is just take the existing MacBook Air, remove the fans because you don't need them anymore,
01:01:24 ◼ ► and put a way, way faster and more power efficient CPU in there, and a faster and more power efficient GPU.
01:01:32 ◼ ► This computer is, with the exception of the complete lack of touch and face ID, but again, set that aside.
01:01:52 ◼ ► But can you imagine, just set aside the Apple Silicon stuff. Pretend this was still an Intel Mac.
01:01:57 ◼ ► If this was the new MacBook Air, and we weren't talking about our Mac, so this is just the new Intel MacBook Air.
01:02:02 ◼ ► I know we don't have benchmarks yet, but I'm saying right now, when people start benchmarking this thing against the previous MacBook Air,
01:02:10 ◼ ► it's going to embarrass the previous MacBook Air big time in both performance and battery life.
01:02:23 ◼ ► And everything else about it is the same. Still a scissor keyboard, still the same function keys on top of it,
01:02:43 ◼ ► Not that whole spec thing is confusing, but trust us when we tell you it's at least as good, if not better,
01:02:55 ◼ ► That was hilarious. I love how much time they spent talking about how much better their image processing was.
01:03:01 ◼ ► So you'll be able to get better video out of the stupid FaceTime camera because of their wonderful image processing.
01:03:17 ◼ ► but if they aren't really working hard on improving the webcams in their laptops and desktops,
01:03:29 ◼ ► And their webcams are so, even before this past year, their webcams were kind of comically out of date and crappy.
01:03:38 ◼ ► And yeah, people say, "Oh, it will make the lid thicker." Well, figure something out. Figure out some kind of compromise.
01:03:49 ◼ ► I personally wouldn't use it a ton, but I use it some and it's fine. Yeah, people use that. It matters.
01:03:59 ◼ ► And yeah, so I did find that kind of hilarious how much time they gave to their lack of hardware upgrade to the camera,
01:04:11 ◼ ► Well, see, the thing about fudging the image, like, yes, they should upgrade the hardware.
01:04:17 ◼ ► That said, our experience with Apple's phones has shown that a lot of progress can be made with "crappy" sensors
01:04:30 ◼ ► Now, I don't know how much this particular image processing improvement makes a difference on this terrible 720p FaceTime camera,
01:04:36 ◼ ► but it can hurt, right? And if it wasn't being done before, like, the fact that they can sort of piggyback on all of the work done for the front face,
01:04:45 ◼ ► or for all the cameras, but for the traditionally lesser front-facing camera on phones, that's one of the benefits of going to ARM.
01:04:53 ◼ ► It's like, oh, why don't we just do the same thing we do when people look into their front-facing camera on phones?
01:04:58 ◼ ► It's the same architecture. We've got the same libraries, the same weird execution units, whatever, same image processor.
01:05:02 ◼ ► Whatever we're doing on the phone, do that here. And they do it, and they say, hey, this makes the camera look a little better.
01:05:11 ◼ ► But this is like, it's not free really, because it's a different operating system, but this is what I expect to get from moving to ARM,
01:05:19 ◼ ► is things that the phone was previously better at, now the Mac should be better at them as well.
01:05:25 ◼ ► In terms of the hardware, I said camera bump. I said the same thing during the keynote and tweet, I think.
01:05:32 ◼ ► If you start thinking about a camera bump on a Mac, you start to wonder how that would manifest, right?
01:05:39 ◼ ► You could bump it out the back, which would make Johnny Ive cry, but hey, it's bumped out of the back on phones.
01:05:46 ◼ ► Like, you know what I'm saying, the camera faces front, but the bulk of the camera bumps out the back for a little bump or a notch or something.
01:05:53 ◼ ► I would pay that price in a heartbeat for face ID, but I can see that I'm not wanting that.
01:05:58 ◼ ► You could bump it out the front, but then you need some kind of dent or ditch for it to go into when you go into clamshell mode.
01:06:05 ◼ ► Right, which is right where your thumb lifts the lid up, though. So they already have the cutout there, so you kind of can't, I mean, you could do a...
01:06:12 ◼ ► You could make it go into the cutout and think of it as like a tab going into a cutout, so now when you lift, you're actually lifting the little tab out of the slot, instead of just having a slot with nothing in it.
01:06:20 ◼ ► You know what I mean? I don't know. I would even accept, just make the lid a little bit thicker. It's not like someone's crying that the MacBook Air is super thick and they can't handle it anymore.
01:06:30 ◼ ► Especially on the front edge, right? Just make the lid thicker. Anyway, that's future facing. This hasn't been discussed, but as far as I'm aware, this MacBook Air is exactly the same.
01:06:42 ◼ ► It's the same case, other than potentially different venting holes and obviously different sort of internal structure, but dimension-wise, I don't think this is any bigger or smaller than the current MacBook Air. In fact, it weighs the same as well.
01:06:54 ◼ ► Yeah, and that's been a point of a lot of criticism of this event so far, that basically what they released, it did do, kind of what we were saying last time, it did change out the guts, and now they're faster and better in a few little ways and few big ones, and they are...
01:07:12 ◼ ► Better battery life, but otherwise they look pretty much the same. They didn't really shuffle up the lineup very much, and they don't really look any different, and they don't really have massive hardware differences that are visible from the outside.
01:07:27 ◼ ► And so, they do look kind of dated in a way. When you look at what PC laptops are doing and have been doing for some time, Apple's laptops look like they were designed in 2015 still. We still have these big thick screen bezels.
01:07:43 ◼ ► We still have relatively small screens for the body size for the 13-inch class, because when you make the bezel thinner, you can fit a bigger screen in the same laptop size that the PC world has been doing forever or for years.
01:07:57 ◼ ► We still don't have things like cellular that we were hoping to get with this transition. We still have the same situation with touch, which is we have no touch screens, and on the same models as before, we have forced touch bars, and on the ones that don't, we still don't. That's nice.
01:08:12 ◼ ► And so, a lot of that stuff hasn't changed at all. Now, it remains to be seen whether that will change. In previous architecture transitions, the first models of the new generation kind of looked the same as the previous ones, and then they, over the following years, used their gains and efficiency and everything else to make better things that they wouldn't have been able to make with the old architecture.
01:08:35 ◼ ► So, I have a feeling a lot of that stuff is yet to come, but a lot of people are understandably kind of disappointed at all the things that didn't change. We didn't see big price cuts. We didn't see, as a result of not having to use Intel chips anymore, we saw small price cuts here and there, but mostly similar.
01:08:55 ◼ ► We still have the exact same dimensions, size, weight, like all that stuff, so I hope and I suspect that more differentiation in the hardware is coming, but here on day one, it's not here yet.
01:09:10 ◼ ► Yeah, that was another sort of spectrum that we talked about in the previous show. The spectrum of the CPU was are you going to make a radically different CPU and three radically different CPUs for three different Macs, or are you basically just going to take an A14, puff it up a little bit, and use that across the whole line.
01:09:24 ◼ ► And similarly, the range of do what you did in the Intel transition, which is take your current line of computers and put different chips inside them, or something radical where these computers look nothing like the previous ones and they have touch screens and face ID and they're just totally new.
01:09:36 ◼ ► They didn't do that. In this case, they went hard on the other edge, which is like if you looked at these, you cannot visually tell the difference without squinting at most of them.
01:09:46 ◼ ► So, I mean, for the first generation product, it's not unexpected. Again, it's what they did with Intel. People who are disappointed, I hope that they channel that disappointment into more fervor in the second and third gen, because I think it is very excusable for the first gen.
01:10:00 ◼ ► It's not like Apple doesn't have a lot to do. They have a lot to do just to make these things work at all with all the software stuff and to get it all to work in this package.
01:10:07 ◼ ► And thankfully, they sort out the keyboard situation before this came. So I give them a lot of leeway to have these computers be boring.
01:10:16 ◼ ► And there is this was talked about in the Intel thing. I don't know if Apple talked about this, but obviously all of the customers talked about this, like that it is comforting to say, I heard the Macs have this new thing and now I'm scared.
01:10:29 ◼ ► And Apple's here to say, it's the same computer you know and love. Look, it looks identical. Like, oh, I feel better now. Whether that was ever an actual strategy or whether it's just the reality of you can't do everything all at once.
01:10:42 ◼ ► It is a real thing in the market that having a computer that looks the same as your previous MacBook Air, but it's just better in all measurable performance ways, makes people happy without scaring them.
01:10:53 ◼ ► And to reinforce that point, doing that is a ton of work. Like all of the other things that had to happen for an architectural transition to be pulled off smoothly, to make the new things that are completely different internally and technically look and work just like the old things, but better.
01:11:12 ◼ ► That's a ton of work and that's a ton of engineering. And so it is reasonable to expect that we didn't have massive other changes because even making this happen was a massive undertaking.
01:11:26 ◼ ► So I have faith, you know, Apple is pretty good on the whole. There have been some dark periods, but they are pretty good on the whole at moving Mac hardware forward over time and making exciting things happen in their hardware lineup.
01:11:40 ◼ ► And it usually doesn't happen as quickly as we want and sometimes we take a step back before we take a step forward, but it does happen on an infinite timescale.
01:11:50 ◼ ► And so I do think we will get there and even though I was hoping for more excitement in the hardware, it is totally understandable why they aren't there yet.
01:12:00 ◼ ► Yeah, I agree. I don't think it's unreasonable to have hoped for it, like you just said, but I don't think it's unreasonable at all that they're wading into the pool rather than jumping in the deep end.
01:12:10 ◼ ► And I don't know, in some ways this is kind of jumping in the deep end, right? Because the M1 sounds, if you believe the Apple hype machine, to be like a phenomenal, phenomenal processor.
01:12:18 ◼ ► And if the M1 is basically just the A14 cranked up a bit, like we've been saying, imagine what an M2 or an M1Z or whatever, and I know we've covered this earlier, but it seems so obvious to me in retrospect that you would want to, if you're Apple, wade into the water very slowly, use these chips that are almost exactly like what you've already been shipping for a while,
01:12:42 ◼ ► and use them in the basic laptops and smaller computers that a lot of people rely on. And then it seems to me like if there was going to be a hardware refresh, I would think, and you can remind me of this in a few months whenever the hardware refresh happens,
01:12:58 ◼ ► but I would think that they would wait and do something bigger with like the 16-inch MacBook Pro or something like that, or even the 16 and 13 in concert, and I would imagine that they would do something where the processor is bigger, better, and different-er than the M1 is to the A14.
01:13:18 ◼ ► I don't know what that looks like, but maybe it has features that have never existed on a Mac before. Hell, it could have a cellular modem in it, which has never been in a Mac. I don't know, something like that. I feel like today, or yesterday strictly speaking, was the, all right, let's get our feet under us and let's walk before we run, and I would be very surprised if we don't see stuff in the next six months that's really going to knock our socks off.
01:13:43 ◼ ► And maybe even not six months, but I think a year or two, then we will look back on this time and be like, oh, those were so quaint. Like, whatever we have in like a year or two, and especially once they complete the transition across the whole lineup, we're going to look back on this like those first core duo, or no, core duos, and the core solo in the Mac Mini of the first Intel transition of just like, wow, those chips were so important at the time, but so primitive in retrospect.
01:14:09 ◼ ► I'm glad to see that all of the specs of the M1 in terms of the supported protocols and ports and everything, that they didn't skimp, right? I mean, most of it, they're just piggybacking on stuff that they've done in the iPads and phones already, but not all of it.
01:14:23 ◼ ► So this has Bluetooth 5 and Wi Fi 6, so latest versions of that stuff. Two Thunderbolt/USB4 ports, right? That's new to Mac. As far as I'm aware, the iPad Pro doesn't support Thunderbolt in any way, shape or form, and none of them support USB4, which is a confusing spec that we talked about in the past in the show, but it supports DisplayPort, Thunderbolt 3, USB 3.1 Gen 2, like it has ports that you would expect a Mac to have.
01:14:51 ◼ ► Like when I saw the MacBook Air when they said it's fanless, I immediately had dread on my heart, oh no, are those just plain USB-C ports on the side? Are those basically two ports? Are those just like two iPad ports? No, no, they're full-fledged Mac ports. There's only two of them, which isn't great, right? And they're more limited, but hey, it's the MacBook Air.
01:15:13 ◼ ► So I'm glad these specs are, you know, it's a forward-looking architecture. Like they, you know, if you're wondering how are they ever going to figure out how to do Thunderbolt with an ARM Mac, done, don't worry about it.
01:15:22 ◼ ► Obviously more work to do for the bigger Macs, and we'll talk about that later, but for the Air, this makes sense.
01:15:29 ◼ ► The one hardware change that, in the case, again, other than the sort of venting situation, which we can't really assess from the photos, is that the hardware function keys, the F4, F5, and F6 keys have different little pictures on them, and presumably they're mapped differently in the software.
01:15:45 ◼ ► The F4 key has a little magnifying glass, the F5 has a little microphone, and the F6 has a little crescent moon. What does that mean?
01:16:03 ◼ ► It doesn't mean anything, so this is mostly, you know, we'll see when we get them what they have them bound to by default, and over the years, it's been kind of weird that they ship, I mean, I'm using a keyboard like this too, as hardware quote-unquote function keys, they do say F1, F2, so on and so forth underneath them, but they always have these little pictures on them.
01:16:19 ◼ ► But if you rebind them, the pictures become wrong. Like if you bind F4 to something that's not searched, that magnifying glass doesn't mean search anymore.
01:16:27 ◼ ► So this is obviously why they made the touch bar. Hey, look, it's not a, it's just like a, not having a--
01:16:33 ◼ ► I was going to say, why don't we just make it a whole big screen, and then we can update the keys to look like whatever they want? Perfect.
01:16:37 ◼ ► It's why they didn't have a hardware keyboard on the iPhone, because you have a screen, and it's infinitely changeable, but buttons are cool. Anyway--
01:16:41 ◼ ► Yeah, please don't encourage them, John. Please don't encourage them to use more touch bars. Please.
01:16:45 ◼ ► I don't know, like, the idea of changing the symbols every couple years on the function keys and the physical function keys, like, I don't--alright, whatever. It's fine. All I'm saying is that those pictures just remind me of how limited it is to have to paint little pictures on actual keys.
01:17:03 ◼ ► But I do love the keys, so I, you know, and I don't like the touch bar, so I prefer to have this model. The pricing is the same, still starts at $999, and that's for the "7-core GPU," which has an 8-core that doesn't work.
01:17:17 ◼ ► And then the 8-core one starts at $1249. There's a storage difference between them. That's a 7-core--see, this is so weird. They have to find some way to make an expensive one and a cheap one. This is true of all these models, right?
01:17:32 ◼ ► They want to have a range of prices. But given that it's a system on a chip, and given that the RAM is on the package with the thing, it's not easy to decide how you're going to price-tier them. The only things you can adjust is RAM, which I guess we'll talk about now. You can get two amounts of RAM, 8 and 16 gigs. Done. That's it.
01:17:52 ◼ ► There are no other options, because it's on the same package as the system on a chip, and I guess they didn't--couldn't fit more than 16, given current memory sizes and the size they wanted to make the thing. So that's a difference in price.
01:18:06 ◼ ► There's 7-versus-8-core GPU, which is a binning thing of, like, well, sometimes they come out with 7 working, sometimes they come out with 8 working, but it's more rare, so those won't cost more. And then there's SSD space, right? How big do you want the drive?
01:18:17 ◼ ► And depending on which one of those things you care about, you might say, "Oh, that's where all the cost is." Or you might get super angry and say, "How much is it an increase in cost to get, you know, go to 8, 16 gigs of RAM, I can get 8 gigs of RAM for 20 bucks. How is it a $200 price difference to get another 8?"
01:18:34 ◼ ► It doesn't matter where you think the money is. Apple just says, "Look, we're going to charge you more for the better model, and you can decide to distribute that money wherever you think it goes, but there's not much that varies between these things." And no, you're not going to be able to say, "Subtract the prices from each other, take that bucket of money, and then lay bills down on the parts that are different."
01:18:54 ◼ ► Don't do that exercise. It won't add up. The margins are better on the more expensive products, right? That's why Apple makes a billion dollars, right? But as they use system-on-a-chips and get sort of more regular, for example, there's no clock speed difference that you can pick.
01:19:11 ◼ ► You can't get a faster CPU, you can't get an i7, i8, you know, or, you know, I'm sorry, thinking of BMW again. You can't get an i5, an i7, an i9 CPU. It's just the M1. And whatever speed it's clocked at or whatever clock, it's the same for all of them.
01:19:28 ◼ ► So they can only differentiate on, the thing that blows my mind is they're differentiating on GPU cores. When has Apple ever tried to differentiate their pricing models on GPU? Never. Like, they give you a better GPU with the big one maybe, especially if it's a discrete GPU, but boy, it's so weird.
01:19:44 ◼ ► So, like, they won't tell us the clock speed, but they want us to know how many cores are working in the GPU, and they tell us the instruction caches. Anyway, the price range, all this is to say is the price range is the same.
01:19:54 ◼ ► The memory range of 8 to 16, 8 as a default is terrible. I wish they'd all been 16, but so what? As long as they offer 16, that's fine.
01:20:01 ◼ ► Overall, the assessment of the machine is like I said before. It's like the previous MacBook Air, but better in every way that you care about.
01:20:09 ◼ ► Like, you know, do you want the battery to last longer? Do you want it to be faster? Do you want it to be quieter? Do you want it to be cooler? And probably, do you want the SSD to even be faster?
01:20:19 ◼ ► We don't have this in hand. We can't benchmark it, but I will confidently say that this thing is going to have amazing performance and battery life compared to the previous MacBook Air.
01:20:29 ◼ ► If you're disappointed that the MacBook Air can't support 32 gigs of memory, you're not a MacBook Air customer. I think it's fine. Using it with 8, I think, is not fine.
01:20:38 ◼ ► So, if someone in your life wants to buy this computer and they want to get the super cheap one with 8 gigs, I don't remember what the default was for the Intel one, but just in general.
01:20:46 ◼ ► I think it was the same. 8 gigs, hmm. I know it's their cheapest computer. I understand it, but 8 gigs is not great. 16 gigs, I think, is fine for a MacBook Air.
01:20:58 ◼ ► I said earlier that they have this chip, the M1. They're going to use it across all their computers, and all the computers that were introduced at the event were just three computers.
01:21:07 ◼ ► And they're going to use it in computers where it makes sense. This chip makes total sense in this computer. I said in the last show, what if they make the Air fanless?
01:21:17 ◼ ► And they did. They didn't have to. They could have put a fan in there and then, presumably, clocked it higher, like they do in the other models that we're going to talk about.
01:21:26 ◼ ► But they didn't, because being fanless is a benefit, and it's cool. And on the MacBook Air model, they're not dying to do tons of high performance work, because it's the MacBook Air. It's the casual, mainline computer.
01:21:41 ◼ ► Markos of the computer is dated, and it is. It looks like a computer that was designed in 2015, because it more or less was, or 2018, or wherever this design came from.
01:21:51 ◼ ► But on the inside, I think it's pretty amazing. I think this could, especially if they redesign the MacBook Air sometime soon, this could go down in history as the new modern equivalent of the 2011 MacBook Air.
01:22:03 ◼ ► Given that the shape and everything is very similar. Because this is probably the biggest bump in performance, and I mean that in terms of how the product performs, not necessarily CPU benchmarks.
01:22:16 ◼ ► Like performance, as far as the customer is concerned, from one year to the next. Because if you got an Intel MacBook Air, and then your friend got this one, your friend got the better computer. By a lot.
01:22:28 ◼ ► You would be so jealous. Your battery is dead in half the time. Your thing is so slow. The fans are spinning up, and their thing is sitting there quiet, cool as a cucumber, like an iPad with a hinge, they would call it, but faster.
01:22:40 ◼ ► I think this is a phenomenal computer. Maybe you think it's boring because it doesn't have a touch screen and face ID, and I want all those things, and cellular, and I want all those things too.
01:22:49 ◼ ► But boy, I was blown away by this. As far as I'm concerned, this is like the no compromises Intel MacBook Air. It's a compromise on MacBook Air for all the reasons that we talked about, things they could have done, and they could have had a fan.
01:23:07 ◼ ► Yeah, and my only reservations on the MacBook Air, that we will only be able to tell by people getting them and using them and everything, is they made it fanless, but the other two computers they launched with the exact same CPU have fans.
01:23:23 ◼ ► So clearly this is a chip that benefits from active cooling. And by the way, real time follow up in case everybody hasn't emailed us yet, the A12X is a 4 core high performance and 4 core low performance chip, so it actually is the same core count as what's in the M1.
01:23:44 ◼ ► Yeah, different cores. The A12 cores versus the A14 cores and probably a clock difference and everything too. Anyway, we were assuming earlier that the A12X was fewer cores, but it actually wasn't. Anyway, so back to this.
01:23:54 ◼ ► My main reservation with the MacBook Air is, in order to make it fanless, how much did they have to either clock it down or how much does it have to throttle its performance down under heavy load? Because obviously, they said twice that on the other Macs they mentioned their active cooling, their fans, and they mentioned that it would allow them to "sustain" their performance.
01:24:18 ◼ ► So what it sounds like based on that is the MacBook Air probably peaks at the same performance as the other ones, but I bet it has to throttle down after a couple seconds maybe of high load to some kind of lower clock speed just for thermal reasons.
01:24:31 ◼ ► So it is probably going to be kind of peaky and limited in that way. How much that matters to you is a different story and certainly to most MacBook Air buyers it probably doesn't matter at all.
01:24:42 ◼ ► And it's still probably, even in its throttled state, it's still probably going to be way faster than the old one. But that is something to be aware of here.
01:24:50 ◼ ► That the 13" Pro and the Mac Mini are able to "sustain" their performance by using fans, so that means this can't do that.
01:24:59 ◼ ► And then secondly, we don't know how warm it's going to get. For me, I cannot stand a hot laptop. It makes my hands all sweaty, it makes it really hard to use it. I hate heating out of my laptop as I'm using it.
01:25:13 ◼ ► And one thing that, you know, you can make something fanless by just having it spread the heat around a lot and tolerating a high temperature as okay. I hope that's not what they've done here. I hope that it's fanless because it just runs so cool in this configuration that it can be pleasantly cool and still perform well.
01:25:36 ◼ ► But one way they could have also done it is it just radiates a lot of heat constantly and it's really warm in use and I hope that's not the reality of using this computer. So we'll find out. But those are two things to watch out for in the earlier reviews for sure.
01:25:49 ◼ ► I'm very confident in the heat and I'll tell you why. Especially given your real-time follow-up that the A12Z has 4 high performance and 4 high efficiency cores and an 8-core GPU. This is built on 5nm process and the A12Z is what, 10nm? 7.
01:26:06 ◼ ► Unless this thing is clocked massively higher than the A12Z, we have a direct comparison. How hot does the A12Z get? I bet an A12Z iPad can get a little toasty playing a game for a long time. But in general, people don't complain about the iPad Pro getting super hot.
01:26:23 ◼ ► I think this laptop will be exactly the same. For most people, this will be the coolest as in temperature laptop they've ever used until they play a game. They're like, "Oh, I can finally feel some warmth." Because it's not a situation where Apple was forced to make this fanless.
01:26:40 ◼ ► If there was any doubt, they could have put a fan in there. Fanless iPads have existed for a really long time and I have confidence that Apple will make the right trade-off. Most of the laptops that get hot have been the ones that have fans that are screaming all the time.
01:26:57 ◼ ► In terms of throttling, this will almost certainly throttle. If it doesn't throttle, they didn't clock it high enough. This is the type of laptop you want to throttle because you want it to be able to peak high, but then most of the time you want it to be going low.
01:27:11 ◼ ► This is not the computer for doing your pro video editing, although I'm sure it will work fine for that and be better than most of the Mac laptops ever made.
01:27:17 ◼ ► But if you care about that "sustained workload," get one of the other models with a fan in it because that will help. I personally think this is exactly the right trade-off to make.
01:27:28 ◼ ► Give me less consistent performance in exchange for having no fan and having it be super cool all the time. Everything is relative, so you're like, "Oh, it's a little bit slower than it could be."
01:27:38 ◼ ► If this is a little bit slower than it could be, it's 80% faster than the previous MacBook Air that "didn't throttle" because it had a fan. Who cares that it's throttling? It's so much faster.
01:27:48 ◼ ► One of the things they said in the presentation was that the efficiency cores on their own have similar performance as the dual-core MacBook Air outgoing from Intel.
01:28:15 ◼ ► They effectively outright told us that it will throttle. I'm accepting throttling as a given because I think they literally said that in the most PR way possible.
01:28:28 ◼ ► They told us it will throttle. That's going to happen, I think. How much it matters remains to be seen. And how much it matters for this product, I think the answer.
01:28:49 ◼ ► My Intel 13-inch MacBook Pro is a piece of garbage that needs to be thrown into the sea. Part of that is purely because there wasn't a direct comparison.
01:29:11 ◼ ► I bought my one-port MacBook which I bought in 2017 or thereabouts. But the more I think about it, the more I think that the things I loved about the adorable were that it was incredibly small and incredibly light.
01:29:26 ◼ ► A little smaller than the MacBook Air. I'm not sure if it's lighter off the top of my head.
01:29:30 ◼ ► But it was incredibly small and incredibly light. And even though I am nowhere near as offended as the two of you are by fan noise, I don't like fan noise. I would rather not have fan noise if I had the choice.
01:29:41 ◼ ► And that also did not have a fan. And I loved that computer so much, even despite all its flaws.
01:29:49 ◼ ► And there were two major, major, major flaws to that computer. The first one was that it only had one port. It only had one USB-C port. And it was only USB-C. It wasn't Thunderbolt.
01:30:02 ◼ ► So that severely limited what you could connect in terms of the quality of things you could connect. Because you could only get USB-C things. You couldn't get Thunderbolt things.
01:30:11 ◼ ► But it obviously limited the quantity of what you could connect. So if I were to record a podcast for the sake of discussion, I need a dongle that will give me a traditional USB out and USB-C in for power.
01:30:24 ◼ ► I would need a dongle just to plug in power and a microphone. Which is kind of ridiculous if you think about it.
01:30:29 ◼ ► And one thing you don't want is for your live audio gear to be plugged in through a dongle. Because they are never 100% reliable. Ever, ever, ever.
01:30:37 ◼ ► Right. So that was a huge flaw. And you know what? Check. It's been fixed. There's two ports. I'd prefer four for sure. But two is better than one.
01:30:46 ◼ ► And the other thing that really stank about the Adorable, in a way that was arguably much worse than the one port. Because the one port bothered me frequently.
01:30:56 ◼ ► But it's incredibly slow performance bothered me always. And from any measure, this forthcoming MacBook Air, it's going to be way faster than the Adorable was.
01:31:10 ◼ ► And potentially, like we've been saying, way faster than the existing MacBook Air that it's replacing. In most cases anyway.
01:31:18 ◼ ► Potentially. 100% it's going to be faster. When they got done with this part of the presentation, I said, "Is there anything that the fastest MacBook Pro you can buy today will actually do faster than this fanless MacBook Air?"
01:31:30 ◼ ► That's the thing to watch for on the specs. Don't watch for how much faster is it than your stupid Adorable. How much faster is it?
01:31:35 ◼ ► When they show the specs and when they put it on a big chart, try to find something that the top end, most expensive 16" i9 MacBook Pro does faster than this fanless Air in terms of CPU and GPU speed.
01:31:47 ◼ ► That's what I'm looking for. I'm not even comparing it to forget about the period. It's going to blow all those things away. It's like, "Okay, but does it embarrass Apple's most expensive laptop?" This fanless thing.
01:32:00 ◼ ► Single threaded, we know it does. The A14 already does, right? But multi-threaded GPU, discrete GPU, it's going to lose out on that.
01:32:08 ◼ ► We can tell that. If you look at any benchmark that benchmarks the A14 and you compare that to Macs. I always like Geekbench. You may have your benchmark of choice.
01:32:19 ◼ ► But you look at that and basically we're still looking at multi-threaded, multi-core performance that scales up with core count. The four high performance cores in the latest iPads, or in the old iPads now, and the two high performance cores in the A14, we can kind of extrapolate.
01:32:39 ◼ ► We're not going to beat the 8 core MacBook Pro or the 10 core iMac Pro or the god knows how many cores Mac Pro until Apple delivers an M chip with more cores. Simple as that. They just need more of them.
01:32:55 ◼ ► I don't know if that's necessarily the case though and Apple will make the same point. When I say compare it, you know, doing something, I'm saying like a real world task. They leaned on this as well. They said like, let's do a thing with an app. Let's encode a bunch of video. I figured what their examples were. Let's play, you know, 4K, multiple 4K video streams.
01:33:13 ◼ ► Let's process raw images in Lightroom. Whatever it is they were trying to show. Because, especially in the case of Apple apps, when Apple is able to tune its software to its specific hardware, they can get ridiculous numbers that are not possible for apps that are just Intel apps that are just made for generic Intel CPUs.
01:33:31 ◼ ► Eventually the apps will catch up with that on Apple platforms or so Apple hopes. But I think that even cases where it is under specced like, oh, the 8 core MacBook Pro has 8 full power cores and I've just got 4 good cores and 4 wimpy ones, right?
01:33:49 ◼ ► Maybe it gets outclassed there, but maybe it still completes the task faster in one of Apple's apps because Apple has custom tailored and optimized it for its specific hardware. And in the end that's what people care about. I'm basically saying like, synthetic benchmarks versus application performance.
01:34:05 ◼ ► I'm still not entirely counting it out against an 8 core, against obviously a 12 core or whatever. As the core counts go up, you know, it loses, right? And GPU I think is going to lose too to the biggest discrete GPUs that Apple ships. And certainly it won't be as fast as like a gaming PC or whatever.
01:34:19 ◼ ► But I am very optimistic about direct performance comparisons to pretty much any Intel Mac laptop except for in the extreme cases.
01:34:30 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, my best guess is, performance wise, again, having known nothing about this except seeing the A14 in iPads and phones so far, my best guess is, right now the A14 GeekBank single core is in the 1500 range. I'm guessing we're somewhere near that, maybe a little bit higher from clock differences. Maybe we're at like 1700 or at most 2000.
01:34:51 ◼ ► But like, you know, the best Macs are like 1200. So we're already single core going to be, you know, significantly higher, possibly like 50% higher, possibly more. So that's, we're looking at significant gains, single threaded, multi-threaded, this is where it gets interesting.
01:35:07 ◼ ► The new iPad Air, which is the fastest A14 but only has two high performance cores, has a multi-core score of about 4200. And if you imagine that can be doubled with having four cores instead of two on the high performance end to roughly 8000, including, and you know, it doesn't scale exactly linearly, but, you know, we do also have a higher thermal envelope here, probably a higher base clock.
01:35:35 ◼ ► So if we get roughly 8000 multi-core on GeekBank's whatever this is, five, I think, then that puts it in the performance category of an eight core iMac. And that puts it ahead of every MacBook Pro.
01:35:49 ◼ ► So it might, it might actually be faster than the MacBook Pro in CPU bound things. Where it won't probably be able to compete is with discrete GPUs for GPU bound stuff. So like, I'm not expecting it to crush the other laptops or desktops in things like video editing that heavily rely on the GPU.
01:36:07 ◼ ► And probably, you know, gaming is not going to be like a massive thing for lots of reasons. But, you know, that's anything that's heavily GPU bound, I expect these to still not do very well. And I think Apple will get there.
01:36:19 ◼ ► Like, this is this is step one, I think they'll get there for the rest. But for CPU bound tasks, I am optimistic. I think these things are going to be quite something. And I think once they eventually do an update to the 16 inch, and possibly a 14 inch or whatever, that I think is where things are going to get really hot. And it's not in a bad way. The good version.
01:36:49 ◼ ► I haven't even finished my thesis here. Hold on. We're on our 17th sidetrack. So I'll try to, I know I'll try to make it brief. But, you know, I went on this meandering point that I'll try to close now, which is, you know, if you look at why I bought the adorable in 2017 or thereabouts, I wanted something that was basically like an iPad, but wasn't constrained. Please email somebody else.
01:37:07 ◼ ► I wanted it to run Mac OS, but I wanted it to be light and portable. And I had to trade off having more than one port. I had to trade. I mean, even my iPad Pro from what, two years ago now? Now it has two ports, thanks to the keyboard.
01:37:20 ◼ ► But I need I had to make the trade off of only one port. And that bothered me frequently. But I also had to make the trade off of just dog slow performance. Like even when the thing was brand new, it was not a particularly fast computer.
01:37:35 ◼ ► And I knew that going into it, but it got real bad after a year. Really, really bad after a couple of years. And so that was something that bothered me every time I used the computer.
01:37:47 ◼ ► And now you're telling me for a thousand bucks, because I think I paid like twenty five hundred dollars to that computer or something like that. For a thousand bucks, you can get a MacBook Air that has two ports and will absolutely smoke that adorable.
01:38:01 ◼ ► Like, how do you say no to that? I mean, you can't. It's phenomenal. And to extrapolate what the gains could be on a proper 13 inch MacBook Pro, and we'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute, or even a 16 inch MacBook Pro, which is not really the computer for me anymore, but I can understand those who like it.
01:38:17 ◼ ► Like this is this is going to be something. And this is going to be an interesting and exciting ride over the next six to 12 months.
01:38:24 ◼ ► So some limitations on these limitations are some of them are across the whole line. Some of them might just be this one computer.
01:38:31 ◼ ► Only two terabytes for the Max SSD size. The fact that all the other machines have the same limitation makes me wonder if it is a product choice or some kind of inherent limitation.
01:38:42 ◼ ► I bet it's probably just a product choice, especially on the air. Although it would have been nice to offer a four terabyte model because it, as Apple itself, has pointed out several times.
01:38:50 ◼ ► Sometimes the computer you want, like, is weirdly balanced. Like you're like, I don't care about CPU or GPU performance, but I store a lot of stuff.
01:38:58 ◼ ► Like, so please, storage is important to me. So I want I would love an air that has four terabytes of storage. Right. Or vice versa.
01:39:05 ◼ ► I need very little storage of a really fast CPU. They don't give you that flexibility. So kind of like the RAM only eight and 16.
01:39:13 ◼ ► You know, the SSD only goes up two terabytes. Kind of disappointing. No GPU support, despite the fact that it has Thunderbolt. Apple says no. No external GPUs for you.
01:39:23 ◼ ► So if you're not happy with the GPU that's in there, you cannot use an external GPU. It only supports one external display. Starting to smell a little bit like an iPad now, isn't it?
01:39:31 ◼ ► It supports one external display. The external display it supports, it can support the 6K display at 60 hertz. Right. So it can support Apple's big display, which is great. But I think a lot of, nobody has Apple's big display and a lot of people have two small displays.
01:39:44 ◼ ► And if you're thinking of using those two ports that connect the two displays, not going to happen, which is kind of disappointing.
01:39:49 ◼ ► They did find the one guy in the world who has a Mac mini connected to their $6,000 display though for the video.
01:39:54 ◼ ► I mean, yeah. I mean, they want it, like, I think this is good. If Apple's going to sell a big, giant, expensive monitor with tons of pixels, all of their Macs sold in the years after should support it.
01:40:04 ◼ ► Even the wimpy ones. And I think that's great. I think it's not saying, oh, you need a pro computer to connect that display. Nope. The mini will do it. The Air will do it.
01:40:11 ◼ ► The limitation of one display though is kind of disappointing. I feel like that is a hangover from the iPad architecture from which this is derived/shared with or whatever. We'll find out in the coming years.
01:40:22 ◼ ► I think this is all, these are all just signs that what they have updated is still only their low end products.
01:40:29 ◼ ► You know, like people are complaining, we'll get to this later, people are complaining like there's no four port update to the 13 inch for instance.
01:40:37 ◼ ► And the mini lost a few I/O ports, which we'll get to in a second. But like, overall, what they updated is only their low end stuff.
01:40:45 ◼ ► And we'll see what comes once they get around to the high end, which I'm guessing next year, maybe next summer, something like that.
01:41:03 ◼ ► Whether the RAM goes off package and they have soldered or socketed in various models, that's a big question mark.
01:41:12 ◼ ► Because right now their high end products support very large amounts of RAM that would be impractical to keep in package in the SoC.
01:41:21 ◼ ► So I'm assuming that their high end models will have off package RAM and maybe use the additional space in the package for more CPU cores.
01:41:32 ◼ ► You know, we don't, you know, they took out eGPU support so far. We don't know if it will ever come back.
01:41:38 ◼ ► I'm guessing probably not. I'm guessing every GPU that ever runs on Apple Silicon is an Apple GPU.
01:41:48 ◼ ► Do they have Apple GPUs on something like MPX modules that you can buy like three or four of them and slot them in later?
01:42:08 ◼ ► And we're just not there yet. And so I wouldn't necessarily assume anything about their high end limitations from what we have so far.
01:42:18 ◼ ► But we can certainly take educated guesses. And I do think that the likelihood of external GPUs from other manufacturers being supported is low.
01:42:28 ◼ ► Agree. But that doesn't mean that Apple can't take their own GPUs and make them external to the package for their higher end products.
01:42:41 ◼ ► That is still on the table I think. But I wouldn't assume that we're going to get like AMD or Nvidia support.
01:42:52 ◼ ► But I also wouldn't assume that that would preclude the existence of high end expandability and options.
01:42:58 ◼ ► Honestly I think having Mark Gurman's theoretical smaller Mac Pro that has slots for the Apple G3, G5, and G7 GPUs they can slot in there in different configurations.
01:43:15 ◼ ► And I think that's actually probably a more likely possibility than what they have now which is like we'll take parts from other people and put them in.
01:43:23 ◼ ► Nope. Don't see that happening. But I also don't see them taking a Mac Pro and making it not expandable again.
01:43:28 ◼ ► So we'll see what happens in the high end. Anyway this is all, we're getting ahead of ourselves here.
01:43:32 ◼ ► Right now we're looking at the low end and while a lot of people are really upset that it's capped at 16 gigs of RAM and two Thunderbolt ports.
01:43:46 ◼ ► And the high end stuff that has more than that they just haven't replaced yet so we really don't know.
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01:46:01 ◼ ► So speaking of low end, the Mac Mini was the next computer and if you look at the specs and limitations it looks very familiar.
01:46:12 ◼ ► It's an M1. It goes from five gig SSD to two terabytes. It can have eight or sixteen gigs of RAM.
01:46:39 ◼ ► We didn't mention this about the other Mini there but both this and the Air have a headphone jack.
01:46:45 ◼ ► We didn't mention it which means just assume that it's still a guest. The headphone jack still exists on these computers.
01:46:49 ◼ ► The thing that surprised me the most about the Mac Mini, other than it only coming in silver and not coming in space grey which is a little baffling,
01:46:56 ◼ ► is that it has a fan. Because when they introduced the fanless MacBook Air I'm like, well the Mac Mini is a similar kind of low end computer, right?
01:47:04 ◼ ► Like if you can make the MacBook Air fanless you can make the Mini fanless. But they didn't.
01:47:08 ◼ ► Which makes me think, again we have no idea because they won't tell us. They literally won't tell us.
01:47:12 ◼ ► People ask them and they say, you know, whatever they say. We're not talking about this today.
01:47:20 ◼ ► Because why would you need a fan in the Mac Mini which has way more room for air flow and cooling and everything compared to a MacBook Air and not needed in the Air?
01:47:29 ◼ ► So the Mac Mini could end up being a little speed demon because it's got a fan, probably a very quiet fan, running on that same M1 system on the chip.
01:47:39 ◼ ► I don't know if I think I put this in the notes. Do they even offer a 7 GPU core version in the Mac Mini or are they all 8?
01:47:47 ◼ ► Right, so it's all the top binned parts, it's the same M1, presumably clocked higher, but everything else about it is the same.
01:47:53 ◼ ► They dropped the price $100, the entry level price. It used to be $799, now the entry level is $699.
01:48:00 ◼ ► Given all the specs are just up, the only thing they have to differentiate the Mac Mini, how can you charge more for it, is storage.
01:48:09 ◼ ► Because nothing else about it changes. Like RAM, I guess, but RAM and storage, they're really getting...
01:48:20 ◼ ► You differentiate iOS devices just by storage. What size phone is Marco getting? 128? 256?
01:48:25 ◼ ► We never ask him how much RAM he's getting because you're getting what you're getting, right?
01:48:28 ◼ ► So it's nice that they gave two choices for RAM. I dread the day they give one choice and it's like 8GB or something.
01:48:39 ◼ ► If you are interested in a Mac Mini to be a tiny little Intel server, this is not your computer because it's not Intel.
01:48:56 ◼ ► Why does it have Gigabit Ethernet? Well, you might not know this, but Ethernet has not been a big feature on the iPads and iPhones.
01:49:04 ◼ ► But it's supported, certainly on the iPad and possibly on iPhones? I don't remember. But I know it's supported on iPad.
01:49:12 ◼ ► Yeah, and that could be a PCIe lane thing. More likely, it's probably just a high-end versus low-end thing.
01:49:21 ◼ ► It wouldn't surprise me at all if they do later, once there is a higher-end chip for their higher-end products, they might offer a higher-end configuration on the Mac Mini with that chip.
01:49:31 ◼ ► Yeah, once they integrate that, because they've had no reason thus far to make 10GB Ethernet support in any of their ARM-based products.
01:49:39 ◼ ► And arguably, with this line of things that they've released, they still kind of don't.
01:49:44 ◼ ► I know the old Intel Mac Mini had it, just because it's probably cheap and easy to make with giving the chipsets to work with the Intel things.
01:49:49 ◼ ► But they don't quite have it yet. So there are some regressions. But the entry-level price being lower is great.
01:49:54 ◼ ► And the performance, again, compared to the past Mac Mini, this should have phenomenal performance.
01:50:02 ◼ ► Especially since you don't really care about the GPU in a Mac Mini if you're just using it as a little server or something.
01:50:07 ◼ ► But even if you're not. So the picture that everyone's making fun of, the Mac Mini sitting there, connected to an Apple 6K display,
01:50:20 ◼ ► I think they had it sitting on top of the stand. It's a little bit absurd in some respects, but in other respects, what I thought about was,
01:50:30 ◼ ► here's what I immediately thought about. With the Intel transition kits, the developer transition kits, they like, what do they do?
01:50:37 ◼ ► They give you, like, you send back the developer transition kit and they give you a good deal on an Intel iMac or something.
01:50:42 ◼ ► I would love to send back my developer transition kit. By the way, I just uploaded my ARM versions of all my apps to the store.
01:50:48 ◼ ► They're available now if you want to go get them. I would love to send that back and have them give me a good deal on an ARM-based Mac Mini.
01:50:56 ◼ ► And you know what I'd do with that ARM-based Mac Mini? I would sit it on the stand that costs more money than it does, and I would connect it to my 6K display.
01:51:03 ◼ ► Because, you know, you could have a whole second computer with the same peripherals and the same desk setup, and it would be a fast computer.
01:51:11 ◼ ► It would be faster in single-core performance than the gigantic Mac Pro that's over there, right?
01:51:15 ◼ ► Just take your display, keyboard, and mouse, and disconnect them from your old computer that you're switching away from and plug them into Mac Mini.
01:51:21 ◼ ► Just Bluetooth, right? I mean, I do this with my laptop. Like, you know, the magic of Bluetooth accessories.
01:51:26 ◼ ► All I'm saying is that a Mac Mini connected to an absurdly large display only sounds ridiculous because you think of a Mac Mini as a wimpy computer.
01:51:35 ◼ ► It's not wimpy. It's got the same M1 chip as the other three computers, and this one has a fan on it, which probably means it's clocked higher and can sustain higher speeds.
01:51:45 ◼ ► This Mac Mini, again, like, what are we going to be comparing to? Are we going to be benchmarking against the Mac Mini?
01:51:51 ◼ ► Or, as Marco mentioned before, are we going to be benchmarking against the 8-core iMac?
01:51:55 ◼ ► It's an inexpensive computer, and it's silly to connect it to a $7,000 monitor setup, but if you've already got a $7,000 monitor setup, it's suddenly faster than your Mac Pro.
01:52:11 ◼ ► Well, I'm just saying, like, this Mac Mini is going to be faster than my Mac Pro in almost everything not related to gaming.
01:52:19 ◼ ► It's terrifying, and obviously it's 16GB of RAM, so it's a limited computer, but I think this Mac Mini is perfectly fine.
01:52:33 ◼ ► Like, if you don't care about the places where it's weak, like if you're not going to play games on it, for instance, doing day-to-day stuff and you have an external monitor that you like,
01:52:45 ◼ ► Now, the fact that you can only do a 6K and a 4K monitor, one has to be HDMI and one Thunderbolt, that's a little bit limiting if you want, like, a three-monitor setup or whatever,
01:53:01 ◼ ► Don't try to think about how much less the M1 costs Apple to put in these machines than the Intel chips, because it's a lot less, and they do not pass that savings on to you for the most part.
01:53:10 ◼ ► I know it's $100 less, but in general, Apple is benefiting more from this savings than you are, which is fine.
01:53:17 ◼ ► Like, for prices to be stable or to go down $100 on the low end, I think that's all fine. I give Apple a pass on that. I think the Mac Mini is fine.
01:53:27 ◼ ► Can you imagine how many more of these Mac Minis they would sell if they sold a 5K external display for like $1,000 or $1,500 bucks?
01:53:42 ◼ ► I don't even know how to make a 5K display. Apple has never shipped a 5K display, except inside other computers. Don't look at those.
01:53:48 ◼ ► No, I couldn't agree with you more, Marco. I'm not in the market for a new computer in any capacity, really, but particularly to replace my iMac Pro, which we should talk about eventually one day at some point.
01:53:59 ◼ ► But if I were to replace the iMac Pro tomorrow, and if there was a 5K first-party display, I would really think hard about getting exactly that.
01:54:09 ◼ ► I love this iMac Pro. I really do. But the Mac Mini should be a screamer for all the sorts of things I would want to do, and mated with a decent 5K display? I mean, why wouldn't you?
01:54:20 ◼ ► Yeah, that's why more than ever, the giant hole in Apple's lineup for displays is not only apparent, but I think holding them back at this point.
01:54:30 ◼ ► Yeah, this is another instance again, the 2TB SSD Macs. On a Mac Mini, you feel like, "Can't you give me the four options? Plenty of room. Thermals aren't a concern. You've got a fan."
01:54:42 ◼ ► This is where you start to think, "Is it actually a limitation?" I don't understand how it could be, though, but maybe it was like, well, the storage management stuff was tailored to the iPad, and the biggest iPad is 1TB, but it just seems a missed opportunity not to give higher ceilings on SSD size.
01:54:58 ◼ ► Just to be clear, the SSDs are not on the package, but the system on a chip. Those are elsewhere on the board, so there's no packaging constraints saying you can't fit more than that. They could, and they would price it ridiculously, and we know how it goes with Apple and storage.
01:55:18 ◼ ► Yeah, and it could be as simple as these are their low-end products. They historically have not offered their highest SSD sizes in their lowest-end products. You couldn't get a 4TB MacBook Air before.
01:55:33 ◼ ► I feel like now that you can get 8 on the big ones, you should be able to get 4 on the lesser products.
01:55:37 ◼ ► I think the more likely explanation besides, I think it's both. I think it's both the product segmentation of wanting to push people with higher-end needs to the higher-end products, and I think it's possibly just the reality of how many chips does that take on the board to offer those larger capacities, and how much room do you want to devote to those on these products.
01:55:57 ◼ ► Well, the problem with the Mac Mini, though, is that the higher-end version of that is $6,000.
01:56:01 ◼ ► Yes. Because there is no other headless desktop computer that they sell. You go from Mini to something that's like 17 times the volume of the Mini. 20, 30? How many Mac Minis could I fit inside my computer? A lot.
01:56:13 ◼ ► Oh, my word. All right, so we should talk about the MacBook Pro. Now, it was so obvious when I heard them say this, but it didn't occur to me until I was listening to Dithering, I think, this morning. And I forget if it was Jon or Ben, but one of them said, you know, you could think of the MacBook Pro that was released yesterday as the spiritual successor to what Marco dubbed the MacBook Escape.
01:56:37 ◼ ► And so this was the MacBook Pro, the Escape was the MacBook Pro, you know, Intel, of course, that did not have a touch bar, and it only had two ports. Is that correct, Marco?
01:56:48 ◼ ► Okay, so this new MacBook Pro running on the M1 also has two ports and in many, many ways, with the exception of having a touch bar now, seems like it's kind of the spiritual successor of the MacBook Escape in that it is a MacBook Pro in name, but maybe not in other ways, question mark.
01:57:11 ◼ ► But nevertheless, I mean, it's nice, and if you don't mind giving up a couple of ports, I don't know why you wouldn't be interested in this. The reason I'm not interested in it is because I really don't want to replace a six month old laptop because my name is not Marco.
01:57:24 ◼ ► But beyond that, I do use all the ports in this laptop. Perhaps I'm just port crazy now that I've spent three years without them. But there are occasions when I'll have like Ethernet plugged in and a phone plugged in or maybe even a phone and an iPad plugged in and of course, power.
01:57:36 ◼ ► So I don't want to go back down to two, but if I didn't mind, this would be a very interesting and compelling machine.
01:57:42 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, and to be clear, there have been, as you mentioned, the 13 inch MacBook Pro has actually been two very different products since 2016. Since they went to this generation with like touch bar and crappy keyboards at first and everything. The 13 inch MacBook Pro has always had the low end model, which is basically a souped up Air in many ways, and the higher end model, which usually had, it always had four ports on the higher end model and it usually had, it always had the touch bar, but it's always been these two very different products.
01:58:11 ◼ ► One of them was basically a souped up Air. The other one was really what you would expect from a "Macbook Pro" and they've only replaced the lower end one here. Again, it's only the low end products.
01:58:24 ◼ ► So many people are especially upset at them calling this "Pro" while not offering higher RAM than 16 gigs and everything like that. And again, I think that's reasonable when you look at what they replaced so far and what they haven't gotten to yet.
01:58:39 ◼ ► The higher end 13 inch Pro has always been a higher end product. It's always used higher grade CPU's, higher thermal envelopes, higher performance, higher core counts for most of the time.
01:58:51 ◼ ► So again, I think it's reasonable what they've done here. It's just that the computer that a lot of people want as the "13 inch MacBook Pro", they haven't replaced that one yet.
01:59:01 ◼ ► Because that's the higher end one. That said, I do take issue with when they have only two ports. Why don't they put one on each side?
01:59:15 ◼ ► Because one of the most wonderful luxuries ever since they went to all USB-C on laptops in 2016, one of the wonderful luxuries of having a four port model is that you can plug in the charging cable on either side depending on whatever was convenient for you.
01:59:30 ◼ ► Now there have been a few asterisks on this arrangement so far. In many of these computers, one side had more Thunderbolt bandwidth than the other.
01:59:39 ◼ ► There's a common problem with the bigger ones that if you plug it into the left side or something, it makes the whole thing run hotter.
01:59:46 ◼ ► And if you plug it into the right side, it doesn't for some reason. There's a few weirdnesses that have cropped up.
01:59:52 ◼ ► But for the most part, as somebody who for most of this time has owned four port models, having the ability to plug the charging cable in on either side is a wonderful little nicety.
02:00:08 ◼ ► So now that we've seen all three of these computers here, it is like the two port 13 inch MacBook Pro, like you said, the MacBook Escape.
02:00:17 ◼ ► You could squint and see that as just like an error in a different case. But these three new ARM computers that they've rolled out, right?
02:00:24 ◼ ► It's basically the same computer in three different sort of contexts. One of them is a fanless thin laptop.
02:00:35 ◼ ► But in terms of like what's in there, it's the same stuff that's in the mini, but now it's got a fan and a couple different ports.
02:00:41 ◼ ► And that's the same stuff that's in the MacBook Pro. But now it's a laptop with fans and a bigger battery and so on and so forth.
02:00:47 ◼ ► Yeah, right. We know the M1 is in all of them, but also most of the limitations are the same across all of them.
02:00:55 ◼ ► 8 or 16 gigs of RAM across the board. Only up to 2 terabyte SSD. Only two ports, two Thunderbolt/USB4 ports, right?
02:01:03 ◼ ► I wouldn't be surprised if they crack these things open, like iFixit and looks at the motherboards of all of them, and that the motherboards actually look kind of similar in terms of what's on them.
02:01:12 ◼ ► And if you looked at the motherboard when they showed it floating into the, I think it was the MacBook Air when they showed it floating in, it looked for all the world like an iPad, logic board, quote unquote, logic board or whatever.
02:01:22 ◼ ► Because it's like, oh, that's a skinny thing off to the side and it makes room for the big battery in the iPad, right?
02:01:26 ◼ ► Or like if you've seen what the logic board in the phone looks like, it's just like, oh, it's basically a giant battery.
02:01:32 ◼ ► And then along the edge there's this little tiny thing that's the actual phone. That's what these things are like too.
02:01:36 ◼ ► So the limitations of this sort of system, this M1 based system, and Margot mentioned PCI express lanes, right?
02:01:44 ◼ ► How much bandwidth is there? How much connectivity can you even have? How much RAM can we even fit in the system on a chip?
02:01:52 ◼ ► It's basically the same. And these three computers they introduce are the three computers where this sort of system, this set of constraints is reasonable.
02:02:01 ◼ ► There are places where it's like, you know, a little bit unreasonable, like again, the storage thing or whatever, and it would be better if they supported more monitors and so on and so forth.
02:02:10 ◼ ► But if you looked at Apple's existing line and said, here is the M1 based system and here are its possible capabilities, what computers will this fit into?
02:02:19 ◼ ► This is the three you would pick because these are the three where this type of thing makes sense.
02:02:39 ◼ ► And this computer is the one where it is probably pressed the most, even though, as Margot said, it's like it's people don't understand.
02:02:51 ◼ ► And by the way, it's replacing the lesser 13 with CPU and battery performance that blows away any 13 ever made. Right.
02:02:59 ◼ ► People apparently don't care about that. All of a sudden, people don't care about performance and battery life.
02:03:02 ◼ ► Anyone complaining about these computers, I give it to them for one day and have them look at that battery meter and not go down.
02:03:07 ◼ ► And they'll, you know, again, assuming Apple's claims are correct, nobody has these computers.
02:03:16 ◼ ► It's kind of fascinating and it's it's fascinating for both of the reason of like how they're rolling this out and also about the future, which I guess we'll get through this computer first and I'll talk about the future.
02:03:30 ◼ ► Battery life is even bigger than the air, as you can imagine, because it's not wedge shaped. Right.
02:03:38 ◼ ► You'd be like, I get like five hours out of my MacBook. What are they talking about? 17 hours. That must be a typo.
02:03:43 ◼ ► We'll find out. But like, you know how long your your iPad lasts and this has bigger batteries than your iPad. Right.
02:04:12 ◼ ► And in real world use and benchmarks, because the cooling system has to mean something here.
02:04:18 ◼ ► And they again, they said as much with the whole thing about sustaining its performance.
02:04:22 ◼ ► So I know it's going to be faster than the air. I don't know how much faster and how much that matters.
02:04:27 ◼ ► And will a fan be noticeably loud during high performance or can they only give it a little bit of active cooling?
02:04:33 ◼ ► And that might be enough. Who knows? Time will tell. But I'm very interested to find out.
02:04:39 ◼ ► Can I ask a dumb question? Why is the power adapter on the MacBook Pro double the wattage?
02:04:46 ◼ ► Like, obviously, some of this I think I could explain away by perhaps maybe a difference in the screen or I don't know, but this should be the same screens.
02:04:58 ◼ ► Yeah, like the MacBook Air is something like 50 and this is something like 60 or something like that.
02:05:07 ◼ ► I think I just put the bigger one in it because if it's going to have that sustained performance, you need a power adapter that can keep up with maximum power draw from everything.
02:05:16 ◼ ► And maybe all they had on hand is 30 and 60 watts. And if 30 watt won't do it, which might be borderline, give them a 60.
02:05:22 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, and that's to be clear. That's also what the previous ones used. Like the previous Air was 30 and the previous 13 inch Pro was 60.
02:05:30 ◼ ► I'm guessing this is partly like keep everything external the same and also, you know, the power adapter is sometimes the limiting factor with high end workloads like video encoding.
02:05:42 ◼ ► Sometimes the laptop can't actually be fully powered by the power adapter and that's when you see some models that actually will slowly discharge themselves even when plugged in when doing something like a heavy video encode.
02:05:54 ◼ ► And that's more tolerable on something like an Air than it is on something called MacBook Pro that's going to be used by video people.
02:06:00 ◼ ► So that could be a situation as well. I'm guessing it's probably, that's probably not going to be a major factor.
02:06:06 ◼ ► But it could just be like pros want the battery to charge faster. It could be as simple as that.
02:06:11 ◼ ► And to be clear, this only supports one external monitor as well. That's another thing that can draw power.
02:06:16 ◼ ► This one probably hurts the most because it is MacBook Pro. It does have two ports. The ports do look the same as each other, but you cannot connect two monitors to them.
02:06:24 ◼ ► Why? Because like I said, this is the system they give you. It makes me wonder how they managed to give HDMI output on the Mac Mini and not, maybe like, maybe, you know, the HDMI output can be limited to 4K because of limitations of the HDMI spec that they're using or whatever.
02:06:39 ◼ ► But once you have these Thunderbolt ports, it would be weird to have like, you know, if you plug in a 6K monitor into one Thunderbolt port, now all you can plug into the other Thunderbolt port is like a 720p monitor or something. I don't know.
02:06:50 ◼ ► But it's, that's, that's a pretty disappointing limitation. I feel like it is just that that is the one of the more painful inherited traits of this overall system that the MacBook Pro gets.
02:07:01 ◼ ► One more power adapter theory also is that they will presumably at some point in the next year launch a higher end 13 inch MacBook Pro or maybe 14 inch, but maybe they want to use the same adapter for both because it's very confusing if you have a 13 inch MacBook Pro and you need a power adapter and they have to say which one.
02:07:20 ◼ ► You got to feel, you got to feel along the sides to see, are there ports on the right side?
02:07:25 ◼ ► Right. So it could, it could be also just planning for the future where they just want to have one power adapter for each size class and that could be it.
02:07:32 ◼ ► Well, what I was hoping to back one of the three of us into is, is it feasible or possible that they would crank up the clock speed or something on the M1 specifically in the MacBook Pro, or I suppose the mini for that matter, and make it considerably quicker than the one in the air?
02:07:48 ◼ ► I don't think that's what's happening. I think your theories are better, but is it possible?
02:07:52 ◼ ► It's limited by cooling, not by power draw, I imagine. Like that's, it's always, you know, it's not as if you can go faster. It's kind of like the, what's like the switch is like that. The switch actually goes faster when it's in its dock.
02:08:04 ◼ ► Because it's powered. That's a battery life savings, but I think in this case it's the dissipation of heat that's limiting the speed these things can go. So I don't think you can clock it any faster if you plug it in.
02:08:13 ◼ ► Yeah. And also think about battery math here. Like if you're, if you're running a 30 watt adapter and maxing out how much power it can draw on a 60 watt hour battery, that's not going to last a lot of hours.
02:08:27 ◼ ► Right? So these are like peak charge level or, you know, peak power draw is not meant to be anything sustained.
02:08:34 ◼ ► That actually reminds me that a common thread I heard throughout the entirety of yesterday's presentation, but particularly when it came to the discussion of the M1, was that everything was couched and hedged to some degree as low power. Like this is the fastest low power processor ever put in a, in a, into a computer. This is the, this is the best.
02:08:54 ◼ ► Oh yeah. The one for the 13 inch. There were like five words in that qualification. It was like the fastest of any, like, you know.
02:09:09 ◼ ► Yeah. It's, it's absolutely true. But I don't know, it, it occurred to me like the, the, the non-tinfoil hat justification for that was that, Hey, you know, there are other computers that exist today that are not low power that are quite a bit quicker. Simple as that. But I couldn't help but wonder, is it that there's going to be, which presumably there will be one day, but is there, is that there, is it that there's a, you know, an M1Z, an M1 plus, an M1++ plus, or is there a M1Z?
02:09:38 ◼ ► An M1 plus plus or what have you, that is a high power version of this chip that is going to be in an entirely different class. And they're just setting up for, you know, in the future, in the next presentation saying, well, you know how we kept talking about how low power it was?
02:09:53 ◼ ► Well, here in the Mac Pro where we don't care about low power, look at how she screams, you know, or something like that. And I think the simple answer is probably the right answer, but it could, I couldn't help but wonder if, if all of this hedging was a very quiet nod to the future.
02:10:09 ◼ ► Well, that brings me to my next point about the future, right? So obviously Apple can do whatever he wants with the Macs. That's why we talked about the various, the spectrums, the possibilities of what they could do with the hardware, what they could do with the CPUs.
02:10:21 ◼ ► But we did have the history of all the iOS devices before it, right? And it turns out what they did was with the hardware, similar to what they did with the Intel and with the system on a chip, they reused the stuff they already had for the iPad and the phone in not radically different configurations, right?
02:10:37 ◼ ► Now on the iOS side, the cadence has been more or less, you know, you get the A13 and the next year you get the A14, right? They've just gone, it's the number has gone up once each year, A7, A8, A9, like it's fairly like clockwork. And there are variants during the year and trailing where you get the Z and the X areas, which have been for the bigger versions of them.
02:10:56 ◼ ► But for the most part, you know, we got the A14 in our phones this year. Nobody is looking forward to an A15 based phone this year. Obviously it's the end of the year, it doesn't make sense. But you know what I mean? Like there's the idea that you're going to increment that number after the letter more than once in a year.
02:11:13 ◼ ► That hasn't happened on the iOS side. And because we assume, and thus far, and Apple has done nothing to dissuade us from this, that the Mac gets basically, not the leftovers from the iPad and the phone, but basically, Apple does the work for the phone.
02:11:29 ◼ ► And to a lesser extent for the iPad, and now the Mac gets the benefit of that, right? But so far, Apple has yet to show that they are doing some work that is clearly only for the Mac. If you look at the M1, it looks a lot like an A14 with more cores and stuff in it, right?
02:11:46 ◼ ► So, we're like, okay, we've got these new Macs, these are low on Macs, they get the M1, right? And now we're like, yeah, maybe in January, February or March, or maybe in the spring we'll see the M2. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. The M2, we just gave you the M1.
02:12:02 ◼ ► If you follow the same cadence as the iOS things, you shouldn't be expecting an M2 until next November, because we just gave you the M1. Now, M1X, M1Z, something like that, maybe, but don't go looking for an M2, because you're not going to see an M2 until next fall at the earliest.
02:12:22 ◼ ► We don't know that that's what the cadence is going to be, but if the M2 is based on the A15, that's not an unreasonable assumption. All this is to say that the future of this line of computers, like, oh, and I bet they're going to do the 16-inch MacBook Pro in the spring.
02:12:38 ◼ ► If they do the 16-inch MacBook Pro in the spring, expect its CPU and GPU to look an awful lot like the current one, maybe with more cores. Don't expect the 16-inch MacBook Pro to come out in the spring with an M2 with entirely different CPU and GPU cores.
02:12:55 ◼ ► That would be awesome if that happened. We would all love it, but it seems to me that everything Apple has actually done so far makes me think that they really, really want to share sort of a foundational technology stack with their other products, which makes perfect sense.
02:13:10 ◼ ► That raises the whole reason that Macs are getting these to begin with, is that Apple didn't have to go to the drawing board and start a whole new CPU and GPU architecture. They had the work they had already done. Now, that raises the question, what the hell is an M1X or an M1Z?
02:13:25 ◼ ► Because the M1 is already basically an A14X. I guess you just put on a different letter at the end and give it more cores, because, you know, you can give it more cores. You can give it more high-performance cores, more high-efficiency cores. You can scale up the GPU.
02:13:40 ◼ ► Presumably, they can give it more PCI Express lanes for more Thunderbolt ports and higher storage limitations. You can give it more RAM. You can maybe put more RAM on the package, but you can take the RAM off the package for the high-end machines. These are all things that Apple can do with the basic underpinnings of the M1 architecture, the M1 suffix architecture. All those things are possible.
02:14:03 ◼ ► But it seems to me right now that for, obviously, the rest of this year, but for all of 2021, I do not expect, except for maybe the tail end, I do not expect to see any Macs that come with anything other than A14 cores and those same GPU cores in different arrangements with different I/O and different RAM sizes.
02:14:23 ◼ ► Which, to be clear, is fine. Those will all be faster. They'll be the fastest Macs Apple has ever made, and they'll be awesome, and you can scale them up to everything except the Mac Pro, which is a real problem that probably not going to happen until 2022.
02:14:36 ◼ ► But that's my current thinking on this. As I said before this presentation, feel free to surprise me, Apple. Feel free to roll out the M2, M3, and M4 all next year. It'll be awesome. I'll be cheering you on. Totally new core architectures, everything, just amazing stuff that I've never seen before.
02:14:53 ◼ ► No, I think you're exactly right. I think it's most sensible. We're going to see exactly what they've done with the iPad, what they're doing here, which is this is the M1, and the other products that are going to be released maybe next spring or summer or whatever it is are going to be the M1X, or something similarly named or similarly functioning, where it is the exact same cores as the M1, just more of them.
02:15:15 ◼ ► And we'll see how they scale RAM and GPU performance. As I said earlier, and as you said, I don't think it's out of the question that they would have maybe in the models that currently have discrete GPUs.
02:15:28 ◼ ► So, iMacs, the 16-inch MacBook Pro, the Mac Pro, maybe they have an architecture where the higher-end chips have more cores on the chip, and they move some of the stuff that's in the chip now out of package. So the RAM is one of the biggest things to move out.
02:15:45 ◼ ► Then you can make a bigger die to have more CPU cores, and to solve some of your higher-end performance needs, you probably move the GPU out as well into its own chip. And then you have more CPU cores available for a reasonable die size in the chip, and then you have a whole separate chip to make an even higher-end GPU to be able to compete for high-end workloads there in that way.
02:16:07 ◼ ► And I think that's your answer. And the RAM is also off-package. Then you can basically make things like the 16-inch the way they've been made. The 16-inch has had a separate GPU and off-package RAM, and the 15-inch before that always had the same thing, with the exception of the handful of models that had integrated graphics as an option.
02:16:28 ◼ ► But for the most part, that's how these models have always been made, and it's been fine. And you can take that exact same architecture and scale it up to basically whatever level you need for that product.
02:16:38 ◼ ► You can fit, probably easily, eight of the high-performance cores into an M1 that didn't need to have a GPU in it. And so the more you can separate out from the main package into separate chips on the board, whether they're slotted or socketed or not, the higher-end performance you can achieve.
02:16:58 ◼ ► And so I think that's most likely where this goes next. That at some point next year, we have an M1X that has pushed some of the stuff that's in the package now out of the package in order to offer more of everything.
02:17:11 ◼ ► I don't think anything is getting pushed out except for RAM next year. I think the entire 16-inch line next year will have the GPU on die. I know what you're saying, and it's totally possible, and I think they have to do it for the Mac Pro, but for the 16-inch, "integrated GPU only" is my guess.
02:17:29 ◼ ► The other possibility with the naming is interesting that we talked about BMW before. BMW has the M3, the 3-series, right? Very recently, BMW decided, "You know what? When we take the M3 and give it two doors, that's not the M3 Coupe anymore. Now it's the M4."
02:17:51 ◼ ► Right. It has fewer doors, but the number is higher. Normally, the 5-series is bigger than the 3-series is bigger than the 2-series is bigger than the 1-series. It all makes sense.
02:17:59 ◼ ► But the "4-series" is not bigger than the 3-series. In fact, it's smaller in some ways because it's got the two doors. It doesn't make any sense.
02:18:08 ◼ ► Anyway, Apple could, because it's just a marketing name, come out with essentially the M1X and just call it the M2. There's no rules about this stuff. Under the covers, it would just be the A14 core. We can look at it, we'll figure out what it actually is.
02:18:24 ◼ ► They can call it the M2 if they want. We don't have precedent. All we've got is this one point so far. We don't have a line yet. So it's possible that Apple could do that.
02:18:32 ◼ ► It seems less likely than sticking letters on the end of it. But who knows? If you want to make a big splash with the 16-inch MacBook Pro with its huge number of cores and amazing integrated GPU, the fastest integrated GPU ever made, blah blah blah blah blah, and you want to call it the M2 but it's really just an M1 with more stuff inside it, sure. Go ahead.
02:18:53 ◼ ► I actually want to give one quick technical note here. This is a tweet from Longhorn. I think his thing is never_released on Twitter. You should follow him. Whoever this person is, they seem to know a lot about this stuff.
02:19:03 ◼ ► But one check-in on the security stuff. They talked about this in the keynote. Oh, we made our iOS devices so secure and now Macs will be secure too, and blah blah blah.
02:19:12 ◼ ► And there's Big Sur with its secure boot image and all that other stuff. People are still worried about, okay, but if I want to just do development work myself and not be in super security mode, can I write my own kernel extensions, can I recompile the kernel, can I boot a basically a quote-unquote "untrusted" operating system?
02:19:33 ◼ ► And according to Longhorn, on all these ARM Macs, there is no "all the security checks are turned off" mode. What you can do, however, is take your unsigned operating system kernel and bless it yourself so that the secure boot policy allows you to boot.
02:19:49 ◼ ► It's kind of like a self-signed certificate in SSL if you're a web developer and understand what I'm talking about. These ARM Macs will not boot a non-secured operating system image, but you can make your own secured operating system image with your own changes in it if you're that type of hacker.
02:20:06 ◼ ► And one final note, the A14 has 4 kilobyte page support, so I know we were talking about how we couldn't boot Windows on the DDK because the page support wasn't right. You still can't boot Windows as far as I know, but that particular limitation, as we suspected, does not exist in the shipping ARM Macs. It was just a DDK thing.
02:20:29 ◼ ► Thanks to our sponsors this week, Bombas, Mac Weldon, and FlatFile. And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can become one if you'd like to at atp.fm/join. And we will talk to you next week.
02:20:42 ◼ ► Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, 'cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
02:20:55 ◼ ► John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, 'cause it was accidental. It was accidental. And you can find the show notes at atp.fm. And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at
02:21:16 ◼ ► c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s, so that's Casey List, M-a-r-c-o-a-r-m, N-T Marco, R-man, S-I-R-A-C, U-S-A, Syracuse. It's accidental. They didn't mean to, accidental. Tech podcast, so long.
02:21:44 ◼ ► Oh, we have a post show, that's right, I put it in there. I suppose we should talk about what we ordered. Yeah, that's what we should talk about, that's our post show. That's what everyone's demanding. But this is a timely thing, it's a timely thing. We can do both. We'll get the order done quickly. Screw it, we'll do it. Oh, okay, okay, you heard it here first. Mm-hmm. I'll get the order done quickly. John, what'd you order? I ordered a MacBook Air, 'cause it is basically perfect for what I wanted. I wanted a computer for the kids to use, and I just wanted it to be a MacBook Air.
02:22:13 ◼ ► And I just wanted it to be an ARM-based MacBook Air that's good and bonus, it has way better battery life and has no fan in it. So I got the 16 gig, obviously, 16 gigs of RAM, one terabyte SSD, Space Gray. And it's coming on the 18th, and I am looking forward to my children accidentally destroying it.
02:22:32 ◼ ► I ordered it within moments of the end of the keynote. I just fired up a store, and as soon as the store came up, I ordered it. I ordered it in such a hurry that A, I ordered it on the wrong Apple ID, I ordered it on my developer Apple ID, and I hope I can transfer.
02:22:48 ◼ ► Because you know when you go to your Apple ID and it shows you all your computers? I hope I can make it go on the list with my other Apple ID, my non-developer one. And B, I forgot to buy Apple Care, so as soon as the computer comes, I have to buy Apple Care retroactively, which apparently you can do up to 60 days after you get the Mac.
02:23:06 ◼ ► You can't do it until you get the Mac, because they ask you for the serial number. So anyway, that's what I got.
02:23:11 ◼ ► Also worth pointing out, any orders placed now are under the extended return policy for the holidays in the US at least. So anything you buy now, you can return until early January.
02:23:30 ◼ ► So John, we knew that you were looking for a computer for your children, although from the sounds of it, you might be stealing it from them. Now Marco, I honestly don't recall what your laptop scenario was.
02:23:40 ◼ ► So can you, before you tell me if and why--well, knowing you, what you bought, can you recap for me what the laptop scenario was in the Armit household?
02:23:48 ◼ ► I use a 16-inch. TIFF uses a previous year 15-inch. And with the exception of TIFF's laptop having to be serviced recently for a defective logic board, otherwise they have been fine.
02:24:00 ◼ ► And we are both fairly stable in that. Our plan was whenever they update the 16-inch, at least she would get one and I would probably end up getting one as well.
02:24:13 ◼ ► And so when I look at what my needs are, I don't want to go smaller on my laptop. I'm very happy with the big one.
02:24:21 ◼ ► I've lived a lot of years in the 13-inch size class and it's nice for a lot of reasons, but my current needs and priorities, I'm just happier with the bigger one.
02:24:31 ◼ ► As for development needs, though, you know, I'm a software developer and I have a couple of little Mac utility apps and I have a big iOS app that I need to care about.
02:24:42 ◼ ► So I need some kind of hardware to use as a development platform for my apps and to test things and everything. And ideally I would love for that to just be my computer.
02:24:54 ◼ ► I would love to upgrade my main desktop or my main laptop to be that. But they didn't release anything that I would consider suitable for that purpose yet.
02:25:01 ◼ ► So, although we'll see once these things actually get here, we'll see. But the main problem with the desktop is the damn display. I hate the LG 5K. I don't want to haul it out to the beach.
02:25:13 ◼ ► I don't want to use it on a day-to-day basis. I have done that before and I don't like it for lots of reasons, not least of which is that it's a buggy piece of crap.
02:25:19 ◼ ► Anyway, so they didn't release anything that can replace my iMac Pro. They didn't release a desktop that has a good monitor story that I could replace the whole setup with.
02:25:37 ◼ ► Instead of getting the Mac Mini, like I have the DTK, which is a Mac Mini, and I've kind of shamefully not used it very much because using it through screen sharing on my computer is terrible.
02:25:53 ◼ ► I don't have enough space here in the office to have a second monitor just for that. I don't want a whole second setup like keyboard, mouse, monitor. I don't want a whole thing like that.
02:26:02 ◼ ► And so I passed on the Mini because I would use it as much as I use this DTK, which is unfortunately not enough.
02:26:10 ◼ ► And I didn't want to buy a $7,000 screen to use with it or use the LG one, which I don't like.
02:26:19 ◼ ► So I was considering the two laptops and I thought, "Okay, well, for performance reasons, the 13-inch Pro is probably the one to get."
02:26:29 ◼ ► When I do use it, I'm planning on actually doing software development on it. Presumably Apple is going to want the DTK back pretty soon.
02:26:37 ◼ ► So I'm about to lose my ARM development platform, we assume. We haven't heard anything yet, but we assume that's probably what's going to happen.
02:26:42 ◼ ► And so I'm going to want some kind of ARM Mac to compile my software on, to test it on, and to ship it to the App Store with until I can get my replacement desktop whenever that happens.
02:26:53 ◼ ► And so I'm going to go for a laptop and I'm going to do my development on that. So clearly the right answer is the 13-inch Pro.
02:27:00 ◼ ► But the 13-inch Pro is not very exciting to me. The Air is exciting. The Air is fanless.
02:27:09 ◼ ► And even though it's not a big difference, it also feels better. It feels thinner and lighter, at least assuming they feel the same.
02:27:17 ◼ ► Because given that they're the exact same dimensions and weight, they probably do feel the same. So assuming it's probably still going to feel a lot better.
02:27:25 ◼ ► And even though the Air is a lower-end machine and will perform worse, I think it'll make me just happier as a novel new thing.
02:27:40 ◼ ► And I also thought the Air might be more likely to have a longer lifespan in my household because what I'm really doing by picking one of these laptops is getting something temporary.
02:27:53 ◼ ► I don't want to be using an Air full-time for myself for the entire next two years or three years or whatever it would be.
02:28:07 ◼ ► So what I'm looking for now is really a temporary laptop to be an ARM development machine for a little while until they release higher-end stuff.
02:28:16 ◼ ► And even though for development the Pro is almost certainly better for performance and fan reasons, the Air is the cooler one, I think.
02:28:24 ◼ ► Not temperature-wise, it almost certainly won't be. But it is the cooler one in terms of awesomeness and novelty and advancement in how these things work and feel.
02:28:33 ◼ ► So I went for the Air. I figure after I'm done with it, either I'll sell it or I'll trade it into Apple or whatever.
02:28:41 ◼ ► Or maybe that might become Adam's first laptop, depending on what his needs are and when I'm done with it.
02:29:01 ◼ ► Tell him about this. Your dad decided because you might use his laptop, you don't deserve two terabytes.
02:29:07 ◼ ► No, I figured I didn't deserve two terabytes. I always get one on all my laptops so far. I've gotten either 512 or one terabyte.
02:29:13 ◼ ► I just figured you would max it out because it's the cheaper one. You did get the eight-core GPU, though, right?
02:29:25 ◼ ► No, it was more because, I couldn't tell you something about the GPU honestly, but it was more for the higher storage and the higher RAM.
02:29:36 ◼ ► So anyway, that's it. So I ordered the MacBook Air and I took a bit of a risk. I ordered it in gold.
02:30:42 ◼ ► And it helps it look more different because it's more different than anything else I've ever had.
02:30:59 ◼ ► They said, "After show requests for the week after next, two Wednesdays from now is the 10th anniversary
02:31:09 ◼ ► And it would be great to hear some reflections on 10 years of podcasting, how it's changed,
02:31:15 ◼ ► I think I'm the least well-equipped as the newest of the three of us to podcasting to answer this.
02:31:35 ◼ ► it might be worth having a quick little celebration now and actually talking about this next week.
02:32:11 ◼ ► Oh, I mean, but I'm used to this 13-inch MacBook Pro now for all its benefits and drawbacks.
02:32:45 ◼ ► Apparently, I'm getting tired at the end of this episode even though we're recording four hours earlier than normal.
02:32:56 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, the RAM is the real thing that's going to kill you, and that's why I'm not recommending you upgrade.
02:33:01 ◼ ► But honestly, this air is going to stomp all over that computer in every area except for RAM,
02:33:07 ◼ ► where if you're using 32 GB of RAM and doing lots of stuff, which is not that hard to do if you're doing a bunch of development,
02:33:11 ◼ ► have a thousand Chrome tabs open and whatever else, then have 20 copies of your app running in simulators.
02:33:19 ◼ ► When Marco gets his, you two should, before the show, come up with some sort of representative tasks,
02:33:33 ◼ ► Well, I'll build overcast on my 16-inch, because I have a command line build script that can do it for benchmarking.
02:33:38 ◼ ► So I'll build overcast on the 16-inch, and then I'll build it on that, and I'll let you know what it does.
02:33:48 ◼ ► I feel like compiling is highly multi-threaded with parallel processes being forked off and everything. We'll see.
02:34:07 ◼ ► There are big chunks of it that you see all the cores max out for 15 seconds here in the middle,
02:34:16 ◼ ► So it would not surprise me if--I'm not sure if the air is going to beat my 8-core MacBook Pro
02:34:24 ◼ ► or my 10-core iMac Pro, but I bet it's going to actually put on a pretty good showing if it doesn't beat it.
02:34:32 ◼ ► Well, you know, it's funny you say that because as you're talking, I'm thinking to myself about you writing SwiftUI and Swift in general.
02:34:39 ◼ ► And I don't think it's going to be faster than your iMac Pro, and certainly the screen real estate will be night and day different.
02:34:47 ◼ ► But there's a universe that we could splinter into in just a few weeks where suddenly you come sheepishly to this very program and say,
02:34:57 ◼ ► "I've stopped using my iMac Pro because the darn MacBook Air is so much faster and so much better."
02:35:09 ◼ ► The true resignment and giving up and defeat for me will be when I get my LG 5K here for one of the new Mac Minis.
02:35:18 ◼ ► That's when you know I've just given up, like, "Oh, man, I just couldn't do it anymore."
02:35:25 ◼ ► I see a future wherein you could decide because I agree from what I know of you, and I like to think I know you pretty well,
02:35:39 ◼ ► I think that if somehow builds of overcast are considerably quicker on this MacBook Air, which is not entirely implausible,
02:35:48 ◼ ► I could see you -- well, actually, I think you're right that the more likely thing you would do is just get a new Mac Mini
02:35:59 ◼ ► But nevertheless, I could see a reality wherein you decide to just go all in on developing on this Mac Mini's real estate be damned.
02:36:06 ◼ ► That would only be if it's a lot faster, though, and honestly, I don't think it's going to be a lot faster,
02:36:14 ◼ ► Yeah. And a lot of compiling is I/O bound, because you've got all these files, and you've got, you know,
02:36:20 ◼ ► there's lots of -- you're reading files in and writing files out and as multi-threaded as you want, like, how much faster --
02:36:25 ◼ ► you know, compiling is not going to probably play to these machines' strength, but I think it'll be competitive.
02:36:31 ◼ ► But for you, Casey, all I'm doing is endorsing the idea that even though you just got this computer,
02:36:40 ◼ ► and buying whatever the equivalent less expensive computer that is better in all possible ways.
02:36:45 ◼ ► Again, the RAM is hampering you, but, you know, you can -- you know, don't feel tied to this 13-inch is what I'm saying.
02:36:52 ◼ ► And mentally, I don't, but I don't know. I've never held onto a computer for only a handful of months.
02:37:03 ◼ ► It's been done before, but, yeah, see, that's the other thing. I don't want to rip that Band-Aid off because it's a slippery slope.
02:37:14 ◼ ► Yeah, just take the laptop out, wash your car, put it in your pocket, and things will solve your problems.
02:37:23 ◼ ► It's actually funny, though, because sitting here today, I consider 32 gigs RAM table stakes for a computer that I would want to use.
02:37:48 ◼ ► So in all conditions, no matter how much RAM your computer has, it should be using all of it.
02:37:52 ◼ ► The question is how much of it is used for file caches and stuff like that versus how much of it is used for actual applications that you're using.
02:37:59 ◼ ► So it's not always easy to say, "Oh, I opened up my computer and I'm using all the RAM. Therefore, I must always need a computer."
02:38:06 ◼ ► Like we do with storage on our phones, like how much storage you're using. RAM is different.
02:38:09 ◼ ► The operating system's goal is to use all the RAM at all times, because there's always something you can be caching, right?
02:38:20 ◼ ► It's harder to make that assessment, but the easy way to do it is to just launch all the apps that you expect to launch.
02:38:26 ◼ ► And before you even start using them, before you start warming up the file caches, then look at a fresh reboot, how much RAM that takes and how much you expect them to expand.
02:38:34 ◼ ► I get what you're saying, though. I said when I bought my Mac Pro that I no longer have to think about RAM, because I got enough that my workload fits in it.
02:38:43 ◼ ► And not having to think about RAM is great. And so I fully endorse at least 32 for the stuff that you're doing.
02:38:51 ◼ ► Just because why even have to worry about it? But it's possible you could live in 16 and not notice too much of a difference, but you'd be thinking about it.
02:39:07 ◼ ► But on my Mac Pro, I have 64, because I thought, "I'm going to need more, and I might as well..."
02:39:13 ◼ ► The price difference wasn't huge, and I knew I would have it for a long time, so it's fine.
02:39:25 ◼ ► I'm looking under the memory tab down at the bottom. You have physical memory, and then you have memory used.
02:39:29 ◼ ► But I don't know if that includes the cached files that's below that? I don't think it does.
02:39:39 ◼ ► On my laptop, I see "swap used" of a gigabyte. I don't have Xcode up. The laptop is currently in second computer social networking web browsing mode.
02:39:54 ◼ ► Whereas on the iMac Pro, which is recording two different ways, it's got two different browsers open.
02:40:17 ◼ ► I mean, when I'm looking at the memory view, I could just send you a screenshot of the Chrome section.
02:40:24 ◼ ► It's in the hierarchy by process name, and the Chrome section doesn't fit in the window.
02:40:30 ◼ ► But it's more than one process per tab. It's got a VT decode XPC service for some video thing, MTL compiler service. Who knows what these are?
02:40:40 ◼ ► What I was going to say earlier, just to put a period on the end of the sentence, is I tell you that I need 32 gigs of RAM, but I don't really have any empirical evidence to back that up.
02:40:51 ◼ ► And if the CPU and the SSDs scream as much as we're being told they do, maybe I don't. Maybe I'd be fine with 16.
02:41:00 ◼ ► And I don't want to roll the dice by paying between one and two thousand dollars and going on a wing and a prayer, especially since I have something that really does work quite well.
02:41:16 ◼ ► And I think if they released an equivalent of this computer today, and for all the reasons we already discussed, I understand why they didn't.
02:41:24 ◼ ► But if they had a four port 13 inch MacBook Pro, preferably that I could put 32 gigs RAM into, I might have already bought it.
02:41:32 ◼ ► If they had the four port with only 16 gigs RAM, I would have thought about it real hard, but I don't think it would have pulled the trigger.
02:41:44 ◼ ► I've seen a lot of people tweeting about this, and I think people are somewhat confused.
02:41:52 ◼ ► So if these new ARM Macs quote unquote use RAM like an iOS device, maybe a 16 gig Mac will be the same as a 32 Intel Mac.
02:42:00 ◼ ► And I'm here to tell you, don't get your hopes up because the thing the things like the way iOS devices use RAM has to do with the operating system and the app runtime environment.
02:42:11 ◼ ► It has less to do with the architecture of the CPU. These Macs still run Mac OS. Mac OS manages memory the same way it always has.
02:42:18 ◼ ► Mac OS has made tons of advancements to try to be more like iOS with sudden termination and automatic termination and all sorts of other things that try to make it more iOS like.
02:42:27 ◼ ► But it's not iOS like. And being 64 bit only helps too, because you don't have to have copies of the 32 bit libraries, but you get that same benefit on Intel Macs now with the operating systems that don't support 32 bit.
02:42:38 ◼ ► So do not expect these ARM Macs to be massively different in terms of memory usage. If you're running the same apps and doing the same stuff, the memory usage is going to be similar to what it was on Intel Macs running the same operating system.
02:42:58 ◼ ► That said, there is a possibility that, you know, what if I go into swap, are these SSDs faster than the SSDs in the Intel Macs? Maybe. I mean, these are newer Macs. The SSDs could be faster.
02:43:12 ◼ ► They said during the MacBook Air segment, up to twice as fast SSDs, but that's because the previous MacBook Air had actually very slow SSDs. Like, they actually updated it at one point and made them slower. And they didn't say anything about the SSDs on the Mac Mini or the 13 inch Pro.