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252: Any Day Could Be Mac Pro Day

 

00:00:00   I've got a problem. Oh, yeah, having uncomfortable thoughts about Jeep Wranglers. Oh

00:00:04   You just need to come up here where it's cold and it'll convince you not to buy

00:00:09   Finally half a car. It's like 30 degrees here and snowing right now

00:00:13   I don't want to hear your lip about how we don't have winter

00:00:15   I just want to be driving around with no roof and no doors. No roof. No doors. No stability. No quality. No safety

00:00:22   Yeah, definitely no safety. It's got a roll cage for Christ's sakes. How are you gonna tell me no safe?

00:00:27   - Yeah, so if you get t-boned in that,

00:00:30   I'm sure the roll cage will save you.

00:00:31   (laughing)

00:00:33   - No, the doors will, oh wait.

00:00:35   - Yeah, there's a reason they had to add a roll cage,

00:00:36   because it rolls over if you like breathe on it funny.

00:00:39   - Oh come on, that's what stability control is for.

00:00:41   Does computers solve us from physics?

00:00:44   Anyway, I think I want a Wrangler,

00:00:46   and that's probably a problem.

00:00:48   It's either that or a Golf R, so save me for myself.

00:00:51   - Of all the vehicles that you have lusted after

00:00:53   for a week here and there,

00:00:56   - I think a Wrangler is actually one of the less offensive ones.

00:01:00   - No, it's pretty offensive.

00:01:01   - It's still not a good vehicle.

00:01:03   - It's either that or a Golf R. So, John, what would you have me have between a Wrangler

00:01:06   and a Golf R?

00:01:07   - Easy, Golf R. No contest.

00:01:09   - Yeah, if those are your choices, I'd go with John on that.

00:01:12   - Yeah, those are the only two choices, it's not a choice at all.

00:01:15   - I mean, a Wrangler, I think, is a better choice than your weird Cadillac rectangle

00:01:18   thing and your SUV dreams, but I don't...I think...

00:01:21   - I think the Cadillac is better than the Wrangler, too. Like, I'm trying to think of

00:01:24   a worse car and all I'm coming up with is one of those giant four-door luxury pickup

00:01:28   trucks.

00:01:29   Yeah, those are, well, but at least those have a little more function than a Wrangler.

00:01:35   No, it's about the same. They're both ridiculous things.

00:01:40   Also if, so that reminds me, DeMuro did a review of, what was it, the G65, an AMG G65?

00:01:49   I think that's right, I might have that wrong. So it's a twin-turbo V12 G-Wagon.

00:01:54   I believe it's pronounced "gwagon."

00:01:55   "Gwagon," yeah.

00:01:56   I was not prepared for that.

00:02:01   So he did a video on the "gwagon," and he—God, it gets better every time I say

00:02:04   it.

00:02:05   He did a video on the "gwagon," and he hated it.

00:02:07   Okay, so fine.

00:02:08   All right, so how about this?

00:02:09   I don't have the money for a Quadrifoglio, but how about that or Gulfar or Wrangler?

00:02:16   What would you have, Jon?

00:02:17   Quadrifoglio over the Gulfar, even though it's uglier.

00:02:19   God, you're so wrong.

00:02:20   I've seen him in real life now.

00:02:21   I saw a white one the other day.

00:02:23   I thought of you.

00:02:24   I say it does not look good in white.

00:02:26   Holy shit.

00:02:27   It doesn't look good in any color, but like, I've seen enough of them now that I know it's

00:02:31   not just like, "Oh, maybe it looks weird in pictures, but it looks good in person."

00:02:33   I don't like it anywhere.

00:02:34   I don't like it in pictures.

00:02:35   I don't like it in a box.

00:02:36   I don't like it with a fox.

00:02:38   Jon, I love you, but you are so wrong about this.

00:02:41   No, I just don't like how that car looks.

00:02:43   But it's a good car, for while it's working.

00:02:45   Yeah, for the ten minutes it's working.

00:02:47   Yeah, and we don't even know.

00:02:48   Maybe, like, the reliability could be fine.

00:02:49   It's too new.

00:02:50   Like, this is the new Alfa, but we'll see.

00:02:52   - No, it's not.

00:02:52   Look, here's your new rule, Casey.

00:02:55   New rule, if you're going to get something fun and fast,

00:02:58   unless it is made by a Japanese company, lease it.

00:03:01   - But what is fun and fast that's made by a Japanese company

00:03:05   that's also at least mildly affordable?

00:03:06   So like--

00:03:07   - The Toyota Baro would be fun.

00:03:09   - It's not fast.

00:03:10   - Not fast.

00:03:11   - It's fun, it's not fast.

00:03:11   You know, you got a GTR, which is too much money,

00:03:14   and that's it, that's all you got.

00:03:15   Maybe--

00:03:16   - No, the NSX is fun and fast.

00:03:18   - It's unaffordable.

00:03:19   - That wasn't one of your criteria.

00:03:21   You're gonna lease it. You're gonna lease the NSX. It'll be fun.

00:03:24   Oh, come on. Alright, let's say, even though this is over my budget, let's say for the sake of discussion, 50 grand.

00:03:29   So, for 50 grand, what do you get that's Japanese fun and fast?

00:03:33   I don't know.

00:03:34   I rest my case.

00:03:35   I'd take a Miata.

00:03:37   Not fast. Fun.

00:03:39   Not fast.

00:03:40   I mean, look, a Wrangler's not fast either, but you find fun for other reasons.

00:03:45   To me, a Miata would be a better version of that.

00:03:49   - Really plenty of fun, yeah,

00:03:50   that's a good mid-life crisis car for you

00:03:52   after your second child is in third grade.

00:03:55   - Yeah, that's fair.

00:03:56   But no, I'm serious.

00:03:57   So I mean, my options are Civic Type R,

00:04:01   which means I would need to install a paper bag in the car

00:04:04   to wear over my head every time I drove it.

00:04:07   - No, they won't let you buy one.

00:04:08   You're over 25, that's it.

00:04:10   - Fair point.

00:04:11   I've heard the Type R is phenomenal to drive,

00:04:15   but it is so unabashedly truly hideous to look at.

00:04:20   - You can get it in black, maybe try to hide

00:04:21   all the wings and ducks and scoops.

00:04:23   - Maybe that's the answer is just take the wing off,

00:04:25   like do a wing delete, if you will.

00:04:27   - It's all wing, you take the wing off,

00:04:28   they're just left with a chassis, that's it.

00:04:30   The entire body of that car is a wing or a scoop.

00:04:33   - I would imagine there must be some kind of like,

00:04:36   marketing differentiation here at work

00:04:39   where they have to make the Civic R so hideous

00:04:43   it won't detract from sales of the NSX from older people with taste.

00:04:47   Maybe, but the regular Civic is kind of gross too. Like, I think they just had a styling

00:04:52   fart on this whole generation. This is a great generation of Civics. Like, they're getting

00:04:57   great reviews. People say they're great cars. So much so that a lot of the best parts of

00:05:01   them are showing up in the Accord, but the styling is rough. Styling is rough.

00:05:07   I mean, if you think about it, all kidding aside, I mean, you can get a Wrangler spec

00:05:10   to like 40 or 45 grand or something like that,

00:05:12   which is truly absurd.

00:05:12   - No, you can get a Wrangler spectrum.

00:05:14   I would never, I would not go near that.

00:05:16   - See, this is getting into the $80,000 pickup truck

00:05:18   territory, yeah.

00:05:19   $50,000 Jeep Wrangler, great, that makes perfect sense.

00:05:22   Good job, America.

00:05:24   - Hold on, jeep.com.

00:05:25   I wonder how, see, I thought, I was trying to move on now,

00:05:27   brought myself right back.

00:05:28   - Someone in the channel even pointed out like the Wrangler

00:05:30   with like leather straps for door handles,

00:05:32   but television screens on the backs of the seats.

00:05:34   Like that is a car that has lost its way.

00:05:37   - Wait, honest question, are the back seats in a Wrangler,

00:05:39   Like, is there actually enough depth there that--

00:05:42   - That's where you gotta keep your 17 friends

00:05:44   when you go surfing.

00:05:46   - Wow.

00:05:47   - They go in the back seats, quote unquote.

00:05:48   - Right.

00:05:49   - No, they're seats.

00:05:50   Even in the coop, they're seats.

00:05:51   - Well.

00:05:52   - The front seats aren't seats.

00:05:53   It's like, you know, a bunch of boards

00:05:54   with a piece of vinyl stretched across it.

00:05:56   - When was the last time you were in a Wrangler, Jon?

00:05:59   I'm so over you right now.

00:06:00   - Is anyone ever really in a Wrangler

00:06:02   or are they just on it?

00:06:03   - Oh my God, I hate you, Jon.

00:06:05   (Jon laughing)

00:06:06   Why do you do this to me?

00:06:07   Why do you do this?

00:06:09   Why are you so mean?

00:06:10   - See, nobody ever wants to hear me talk about

00:06:12   fancy snow tires on my fancy Tesla,

00:06:13   but everybody wants to hear you talk about

00:06:15   your terrible car idea of getting this cheap, crappy car.

00:06:18   - We have like an intervention of Casey.

00:06:19   Casey is like, is too suggestible when it comes to like,

00:06:23   he has like a car-shaped hole in his life,

00:06:25   mostly filled with like BMW repair bills.

00:06:27   (laughing)

00:06:29   And he's very susceptible to like, maybe this will fill it,

00:06:33   and like, and just anything, like Jeep Wrangler,

00:06:36   like the Trackhawk. - Just something do this

00:06:38   for me. Anything! Yeah, and so I don't know, just like he runs across the wrong ad or the

00:06:44   wrong YouTube video and just he's like, "You know what I should get? A Winnebago." I mean,

00:06:49   that's his next thing. He's going to be like, "Why not?" The whole family could go on vacation.

00:06:56   We could live in it. We'll need to sell our house to afford it. My parents briefly had

00:07:00   like a little tiny, what you call them, RV, and I am still a little upset that they got

00:07:05   rid of it. I was joking but there it is. Yep. See? That's the seed and that seed will grow

00:07:10   in your mind until maybe three years from now. $41,235 for a new Wrangler. Holy schnikes.

00:07:19   Just why? At that point, why? Like there are so many better things in every way. Just tell

00:07:24   me what? Tell me what? Two Honda Civics. I would rather drive two Honda Civics than a

00:07:31   Like one in a different color, like you know, just alternate the excitement of having two

00:07:37   cars that you rotate.

00:07:39   It's like raid one for cars.

00:07:41   If one car has a repair it's so much less annoying.

00:07:44   If only you could drive both of them to the dealership at the same time.

00:07:49   Actually I don't think I would need to go that, quite that bananas.

00:07:51   Yeah that's the problem, you'd never actually need to go that.

00:07:57   Apparently the Magic Keyboard with numeric keypad is bendy, and I guess that's something

00:08:01   we're supposed to be upset by because I tell you what when I get a new keyboard

00:08:05   the first thing I do is a bend test to make sure it's not bendy. No not not bendy

00:08:10   you didn't read the link. Not bendy like if you put it in your pocket and sit on it

00:08:14   it'll bend like an iPhone 6 but there's two kinds of reports. One kind is I open

00:08:21   up the box on my brand new Magic Keyboard with numeric keypad which is a

00:08:25   hell of a product name. I don't know if that's the official name but you know

00:08:28   what I'm talking about. And I took it out of the box and put it down on the desk in

00:08:32   front of me and it's bent, like it's warped, it wobbles, like, you know what I mean? So

00:08:35   that's, that's no good. That's just like, you know, manufacturing defect or, you know,

00:08:39   maybe it got bent in transport or something like that. But the second strain of this kind

00:08:44   of story is I got a new Magic Keyboard, took it out of the box, it was fine, typed on it

00:08:48   for a week, and apparently the force of my typing bent it in the middle. If you're going

00:08:52   to put only little pads or feet on four corners of a very long keyboard and it's so thin that

00:08:57   it bends in the middle from the force of typing, that is a pretty big failure for the functionality

00:09:02   of a keyboard.

00:09:03   Now, your beloved Magic Keyboard that you have without a numeric keyboard maybe has

00:09:07   a short enough wheelbase, so to speak, that having the little feets on the corners doesn't

00:09:12   make it bend in the middle, or maybe you should just not look at your keyboard to see if it's

00:09:15   bent in the middle.

00:09:18   But anyway, we'll link to this MJ size webpage that has a collection of all of this information.

00:09:24   I don't, you know, if it's a manufacturing defect,

00:09:27   it kind of makes me feel better.

00:09:28   It's like, oh, they'll fix the manufacturing defect.

00:09:30   But if it was actually the case

00:09:31   that the mere act of typing on the keyboard bends it,

00:09:34   that's pretty bad.

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00:11:13   Thank you so much to Fracture for sponsoring our show.

00:11:16   (upbeat music)

00:11:19   Let's do a little bit of Ask ATP.

00:11:23   Paige Hilliard writes in, "Is there any way the three of you

00:11:26   could come up with a list of realistic things

00:11:27   that you would like to have as holiday gifts,

00:11:29   even if some of you already have them?

00:11:31   Helpful hints would be greatly appreciated,

00:11:33   and potentially opening up your website

00:11:35   to sell t-shirts or gear year round

00:11:37   would be even more appreciated."

00:11:39   So the bad news is that Paige's spouse or what have you

00:11:44   is probably going to be listening to the show.

00:11:47   And so, Paige, now you can't use any of these ideas because we're now giving them away.

00:11:52   However—

00:11:53   You assume we have useful ideas.

00:11:54   That's also fair.

00:11:56   I was thinking about this on and off most of today.

00:11:59   I try to every year—and I did not do it this year—I try to every year do a holiday

00:12:05   roundup of, "Here's a bunch of different GIFs that I recommend at all sorts of different

00:12:11   price points."

00:12:12   And so I'll put in the show notes the last couple of years of these posts.

00:12:16   And they're just stuff I like.

00:12:17   Sometimes it's board games, sometimes it's stupid, like cables or something dumb like

00:12:21   that.

00:12:23   But this year I didn't do it, mostly because I didn't feel like I had that many new and

00:12:27   interesting ideas.

00:12:29   So I'm missing out on that sweet, sweet affiliate money, but my priority is to do a post that

00:12:34   I think is useful before it is make a few bucks on affiliate money, so that's why I

00:12:37   didn't write it.

00:12:38   The only thing I can come up with that I think is useful is for those of us with new phones,

00:12:43   a Qi charger seems like a pretty good answer.

00:12:46   Now, you would have to figure out,

00:12:49   would your partner want a stand-up Qi charger,

00:12:52   say for at a desk, or would they want a lay-down

00:12:55   Qi charger, say for like at a nightstand?

00:12:59   But that seems to me to be a pretty good option

00:13:01   and a pretty safe option for anyone

00:13:04   that has an iPhone 8 or newer.

00:13:06   - I have a hard time with this

00:13:08   because I am very hard to shop for,

00:13:11   as everyone in my family always complains about

00:13:14   right around this time of year.

00:13:16   And when I do think of something that I actually want,

00:13:18   I just buy it immediately and don't give anyone else

00:13:20   a chance to buy it for me.

00:13:21   Or sometimes the things that I want are too expensive

00:13:24   that I would feel comfortable asking for as a gift.

00:13:27   So it's kind of a hard topic,

00:13:31   especially because we don't know anything

00:13:33   about this person really.

00:13:35   So if they like coffee, I can tell you lots of coffee gear

00:13:40   that could be useful.

00:13:42   I've written it up on my side a few times,

00:13:44   so like Casey, I didn't do anything

00:13:46   with any kind of gift guide this year,

00:13:48   but you know, coffee equipment, kitchen equipment in general

00:13:52   for whatever they like to do,

00:13:55   that's always interesting gift ideas,

00:13:58   but it's really hard without knowing anything else.

00:14:01   I can think of kind of like a greatest hits kind of thing,

00:14:03   like just stuff that everyone seems to enjoy,

00:14:06   and certain kitchen gadgets fit this requirement,

00:14:08   I think, pretty well.

00:14:10   Certain ones are things like having a really nice

00:14:13   pair of gloves for the winter is always good for Christmas.

00:14:17   I enjoy having a really nice flashlight.

00:14:20   There's a lot of flashlights by the brand Phoenix

00:14:23   with an F-E-N-I-X that I really enjoy

00:14:26   that just use two AA batteries.

00:14:28   You can get smaller or bigger ones.

00:14:30   The two AA ones I think are the best size to weight balance.

00:14:34   They've got super nice LED flashlights.

00:14:36   That's just kind of a pleasant thing to have around.

00:14:40   of the Qi charging mats is really good.

00:14:42   The Mophie one that the Apple Store sells is excellent.

00:14:47   I've tried a few other ones now.

00:14:48   I actually just got in the Grovemade one.

00:14:50   Those just came today.

00:14:52   I have not yet actually used it beyond just five seconds

00:14:55   to test it out because it's gonna be my nightstand charger

00:14:59   and I haven't gone to bed yet.

00:15:01   But it looks really nice and it's very well built.

00:15:04   It's pretty big but pretty well built, pretty nice.

00:15:07   And yeah, just, you know, I mean, there's all sorts of stuff

00:15:09   I like having a really nice backpack.

00:15:12   I have a backpack from Briggs & Riley,

00:15:15   which is a fancy luggage company.

00:15:17   They make fantastic luggage,

00:15:18   which is why I got their backpack.

00:15:20   And I just love that.

00:15:21   It's so delightful to have that.

00:15:22   Any kind of, like certain people, myself included,

00:15:26   like having nice leather goods.

00:15:28   So like a leather laptop case maybe, something like that.

00:15:33   That kind of stuff.

00:15:35   But I mean this stuff, this is so like kind of general purpose.

00:15:39   I like having really good travel mugs.

00:15:42   Zojirushi makes a really nice travel mug that I really, really like.

00:15:46   Yeah, I don't really know.

00:15:51   It's really hard to know like how to be more specific than this.

00:15:55   But those are all nice things.

00:15:57   Yeah, you know, hearing you talk gave me a couple of other ideas.

00:16:01   One of the best investments I've ever, ever, ever made was what I call my Go Pack, which

00:16:06   is really just a collection of cables and whatnot that are basically duplicates of anything

00:16:11   I would need to charge any of my devices and a couple other miscellaneous bits.

00:16:16   So if I ever go overnight anywhere, I just grab this bag that has all of my chargers

00:16:23   in it always.

00:16:24   They never ever leave that bag unless they're in a hotel being used or whatever.

00:16:28   And I don't have to remove my entire installation from my bedside table or anything like that,

00:16:34   pack it up, and then reassemble it when I get back home.

00:16:36   It is just everything in duplicate.

00:16:38   And I've written a couple of blog posts about that, and so I'll put a link to that in the

00:16:42   show notes.

00:16:43   It can get pretty spendy, depending on what you want.

00:16:44   I think I spent like $200 on mine, and I'm not talking about the bag itself, I'm talking

00:16:47   about all the bits inside.

00:16:49   But I have a couple of fairly expensive things that I find very useful that most normal humans

00:16:53   probably wouldn't.

00:16:55   And then additionally, hearing you talk about your, did you say Briggs & Reilly, backpack,

00:17:00   I happen to adore anything that Tom Bihn makes.

00:17:04   That's T-O-M-B-I-H-N.

00:17:07   It's maybe a little late to order it for this holiday season, unless you are on the West

00:17:11   Coast because they're Seattle based, but pretty much anything Tom Bihn makes, I adore.

00:17:16   And I highly recommend that as much as Marco seems to highly recommend Briggs & Reilly

00:17:21   as well.

00:17:23   So just a couple other quick thoughts

00:17:24   that Marco made me think of.

00:17:25   - Oh wait, before, one more thing also.

00:17:27   I came up with something more specific

00:17:29   in the kitchen category.

00:17:31   I have gotten as gifts for other people in the past

00:17:34   my favorite kitchen thermometer,

00:17:36   which is the ThermoWorks Thermapen Mark IV.

00:17:39   If you have any need for a kitchen thermometer,

00:17:42   and if you ever do anything in the kitchen ever, you do.

00:17:45   Even if you don't think you need one, you need one.

00:17:47   And once you have one, you will use it for lots of things.

00:17:50   Every kitchen should have a thermometer and a scale.

00:17:53   And the scale you can get pretty much any cheap garbage,

00:17:55   it doesn't really matter.

00:17:55   The thermometer, they actually matter quite a bit,

00:17:57   there's pretty big variations in quality and accuracy

00:17:59   and speed and everything else.

00:18:01   What you want is the Thermapen Mark 4 from Thermoworks.

00:18:05   It runs about 70 bucks usually if you find a good sale.

00:18:10   I think it's about 90 if it's not on sale.

00:18:14   This is the one that like if you see like on Top Chef,

00:18:16   if you ever see anybody using a kitchen thermometer,

00:18:18   it is probably this one.

00:18:20   There's a reason for that, it's awesome.

00:18:22   This is like the, I was gonna say the Cadillac of

00:18:25   thermometers, but Cadillacs aren't that great anymore,

00:18:26   are they?

00:18:27   (laughing)

00:18:28   This is the Tesla of thermometers.

00:18:29   Like this is, it's really, really nice.

00:18:33   Yeah, it's great.

00:18:34   Generally, and like, you know, I mentioned Phoenix earlier

00:18:36   with the LED flashlight thing, and those are like 50 bucks.

00:18:40   You know, so these aren't cheap, but it's really nice when,

00:18:43   if you're the kind of person who values quality

00:18:46   and nice things, which almost everyone is, about something.

00:18:48   It might not be about the same things that you or I are,

00:18:50   but almost everyone can appreciate quality in something.

00:18:54   And it's really nice when you can find something like this

00:18:56   in a category where pretty much everything else

00:18:59   in the category is kind of mediocre garbage,

00:19:02   and if you can figure out what's the one really awesome

00:19:05   thing in that category, even if it's a little bit

00:19:07   ridiculously priced, that kind of thing makes a good gift.

00:19:10   Because it's the kind of thing where people who receive it

00:19:13   can probably appreciate something really awesome like that,

00:19:17   but because it's expensive and/or obscure,

00:19:20   they might not ever know about it

00:19:21   or they might not feel justified spending the price for it.

00:19:24   So that's the perfect kind of thing

00:19:25   that makes a great gift is like,

00:19:27   I wouldn't have bought this for myself,

00:19:29   but I really appreciate having it.

00:19:31   - Yeah, I do agree that that is one of the best gifts.

00:19:33   The, oh man, this is great,

00:19:35   but I'm so glad I didn't spend the money on it.

00:19:38   That is the sweet spot.

00:19:39   Jon, we've delayed you far too long.

00:19:41   What are your thoughts?

00:19:42   - I reject the premise of this question,

00:19:44   which is that we should, this thing is,

00:19:46   We should list things that we like because people who listen to the show will like the

00:19:50   same things that we like.

00:19:51   I mean, we can try to list things that we like even if we already have them.

00:19:54   Like, that is one task.

00:19:56   But the second part of this is for those of us who are partnered with ATV fans, the idea

00:20:01   being that if we list things that we like, that people who like the show will also like

00:20:05   those same things.

00:20:06   And I don't think that's true.

00:20:07   Like, just because we like – that means we like them.

00:20:09   Everyone who listens to the show is not like us, hopefully.

00:20:12   So yeah.

00:20:14   And also I'm terrible at giving gifts, so even if I had good ideas for gifts, you know,

00:20:17   you shouldn't listen to me.

00:20:18   So…

00:20:19   That's very helpful.

00:20:20   Thank you, Jon.

00:20:21   And I put this question in there, and I basically put it in just to say, "Can you come up

00:20:24   with a list of—?"

00:20:25   And the answer for me is no, I can't.

00:20:26   I cannot do that because I don't think I should, I don't think it makes sense, and

00:20:30   even if it was phrased so it does make sense, I'm bad at that.

00:20:33   So I'm glad you two filled in.

00:20:34   Paige, just let you and your partner know that Marco and I are your favorites, and Jon

00:20:40   is useless.

00:20:41   - To ask, what do you ask for?

00:20:43   I'm not as bad as Marco in that I don't immediately

00:20:46   buy everything that I want, but when people ask me

00:20:49   what they should get me, my answer is always nothing,

00:20:51   which is probably the worst thing you can say

00:20:52   to someone who wants to get you a gift.

00:20:53   So I'm just terrible all around when it comes to gift stuff.

00:20:57   - Yeah, honestly, I would love to get to the point

00:20:59   with the family where maybe we just get gifts for the kids.

00:21:03   That seems like a better way to do it.

00:21:05   But I think this is the kind of thing

00:21:07   like many adults want this outcome,

00:21:10   but it's very hard to get families to agree to that.

00:21:13   - We're getting close.

00:21:14   We should have a big family map of how far

00:21:16   we've successfully spread the only gifts for kids thing.

00:21:20   We've gotten pretty far.

00:21:21   There's only a few holdouts left.

00:21:23   - Oh my word.

00:21:24   All right, moving on.

00:21:25   Rob Fiorendino writes, "How do you feel about your code

00:21:29   "or your apps after you've written them?

00:21:31   "Are they more like your children

00:21:32   "or your tools out in the shed?"

00:21:34   I will speak for myself and say any code

00:21:36   that I've written more than three days ago

00:21:38   is always garbage and any code I've written

00:21:40   in the last three days is often garbage.

00:21:42   John.

00:21:44   - I'm not sure, like with the children or tools thing,

00:21:46   I'm not sure like what Rob is getting at there.

00:21:51   You can take it lots of different ways.

00:21:52   Like, you know, tools in your shed or children,

00:21:56   like, I don't know.

00:21:57   Anyway, I'll just tell you how I feel about my code

00:21:59   'cause I don't understand that part of it.

00:22:00   - I think he's just saying, you know,

00:22:02   is it disposable and you're like, yeah, whatever,

00:22:04   or is it, oh, this is my creation that I've labored for

00:22:08   and it is perfect in every possible way.

00:22:10   - Like you said Casey, it really depends on the timeline.

00:22:14   Sometimes you write code

00:22:16   and as soon as you're done writing it, you just hate it.

00:22:18   But it's like, you just gotta do what you gotta do

00:22:20   'cause it's work, right?

00:22:21   Other times you can be mildly satisfied with it

00:22:26   but there's really no such thing as far as I'm concerned

00:22:30   as code that I write that I can look back on

00:22:33   in the long term and not see all the terrible problems with.

00:22:38   Like a couple of years down the line,

00:22:40   no matter how incredibly happy you are with something,

00:22:43   you, I will, I always do see what's really wrong with it.

00:22:49   If only because if that code lives on,

00:22:54   like if you're aware of its existence,

00:22:57   it probably means that it's still in use,

00:22:58   which means that it has to be modified to account for,

00:23:02   you know, the changes of reality, like, you know,

00:23:05   things change and you have to modify

00:23:06   and augment your code to do new things.

00:23:08   And inevitably you get to the point where you are modifying

00:23:11   your code in ways that you did not anticipate

00:23:13   when you wrote it and nothing makes code uglier

00:23:17   and makes you more annoyed with it

00:23:19   than more than trying to change it in ways

00:23:21   that it wasn't meant to be changed.

00:23:22   Like you never thought things would change along this axis.

00:23:24   So you always thought this bedrock assumption would be true

00:23:27   when the entire system was built around it.

00:23:28   Then that bedrock assumption is not true.

00:23:30   and you're just like, oh, God, do I rewrite the whole thing?

00:23:34   How can I change it, is it too much?

00:23:35   And then so you just feel bad about it.

00:23:37   So it's mostly the more time goes on

00:23:40   and the more it has to change,

00:23:41   the more bad I feel about it.

00:23:43   - Marco?

00:23:44   - Pretty much all my old code, I look at it as,

00:23:47   yeah, this is just garbage and it's a burden.

00:23:52   Like I love deleting code,

00:23:54   I love when a library comes around

00:23:57   that removes the need for some code I've written

00:24:00   that I can just delete my code and use the library,

00:24:02   or new APIs from Apple and those kind of stuff like that.

00:24:05   I code to accomplish something else.

00:24:11   Like I code to build a product.

00:24:14   The actual code, I take very little joy in like,

00:24:18   is it beautiful or elegant or interesting or clever?

00:24:23   Like I don't, I take no joy in any of that.

00:24:27   So I write code and immediately, even as I'm writing it,

00:24:30   I'm like, oh God, I don't wanna have to maintain this,

00:24:32   I don't wanna have to do this crazy thing,

00:24:36   but it's all to accomplish the end.

00:24:38   So basically, immediately after my code is written,

00:24:43   I don't like it, and I just try to move on if I can.

00:24:47   - Yeah, I mean, I gave a slightly snarky answer

00:24:49   in saying everything I've written I hate,

00:24:51   and that is only slightly snarky.

00:24:53   I mean, I really do feel that most of the time,

00:24:55   But all kidding aside, in my entire career, and I've been doing this for, oh geez, like

00:25:01   13 years now, I think there have been maybe, probably five or less blocks of code.

00:25:10   I don't mean that as like five lines.

00:25:12   I mean like projects, maybe is a better way of phrasing it.

00:25:15   There have been like five or less projects wherein I've written some code and thought

00:25:19   to myself, "You know what?

00:25:21   That was really solid, and I did something really good and/or clever there.

00:25:26   And usually clever is bad when it comes to code, but occasionally it can be good.

00:25:32   And so I think, all kidding aside, probably five times or less in my career I've looked

00:25:37   back and said that was good work.

00:25:39   Everything else is either, "Well, it didn't immediately turn into a fireball, so I consider

00:25:45   that job well done."

00:25:47   Marco has the advantage that no one else is telling him to change his product in ways

00:25:55   that he didn't anticipate it changing because he's the one who decides how it's going to

00:26:00   change and if anyone has any kind of idea how it might change in the future, it's him

00:26:03   because he's going to be – and it's not like he's saying he predicts everything,

00:26:06   but he never has someone coming and saying, "You should add this feature that flies in

00:26:13   the face of your entire internal design of your application. Even if he has the notion

00:26:18   to do that, he's not forced to do it on an abbreviated timeline or like all sorts of

00:26:23   like the pressures of a real job that forces you to do things.

00:26:26   Except when the iPhone 10's coming out and you got to make the release date.

00:26:29   Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. But that's like, that's more like just, that's what your entire

00:26:35   job is, is using someone else's API. You know, you don't write UI kit, you roll them with

00:26:39   the punches of Apple's platform. You're writing on top of a platform. Everyone has that same

00:26:43   If you're writing, you know, whatever you're writing on top of a framework and that framework changes and you got to, you know, roll with those punches too.

00:26:50   But like, but I'm saying for like the things that your actual product does.

00:26:52   So I think it makes you feel worse when you have to change your thing in a way that it was never meant to be changed and you have to do it ASAP.

00:27:03   And you know, whether you think it's a good idea or not, it has to happen.

00:27:06   that does like the worst damage to even even code that you that you feel like

00:27:10   you know was was arranged in a reasonable way and designed in a reasonable way you

00:27:15   have to go in there and basically like injure it and and scar it and make it

00:27:19   uglier and just makes you want to just never look at it again and tear it all

00:27:22   down and start over and you know I know those feels all too well now one of my

00:27:27   favorite pastimes on the show is to bag on Marco for not having a job however in

00:27:31   In Marco's defense, I have to stand up for Marco on this one.

00:27:35   I feel like just in the last few days, Marco, and I don't know how much of this you want

00:27:39   to talk about on the show, so I'm going to be a little cagey about it, but just in the

00:27:41   last few days you had maybe not an emergency, but a "oh crap" moment where some external

00:27:47   force forced you to do a whole bunch of things and write a whole bunch of code that it seemed

00:27:52   like you—if you were planning on doing it at all, it was going to be long in the future.

00:27:56   And so I do think, Jon, you're usually right,

00:28:00   but it just so happens that it seems like, Marco,

00:28:02   you've just gone through this recently,

00:28:04   so how do you feel about that code,

00:28:05   whether or not you wanna discuss the motivations behind it?

00:28:08   - I'm happy to talk about it.

00:28:10   So the code you're referring to is overcast

00:28:13   handling permanent feed redirects,

00:28:15   or feed changes for podcasts.

00:28:18   Basically, the way I built the overcast

00:28:21   crawling infrastructure and database

00:28:24   is that feeds are keyed uniquely on URLs

00:28:29   so that every, feeds map one to one to URLs.

00:28:32   And those URLs really can't or shouldn't change

00:28:35   in the feed.

00:28:36   If you have a new URL, it gets a new feed entry.

00:28:39   And then episodes are represented as feed items,

00:28:43   and feed items are keyed based on their feed ID

00:28:47   plus then a bunch of random numbers

00:28:50   based on hashing their contents

00:28:52   and then their GUID and stuff.

00:28:54   And so once you have feeds and feed items

00:28:59   matched to a certain feed URL,

00:29:01   it's not trivial to then move those subscribers

00:29:05   to a different feed URL because all the item IDs

00:29:08   for everything they have subscribed to will be different.

00:29:11   And I can't easily change,

00:29:12   I can't just like modify the ones that are on the old feed

00:29:15   to point to the new feed

00:29:17   without having lots of other problems and everything else.

00:29:20   And also worth noting is that the feed items table

00:29:24   is 170 gigs now.

00:29:27   The table that maps users to feed items

00:29:31   is also about 170 gigs.

00:29:33   These are the two biggest and highest

00:29:35   traffic tables in Overcast.

00:29:37   It is very hard to modify these tables at all,

00:29:40   to modify the schema, to add indexes,

00:29:43   or to change the schema, to run ultra tables on it.

00:29:47   It pretty much can't be completed

00:29:49   in any kind of real-time fashion.

00:29:50   The only way to really change that would be to

00:29:52   set up a whole new database as a replica,

00:29:55   modify it, and then make it the new master.

00:29:58   And that's just a lot of administration work,

00:30:00   and it's risky, it involves downtime,

00:30:03   and I hate doing it, and so all this is to say that

00:30:06   for Overcast to modify what URL a feed entry points to

00:30:10   is a big deal, and so, since the beginning of Overcast,

00:30:19   The way it handled redirects was in HTTP terms,

00:30:23   it treated them all as 302s, temporary redirects.

00:30:27   So if it encountered a redirect,

00:30:29   it would follow it when crawling the feed,

00:30:31   but it would never update the source URL

00:30:34   to point to a new one if it encountered a 301 code,

00:30:37   which is the permanent redirect code.

00:30:39   This works on the web, because on the web,

00:30:43   it's pretty common practice that if you host a website

00:30:47   to add a certain domain name or a certain path,

00:30:51   and you change your URL scheme or you move hosts,

00:30:53   it's kind of known on the web that you're supposed

00:30:56   to set up a redirect pretty much indefinitely,

00:30:58   that it is a bad idea to ever change URL

00:31:02   without having a redirect in place,

00:31:03   'cause then you're losing all your search engine ranking

00:31:05   and your inbound links from other places

00:31:06   and everything else.

00:31:07   It's kind of understood as a best practice on the web

00:31:10   that you don't break redirects ever.

00:31:12   So on the web, a permanent redirect is much less important

00:31:15   to be treated as such because you can just always crawl

00:31:19   one of the URLs that something used to be at

00:31:21   and if it's been properly maintained,

00:31:23   it will get you to where the feed is,

00:31:25   like where the new one is.

00:31:28   Podcasting doesn't work that way in practice.

00:31:32   So all this time when I've been doing,

00:31:35   basically treating this like the web,

00:31:37   where I just kind of assume that if I follow a redirect,

00:31:40   it'll always be there, in podcasts,

00:31:43   A lot of podcasters, first of all, aren't web programmers.

00:31:46   A lot of podcast producers,

00:31:48   and they come from the media world.

00:31:51   There's also all sorts of podcast hosting

00:31:55   and analytics and advertising platforms out there

00:31:58   that all want to host your feed for you at their domain

00:32:03   and are all selling their services

00:32:05   quite successfully to big podcasters.

00:32:08   And the big podcasters, to them,

00:32:10   Their entire world is iTunes.

00:32:13   And with iTunes, you don't have to maintain

00:32:15   permanent redirects forever if you change your feed.

00:32:18   You can just tell iTunes what your new URL is,

00:32:22   and it will move for you, for itself,

00:32:25   and for Apple podcast subscribers,

00:32:28   and then you don't have to think about it anymore.

00:32:30   So the concept of having permanent redirect setup

00:32:34   is in practice, not known, or not practiced

00:32:37   by most podcasters.

00:32:38   They are happy to move their feeds to anyone else's service,

00:32:42   anyone else's domain, whatever new ad tracking

00:32:45   insertion platform they're using this six month period,

00:32:49   they'll move it all the time.

00:32:51   And they don't consider what web programmers

00:32:53   would consider is necessary for that.

00:32:56   So I could sit here as much as I want

00:32:59   and try to blame them and say,

00:33:00   "Well, you know, this is your problem, not mine."

00:33:03   But the reality is, it becomes my problem.

00:33:06   It is definitely my problem and I'm the one who needs to fix it and find a solution because

00:33:12   what happens is when a big podcast moves, like about a year ago, This American Life

00:33:16   moved their feed and they broke the old redirect.

00:33:20   I suddenly had like 80,000 people telling me that their number one podcast was broken

00:33:25   and overcast.

00:33:28   This was bad.

00:33:29   It became my problem, very much so.

00:33:32   At the time, I didn't have any kind of infrastructure in place to move subscribers between feeds

00:33:39   in a way that wouldn't just break everything.

00:33:42   And This American Life has another problem where they don't keep their back feed going.

00:33:48   They only keep the most recent handful of episodes in the feed.

00:33:51   Once something is older than a few weeks old, you can't download it anymore.

00:33:54   I think they sell them or you can get them in their app or something, but you can't download

00:33:58   them out of the regular feed anymore.

00:34:00   So if I move people over to a new entry

00:34:03   that doesn't have all those back catalog episodes

00:34:05   for This American Life, that's a pretty big problem,

00:34:08   especially for that show, 'cause it's so popular.

00:34:11   And a lot of times people will save episodes

00:34:13   for like months at a time,

00:34:14   like they'll save up a big back catalog

00:34:17   so they can either go back and re-listen

00:34:18   or they'll save it up for like long car trips,

00:34:19   whatever else.

00:34:20   So there's all these like very, very fragile conditions

00:34:23   in which I have to be very careful what I do

00:34:25   to handle redirects, if anything.

00:34:27   and my original plan up until now of just not handling them

00:34:31   was breaking down pretty badly.

00:34:34   The driving factor this past week was that,

00:34:37   which is what Casey was alluding to,

00:34:39   the New York Times podcast The Daily is very, very popular.

00:34:44   The Daily moved their feed.

00:34:45   Overcast didn't handle, didn't take the redirect.

00:34:48   And the old feed wasn't redirecting the new one.

00:34:50   I was hearing about it from a lot of people.

00:34:53   And eventually it worked it out,

00:34:54   and they arranged to put that redirect in place.

00:34:58   So that was a temporary patch,

00:35:00   but ultimately this was kind of like

00:35:02   one of the many wake up calls.

00:35:04   If I finally had it, it's like, okay,

00:35:06   I need to handle redirects.

00:35:08   Also, like SoundCloud is falling apart,

00:35:11   and it seems like they're probably not long for this world.

00:35:14   So like, and a lot of podcasts are hosted there,

00:35:16   so there's gonna be a lot of feed moves there,

00:35:18   and there's so many popular shows

00:35:19   that are moving to different ad insertion platforms now

00:35:21   and changing their feed address again.

00:35:23   It's a big enough problem now that any podcast

00:35:27   crawling setup like this, it has to have a way

00:35:30   to have permanent redirects.

00:35:32   That's just the environment now.

00:35:34   Too many popular shows move too often.

00:35:37   You have to do it.

00:35:38   So what I've been working on for the last,

00:35:41   I don't know, week or so, is that,

00:35:44   is permanent redirects and making it work.

00:35:47   It's really not good.

00:35:50   The way I do it is really not good,

00:35:51   but the only way I can do it without totally modifying

00:35:55   my database schema and going through like SysAdmin hell

00:35:58   for weeks as I do that.

00:36:00   Not to mention lots of costs associated with that

00:36:04   and possible bug potential,

00:36:05   so I really don't wanna do that.

00:36:07   So what I do now basically is

00:36:10   I have a separate process from the crawlers,

00:36:12   'cause speaking of your old code,

00:36:15   my crawlers are the only thing I have written in Go,

00:36:19   and I haven't written really any Go since,

00:36:20   my Go skills are very rusty.

00:36:22   And I look at the crawler code now,

00:36:25   and it's so complex, 'cause it was,

00:36:27   not only is it written in this language

00:36:29   that I've used for nothing else,

00:36:30   so my skills are dull, but also,

00:36:34   it's like the first Go program I ever wrote,

00:36:36   so it's not particularly great Go code.

00:36:38   It's like me learning the language,

00:36:40   and so everything's in one big file,

00:36:41   and it's kind of all over the place,

00:36:43   and for me to track redirects there,

00:36:46   I would have to modify the Go code.

00:36:47   And I was trying to do that at first

00:36:49   to solve a few other problems.

00:36:50   I'm just like, looking at this like,

00:36:53   I just want to set this on fire.

00:36:54   Like, I have no idea what any of this does.

00:36:56   I'm so scared, so I should go like,

00:36:57   it mostly has worked for a long time,

00:37:00   and I don't wanna touch it.

00:37:01   (laughing)

00:37:02   But, so instead I made a separate process,

00:37:05   a separate process in PHP, my comfort language.

00:37:08   (laughing)

00:37:10   I know it's bad.

00:37:11   It's like comfort food, like it's not good for you,

00:37:14   but you know, anyway.

00:37:15   So I made a PHP separate queue that just once a day

00:37:20   checks feeds for redirects.

00:37:22   And if a feed is redirecting to the same place

00:37:25   that is also an iTunes registered feed

00:37:27   for more than I think two days, I set the threshold at,

00:37:31   then it will take all the subscribers

00:37:35   and basically create new entries for them

00:37:39   in the new feed that match their entries in the old feed

00:37:43   and then delete the old feed description.

00:37:45   So to the user, the only thing that appears to happen is

00:37:49   all of a sudden the episodes for one of those shows

00:37:53   that got moved, they all just re-download for some reason.

00:37:56   Everything else is preserved, played, unplayed states,

00:38:00   whether it's starred or not, progress if you're partial,

00:38:03   and that's all preserved, 'cause that just gets reinserted

00:38:06   with the new IDs.

00:38:07   But you do have to re-download, 'cause the client

00:38:09   sees them as new entries.

00:38:12   Basically, that's now in place, there's now this queue

00:38:14   that runs those things, it's going through the backlog.

00:38:16   It took way too long for me to do this.

00:38:18   I'm glad I finally did it.

00:38:20   I wish I had a slightly more elegant solution

00:38:22   that wouldn't require redownloading,

00:38:24   but that would just be a lot more overhead.

00:38:28   So I'm not gonna do that yet, maybe down the road

00:38:29   if it becomes a big problem.

00:38:31   And man, once I found, once I had something

00:38:34   actually checking for 301 redirects

00:38:36   and for the iTunes new feed URL tag, which is inserted,

00:38:40   it's like, people who aren't familiar with podcasts

00:38:43   who just know web programming, this would make you cry.

00:38:46   That like, the way that you can redirect a feed

00:38:49   for podcasts is you leave the old feed still there

00:38:53   returning a 200 response code, but you put an XML tag

00:38:57   in the RSS feed that's iTunes colon new feed URL

00:39:02   and just leave that there for a few days

00:39:04   and iTunes picks it up and moves your feed for you.

00:39:07   - Oh.

00:39:08   - And then the old feed just can sit there

00:39:10   not getting the episode added to it

00:39:11   and just get deleted and stop working.

00:39:14   Like, that's how, like, I'm telling you,

00:39:17   this is what I have to deal with.

00:39:19   So it's like, again, like, the web programmer,

00:39:21   I mean, when I started this whole thing,

00:39:22   I was like, I don't need to do that.

00:39:23   That's terrible, no one's gonna really do that,

00:39:25   but no people really do it, at increasing frequency.

00:39:28   And yeah, and so anyway,

00:39:29   once I had this redirect checking working,

00:39:31   I was able to see quite how many very popular shows

00:39:36   have had redirects since 2014 when I started crawling them.

00:39:40   And it's a lot.

00:39:41   Some of them were simple like moving from HTTP to HTTPS.

00:39:47   That's a very common one,

00:39:48   like all the relay shows did that.

00:39:50   Lots of popular shows have done that.

00:39:52   But a lot of them are just moving

00:39:53   to different ad platforms and tracking platforms

00:39:55   and insertion platforms and publishing platforms.

00:39:58   No one hosts their own feed in podcasting.

00:40:02   So it's a mess out there and so I had to deal with it.

00:40:05   Even though I really didn't want to

00:40:07   and I was so opinionated about,

00:40:09   like, I don't need to do this,

00:40:10   like, they should have redirects in place forever,

00:40:13   but that's not the reality,

00:40:15   and I had to, you know, adopt to that,

00:40:17   because that's the industry I'm in.

00:40:20   - So yeah, so occasionally you have to do things

00:40:22   and do 'em on the double,

00:40:23   because other people weren't thinking about you.

00:40:26   - But it's not his boss telling him to do it, though.

00:40:27   He's his boss, he's the one,

00:40:29   he got to, the point is,

00:40:30   he got to delay doing it for a really long time,

00:40:32   because he didn't want to.

00:40:33   - Eh. (laughs)

00:40:35   - Not with the daily, though, right?

00:40:36   - And not with the American life.

00:40:38   - Not when very popular feeds redirect there.

00:40:40   - But I was saying, no one is forcing you

00:40:43   to add an about screen that includes a car racing game

00:40:46   to your thing, and you really don't have your display system.

00:40:49   No one's making you support video podcasts

00:40:51   if you don't want to, no one's deciding

00:40:53   you have to have a recipe manager

00:40:54   and a to-do list inside it, that's the type of thing.

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00:41:29   and tell anybody, oh please update your address book,

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00:41:34   since that time because web hosts change,

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00:41:39   and it's always nice to have a domain for your home base,

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00:42:40   - So, back to Ask ATP.

00:42:44   Thankfully, thankfully we have a quick one to round us out.

00:42:49   Stefan Kozlowski writes,

00:42:51   "Do you guys pronounce the command S-U-D-O

00:42:56   as "Soo-doo" or "Soo-dow."

00:42:59   And I will start by saying I have always pronounced it "Soo-dow."

00:43:04   And I understand that it stands for "Super User Do,"

00:43:08   so "Soo-dow" is probably the more academically correct answer,

00:43:13   but I've always pronounced it "Soo-dow."

00:43:15   - I have to think about this question

00:43:17   because I think I do both, both out loud

00:43:21   and both in my head, depending on context.

00:43:24   That's the conclusion I came to by tracing through

00:43:27   the times that I've said it or thinking about it.

00:43:30   I think I do both.

00:43:31   I don't know, that's not a satisfying answer,

00:43:33   but I think that's the reality.

00:43:35   - I pronounce it wrong, and I don't care.

00:43:37   I'm proud of it.

00:43:38   I say pseudo, and I know it's super user do.

00:43:41   I'm very aware of this.

00:43:43   However, I don't care.

00:43:44   To me, pseudo is its own word,

00:43:46   and so it gets its own pronunciation.

00:43:48   - Yeah. - I don't think that's wrong.

00:43:49   That's just one of two very common pronunciations.

00:43:52   Like who's to say which is wrong?

00:43:53   I don't even know if that is the less common one.

00:43:55   It may be for all I know it's the more common one.

00:43:57   - It's a Linux thing.

00:43:58   It's definitely wrong.

00:43:59   There's always, whatever everyone does with Linux,

00:44:04   a lot of people will say it's wrong.

00:44:06   - Well, I don't know.

00:44:08   I think that it's in the running

00:44:10   to being the more popular one.

00:44:12   Because like you said, it is a word, P-S-E-U-D-O,

00:44:14   like the fact that people just substitute a word there.

00:44:18   - Oh, that was what I was talking about.

00:44:19   I was just saying like, basically,

00:44:22   Conceptually in my head, I read that as pseudo.

00:44:25   Like I read it as a word, and I know what it means.

00:44:28   It's like being fluent in a language.

00:44:29   Like I'm not thinking about like its component parts.

00:44:32   I'm thinking like, oh, I need to pseudo to do this command.

00:44:34   Like that is its own word in my head.

00:44:37   I don't think like, oh, I need to super use or do.

00:44:40   Like when I make a directory, I think, oh,

00:44:45   mkdir, or mkdir, like I think that in my head

00:44:48   like as like its component parts.

00:44:49   So I don't like think about that as in,

00:44:52   I don't say like, you know, make dire.

00:44:54   It's dir for directories.

00:44:56   But pseudo to me, like that has become its own word

00:44:59   in my head, so that's why I pronounce it the way I do.

00:45:01   I don't care about the component parts of it

00:45:04   and how they're pronounced.

00:45:06   - All right, Jon, tell me about your black screen of death.

00:45:10   - This could have been follow up,

00:45:12   but I'm trying to, you know,

00:45:14   I think it has wandered out of follow up

00:45:16   and now it's just like practically a weekly segment

00:45:18   where I complain about my laptop in some way.

00:45:20   You know, people gave me so much crap when I was complaining about my laptops.

00:45:25   These are not systemic complaints.

00:45:28   These are specific complaints for the most part.

00:45:32   Sometimes they're just updates on my life with the Mac.

00:45:33   The Touch Bar thing was not really a complaint about Touch Bar, just telling you I tried

00:45:37   to use it and it wasn't for me.

00:45:38   You know what I mean?

00:45:39   So that's different.

00:45:40   But anyway, this is -- and this might not be a laptop bug, but it's a situation I find

00:45:44   myself in frequently, and one of those things where I don't know where to blame it, but

00:45:50   but it just makes my overall experience with this thing worse.

00:45:52   I think I mentioned it before that, so I've got this docking station, and it's great when

00:45:57   everything works well, but sometimes it gets cranky when I undock it.

00:46:02   So I'll undock and I'll go, you know, I'll undock with it in clamshell mode and I'll

00:46:06   go off to a meeting or something and then I'll arrive at the meeting, open up my laptop,

00:46:09   and everything about it will work perfectly except for the screen is 100% black.

00:46:13   And I used to know that everything was working perfectly back when the touch bar was not

00:46:17   in the, you know, the mode that I changed it to where it just shows the function keys all the time,

00:46:21   because I would unlock with touch ID or unlock by typing my password into the totally black screen.

00:46:26   And then I could command tab and I could see the touch bar changing as I command tabbed among the

00:46:30   applications that, you know, everything's working. I come command tabbing. I'm presuming the track

00:46:34   pad is working. If I could see the mouse cursor, it would be moving. I could, you know, type

00:46:38   keyboard commands that I know worked in the front most application, you know, and like I could, if

00:46:43   you could use it without seeing the screen, it was all working, but the screen was a hundred percent

00:46:46   black and nothing I would do to that computer sitting there would make that screen not be

00:46:51   black. Put it to sleep, wake it up again, close the lid, open it. The only way I found

00:46:55   to bring it back is a hardware way where I would use my little, they have some little

00:47:01   dongle thingy that goes in the side that gives you like a USB port, an HDMI and a bunch of

00:47:06   other crap. Plug that in the side and then plug the room's monitor into the HDMI port.

00:47:15   That would wake up, first of all, my machine would start projecting on the external screen,

00:47:20   but also it would wake up the internal display.

00:47:23   So I've had this book a really long time, and it's annoying.

00:47:26   Sometimes I've had to leave the meeting room, go back to my desk, get my dongle, come back

00:47:30   to the room, plug it in, plug in the HDMI monitor, and then my thing was awake.

00:47:33   Anyway, I ran into this problem, and I'm calling this the black screen of death, even though

00:47:36   it's not death, it's like in limbo.

00:47:38   It's alive but blind.

00:47:41   This happened to me where I unplugged my thing because I was in a hurry to get home, unplugged

00:47:45   it and I needed to use my laptop at home.

00:47:48   And I got home and opened it up and sure enough, black screen.

00:47:52   And I didn't have my little dongle because it was back at work.

00:47:54   So I couldn't do the one magic hardware thing that makes my screen burn back to life.

00:47:58   And I tried so many other things.

00:47:59   I tried SSHing into it from another machine.

00:48:02   I tried plugging in other things.

00:48:03   I tried getting out my very own Apple branded HDMI dongle and plugging it into my gaming

00:48:08   monitor which is HDMI and turning everything on.

00:48:10   didn't wake up the screen. In the end, I had to hard reset the thing, which really

00:48:16   annoyed me. That's why I spent like 20 minutes trying to bring this thing back, because I

00:48:19   was in the middle of a lot of stuff. You might be surprised to hear that I had a lot of windows

00:48:24   open. I had a lot of things going on. I had a lot of terminals, a lot of shelves, and

00:48:32   no, I don't use any one of the million things that can let me resume my shelf. I'm exactly

00:48:36   where I left off. Yes, I'm sorry. I'm disappointing all the people who love Tmux and screen.

00:48:40   and all the other things that do that.

00:48:42   - That's right, I also use none of those things.

00:48:44   I always have tons of terminal tabs and windows open

00:48:46   and it's fine.

00:48:47   - Right, anyway, I was annoyed that I lost everything

00:48:49   that I was working on and had to hard reset my computer.

00:48:52   Who wants to reset it?

00:48:53   And the worst part is I'm not hard resetting it

00:48:55   'cause it crashed.

00:48:56   I'm not hard resetting it because it's frozen.

00:48:58   It's not like everything was fine

00:49:00   except the screen was 100% black.

00:49:01   So this is really putting a damper.

00:49:04   This bug and the possibility that this bug can be there

00:49:06   in my annoyance when it happens.

00:49:08   It's kind of like the month 13 is out of bounds thing

00:49:10   where it's like everything is mostly working,

00:49:12   but there's some part of it that's not working

00:49:14   that you feel like someone should notice.

00:49:15   So I would like, I think something in the operating system

00:49:20   should be aware after a certain period of time

00:49:23   that there is A, no monitor attached,

00:49:25   and B, the screen is entirely black.

00:49:27   And I don't think that's a sustainable state

00:49:29   and the lid is open.

00:49:30   I think that set of things,

00:49:32   there should be some assertion in the operating system

00:49:35   that says if no monitor is attached

00:49:37   and the lid is open and you're awake,

00:49:40   but the screen is 100% black, fix that.

00:49:44   Like, make it not be like that.

00:49:45   I'm hoping that's a thing that it can detect,

00:49:47   and I don't know who to blame.

00:49:48   Maybe I blame the docking station.

00:49:50   Maybe it's an OS bug, who knows?

00:49:52   But anyway, I don't like laptops.

00:49:55   - Are you on High Sierra on this?

00:49:57   - Yes, no, no, I'm not, I'm on regular Sierra, sorry.

00:49:59   - Okay, so it probably isn't like a,

00:50:02   well, I guess it isn't a new OS bug, at least,

00:50:04   but not like Sierra was bug-free either.

00:50:07   - I don't know what it is.

00:50:08   It's just my latest in a long line of infuriating

00:50:12   sort of bugs on my laptop.

00:50:14   - So I can assure you that this is not only

00:50:19   not a bug that has been fixed in High Sierra,

00:50:23   but it is not unique to your laptop

00:50:25   because my MarkoBook Pro that I use at work,

00:50:28   that exhibits this same behavior.

00:50:30   Now I wouldn't say that it happens all the time.

00:50:33   I wouldn't even say that it happens terribly often,

00:50:36   But the only solution I had come up with for it

00:50:38   was occasionally I can sleep it and then reopen it,

00:50:43   you know, close the lid and reopen it,

00:50:44   and then sometimes it'll come back.

00:50:47   Or like you said, you know,

00:50:48   disconnect external monitors, reconnect external monitors.

00:50:51   But just like you said, additionally,

00:50:53   there are times that I just have to just kill the machine

00:50:55   and bring it back.

00:50:56   So this is a clamshell problem.

00:50:58   This is a software problem.

00:51:00   This is not a new MacBook Pro problem.

00:51:03   And that is very sad.

00:51:04   - I mean, it seems like there must be

00:51:05   some hardware aspect to it because I don't think merely closing the lid and opening it.

00:51:09   I think it's the fact that you're attaching an external monitor and something about the

00:51:12   "I've attached a monitor, please detect that it's there" and start sending your video signal

00:51:16   to it, "Oh, you just yanked it out, I have to handle that."

00:51:18   It's related to the fact that the hardware configuration of the machine is changing.

00:51:23   I've never seen it...

00:51:25   Once the computer is working in isolation and I'm not plugging anything into it, I've

00:51:28   never seen it happen there where I close the lid and open and the screen doesn't turn on.

00:51:32   So I don't know.

00:51:34   Yeah, like these type of problems are very often waking from sleep problems and stuff

00:51:38   like that, but I feel like waking from sleep is almost more explicable.

00:51:41   It's like, well, the computer's not even awake.

00:51:44   And so like obviously it's not working.

00:51:45   This is the worst because it's so clear, especially with the touch bar, that everything

00:51:49   is working just fine.

00:51:51   That the computer is running, it just refuses to display anything on the screen.

00:51:54   And I find that infuriating.

00:51:56   I should also add, since this is apparently the airing of grievances, it is the holiday

00:52:00   season after all.

00:52:01   I should add that my MarkerBook Pro is now going to have to go in for service when I'm

00:52:08   out over the holidays because it turns out if you plug in and remove – what is the

00:52:13   port on the side?

00:52:14   What is the Thunderbolt?

00:52:15   But it's also known as –

00:52:16   Mini DisplayPort.

00:52:17   Mini DisplayPort, yeah, thank you.

00:52:20   If you plug and unplug Mini DisplayPort cables every single day, all day, every day, it turns

00:52:26   out they start to fail over time.

00:52:27   So Monday, when I got to the office, I tried to plug in my two LG 4K monitors, and one

00:52:34   of them in particular wouldn't plug in for the longest time.

00:52:37   I would switch around cables, I switched around where I was plugging them in, it was nothing

00:52:44   I could do to get it to work.

00:52:46   And then finally, I had a, actually my head IT guy come over and look at it, and he plugged

00:52:54   in his MarkoBook Pro and it worked no problem, immediately. Unplugged it, plugged it back

00:52:59   in, worked no problem. So it appears that either the graphics card is dying or the connectors

00:53:04   are getting screwed up in some way, shape, or form. So I hope, Marco, that in your beloved

00:53:11   MarkoBook Pro that you are not often using the Thunderbolt ports because over time after

00:53:16   a year or two, after a couple of years, you might find them failing. So good luck.

00:53:20   - Yeah, this is one of the things that the move to USB-C

00:53:23   made a lot better, that USB-C, as far as I can tell so far,

00:53:27   the connection does wear out over time,

00:53:31   just like many of them do.

00:53:32   However, it seems like the parts that wear out

00:53:35   are mostly in the cable end and not in the port end.

00:53:38   So it is kind of annoying that your cable loosens up

00:53:40   over time, especially when it's your power cable

00:53:42   to your new MacBook Pro, but it does seem like

00:53:46   that's probably an easier fix long term

00:53:50   that you can probably just replace the cable

00:53:51   in those conditions for USB-C,

00:53:53   but the Mini DisplayPort connector

00:53:56   that then became the Thunderbolt connector,

00:53:58   that's never been a good connector.

00:53:59   One of the big problems with it is that

00:54:01   the cables are kind of loose in there.

00:54:02   There's nothing holding them in, really.

00:54:05   So they can just very easily slide out

00:54:06   or get a little bit dislodged or a little bit jostled.

00:54:11   I will defend a lot of great things

00:54:14   about the 2015 era Retina MacBook Pro.

00:54:17   However, the design of the Thunderbolt port is not one.

00:54:21   - So I kinda wish I had a Thunderbolt one.

00:54:25   Or a Thunderbolt one, I'm sorry, a Touch Bar one,

00:54:27   but that ain't never gonna happen.

00:54:29   My IT guy refuses to buy any Touch Bar MacBook Pros,

00:54:33   and maybe it's because he's smarter than me.

00:54:36   I don't know.

00:54:37   - Yeah, well, I mean, think about it from the point of view

00:54:39   of an IT manager at a company.

00:54:41   Like, a computer that seems to have a pretty high

00:54:46   keyboard failure rate compared to most computers.

00:54:49   And again, people who defend this keyboard,

00:54:52   even if that rate is 20%, that's still really high

00:54:56   for a computer that has only existed for a year.

00:54:59   If that's the kind of failure rate you see

00:55:01   on a pool of these new computers,

00:55:03   and if buying them would make you have to like

00:55:07   rebuy a whole bunch of dongles or display things

00:55:10   or projecting things or things like that

00:55:12   for like the whole office,

00:55:13   you can totally understand why,

00:55:16   an IT manager would be like, yeah, that's not worth it.

00:55:19   We can't afford the downtime for the keyboards.

00:55:22   That's a lot of work for the IT people to have to

00:55:26   pull those out of service from the company

00:55:28   when the keyboards break, get them repaired,

00:55:30   put them back into service,

00:55:32   figure out things in the meantime.

00:55:34   That's a huge burden on an IT staff,

00:55:37   even before you consider all the dongle stuff.

00:55:40   That makes total sense.

00:55:42   I totally get it.

00:55:42   Honestly, that's probably why Apple still sells the 2015 model new in the Apple store

00:55:48   today.

00:55:49   They probably sell a ton of them to big corporate purchasers who just want what they've been

00:55:54   buying for years because they know it's fine, they're already equipped for it, and it's

00:55:57   pretty reliable.

00:55:59   Except when you have to replace your Thunderbolt port.

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00:57:43   Betterment, rethink what your money can do.

00:57:45   - We have somehow accidentally procrastinated

00:57:52   for an hour and 20 minutes by my clock.

00:57:55   But we should probably talk about the iMac Pro.

00:57:58   And unfortunately for me, I started to have a holiday party

00:58:03   and made it through about a half a drink because I was very busy tonight.

00:58:07   So I'm sad to report, ladies and gentlemen, that this is not a holiday party for me, and

00:58:11   I'm going to have to endure this sober, and I'm doing it for you, the listener.

00:58:15   So all right, guys, tell me about what's going on.

00:58:19   Wait, why do you have to endure this?

00:58:21   Aren't you sitting in front of a 5K iMac right now?

00:58:23   I'm mostly giving you a hard time.

00:58:24   I am sitting in front of a 5K iMac.

00:58:26   So you're an iMac buyer.

00:58:28   This is a computer that could potentially be for you.

00:58:30   You like this kind of computer.

00:58:32   I do, I do. I'm mostly giving you two a hard time.

00:58:34   Yeah, don't you do a lot of video transcoding and buy all of Apple's stuff in space gray?

00:58:37   You know, the sick thing about the iMac Pro is the thing that I think appeals most to me about it

00:58:44   is the fact that it's space gray, because I think that is so hot and it's so ridiculous.

00:58:48   And I'll be the first to tell you that is utterly, truly ridiculous,

00:58:52   that the thing I'm most excited about is the color, but oh my god, it looks so good.

00:58:56   And those accessories look so good.

00:58:58   No, I snark, and if you're not a long time ATP listener, I don't remember which episode

00:59:05   it was, and I probably won't remember to put in the show notes, but it was early on in

00:59:08   our run.

00:59:09   Yeah, well, it was all of them.

00:59:10   But no, early on in our run, it just so happened that I knew we were going to be talking about

00:59:16   the Mac Pro, and I don't remember why, because there was no news about it, but we were going

00:59:19   to be talking about the Mac Pro.

00:59:21   And I made the mistake of bringing my drink upstairs with me into the office while I recorded,

00:59:27   and no, I didn't spill it on anything, but that part wasn't the mistake. The mistake was that I

00:59:32   also brought the bottle with me, and by the end of that episode, I had had quite the holiday party

00:59:37   all by myself. And so anyway, it's very embarrassing, and I won't actually, I probably won't

00:59:43   link it because I am embarrassed by it, and I shouldn't have done it, but you know, it is what

00:59:46   it is, and you only live once. Anyway, the iMac Pro does appeal to me. We should do a kind of an

00:59:51   an overview in just a moment. It does appeal to me. I don't think I find it worth all of

00:59:56   that money. I'm not saying that it's an unreasonable price. I'm not saying that it should be lower.

01:00:01   I'm just saying I have a really nice iMac in front of me, and yes, I do transcode things

01:00:06   a lot. Yes, I am getting into video now, but sitting here now, I don't feel like I need

01:00:13   a new computer, which is usually stage one in case you're buying a new computer. So anyway,

01:00:18   Marco, tell me about what this iMac Pro is all about.

01:00:21   - We actually, there's still a lot of big unknowns about it

01:00:24   because as we record this, it is, well actually,

01:00:27   are they gonna launch it at three in the morning tonight?

01:00:29   - Oh, I think you're right.

01:00:30   Are we just gonna, maybe I should start

01:00:32   my holiday party after all.

01:00:32   - Just keep podcasting until the configurator goes live

01:00:35   and then we can answer more questions.

01:00:36   - I really don't wanna do that,

01:00:38   but there's something to be said for how funny that would be

01:00:42   and I will go downstairs and get myself more water

01:00:44   and my bottle and we can do a holiday party

01:00:47   if that's what it takes.

01:00:49   - No, I'm not staying up till three in the morning.

01:00:52   - It'll be just me and the listeners.

01:00:53   - Yeah, I'm gonna make it, 'cause the thing is, for me,

01:00:56   the Christmas season is way too busy

01:00:58   for me to buy a new desktop and set it up

01:01:01   and move my stuff over and everything.

01:01:03   I'm way, way too busy for a while.

01:01:06   So if I just wait until the morning to order mine,

01:01:10   if I order one, I mean, I'm still telling myself if.

01:01:13   - You said that and I took pause,

01:01:17   but I didn't wanna ruin your flow,

01:01:18   so I just bit my tongue, but you're gonna order one.

01:01:21   Now, it may not be tomorrow.

01:01:22   I believe that it may not be tomorrow,

01:01:24   but you're gonna order one.

01:01:25   - I mean, it's probably gonna be at least eight

01:01:27   in the morning, like I'm not gonna wake up at three.

01:01:30   I might wait until eight.

01:01:32   So anyway, all this is to say,

01:01:33   at the moment that we're recording,

01:01:34   we don't know any of the pricing

01:01:37   and the configuration options really.

01:01:39   Like, we know what options will be available roughly,

01:01:43   but we don't know if there are certain combinations

01:01:45   that they will require.

01:01:47   We don't know some of the finer details

01:01:49   of some of the options.

01:01:51   So the core counts are gonna be eight, 10, 14, and 18,

01:01:56   but the 14 and 18 aren't available until, quote,

01:01:59   early next year.

01:02:00   We don't know what that means, really.

01:02:01   That could mean in two weeks,

01:02:02   or that could mean in three months.

01:02:05   So there's a whole lot of unknowns.

01:02:07   And yeah, the biggest thing is that

01:02:09   we only know the base price at this moment.

01:02:11   We only know that it starts at $5,000,

01:02:13   and that is eight core, one terabyte,

01:02:16   and I think 32 gigs of RAM, which is a great,

01:02:19   like that's an awesome, like that is my iMac,

01:02:21   but with twice the cores.

01:02:22   Like my iMac is 32 gigs of RAM, you know,

01:02:26   it was the top CPU at the time I bought it,

01:02:28   which was in 2014, and that was $4,300

01:02:32   or something like that at the time.

01:02:36   I think the top iMac is slightly cheaper now,

01:02:38   but it's like when you spec up an iMac

01:02:41   to be one terabyte of SSD and 32 gigs of RAM,

01:02:45   you're already getting about $4,000.

01:02:48   Like, you're near that point.

01:02:50   And so, for this to be eight cores starting at $5,000

01:02:55   and for it to be the Xeon line with ECC RAM,

01:02:58   workstation GPU. - And a way better GPU.

01:02:59   - Yeah, like way better GPU, faster SSD,

01:03:02   and a whole lot of extra stuff.

01:03:05   Am I reading correctly from the reviews

01:03:06   that it comes with all three peripherals?

01:03:09   It comes with a trackpad, keyboard, and mouse?

01:03:11   It's so hard to tell from these early reviews because, like you said about the pricing,

01:03:14   you also, like, Apple just, you know, gives you a bunch of stuff and say, "Here you go."

01:03:19   They don't say, you know, "Would it even be possible to order it this way?"

01:03:23   Or would you have to, like, say, "Yeah, you can buy all these input devices, but you only

01:03:27   get to pick one, you know, to come for free with your iMac Pro."

01:03:32   This is why you're going to win the bet.

01:03:34   You're going to make me buy a whole second iMac Pro just so I can get a black trackpad

01:03:38   and a black mouse.

01:03:40   - That's the real black tax.

01:03:43   - Wow, that's true.

01:03:46   - You have to buy a whole second machine

01:03:47   to get the new enterprise.

01:03:48   - Yeah, no more like $300 extra.

01:03:50   - Yeah, I lamented the 150 bucks or whatever it was

01:03:52   for the black book and this is a whole new world.

01:03:56   - Anyway, so all this is to say,

01:03:59   pricing is still a big unknown for us

01:04:01   for like all the details.

01:04:02   Like the configuration that the reviewers all had

01:04:05   was 10 core, so it's one step up in the processor line

01:04:08   from eight to 10 core, and I believe it was,

01:04:11   was it 64 gigs of RAM?

01:04:12   - 128 gigs of RAM.

01:04:14   - Okay, yeah, so that's probably going to be

01:04:16   a $7,000 configuration.

01:04:18   - Yeah, and the big sort of non-linear price increases

01:04:22   are always gonna be 128 gigs of RAM and four terabyte SSD.

01:04:25   Those are gonna cost as much as a car.

01:04:26   Like, I don't know why, it's never like,

01:04:29   it's double the price of the size that's half as much.

01:04:31   Nope, it is not, it is more.

01:04:33   - No, it's not, yeah, it's gonna be like,

01:04:34   one terabyte comes with it, two terabytes might be like

01:04:37   plus 400 and then four terabytes might be like plus 1200.

01:04:41   It's gonna be like that kind of jump.

01:04:42   Like, you know, it might even be more than that

01:04:45   'cause these are pretty--

01:04:45   - And the interesting thing about these computers,

01:04:47   and we knew this already,

01:04:48   but I think people are relearning it for the second time

01:04:50   because again, we saw these machines at W3C,

01:04:52   actually physically saw them.

01:04:54   And in my case, touched them

01:04:56   even though you weren't supposed to.

01:04:57   (laughing)

01:04:58   You got yelled at by the Apple person.

01:05:00   But there's no upgradability in this.

01:05:05   This is a question we asked the person who was there,

01:05:07   Like, you know, is the RAM soldered to the board or is it in slots?

01:05:09   He said, it's in slots, but you can't get it.

01:05:12   Like, there's no little door for you to upgrade the RAM.

01:05:15   There's like, you configure this machine from Apple and you buy it and that's it.

01:05:20   Now in theory, you could, like iFixit could probably find a way to open this thing up

01:05:23   and take out the RAM and upgrade it.

01:05:25   Like, there's nothing really stopping you from doing it.

01:05:27   It's not like it's locked with the key or whatever, except for perhaps a secure boot

01:05:31   thing, which we'll get to in a minute, but who knows how they're integrating that with

01:05:34   their RAM.

01:05:35   Essentially, there are no upgradable parts inside this thing that you are allowed to

01:05:43   change or that you can bring to an Apple store and say, "I'd like to buy more RAM.

01:05:46   Can you put more RAM in this for me?"

01:05:47   Apple's going to say, "No, the RAM that you got is what you got."

01:05:50   Same thing with upgrading the CPU or any sort of stuff like that, which if you're going

01:05:53   to have a machine that's totally sealed up, this is the one to do it on because the iMac,

01:05:57   the whole point of it is it's all in one, right?

01:06:00   And you know the Mac Pro is coming and that really highlights what we think will be a

01:06:05   very important difference between the iMac Pro and the Mac Pro. The iMac Pro

01:06:09   has the freedom now to say 100% sealed box, configure it the way you want it, and

01:06:14   that's it. You know, no doors, no flaps, no upgrading after the fact, it's just the

01:06:18   machine you get is the machine you get, leaving the, paving the way for the Mac

01:06:23   Pro to take the opposite choice. So some people are kind of annoyed at that, but I

01:06:27   feel like it is a reasonably smart differentiation, differentiation between

01:06:32   between these two machines.

01:06:33   So it's clear to you,

01:06:34   why would I buy this one machine over the other?

01:06:36   It's like, well, you want,

01:06:37   if you want everything in one,

01:06:38   and beautiful and elegant and simple and clean,

01:06:41   and sealed up and done and done,

01:06:43   it's the iMac.

01:06:44   And if you want the other thing, it's the Mac Pro.

01:06:46   - Well, I mean, to be fair,

01:06:48   we don't actually know yet

01:06:49   whether the Mac Pro will be upgradeable.

01:06:52   - We don't, but we're hoping.

01:06:53   - I mean, the tube was slightly upgradeable.

01:06:58   Like, you could-- - You could change the RAM.

01:06:59   - You could add RAM, that's it.

01:07:01   - Yeah, you could swap out the SSD too.

01:07:04   - I don't think anybody ever sold the SSDs separately.

01:07:07   - Yeah, it wasn't like, I think it was like

01:07:09   the M.2 whatever thing, it wasn't entirely,

01:07:11   you know, you could buy stuff.

01:07:12   The whole point is, you could open the case

01:07:14   and pull things out of it.

01:07:15   Whereas this, for all we know, it's glued together.

01:07:18   Like, I don't even know how easy it is

01:07:19   to even get inside this thing.

01:07:21   - I mean, it's probably like every other iMac.

01:07:22   Like, all the components appear to face the back,

01:07:26   but you can't open it from the back probably,

01:07:28   so you probably have to like remove the screen

01:07:31   and basically go in-- - Which you may be glued on.

01:07:33   - Right, right.

01:07:34   And so it's probably like magnets like the other one.

01:07:37   But anyway, it's probably very similar

01:07:39   to the construction of the 27-inch iMac today.

01:07:42   So you probably can get into it, but you don't want to

01:07:46   because it involves so much surgery on the screen

01:07:49   that laypeople really shouldn't do it

01:07:52   because you will risk damaging things

01:07:54   or getting dust in there or whatever else.

01:07:55   So it's something that like, yeah, Apple can do it.

01:07:59   their technicians can do it, but you shouldn't.

01:08:02   - It looks pretty clean inside from the pictures

01:08:03   they have on Apple's website.

01:08:04   If you look inside there, if the back came off

01:08:07   in a reasonable way, it's pretty nicely laid out.

01:08:09   The RAM is really easy to get to.

01:08:10   It's sitting right there in little dim slots.

01:08:12   You could pull it right out.

01:08:13   Like it's got a nice little heat pipe arrangement

01:08:15   with the central heat sink and the two fans.

01:08:17   And like, it looks nice in there.

01:08:19   It looks like they, you know, sweated the details

01:08:21   and made it look nice on the inside,

01:08:22   even though nobody's ever gonna see that

01:08:24   except for an Apple technician when, you know,

01:08:26   some part of it breaks or something.

01:08:28   Yeah, but ultimately, I am very excited about this machine.

01:08:32   I was a little excited about it when it was announced

01:08:35   this past summer.

01:08:37   But I'm even more excited now that we're getting

01:08:40   performance numbers and that we're getting

01:08:41   the first reviews that have been out.

01:08:43   The best review that I've seen so far is the MKBHD review.

01:08:46   He's had it for, he said about a week,

01:08:49   and he's a hard user.

01:08:50   He creates and produces very high-end video content.

01:08:53   So he's editing high bandwidth, high resolution video

01:08:57   on this thing, and that really pushes it.

01:09:01   One of the major concerns I had with the iMac Pro

01:09:03   when we first heard about it was,

01:09:05   I believe we talked about it in our live show

01:09:07   at WBC this past summer, which my main concern was like,

01:09:11   how does it handle being under load?

01:09:13   Because my regular 5K iMac, it's a very graceful machine

01:09:18   until you really ask it to do something hard,

01:09:22   and then you hear annoying fan noise,

01:09:24   and the fan really spins up, and it's loud,

01:09:27   and it's just kind of ungraceful.

01:09:29   And a Mac Pro, historically, has not done that.

01:09:33   Mac Pros usually are able to take pretty much any workload

01:09:37   and still be dead silent or close enough to silent

01:09:41   that you won't hear it in an average room.

01:09:43   And so I really miss that.

01:09:45   Like going back to a consumer level product,

01:09:48   like the regular iMac or a laptop,

01:09:51   like when you put it under load

01:09:53   and you hear the fan spinning,

01:09:54   I always kind of feel like,

01:09:55   this really isn't made to do this very much.

01:09:58   And, you know, so anyway, I, heat and how it deals with heat

01:10:03   is a big question mark for me.

01:10:06   Upgradability is kind of a known thing at this point,

01:10:09   like the laptops haven't been meaningfully upgradeable

01:10:12   since 2012, the desktops, you know,

01:10:15   the only thing that's been upgradeable about the desktops

01:10:17   any time recently has been RAM,

01:10:19   and even that is slowly fading away

01:10:21   in the rest of the lineup, so. (laughs)

01:10:24   Really, to me, the upgradability thing is,

01:10:28   it's certainly something, it's significant.

01:10:32   It matters, I think, more for long-term servicing costs

01:10:36   than necessarily getting a good deal up front.

01:10:39   Like, in the olden days, you'd be able to buy a MacBook

01:10:44   or whatever, or a PowerBook, and go get third-party RAM

01:10:47   from Crucial or OWC or something like that,

01:10:50   and save a bunch of money on a high-end configuration

01:10:51   by buying the parts yourself

01:10:53   and putting them in from third parties.

01:10:54   Those days are long gone for the entire lineup,

01:10:57   desktop to laptop.

01:10:59   The only thing you can still do that for is Casey's iMac.

01:11:03   And you shouldn't because look what happened

01:11:05   to Casey's iMac.

01:11:06   - I was waiting for somebody to make that joke

01:11:08   and prepared to make it myself.

01:11:09   - That's not the reason you shouldn't,

01:11:10   but I think the second use case is just longevity.

01:11:13   'Cause if you buy it, then you're happy.

01:11:14   You buy a 32 gig arrangement and you're happy.

01:11:16   And it turns out that this thing is so reliable

01:11:18   and the screen just looks gorgeous year after year

01:11:20   that the thing is five years old and you're like,

01:11:22   know what this thing still does everything I need it to do but I could

01:11:26   use a little bit more RAM because I thought 32 would be enough for me to do

01:11:29   what I need to do forever but the latest version of Adobe's whatever suite is

01:11:32   just a RAM monster and I would really like to have 64 and that's where you

01:11:36   want the ability to say yeah I used it for five years for 32 and it was great

01:11:40   to extend the life of this machine let me upgrade it to 64 and you totally

01:11:44   could on this machine if you can get inside it in a reasonable way but you

01:11:48   can't so if there was a little RAM door you would yank out the RAM five years

01:11:51   later and put in some new RAM. And same caveat about third party RAM, yada yada, there's

01:11:55   a whole reason Apple doesn't want you doing that, it makes sense, but it really does extend

01:11:58   the life of the machines if you can add an SSD to a thing that had a spinning disk, or

01:12:02   add a faster SSD, or expand the RAM. And that's basically all you've been able to do with

01:12:06   any Mac for the longest time, if you've been able to do anything at all, but it does extend

01:12:10   the life of your machines. I mean, my Mac Pro is the obvious example where so much of

01:12:14   the insides have been swapped and rotated and just gotten better and better over time,

01:12:17   that it's extended the life of the machine. If it was still the way I bought it when it

01:12:20   was new, it would be completely unusable right now.

01:12:23   - Oh yeah, but that was also in many ways

01:12:27   a product of the times that it went through.

01:12:29   The SSD transition, that's not gonna happen again, right?

01:12:33   Or maybe we move to those RAM computers.

01:12:35   - Yeah, but even just the video card.

01:12:37   I've gone to like three or four video cards in this thing,

01:12:39   each one faster than the next.

01:12:40   That's really extended the gaming life of the machine.

01:12:43   - Yeah, that's true.

01:12:45   But anyway, I feel like most of those days are over.

01:12:48   There was a good section on connected this week

01:12:50   where Steven talked about the video card upgradeability

01:12:53   of previous Mac Pros.

01:12:54   And usually, people who want upgradeable Mac Pros,

01:12:58   they usually think of it, if they haven't done it before,

01:13:02   they think of it from a PC builder perspective,

01:13:05   where if you're in the PC world, building Windows PCs,

01:13:08   you can swap out video cards with all sorts

01:13:10   of different great options all the time,

01:13:12   everything costs very little money, relatively speaking,

01:13:14   and you have tons of great options.

01:13:16   When the Mac world, you've only ever been limited

01:13:19   to the handful of cards that actually supported the Mac.

01:13:24   And this has been true of many peripherals,

01:13:26   even when the Mac Pros were the tower style,

01:13:29   like what you have and what I used to have.

01:13:31   You couldn't just put in any PCI Express card in there

01:13:34   and have it work.

01:13:35   Many of them would, but most of them wouldn't.

01:13:38   Or they would work partially.

01:13:40   - It was more than you'd think.

01:13:41   You'd more than you'd think if you had to flash them,

01:13:43   because it's basically just based on the architecture.

01:13:45   Apple makes drivers usually for the architecture,

01:13:48   not just for a very specific card.

01:13:50   So a lot more cards than would work in anything.

01:13:52   But even if it was just a handful of cards,

01:13:54   it's not, yeah, you don't have the selection

01:13:55   of a PC builder.

01:13:56   But to have the option to put a faster card in there,

01:13:59   even if you only have literally one choice,

01:14:02   there's only one choice that you can buy

01:14:03   that is faster than your current one,

01:14:04   it's way better than zero choices.

01:14:06   And one of the things I put in the notes here,

01:14:09   this is a tweet from BareFeets,

01:14:10   the website that does lots of this kind of testing,

01:14:13   emphasizes this fact that they were,

01:14:15   you know, they have benchmarks,

01:14:16   like these are OpenCL benchmarks,

01:14:18   so they're things that run on the GPU of the iMac Pro.

01:14:23   And then they pitted it against a 2010 Mac Pro.

01:14:27   And the 2010 Mac Pro was faster, why?

01:14:29   Because the 2010 Mac Pro has a replaceable video card.

01:14:33   And like Margo said, there's not a lot of choices

01:14:35   for what you can put in the 2010 Mac Pro,

01:14:38   but there are a couple of them.

01:14:40   And one of them they were able to put in there

01:14:42   was one that uses the same architecture

01:14:45   the GPU and the iMacs Pro so it's an AMD Vega or however you pronounce it 64 so

01:14:51   they put that card in and because it's the same architecture and because Mac OS

01:14:56   has drivers for it because of the iMac Pro it's able to use that card and just

01:15:01   so happens to the card they could fit in that gigantic 2010 Mac Pro tower that

01:15:05   has tons of room for cooling and everything that card is just faster than

01:15:08   the one that's in the iMac because the iMac is a slower card it's probably

01:15:10   a clock slower because it's a more thermally compromised environment.

01:15:15   And so if what you care about is GPU performance in your 3D program or in your OpenCL whatever

01:15:20   program, 2010 Mac Pro is faster than an iMac Pro.

01:15:25   And I think this also highlights the role that the Mac Pro might play.

01:15:29   Will the Mac Pro have an upgradeable GPU?

01:15:31   Maybe, maybe not.

01:15:32   But I think the most important thing for these type of computers, for the Mac Pro or even

01:15:37   for the iMac Pro is to be super fast when you release, which I think this qualifies.

01:15:42   It's got lots of cores in the CPUs, and if you have an application that can use them,

01:15:45   it will really make a difference in your life. The storage on this Mac Pro is really, really

01:15:50   fast, and the iMac Pro is really fast. It's faster than the laptops, right? And so that

01:15:54   makes it the fastest Mac Apple has, because the old Mac Pro is so old. And it's got, you

01:16:01   the GPU is plenty fast, right? But to fulfill its role as the iMac Pro, I feel like next year,

01:16:09   there needs to be a much faster GPU in the iMac Pro. Or, you know, like they need to update the

01:16:14   internals of this iMac Pro on a reasonable basis. Fine, they're not upgradeable, fine. But Apple

01:16:20   itself has to upgrade them and revise them. Because otherwise, it will just get more and

01:16:25   more embarrassing that your 2010 Mac Pro, every year you can buy a new GPU to get you, you know,

01:16:29   know, a 2x speed boost and whatever it is that you're doing. And the iMac Pro year

01:16:33   after year, like the internals don't get upgraded. And if the Mac Pro is or isn't

01:16:38   upgradable, same story. Technology marches on and at the very very top end, Apple

01:16:44   has to be committed to releasing computers that are competitive with the

01:16:48   top end and then revising their computers to continue to be competitive.

01:16:51   And if they don't want to revise them, then merely make the certain components

01:16:54   upgradeable and people will buy a PC Vega card that is faster than the one that they

01:17:00   had before and flash it and throw it in there and it will work because the drivers work

01:17:05   with every card in that architecture and everyone will be happy.

01:17:09   My biggest concern here is the thermals. And I believe them when they say they've gotten

01:17:16   this to, they've gotten the iMac enclosure to cool the up to 500 watt load that they

01:17:22   they are putting in here or that it's designed for.

01:17:25   But it seems like there's not a lot of headroom.

01:17:27   Like, and this was exactly the problem they had

01:17:30   with the 2013 cylinder Mac Pro.

01:17:33   You know, Craig Federighi famously said

01:17:34   that they designed themselves into a thermal corner.

01:17:36   It seems like the 2013 Mac Pro was designed

01:17:38   with just barely enough cooling power,

01:17:42   and even then it wasn't really quite enough

01:17:44   because of the way the dual GPUs got so hot.

01:17:46   With this, it seems like they went into it,

01:17:50   like you know, John, you mentioned last time

01:17:51   talked about this, that they went into the design brief

01:17:54   of this seemingly with like fit pro workstation grade

01:17:58   components into the iMac enclosure.

01:18:01   Well why?

01:18:02   Like why couldn't it be a little bit differently shaped?

01:18:05   - Why couldn't it be designed in an enclosure

01:18:06   that supports pro-grading components, like the reverse?

01:18:08   - Exactly, and so because of that,

01:18:11   because they went in with the apparent goal

01:18:15   or requirement of fit this into the iMac case,

01:18:18   that was never designed for this amount of thermal load.

01:18:21   I mean, this case was designed in 2012,

01:18:25   or was launched in 2012,

01:18:26   and it was launched with the first,

01:18:28   well, with the second generation 27-inch iMac.

01:18:31   Even the Retina one was not designed for this.

01:18:34   This was before the 5K.

01:18:36   We have shoved so much stuff

01:18:38   into the exact same size enclosure

01:18:40   that in 2012 they probably were not thinking of

01:18:43   when they designed the shape and ventilation

01:18:47   and size and everything else.

01:18:49   With that in mind, with the thermals as a severely

01:18:53   limiting factor probably here, I worry that,

01:18:57   on two fronts, number one, I worry like,

01:18:59   how much did they have to clock down the GPU

01:19:02   and the CPUs to fit here?

01:19:06   - And that gets to what you were saying of like,

01:19:08   if they're on the ragged edge of their thing,

01:19:10   if they've had to downclock things,

01:19:12   basically they couldn't support the cooling,

01:19:15   and the only way they could get things to fit

01:19:17   is they had to say, well, let's just slightly

01:19:18   downclock everything. And I don't know if that's true, that's just been a rumor for

01:19:21   a while that like basically all the components are running at, you know, slower speeds from

01:19:26   the GPUs and the CPUs and the RAM and every part of the system. Not a lot downclock, but

01:19:30   just a little bit. And the only reason you do that is because you couldn't, you couldn't

01:19:35   cool them running at their full speed. And that, I mean, maybe that's a compromise for

01:19:40   like, hey, this is a slim computer. It's all in one. You don't have a big box, you don't

01:19:43   have a big thing or whatever, I don't think it's unreasonable, but it does, you know,

01:19:48   optimistically say, this now further emphasizes why you might want the upcoming Mac Pro because

01:19:54   presumably that one will not have to downclock its components.

01:19:59   And so it will therefore be faster and have more headroom and everything.

01:20:02   And that gets to your point, Marco, about if they had to downclock things that you're

01:20:06   concerned about all the same things about the 2012, about reliability and about noise.

01:20:11   So it could be argued that the 2013 Mac Pro, the trashcan,

01:20:15   the privileged noise above reliability,

01:20:18   like it was very quiet all the time,

01:20:20   but maybe it should have been a little bit more noisy

01:20:21   because there was lots of overheating problems

01:20:23   with the GPUs, right?

01:20:24   So maybe they made a different choice here.

01:20:26   That's one thing that I found lacking in all the reviews

01:20:28   is a rigorous testing of the noise.

01:20:32   I mean, people gave their subjective reviews or whatever,

01:20:35   but I'm looking for someone who's like a fanatic on it

01:20:38   than like I am about fan noise.

01:20:40   - Yeah, and I wonder too, like the reliability of that,

01:20:43   that's not a small point.

01:20:44   Because nothing in here is really serviceable,

01:20:47   because even Apple getting to it is challenging,

01:20:52   taking off the screen probably and everything,

01:20:54   and because these are all expensive custom components,

01:20:58   this is not a machine that I would want to own

01:21:01   out of warranty very long.

01:21:03   And I certainly would never buy one out of warranty,

01:21:06   and I would probably try to not sell it out of warranty

01:21:09   because I worry that if it's operating

01:21:12   at so close to the thermal limits of this enclosure,

01:21:17   because this enclosure was never designed for this,

01:21:20   it's similar to a laptop,

01:21:21   where laptops often run pretty warm

01:21:24   if you push them all the time,

01:21:27   and laptops tend not to last as long.

01:21:28   They tend to have reliability problems

01:21:30   where components break or you have heat fatigue

01:21:32   and your GPU falls off or things like that.

01:21:34   There's all sorts of problems with laptops

01:21:36   with just things that run too hot

01:21:38   because they have such constrained enclosures.

01:21:41   This is basically a giant workstation laptop

01:21:43   in a big screen, in the way that it is clearly

01:21:47   very thermally constrained.

01:21:50   The old Mac Pro towers, and even the Trashcan Mac Pro,

01:21:54   those had a lot of headroom for most configurations.

01:21:57   The main problem the Trashcan had was

01:21:59   if you actually stress the GPUs, that would cause a problem.

01:22:04   If you just stress the CPU, it's fine,

01:22:06   'cause that was, it was designed with the kind of

01:22:09   asymmetric triangle of heat sink in the middle there,

01:22:12   it was designed to have one very hot side,

01:22:14   which was the CPU, and two kinda hot sides,

01:22:16   which were the GPUs.

01:22:17   And as long as the kinda hot sides didn't get super hot,

01:22:20   it was fine.

01:22:22   But unfortunately, that's not how people work anymore.

01:22:24   And they sold it as a GPU workstation,

01:22:26   which was kind of a problem.

01:22:28   So, but I think it could have been done as it was,

01:22:33   as quietly as it was,

01:22:35   if they just made it a little bit bigger.

01:22:37   The main problem with the TrashCam Mac Pro,

01:22:38   I think, is probably just they wanted to make it small.

01:22:42   And they succeeded.

01:22:43   It was very impressively small.

01:22:45   But that's something that nobody was really asking for.

01:22:47   And instead they made it unreliable,

01:22:49   if you stress the GPUs.

01:22:50   Anyway, with this, I feel like they've done the same thing.

01:22:53   They've kept it super thin on the edges,

01:22:57   just like the current one,

01:22:58   and the back of it's pretty small too.

01:23:00   And they've kept the same enclosure, but why?

01:23:03   Nobody was asking for that.

01:23:04   and it has severely constrained them.

01:23:06   - They didn't even put that many more vents.

01:23:08   Like the vents are bigger, but like the back of this

01:23:10   is not covered with vents in places

01:23:11   where the regular ones aren't.

01:23:12   They hid the vents behind the leg,

01:23:14   just like they always do, so it looks clean from the back.

01:23:16   And that is, like not only are they keeping the case

01:23:18   the same, which presumably has big advantages

01:23:21   in terms of tooling.

01:23:22   You don't have to come up with a whole new case design.

01:23:24   You don't have to come up with a whole new set of machines

01:23:26   to carve out your case.

01:23:27   Like it's just some different slotting in the thing

01:23:29   and you know, whatever.

01:23:30   I don't know if that's actually as big a savings

01:23:33   as it might seem to be, but there's something to be said for keeping something the same.

01:23:38   But they could have made the entire back of this thing like a giant cheese grater, and

01:23:43   that would certainly allow more airflow into and out of this thing, and would have allowed

01:23:46   you to have bigger, lazier, slower spinning fans instead of two relatively fast ones pushing

01:23:52   all the air out of the central thing and pulling all the air in through these little slits,

01:23:56   right?

01:23:57   So it's all very elegant looking and everything.

01:23:59   And we don't know.

01:24:02   worrying more than anything else. We're not saying there's going to be thermal problems.

01:24:06   Even the downclocking thing is just something I've read as a rumor and I haven't actually

01:24:09   seen anyone pull out the speeds for all the components and say, "Here are the speeds for

01:24:14   the components and if you put these things in a PC, you would never clock them down like

01:24:17   this if you had adequate cooling." So we don't know. But that gets to the heart of what you're

01:24:22   talking about before. The reason you pay for all these expensive components, Xeons and

01:24:26   ECC RAM and all that other stuff, is for the reliability factor. And if the reliability

01:24:30   factor is undercut by the thermals in the form factor, then that makes this a less compelling

01:24:36   purchase.

01:24:37   Right, like I don't want my professional workstation, you know, $5,000 end up dollar computer to

01:24:44   be operating very close to its thermal limits from day one. Because, especially since I

01:24:50   can't service anything, because what that tells me is I don't think this is going to

01:24:54   last as long as a tower. And my current iMac I think has similar issues. I think that just

01:25:00   inherent in the iMac design that like,

01:25:03   when you constrain things with thermals,

01:25:05   things don't last reliably as long.

01:25:07   Simple as that.

01:25:08   That's been the case for all computer hardware forever.

01:25:10   When you can give them more thermal headroom,

01:25:13   they last longer and they run more reliably

01:25:16   and they run more gracefully under load.

01:25:18   And it's important to say what you just said

01:25:19   because like we still don't know.

01:25:20   We haven't used this yet.

01:25:22   None of us have one.

01:25:23   We haven't used it and the reviews have not been very clear

01:25:25   about load and thermals and noise and everything else.

01:25:29   But that is a major concern for me at least,

01:25:32   that they crammed all this stuff into a case

01:25:34   that was never designed to handle it,

01:25:36   and even though they did a lot of work

01:25:37   on the cooling system and redesigning the internals

01:25:40   and everything, it was still a case that was not designed

01:25:44   for 500 watt workstation grade components inside.

01:25:46   So that's my main concern is like,

01:25:48   is this really going to last?

01:25:49   And as I mentioned a few months ago I think,

01:25:51   I'm not sure I want to spend $6,000 on a great computer

01:25:57   that is gonna be really flaky in three years.

01:25:59   - You'll just sell it before then anyway, so.

01:26:02   - Maybe, but I don't sell desktops that often.

01:26:05   I mean, look, I'm still using my 2014 iMac now.

01:26:08   And so I really, like seeing the reviews of this,

01:26:11   I really want one, I really, really do,

01:26:13   because I really want a speed upgrade.

01:26:17   I do so much parallel work that would benefit

01:26:20   from those new cores, so, so much.

01:26:23   I really want the Black Trackpad.

01:26:25   Your compiling would probably benefit from both the faster disks and the, well I don't

01:26:30   know if the disks are faster in random seeks because I haven't seen that, but like I like

01:26:34   the disk subsystem I think is getting short shrift here because first of all the disk

01:26:37   subsystem in the, I think the 2016 and 2017s was much faster than it was before.

01:26:43   People don't, you know, for large data transfers like if you know, if you're doing like video

01:26:47   or something like that, and again I don't know how it is for random access with a bunch

01:26:50   of small files and stuff, but I love seeing stuff like that because people don't think

01:26:53   it's got an SSD and they think SSD equals SSD equals SSD but as these get

01:26:58   faster and part of the advantages of buying expensive for hardware is it

01:27:01   should have the fastest SSD on the fastest interface and so the numbers

01:27:05   coming out of us is like three gigs per second read and write sustained through

01:27:10   the internal storage and that's great that is better than that's better than

01:27:14   Casey's a little MacBook adorable right a lot better and that's exactly they

01:27:18   both have SSDs aren't they the same speed they are not right that's what I

01:27:21   I want out of a pro machine and that's you know this machine for like

01:27:24   Processing 8k video and stuff like that that's a lot of data to move on and off the disk and into and out of RAM and

01:27:30   So you know all thumbs up on that

01:27:33   That that's one of the things that's attracting me to the machine the reason

01:27:37   I think that for so many applications like the very fastest Mac that Apple sells

01:27:41   Maybe you won't make everything that you do faster, especially if you don't take advantage of the multiple cores

01:27:46   But you know if you do stuff that that it uses lots of disk bandwidth

01:27:51   even if you don't care about the CPU cores or the GPU,

01:27:55   this is the best disk machine.

01:27:56   If you just do stuff with GPUs,

01:27:58   this is far and away gonna be the fastest GPU.

01:28:00   Even if you don't care about the cores

01:28:01   and you don't care about the disk.

01:28:02   Like there's a lot to like,

01:28:04   even if you're not gonna use every aspect of this computer.

01:28:06   And yeah, you have to pay for the other aspects too,

01:28:09   which is the reason people get cranky.

01:28:10   Like I just want the good GPU.

01:28:12   I don't need Xeons.

01:28:13   I don't need all this other stuff.

01:28:14   Well, you get it all, right?

01:28:15   It's expensive.

01:28:17   It's just the way it is.

01:28:18   But having to pay for it all to get a good GPU

01:28:22   is way better than literally having no option

01:28:24   except to buy a 2010 Mac Pro and a third party GPU

01:28:27   and shove it in there.

01:28:29   - Yeah, and the final thing that I worry about here

01:28:31   before anybody has one is having this much heat

01:28:35   going to be a problem for the screen.

01:28:41   You know, this iMac was designed in 2012

01:28:45   and the components behind it were 85 watt

01:28:48   to 100 watt load probably.

01:28:50   Now it can be up to 500 watt load.

01:28:52   Is having that amount of heat right up against

01:28:55   the back of the LCD panel going to be a problem

01:28:59   for the longevity and quality of the LCD panel?

01:29:02   Are you gonna develop a splotch in the right quadrant

01:29:07   near the middle where the processor is on the back?

01:29:11   I don't know.

01:29:12   How do LCDs handle very high heat

01:29:16   being generated on a component

01:29:19   that is stuck to the back of them for three years?

01:29:22   These are the kinds of things I'm worried about.

01:29:24   As this is like, I'm so excited about this machine,

01:29:25   and I'm probably gonna buy at least one,

01:29:28   but I don't know.

01:29:30   These are problems that I wouldn't worry about

01:29:31   if it was a tower,

01:29:33   and I intend to buy the tower when that comes out too.

01:29:36   The only reason I'm even talking about this now

01:29:39   is because Tiff wants me to buy this,

01:29:41   so that way I can give it to her when I get the tower.

01:29:45   So that's probably what I'm going to do,

01:29:47   but it's hard not to think about those concerns

01:29:51   when I've been a little bit burned by IMAX in the past,

01:29:55   and I've had such great experiences with the towers.

01:29:59   - You know, I'm surprised that you're harping

01:30:01   on the thermal stuff so much,

01:30:04   because it seems to me like Apple's gotta know

01:30:08   what the thermal requirements for this thing are,

01:30:10   And with the trash can, yes, they designed themselves

01:30:14   into a corner in that they didn't have a lot of headroom,

01:30:16   which is what you said before,

01:30:18   but it's not like it was broken the moment it shipped.

01:30:22   And so I don't think this is gonna be any different.

01:30:25   I really don't.

01:30:25   And having seen it very briefly,

01:30:29   I saw it when we were at WWDC, as did Jon,

01:30:33   and my recollection of that brief window of time

01:30:36   I spent with it was that I could hear the fans,

01:30:39   even despite the fact that it was in a very loud demo room.

01:30:42   And they said that the fans were screaming deliberately because it was a very early pre-release

01:30:46   model and they just wanted to crank the fans up to 11 to make sure that whatever they were

01:30:52   demoing on screen, which I don't even remember anymore, didn't cause any problems.

01:30:56   And those fans, I'm sorry to report gentlemen, my recollection were they were loud.

01:31:01   Now, that doesn't mean they were going to be loud always, it doesn't mean they were

01:31:03   going to be loud every time you hit Command-R and Xcode.

01:31:07   But it certainly seemed like it was capable of moving a whole lot of air.

01:31:13   And you very well could be right.

01:31:14   I mean, obviously, all three of us are just pontificating at the moment.

01:31:17   But I would be really surprised if we see widespread thermal issues with this thing.

01:31:21   I mean, it has been extensively redesigned on the inside specifically to avoid that very

01:31:26   problem.

01:31:27   But so is the trashcan.

01:31:28   Like, and that's exactly what it had.

01:31:29   But it was maybe not from day one, but it had GPU failures due to heat, right?

01:31:33   And so that was the major and I think the only sort of systemic hardware problem with

01:31:42   the trash cans.

01:31:43   And Marco is sitting there right now in front of a computer that he says runs the GPU too

01:31:47   hot and his isn't even a pro.

01:31:49   So there's some reason to believe that Apple doesn't have the cooling stuff licked for

01:31:55   stuff stuck to the back of a monitor even if it is not really hot stuff like this.

01:31:59   So I think it is reasonable to be concerned,

01:32:01   given the recent history about this.

01:32:04   And just worry, we don't know, we'll find out, right?

01:32:07   But the problem with this is,

01:32:09   the only real way to find out is to be like me

01:32:11   and be like, I'm not gonna buy one of these

01:32:13   for the first two years just to find out what the deal is.

01:32:15   But you can't do that.

01:32:17   If you want one on day one,

01:32:18   you kind of have to pull the trigger

01:32:20   and say whether, are you gonna buy it

01:32:23   or are you not gonna buy it?

01:32:23   And that's where the worry comes in.

01:32:25   'Cause you won't have time if you're gonna buy it

01:32:27   when it comes out within the first month or two,

01:32:30   you won't have time to see in six months

01:32:31   does everyone fire all their GPUs or not.

01:32:33   So you just kinda gotta cross your fingers

01:32:35   or be prepared to sell it to somebody else

01:32:39   or do what Marco's gonna do,

01:32:41   which may end up working out,

01:32:42   which is Marco gets the computer,

01:32:44   he stresses all the CPU cores,

01:32:47   encoding MP3s and compiling stuff,

01:32:49   and then he passes off to Tiff and she stresses the GPU

01:32:52   but leaves the CPU alone

01:32:53   because she's just playing games on it.

01:32:54   and doing Photoshop stuff, which is also all GPU stuff.

01:32:57   - Yeah.

01:32:58   So you'll spread the heat,

01:33:00   so you get a splotch on one side of the screen,

01:33:02   and then a splotch in the other.

01:33:03   (laughing)

01:33:03   - It'll even out over time.

01:33:04   (laughing)

01:33:06   Yeah, I really hope that it's good,

01:33:08   because all the reviews are very, very positive,

01:33:12   and these are still, these are very early reviews,

01:33:14   but they're very promising,

01:33:16   and quite how universally positive they are.

01:33:19   And man, Skylake Xeons are awesome,

01:33:24   according to these reviews.

01:33:26   This is a big deal on the processor front

01:33:29   because the 10 core version that they've seen

01:33:33   of the reviewers seems to have 10 cores

01:33:36   without a significant single core performance penalty.

01:33:39   Like in the previous generation--

01:33:41   - That was a little penalty.

01:33:42   It was a little bit slower than--

01:33:43   - It's slightly slower single core than the newest iMac

01:33:47   at the top spec, but barely.

01:33:51   And it's obviously way faster and multi-threaded.

01:33:53   And so the real promise is supposedly that the 18 also doesn't take a small hit, because

01:33:58   it used to be like, yeah, you take a little hit, but then when you go up to whatever the

01:34:01   maximum core count is, you take a pretty significant hit in a single core.

01:34:04   And so the theory with these is that the 10 core takes a little hit, the 18 core will

01:34:08   be similar performance to the 10 core in single-threaded.

01:34:11   So it's like you're not, you don't have to make this horrible choice between, well, if

01:34:15   I want awesome performance in my parallel tasks, I have to give up in single-threaded.

01:34:19   You just give up a tiny bit and it doesn't get worse as you go up in core.

01:34:22   We'll see if that's true, but that's the pitch.

01:34:25   - The main concerns for most people here,

01:34:27   when they see this, are price and lack of upgradeability,

01:34:31   and those are very valid concerns.

01:34:32   But it's a very, very good value

01:34:35   for what you get for workstation parts.

01:34:38   A lot of people look at the Pro line,

01:34:39   as Jon said earlier, because they want

01:34:41   a really good GPU for gaming, say.

01:34:44   But that's never been what the Mac Pro's been very good at.

01:34:46   You could do that with it,

01:34:48   but it was a pretty inefficient way to do that,

01:34:50   price-wise and sometimes even performance-wise.

01:34:54   You know, you can get GPUs that are pretty decent

01:34:57   for gaming, but that's not why they're selling them here

01:35:00   and they don't expect people to buy it for that reason

01:35:03   and when you compare it to the price

01:35:05   of just building a gaming PC,

01:35:07   which Jon should have done years ago,

01:35:08   it's not even close.

01:35:10   And PC people and Mac people who just wanna play games

01:35:14   look at this and say, "Look, I could build a gaming PC

01:35:16   "for way less money."

01:35:17   And that's true, but you wouldn't put a Z on it

01:35:20   and you wouldn't have a wonderful Apple 5K display

01:35:22   in front of it, and you wouldn't have ECC RAM,

01:35:25   and workstation class other stuff,

01:35:27   and the workstation class SSD,

01:35:30   you wouldn't have all that stuff.

01:35:32   So when you actually go to Dell or HP or somebody

01:35:36   and spec out workstation grade components

01:35:38   in a workstation that match the components in this

01:35:41   that are actually like a Xeon with the same core count

01:35:44   and a workstation GPU and workstation grade SSD

01:35:47   that's super fast, if you can even get them to give you one,

01:35:49   it's actually pretty competitively priced.

01:35:51   From what we know so far, again,

01:35:53   we don't know the pricing of the upgrades yet,

01:35:54   but the base price and what you get in the base model,

01:35:57   it's actually pretty reasonably priced it seems.

01:35:59   If you are looking, and if you spec up an iMac,

01:36:01   as I said, if you spec up a regular iMac

01:36:04   into this territory of performance and capacity

01:36:06   and everything, you're already getting to about 4,000.

01:36:09   So to get double the cores for 5,000 is not unreasonable,

01:36:14   I don't think, in addition to all the other upgrades.

01:36:16   So value, I think, from what we know so far,

01:36:20   it's probably fine.

01:36:22   Lack of upgradability is a big thing,

01:36:24   but I think this is just the era in which we live now.

01:36:27   I think the reality, our laptops, again,

01:36:29   haven't been upgradable for years,

01:36:31   for five years for most people.

01:36:32   They haven't been upgradable meaningfully, if at all.

01:36:35   And this is just the world we live in now.

01:36:38   The reality is upgrades have been getting fewer and fewer,

01:36:42   they've been getting increasingly problematic,

01:36:45   like Casey has with his RAM,

01:36:48   because as things get super advanced,

01:36:50   they also tend to get more picky and more specialized,

01:36:52   and it's harder to find and make third-party stuff

01:36:54   that actually works.

01:36:55   Look how long it takes people to make third-party things

01:36:58   for the custom Apple SSD modules in a lot of laptops

01:37:01   and many of the recent desktops.

01:37:04   It's just things are getting more advanced,

01:37:06   more specialized, more integrated.

01:37:08   So I think the era of upgradability

01:37:11   is really pretty much over for most computer things.

01:37:15   And I say this not happily because I always did that.

01:37:19   I participated very heavily in that.

01:37:21   I would always buy my laptops with base configuration

01:37:25   and then spec them up with third-party parts to save money

01:37:27   and to get bigger capacities and stuff

01:37:30   and upgrade down the road with an SSD

01:37:31   to make it faster and everything.

01:37:33   And that was a great time for a long time,

01:37:35   but I think the time is over.

01:37:37   The technology has moved on, the market has moved on,

01:37:40   and I think very few people

01:37:42   really even would do that anymore,

01:37:44   even if they could, and additionally, now you can't.

01:37:49   So it kind of closes the door on that.

01:37:51   And I think rather than hoping to go back to the time

01:37:55   where you could buy John's Mac Pro in 2008

01:37:57   and keep it running all this time

01:37:59   with just occasional upgrades

01:38:00   of relatively inexpensive parts,

01:38:02   we're not going back to that time.

01:38:04   Like we can't, the parts now are too specialized, too good.

01:38:08   Even John's computer, you could never upgrade the processors.

01:38:11   You could never upgrade the motherboard

01:38:12   and make it a faster bus or anything.

01:38:14   You just can't do that.

01:38:15   - Can't you do the CPUs of mine?

01:38:16   I think you can.

01:38:17   - Well, you can, but only within a range of like,

01:38:19   the three that were available at that time.

01:38:22   Like you can't put in a new Xeon into your motherboard.

01:38:26   Intel changes the socket like every two years.

01:38:28   - Yeah, there was a long stretch though

01:38:30   where they kept the socket the same.

01:38:31   It's not my model year, I think.

01:38:33   Well, maybe actually it was a 2009.

01:38:34   Someone recently posted a YouTube video.

01:38:36   I think they were doing a 2009

01:38:38   and they just upgraded the heck out of it

01:38:39   to basically the fastest CPUs that still fit in the socket

01:38:42   and all the other stuff fast.

01:38:43   and it wasn't super impressive, but it was pretty neat.

01:38:45   It was mostly interesting just to watch

01:38:47   exactly what it takes to do that.

01:38:49   If I can find the link, I'll throw it in the notes.

01:38:51   But yeah, you're right, eventually they change the socket

01:38:53   and then you're out of that business.

01:38:54   - Or even just the new ones require a certain type

01:38:57   of bus speed or RAM type or Northbridge

01:38:59   that yours doesn't have, stuff like that.

01:39:02   The requirements change even if the socket doesn't change.

01:39:05   Usually you can't meaningfully upgrade your processor

01:39:08   after it's being sold.

01:39:11   So the era of upgradeability has been fading for a long time

01:39:16   and I think it's very well over now.

01:39:19   It's very, very clearly over.

01:39:20   And so rather than hoping to go back to a time

01:39:23   that we're never gonna go back to,

01:39:25   a more productive approach now would just be like,

01:39:28   figure out how to operate in this new environment

01:39:31   and base your purchases accordingly.

01:39:33   So if you're concerned about running the same computer

01:39:37   for 10 years, well, you're gonna take a big risk on that.

01:39:39   It might break after year five and require a repair

01:39:42   that is gonna be more than it's worth

01:39:44   or it won't even be available anymore.

01:39:46   So my approach to this is I have just gotten accustomed

01:39:51   to selling computers after three years of using them

01:39:54   or sometimes less.

01:39:55   I buy AppleCare if I'm concerned about service costs.

01:40:01   I don't buy it on phones, as I mentioned,

01:40:02   because that's not for me, but for Macs,

01:40:06   I sometimes do buy it depending on pricing

01:40:08   and concerns at the time.

01:40:10   Once a Mac is out of AppleCare coverage,

01:40:13   I don't want it anymore, so I try to sell it before that.

01:40:16   Currently I'm using my iMac, that just left its warranty,

01:40:21   and this is very unusual for me, I don't usually do this.

01:40:24   But the new world where nothing is upgradeable

01:40:27   might require you to either buy less perfect

01:40:32   and less expensive gear more frequently than you used to,

01:40:37   and/or get used to selling it, which is not great,

01:40:41   it's not fun and it's not particularly profitable.

01:40:44   But you don't have to run everything

01:40:47   into the ground necessarily.

01:40:48   If you want super high-end stuff,

01:40:50   the old way was buy something high-end

01:40:53   and just upgrade it every 18 months

01:40:55   until something better came out

01:40:56   that you could upgrade the whole thing to.

01:40:58   The new way is you can't do that anymore.

01:41:00   You can just buy something new every three years

01:41:03   or two years or four years and sell the old one

01:41:06   while it's still worth something.

01:41:08   This isn't a great solution for everybody,

01:41:12   but we don't have any choice.

01:41:14   The world of upgradeability is gone for Macs

01:41:17   and even many PCs.

01:41:18   So that world is beyond us now.

01:41:21   So it's worth, rather than dwelling on this too much

01:41:25   and trying to fight this fight forever,

01:41:28   it's worth just figuring out

01:41:29   how can you operate in the new world?

01:41:32   - It's coming back for the Mac Pro though,

01:41:34   even if it's just GPU upgradeability.

01:41:35   I'm holding that hope.

01:41:37   - You know, again, we still don't know

01:41:38   anything about the Mac Pro.

01:41:40   - And I wanna emphasize, the GPU,

01:41:42   I mean, it's not just important for me.

01:41:44   Like the GPU is the, I think the most critical,

01:41:46   just because GPUs get so much better year over year

01:41:49   because of the inherent parallelism of their task

01:41:51   that all they can basically, you know,

01:41:53   as soon as there's a shrink,

01:41:54   they can fit more execution units.

01:41:56   And because the problem is so parallel,

01:41:58   like you actually get a win for that.

01:42:00   So they are still on that crazy path

01:42:01   where, you know, year after year,

01:42:03   They just get faster roughly in pace with transistor density.

01:42:07   There's a little bit of a problem with RAM and bandwidth and stuff like that, but in

01:42:12   general their speed increases year over year are so big that if you are not on that train,

01:42:17   if you can't participate in that train and you're doing something that is GPU intensive,

01:42:21   even if it's not gaming, whatever it may be, something GPU intensive involving video or

01:42:25   whatever, it's like you have to throw out the whole machine because eventually two years

01:42:29   later the GPUs are four times as fast and you're just left in the dust.

01:42:32   you have to be able to upgrade the GPU,

01:42:34   so please, Apple, make a machine

01:42:37   where you can upgrade the GPU.

01:42:38   Just one, just one, make it really expensive,

01:42:40   but yeah, you gotta do it, please.

01:42:42   - I mean, I'll just point out that

01:42:44   when Apple had the Mac Pro Roundtable

01:42:46   and they announced that a new Mac Pro will exist sometime,

01:42:49   not in 2017, they never said upgradable.

01:42:53   They said modular.

01:42:54   - I know, I know. - That's a very

01:42:55   different thing. - I'm just saying,

01:42:56   I'm just hoping, I'm just holding out hope.

01:42:58   It's not founded on anything other than

01:43:01   - Just process of elimination of like,

01:43:03   how could you differentiate from the iMac Pro?

01:43:06   Yeah, the screen will be separate,

01:43:08   so that's the modular part, right?

01:43:10   Also, it could be upgradeable.

01:43:13   - It could be.

01:43:14   - It could.

01:43:14   - Some part of it.

01:43:15   - I'm just trying to do my hopes up,

01:43:17   because this is still Apple, and modern Apple at that.

01:43:22   And so the chances of it being that upgradeable, if at all,

01:43:27   I would not consider that a sure thing.

01:43:31   If you're looking at the iMac Pro and you're thinking,

01:43:33   oh, I wanna hold it for the Mac Pro

01:43:34   because it'll be upgradable,

01:43:36   I would not consider that a safe assumption.

01:43:38   It might be upgradable, but modular simply means

01:43:42   you will probably be able to configure it

01:43:43   with lots of different configurations up front.

01:43:46   The iMac Pro comes with one CPU and one GPU,

01:43:51   and they're both within a certain range of options here.

01:43:54   Maybe the Mac Pro will let you pick two CPUs or two GPUs

01:43:59   or one CPU and three GPUs, I don't know.

01:44:02   Like, that's modular.

01:44:04   It doesn't mean any of this stuff is upgradeable necessarily.

01:44:07   It might be upgradeable,

01:44:08   but we have no indication that it will be.

01:44:11   And I would certainly not bet on it.

01:44:14   But anyway, the other point is that with the Mac Pro,

01:44:18   we don't actually know when it's coming.

01:44:20   All Apple said was, "Not in 2017."

01:44:23   It might be 2018.

01:44:25   - It could arrive the first day of 2018.

01:44:27   - And so as soon as 2017 ends,

01:44:28   any day could be Mac Pro Day.

01:44:30   - Yeah, New Year's Day.

01:44:32   - God help for the next decade,

01:44:33   any day could be Mac Pro Day.

01:44:34   - Yeah, or it could come out in 2025.

01:44:38   Or it could come out, never.

01:44:40   They could just change their mind and say,

01:44:41   "You know what, actually, we're not gonna do it anymore."

01:44:43   Like, it's not even a sure thing that's going to exist.

01:44:45   - What it means is that every day you wake up

01:44:48   in 2018 and later, could be Mac Pro Day.

01:44:50   (laughing)

01:44:53   - This is like Casey's doom, like,

01:44:55   Do you like, worrying every week

01:44:57   that the Mac Pro will be announced and released?

01:44:59   - I mean, realistically speaking, we know,

01:45:01   it's like we're all waiting for WWDC

01:45:03   and if they miss next year,

01:45:04   then we're waiting for next year's WWDC.

01:45:05   So we do have some thing to hang our hat on.

01:45:08   - Yeah, but the Mac Pro could come New Year's Day

01:45:12   or it could come in June or it could come in December

01:45:16   or it could come in 2019.

01:45:18   So for anybody deciding whether to buy an iMac Pro,

01:45:22   if you're at all on the fence

01:45:24   about whether you might want a Mac Pro instead?

01:45:27   - Yeah, just buy it and sell it like Marco.

01:45:30   - Well, yeah, 'cause it's like you don't really know

01:45:32   when it's coming or even, again,

01:45:34   you don't even really know if the Mac Pro is coming.

01:45:37   Like, yes, Apple's had their working on it,

01:45:39   but things could change over time, you never know.

01:45:41   Like, until it's actually out,

01:45:44   you can't guarantee that it will be available.

01:45:46   Like, you can't guarantee this thing will exist.

01:45:48   And because we don't know anything about it,

01:45:51   or even when or if it's coming out,

01:45:53   then I think if you are really tempted by the iMac Pro,

01:45:57   and you're not patient, and you need to buy something soon,

01:46:01   and you really can't wait until June

01:46:04   just to see if it all comes out by then,

01:46:06   then this isn't a bad option.

01:46:08   I have a feeling, my prediction here

01:46:11   of what's going to happen here,

01:46:13   the iMac Pro is probably going to be so good,

01:46:17   and it's probably going to satisfy so many Pro needs,

01:46:20   that when the Mac Pro does finally come out,

01:46:23   it's going to sell really badly.

01:46:26   And then Apple will use that as justification

01:46:30   to really finally kill it.

01:46:33   I expect the next Mac Pro

01:46:35   to be a single release product line.

01:46:38   I don't expect it to ever get another update

01:46:40   after its initial release

01:46:41   because I don't think it's going to sell well.

01:46:44   And I say that not happily because I want that computer,

01:46:48   but the iMac Pro I think is going to solve

01:46:51   so many pro needs for so many people,

01:46:54   possibly even me, it's going to be good enough.

01:46:58   It's also, and the timing of this is also

01:47:00   going to exacerbate this, where people who have been dying

01:47:04   for a high-end Mac Pro update for the last three years,

01:47:08   they're gonna be, like a lot of that demand

01:47:11   is gonna go to the iMac Pro simply because it's out first.

01:47:15   And so then when the Mac Pro comes out

01:47:17   with probably the same generation components,

01:47:20   at least the same generation of processors.

01:47:21   Maybe GPUs will have a small update by then,

01:47:23   but when the Mac Pro comes out, say, in six months,

01:47:26   with the same generation stuff at a higher price point

01:47:29   after so many people have had six months

01:47:32   to just buy the iMac instead,

01:47:35   I really don't think it's gonna sell very well.

01:47:37   - Well, the 8K screen will be a big draw.

01:47:40   - We'll have to see.

01:47:41   Honestly, I do wonder if they're gonna do an 8K screen,

01:47:44   'cause all they said was they're doing a Pro display.

01:47:46   They didn't say what size or anything about it.

01:47:48   - I'm a little more optimistic about upgradeable GPUs

01:47:50   than I am about the 8K screen, but we'll see.

01:47:52   - Yeah, so all this is to say,

01:47:55   if you're thinking about buying this,

01:47:58   but you are making an assumption about the next Mac Pro,

01:48:02   really question that assumption.

01:48:04   First of all, can you just wait and see?

01:48:08   If you can wait and see, wait and see,

01:48:10   but you don't know how long that wait's going to be.

01:48:12   (laughs)

01:48:14   And then secondly, is what you're waiting for

01:48:17   actually going to happen?

01:48:18   do we actually know that?

01:48:20   Is it likely to happen?

01:48:21   Have they said anything about it?

01:48:23   And chances are the answer to all those things

01:48:24   is we don't know or no.

01:48:26   Ultimately, I have a feeling this is the new Mac Pro

01:48:30   in practice, whether they release it next summer

01:48:32   that nobody buys or not, that's a different story.

01:48:34   But I think we're going to look back on this point

01:48:37   in Apple history when we're all even older men

01:48:39   in a few years on this podcast, hopefully,

01:48:43   talking about, oh, remember when the iMac Pro came out

01:48:46   when the Mac Pro became an iMac, basically,

01:48:49   I think this is the new line of Mac Pros for the long term.

01:48:53   - I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

01:48:56   - It might not be.

01:48:57   - We have a lot more to discuss about this,

01:48:59   but we have gone long,

01:49:01   and we have an interesting holiday schedule

01:49:03   coming up very, very soon,

01:49:04   so I think we should probably just stop here.

01:49:07   And we will talk next week about the press tour with this,

01:49:11   and we'll talk next week about the new, interesting

01:49:15   hardware and encryption sort of things.

01:49:17   What is it, the T2 chip, is that right?

01:49:19   - And there's all sorts of cool stuff in there.

01:49:21   - Yeah, so we have plenty more to say,

01:49:24   and as much as I joke, I'm actually pretty interested

01:49:26   to talk about some of this stuff,

01:49:27   so we will save that for next week.

01:49:30   - Thank you to our sponsors this week,

01:49:31   Betterment, Hover, and Fracture,

01:49:33   and we will see you next week.

01:49:35   (upbeat music)

01:49:38   ♪ Now the show is over ♪

01:49:40   ♪ They didn't even mean to begin ♪

01:49:43   'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

01:49:49   John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:49:53   'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

01:49:59   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:50:04   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them

01:50:09   C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, N-T-Marco-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C, U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A.

01:50:25   It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Tech podcast so long.

01:50:37   (groaning)

01:50:39   - So Casey, do you want us to talk even more

01:50:41   about the Mac Pro?

01:50:42   - About the Mac Pro, no.

01:50:43   About the iMac Pro, eh, whatever, that's fine.

01:50:46   - If you look at what this iMac Pro is,

01:50:50   versus what the 2013 Mac Pro was,

01:50:53   and technically still is, this is a Mac Pro.

01:50:56   It just happens to have a screen glued to the front of it.

01:50:59   But it's really no less upgradeable

01:51:02   than the 2013 Mac Pro was.

01:51:04   It's way faster in every way.

01:51:06   It has more options, bigger, you know,

01:51:08   it's, and it supports desktop retina correctly.

01:51:11   - I think RAM and SSD upgrade,

01:51:13   I think it's not really more,

01:51:15   RAM and SSD upgrade, that's a lot.

01:51:17   Like it was so easy to take,

01:51:18   it was so easy to take the top off the trashcan.

01:51:20   It comes right off, just a little,

01:51:22   comes right off and right there in front of you,

01:51:24   totally reachable, is the SSD and the RAM.

01:51:28   That's a big deal. - Was the SSD actually,

01:51:29   let me, I'm loose, does anybody see someone?

01:51:30   - Pretty sure, it was just on the outside

01:51:32   of one of the boards, you can just yank it out of the slot,

01:51:34   put another one in.

01:51:35   - Let's see, oh yeah, they do sell one.

01:51:37   Yeah, Mac Pro 2013.

01:51:38   - At this point, I would do that for my wife's iMac.

01:51:43   I wish I could upgrade the SSD right now

01:51:45   because I would pay for a two terabyte one.

01:51:47   - It's $1,200. (laughs)

01:51:51   For two terabytes. - For a two terabyte SSD?

01:51:53   Well, I would buy a third party one, obviously.

01:51:54   - No, this is third party, this is from OWC.

01:51:57   - That's for the Mac Pro, though.

01:51:58   I'm assuming it's not the same thing in the iMac.

01:52:01   - No, you're right, in the iMac it's probably different.

01:52:03   But anyway, for all intents and purposes,

01:52:05   Like if Apple came out and said, this is the Mac Pro now,

01:52:10   like if they didn't pre-announce the existence

01:52:12   of a new modular one next year or not this year,

01:52:15   we would grumble for a few weeks

01:52:17   about how it wasn't upgradable.

01:52:19   - I would grumble forever.

01:52:20   - Yeah, I was gonna say a few weeks is when--

01:52:22   - You know why I would grumble forever?

01:52:23   - You're gonna grumble forever no matter what they release.

01:52:25   - No, the reason I would grumble forever

01:52:27   hasn't had anything to do with almost anything we discussed

01:52:29   except for one part, the fact that things

01:52:31   might be downclocked.

01:52:32   'Cause the whole point of the top line of the computer

01:52:34   to be the fastest it can be.

01:52:35   And so don't take the world's fastest parts and then downclock them.

01:52:38   Right?

01:52:39   That's the biggest thing.

01:52:41   You need to have a world's fastest Mac that is not intentionally hobbled by some stupidity.

01:52:46   Now if they changed the iMac Pro to not do that and to run all the parts at their maximum

01:52:50   speed to get the highest binned parts from all the manufacturers, right, and run them

01:52:55   at their high binned speed, then yeah, I would be less grumbly.

01:52:59   But if this specific one with its rumored downclocked parts, that cannot be your top-of-the-line

01:53:04   computer because it's so it's it's like it's like you know this is this is our

01:53:08   top-of-the-line car it's you know it's the the the accurate NSX right but we've

01:53:13   detuned the engine by putting a restrictive exhaust on it so we've cut

01:53:17   off 100 horsepower that's just sitting there like what are you what are you

01:53:20   even doing but you could make that argument for everything though you can

01:53:24   make that argument for any car everyone every freaking car is an aftermarket

01:53:27   exhaust yeah car it cars a bad example but but for silicon parts like they've

01:53:32   bin to a certain clock speed and the more expensive ones are the ones that can go faster,

01:53:37   right? And to not run them at their top speed or to buy slower speed chips because you can't

01:53:43   cool them, you've made a bad top end computer then. Like you're leaving money on the table.

01:53:48   Like you're charging enough money that you could put in the top end part, but instead

01:53:53   you buy the slower one. Or worse, you buy the top bin one but don't run it at its maximum

01:53:57   clock speed. That is just an embarrassment. You can't do that. You gotta have a fastest

01:54:02   computer with all the fastest stuff. That's the whole point of the top of your line is

01:54:05   to be the top of your line.

01:54:09   I think you're getting a little overly worked up. If some GPU is running at 90% of its maximum

01:54:16   capacity, who cares?

01:54:17   What are you leaving that 10% there for?

01:54:20   Who cares? It's still infinitely better.

01:54:24   People who want the very fastest computer are willing to pay for it. That's who cares.

01:54:27   That is, but by definition, Jon, that is the fastest computer.

01:54:31   This is all bold because it's hypothetical, but like, in this hypothetical world, that

01:54:35   is the fastest computer that Apple sells.

01:54:38   There is no other discussion to be had.

01:54:40   Yeah, I know, but like, but it's not, it's, you know what I mean.

01:54:43   Like, it's like saying whatever Mac, Apple, if the fastest computer they sold was the

01:54:47   adorable, it's like, but that is the fastest, you would know that it is possible to make

01:54:50   a faster one by doing obvious things, right?

01:54:53   You enjoy your PC then.

01:54:55   Like what do you, what do you really-

01:54:56   I'm with Jon on this, because the role of it is to be the top.

01:55:00   Haven't you read my case for the true Mac Pro successor?

01:55:03   Like, this is the whole point of your top-of-the-line computer, right?

01:55:06   I mean, yes. I'm not arguing that there should be a top-of-the-line computer.

01:55:10   I'm not arguing that it should be really damn fast.

01:55:13   But if you're worried about a processor being 4 GHz instead of 4.1, like, who cares?

01:55:19   It's still...

01:55:20   People who buy this computer care. That's who cares.

01:55:22   Like, because I'm not saying like,

01:55:24   oh, you have to do something magical

01:55:25   to make it faster than everybody else.

01:55:27   But like, don't take a part that runs at 4.1

01:55:29   and run it at four.

01:55:31   Why?

01:55:31   Like, why, oh, we had to do that

01:55:33   to fit it into the thermal envelope.

01:55:34   And it gets back to what Marco and I were talking about.

01:55:36   Who's asking you to fit it in the skinny case

01:55:39   versus who is asking you to get the fastest

01:55:41   that everyone can buy?

01:55:41   People buy whole new computers for a 10% speed bump

01:55:44   to things that they do, right?

01:55:46   They say, my computer is too slow.

01:55:47   If I get 10 to 20% improvement on this,

01:55:49   it makes a difference in my workday,

01:55:51   in my compile cycle, in my render time, in my whatever, right?

01:55:55   They'll buy a whole new computer for a double digit percentage speed increase.

01:55:59   And you're saying I'm willing to leave double digit speed increase on the table so I can

01:56:02   fit it into a skinny case that's not what I'm asking for.

01:56:04   So that's why I'm saying I would grumble forever about this because it is a wrongheaded thing

01:56:08   to say we're going to make the fastest computer we can for our most demanding users, but we're

01:56:12   going to do a super obvious thing that makes it slower in some small way.

01:56:16   But so you're out you keep asking who cares I'm telling you who cares you don't care, but I care

01:56:23   [BEEPING]

01:56:26   [ Silence ]