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195: The Show Must Go On

 

00:00:00   My kids were refusing to eat the purple potatoes, so I made them do blind taste tests and they

00:00:03   couldn't tell the difference.

00:00:04   I'm like, "Ha!

00:00:05   Eat your stupid potatoes.

00:00:06   It's not burned, it's purple.

00:00:07   Just eat it."

00:00:08   [Music]

00:00:09   So, as chief summarizer in chief, that job is usually quite delightful, but on rare occasions,

00:00:17   it is anything but delightful.

00:00:21   And we are recording the night of November 9th, 2016.

00:00:25   night, our country made a very peculiar choice that none of the three of us agree with. And

00:00:34   we were debating what to do about the presidential election and how we should handle it and what

00:00:39   we should say about it, what we should talk about. And the conclusion the three of us

00:00:44   came to is we wanted to acknowledge that it is a thing and it happened and we're upset.

00:00:51   But otherwise, carry on.

00:00:54   It's gonna do me some good to forget about this for a little while.

00:00:58   I think it's gonna do you guys some good to forget about this for a while.

00:01:02   And genuinely, no snark intended, it's our hope that it'll do you, the listener, some

00:01:07   good to not think about that for a little while.

00:01:11   I'm upset, I'm frustrated, and I'm angry, but really, I'm gonna get over these Mac Pros

00:01:17   soon, or the MacBook Pros soon.

00:01:19   I ruined my own joke.

00:01:20   that's how upset and angry I am.

00:01:22   - We're off?

00:01:23   - Yeah, we're gonna totally fix that in post.

00:01:25   But anyway, but no, seriously though,

00:01:28   all kidding aside, we're all frustrated, we're all upset,

00:01:31   and I'll give you guys a chance to weigh in

00:01:32   if you have anything to add,

00:01:33   but it's gonna be business as usual around here,

00:01:35   and we're gonna try our best to just move along.

00:01:39   - Yeah, and I do wanna clarify,

00:01:40   like, you know, we're not, I'm not for a second

00:01:43   going to forget that this just happened,

00:01:45   and I'm not going to pretend that it didn't happen,

00:01:48   I'm not going to forget what this means,

00:01:51   what this signifies to so many Americans.

00:01:53   This is not going to be forgotten at all.

00:01:57   But we have a tech show to do,

00:01:59   so we're gonna do the tech show.

00:02:01   And hopefully that can help us and our listeners

00:02:05   temporarily get a reprieve from what has happened.

00:02:08   - Yeah, the show must go on, as they say.

00:02:10   We've talked about this before.

00:02:11   We will touch on social topics as they intersect with tech,

00:02:15   and this potentially intersects with everything,

00:02:17   but I think this falls more into the category

00:02:19   of what we mentioned on a past show,

00:02:21   that if something really big happens,

00:02:22   it would be weird if we didn't acknowledge it,

00:02:24   but by the same token,

00:02:25   especially with how all three of us are feeling today

00:02:27   and how a lot of our listeners are feeling today,

00:02:30   the overwhelming consensus is

00:02:33   we just want to do a regular show as a brief respite

00:02:36   from what we've all been dealing with today

00:02:39   and will be dealing with going forward.

00:02:40   So there you have it.

00:02:42   Yeah.

00:02:43   - So let's start with some follow-up.

00:02:45   Isiko writes in to say, "Apple did not ship an eDRAM/IrisPro Skylake on the 15-inch MacBook.

00:02:53   It is HD 530."

00:02:56   We're talking about video cards, is that right?

00:02:57   Yeah, that was in my reference to what I was talking about on a past show where I said

00:03:02   that Apple kind of puts itself in a difficult position by demanding the highest and fanciest

00:03:08   version of all the chips, especially with the biggest GPU embedded in them.

00:03:11   It would be better if they went with wimpier chips and just used the discrete, but that's

00:03:14   what they actually did on the 15-inch.

00:03:15   I mean, it's not wimpy, the HD 3530 is one of the better ones, but it's not the one with

00:03:20   the embedded DRAM and the Irish Pro things.

00:03:23   And no, I'm not saying "Irish Pro," which is what everyone hears and probably what I

00:03:26   say half the time, but I'm trying to say "Iris Pro," but it's difficult.

00:03:31   Goodness.

00:03:32   All right, moving along.

00:03:35   The touch bar apparently registers past the screen area, particularly on the left-hand

00:03:41   side where the escape key—well, I guess it's not a key anymore. The escape button would be—can

00:03:46   we talk about how we know this or should we not talk about how we know this?

00:03:51   There was a French website that posted something that someone, a listener, translated for me.

00:03:56   But the—this is when we were discussing, like, it's a shame that they didn't have the touch

00:04:01   bar go all the way to the left because you can reach the upper left-hand corner and feel for it.

00:04:07   but that part is not screen. We knew that for a fact from day one, that part is not a screen,

00:04:12   you can't draw the escape button up against the left end of the bar. The question was,

00:04:16   all right, so there's no image there, but is it touch sensitive? And the answer is,

00:04:20   it's about half touch sensitive. Like, so if you just take the blank space where you can't show

00:04:24   any pixels on the left side of the touch bar and divide it in half vertically, the left half of it

00:04:30   does nothing. You hit it, doesn't do anything, it's not touch sensitive, it's not pressure sensitive,

00:04:34   of doesn't light up or anything. The right half of the blank region doesn't

00:04:37   light up but does register your touch in some way and because it's about the

00:04:41   width of your finger you can pretty much take your finger and jam it on the left

00:04:45   side of the touch bar and it will activate the escape key. In fact it will

00:04:48   activate the escape key even if no part of your finger is actually touching any

00:04:51   of the pixels that make up the escape key or the picture of the escape key or

00:04:55   whatever. So it's kind of a weird compromise like they almost got it to go

00:04:58   edge to edge but not quite and I guess maybe when iFixit does a teardown

00:05:01   maybe they'll figure out why, like how do the touch sensors extend that far, how far

00:05:06   does the screen go, and so on and so forth.

00:05:10   Have either of you done with the simulated touch bar on an iPad yet?

00:05:14   No.

00:05:15   Have you seen that app that does that?

00:05:16   Yeah, but it's the wrong size, isn't it?

00:05:18   So it doesn't seem like it would be much of a test of anything.

00:05:21   It's interesting, like I ran that way yesterday for a while while I was working, and it's

00:05:25   actually kind of interesting.

00:05:27   I guess we'll put the link in the show notes, I forget the URL offhand, but Steven Trout

00:05:30   and Smith has been tweeting it a lot here and there

00:05:32   and different things.

00:05:32   And basically, you have to have Xcode,

00:05:34   you have to install the special build of 10.12.1

00:05:38   that isn't the real 10.12.1, but it's a new 10.12.1

00:05:41   with a different build number.

00:05:42   You have to download separately from those websites.

00:05:44   It's kind of a mess to get it working.

00:05:45   And then you have to get it running on an iPad,

00:05:47   which means you have to have a signing provisioning profile

00:05:49   and everything, but if you can get past all of that,

00:05:52   which is a lot, it is interesting to see.

00:05:55   And so I placed my 9.7 inch iPad Pro

00:06:00   on top of my keyboard kind of in the right spot

00:06:01   where it should be.

00:06:03   And it's interesting that like,

00:06:05   so as you mentioned, it is significantly smaller

00:06:08   than the real touch bar.

00:06:09   I've been able to estimate from pictures

00:06:11   that the real touch bar is 11 inches long

00:06:15   or 10 inches long or something like that.

00:06:16   And the iPad 9.7, the side of the screen

00:06:19   is like 7 point something inches long.

00:06:21   So it's substantially smaller.

00:06:23   And you can tell, the touch targets do feel

00:06:24   a little bit small when you run the simulator.

00:06:27   But it is really cool to see,

00:06:28   as you move throughout the OS, just to see

00:06:30   what the touch bar actually does,

00:06:32   and how it responds to different things that are available.

00:06:35   You know, as I mentioned at the end of last show,

00:06:38   this really is showing that Apple's putting

00:06:40   a lot of effort into the Mac,

00:06:42   and the Mac is not just some totally dead platform to them,

00:06:45   because they have a lot of stuff

00:06:48   built for the touch bar already.

00:06:49   Like, so much, so many of the built-in apps

00:06:52   already support the touch bar,

00:06:54   with some pretty useful stuff, like there's like one,

00:06:57   like an iTunes widget that's kind of always showing

00:07:01   whenever iTunes is doing anything.

00:07:03   It looks like a little equalizer and you can tap that

00:07:04   and it converts the whole bar into basically

00:07:07   an iTunes scrubber with a couple of play/pause buttons.

00:07:10   And you can just leave that open the whole time you're working

00:07:13   so if you like to scrub through songs

00:07:15   or to see your progress through a song,

00:07:17   which is important when you listen to such

00:07:18   incredibly lengthy songs as I do,

00:07:21   it's actually kind of nice to see.

00:07:23   And you can play with all this stuff on this iPad thing.

00:07:25   it actually works pretty well.

00:07:28   I would say if you are curious about the touch bar,

00:07:30   and if you have the patience and skill required

00:07:33   to use Xcode to open some open source thing

00:07:35   and provision it to actually run on an iPad,

00:07:38   it's kinda cool to see.

00:07:40   But again, I'm not sure I would recommend it

00:07:42   for full-time use, unless you have a 12.9 inch iPad Pro,

00:07:44   'cause that actually would be big enough, I think.

00:07:47   I think that'd be about the right size.

00:07:49   But on an iPhone 7, it's pretty tiny,

00:07:51   but it's cool to see.

00:07:52   And it works surprisingly well.

00:07:54   it's responsive, the animations are fluid.

00:07:56   It's surprisingly good for this two day old hack, basically.

00:08:01   It's pretty amazing to have this running on an iPad.

00:08:04   And I will say though, having run this

00:08:06   on this little thing above my keyboard on my desktop,

00:08:09   I think Jon's concerns last episode

00:08:12   about the ergonomics of looking up and down so far

00:08:16   between a desktop screen and the front of your keyboard

00:08:19   and that distance being way further

00:08:21   and how you adjust your eyes on a laptop,

00:08:23   that is a real problem.

00:08:26   And it's a problem enough that it's,

00:08:29   I'm not entirely sure the touch bar on desktop

00:08:32   is ever going to make a lot of sense,

00:08:34   just because that really is odd and kind of uncomfortable.

00:08:38   I will say though, that now that I've seen

00:08:41   how well this works, it is kind of an interesting idea

00:08:44   that what if Apple made an external touch bar

00:08:48   that was just it by itself

00:08:50   that didn't include a keyboard necessarily.

00:08:52   Maybe you can get a keyboard that had one with it,

00:08:54   but maybe they also sell an external one.

00:08:56   I mean, this is wishful thinking.

00:08:57   I don't think they actually would do that,

00:08:59   but once you use an iPad like this,

00:09:02   you see like, oh, this actually does work.

00:09:05   It is kind of useful,

00:09:06   and there could be something here if it was done well.

00:09:10   - Where would you put the external touch bar?

00:09:12   - Above your keyboard, same place I put mine.

00:09:14   - But that's the same problem with the whole desktop thing

00:09:16   of the focal distance change and everything.

00:09:19   What have you solved by having

00:09:20   just a random external touch bar?

00:09:22   - Well, you have quick access to,

00:09:23   you know, it's kind of like having media keys

00:09:25   on your keyboard, but on steroids.

00:09:27   - But you have to look at them.

00:09:29   - I have to look at most of my media keys

00:09:30   most of the time, too, 'cause I never remember what's what.

00:09:33   - Well, you probably just have to glance, maybe,

00:09:35   'cause you know you're going for somewhere on the middle.

00:09:38   It's different than reading and just glancing

00:09:41   to see where it is.

00:09:42   - Well, but they're always in the same spot.

00:09:44   If you use a frequent item a lot,

00:09:46   that's always gonna be right there.

00:09:48   - Yeah, as long as that app is front most.

00:09:49   That's the tricky bit.

00:09:50   How did you find that in terms of the context switching?

00:09:52   Because if you have a particular,

00:09:53   especially for media keys and stuff,

00:09:54   I'm used to hitting play/pause on my keyboard

00:09:57   to pause iTunes at work, but it doesn't matter

00:10:00   what app I'm at.

00:10:01   I'm not my text editor.

00:10:02   I can hit play/pause and it stops the music

00:10:04   if someone comes over to my desk or something,

00:10:05   but I'm never actually in iTunes.

00:10:08   - Well, I wasn't using any third-party apps.

00:10:10   I was only using Apple ones that have support for this.

00:10:13   But things like having, like when I mentioned

00:10:16   the expanded iTunes view with the scrubber,

00:10:18   that stays up even if iTunes is not front most,

00:10:20   which is kinda cool.

00:10:21   Like that's just like, it's one of the modes,

00:10:23   you know, like there's like all these buttons

00:10:25   in the side that you can like--

00:10:26   - The control strip part, you mean, that's always there?

00:10:28   - Yeah, the thing on the right.

00:10:29   You can like toggle on certain modes

00:10:30   that persist until you change them,

00:10:32   and that's just one of those modes.

00:10:34   Like one of them is like the old function keys,

00:10:35   one of them is the iTunes thing.

00:10:37   - You guys never used the real control strip, did you?

00:10:39   - Nope. - Nope.

00:10:41   - I did and it was awesome.

00:10:42   Congratulations, John.

00:10:45   It was pluggable, too.

00:10:46   You could buy third-party things that would add new tiles to the control script and you

00:10:49   could configure it how you wanted.

00:10:52   Yeah, it was really nice.

00:10:56   So it's come back, but now it's on my keyboard and it comes from the other side by default.

00:10:59   Actually, you can't move the control script, can you?

00:11:01   You can't make it come from the left, right?

00:11:02   It's always on the right side?

00:11:03   I'm sure there'll be a P list entry for you, John.

00:11:06   Don't worry.

00:11:07   No, well, you can't even pin the dock to the edge anymore.

00:11:09   Are you kidding?

00:11:10   This is why you never mess with those sorts of things, kids.

00:11:12   This is why you embrace the defaults.

00:11:14   Anyway, as for the big scrubber, that's one of my frustrations with QuickTime Player,

00:11:19   and one of the many reasons why I still have QuickTime Player 7 installed and hope it never

00:11:23   breaks, is frequently, I mean, I should probably just use a real audio editor like Vision or

00:11:28   something, and sometimes I do.

00:11:30   But sometimes you just want to open up an audio file and scrub to a particular timestamp,

00:11:33   and it's a really long file because it's like a podcast or something, and you just can't

00:11:37   do it in like when the the audio window is small so I open it in QuickTime 7 and

00:11:43   I stretch the audio window to really wide and suddenly I have a scrubber

00:11:47   that's the entire width of my screen to give me the resolution I suppose I could

00:11:50   do that with the other QuickTime player too but the point is I'm making a window

00:11:53   bigger on a non-visual medium and the only reason I'm making the window bigger

00:11:56   is because I want more precision in the scrubber this brings us back to our old

00:11:59   discussion about ideas of zooming and scrubbering stuff but anyway if you have

00:12:03   have a screen that is the width of a QWERTY keyboard, that's a pretty good scrubber length,

00:12:08   and you probably get decent resolution there. Not as big as you'd get maybe on like a giant

00:12:13   5K display where you make it the entire width of the thing, but you know, I mean at a certain

00:12:16   point you need to just open an audio editor and zoom in on the waveform, I understand

00:12:19   that, but it's one of those hacks that you do.

00:12:22   So in summary, Marco, Touch Bar, tentatively optimistic? I mean, you sound pretty pleased

00:12:28   with it in principle.

00:12:30   - I mean, again, I didn't get to try a real one yet.

00:12:33   - Sure, sure, sure.

00:12:34   - Time will tell on this again.

00:12:36   It seems pretty cool.

00:12:37   I think what I said last episode of the one before--

00:12:42   - If you were buying again, your laptop.

00:12:45   - If I were buying a Mac laptop today,

00:12:48   and I intended to use it as my primary computer,

00:12:52   I would get the touch bar,

00:12:53   because I think it will probably end up being really great.

00:12:57   Reviewers seem to have them now,

00:12:59   So we should hear fairly soon from people

00:13:01   who have actual hands-on experience

00:13:03   for more than 10 minutes.

00:13:06   We should hear from them how these are in practice

00:13:08   and then hopefully sometime soon people will actually

00:13:11   start being able to own these things.

00:13:13   I mean, I don't think any of the initial orders

00:13:16   have shipped yet, 'cause they all had like that

00:13:18   two to three week ship date estimate at first.

00:13:21   So I don't think anybody actually has one yet

00:13:23   except a couple of reviewers,

00:13:24   but I do look forward to hearing what they say,

00:13:27   having used the real one, not some iPad approximation of it,

00:13:30   but the iPad approximation was pretty good.

00:13:33   - That's awesome, I'm really looking forward

00:13:35   to trying this one day eventually, maybe.

00:13:39   Jon, tell me about the next Mac Pro.

00:13:41   Is it gonna be an all-in-one?

00:13:42   - This is a topic that has come up on lots of past shows

00:13:46   and has been gaining steam as people hear us moan

00:13:49   about the Mac Pro, and Marco wrote a big piece

00:13:51   about the advantages of Pro and all that,

00:13:54   And it's seeming to me, you know, probably many months out from any potential movement

00:13:59   on this front, that if Apple is not going to make another Mac Pro in the style that

00:14:07   we expect it to be, as in a computer that doesn't have a monitor, like if they're, you

00:14:11   know, they're not going to make another trash can, if they're reimagining the Mac Pro as

00:14:14   something other than a trash can, the most likely reimagining is what everyone keeps

00:14:18   referring to as an iMac Pro, which is a big 5K screen with a bunch of computer crap stuck

00:14:24   to the back of it, and the only difference would be that the computer craps stuff to

00:14:27   the back of it is more pro-ish. And so then there's the question, like, can you fit a

00:14:33   Xeon in there? Can you actually put a decent graphic card in there? There's a lot of room

00:14:38   behind a 5K display. Obviously they want it to be super skinny, and they're kind of like

00:14:43   their own self-imposed constraints, especially on the back of the display, because you don't

00:14:46   even see that when you're looking at it in the front. It doesn't need to be portable,

00:14:49   except for that guy who brings his iMac to Panera Bread to play World of Warcraft.

00:14:53   natural yeah uh so you know realistically you could totally do that now if apple did it i assume

00:15:00   they would make their life more difficult by still trying to make it thin and using all their

00:15:04   skills uh honed by working on these super slim macbook pros and on their iDevices to

00:15:12   continue to make it skinny and use clever heat routing and venting and special fans and whatever

00:15:20   to make it so it doesn't melt. And so these days, as I dwell about the Mac Pro in bits

00:15:26   and pieces, I start thinking about a Mac Pro that looks like an iMac and thinking, "They

00:15:32   could fit some pretty good stuff in there. Maybe they won't even go with Xeon, so maybe

00:15:35   they'll just try to use better desktop chips and have a higher RAM ceiling and a bigger

00:15:39   GPU. Maybe it really literally is named iMac Pro. Or maybe it's just called Mac Pro and

00:15:44   the new Mac Pro isn't all in one." You know, like, I guess this is the bargaining stage

00:15:49   I'm like, "All right." - I was just about to say that.

00:15:51   Get out of my head, oh my gosh.

00:15:53   - Make me a matte black Mac Pro-shaped thing

00:15:56   with a decent GPU and a Xeon and ECC RAM

00:16:01   with a high limit, I'd buy it.

00:16:03   - Yeah, I mean, I would love that myself.

00:16:06   I would absolutely love that.

00:16:07   And the thing is, again, this totally is bargaining,

00:16:12   but at this point, I'll take what we can get.

00:16:15   If they can make something that is Mac Pro-like

00:16:19   that happens to be an all-in-one,

00:16:20   that will cut out certain use cases

00:16:23   that will make certain people

00:16:25   who would have bought a tower Mac Pro not buy it.

00:16:28   And that will possibly hurt its sales.

00:16:30   But if that's what Apple has to do

00:16:32   to make it palatable to Tim Cook and Johnny Ive,

00:16:35   then I guess we'll, you know,

00:16:37   I would take that over no Mac Pro, you know?

00:16:40   So I don't know, but I think the question

00:16:43   of what you could put into that

00:16:45   depends entirely on the cooling setup.

00:16:47   You know, if you look at the way the Tube Mac Pro is set up,

00:16:50   which by the way, and I didn't mention this too much

00:16:52   in the post, but the Tube Mac Pro has a serious problem

00:16:57   that the GPUs die frequently.

00:17:00   And this has never really been much in the public eye

00:17:03   because not a lot of people own these machines,

00:17:05   relatively speaking, but there's a massive,

00:17:08   like, GPU death flaw in the Tube Mac Pro.

00:17:12   - I brought this up about your article

00:17:14   and you didn't add it to your article, did you?

00:17:16   Well, here's the thing, okay.

00:17:18   A lot of people have first asked me the question of,

00:17:21   why do I presume the Mac Pro is dead?

00:17:24   And I'll tell you right now,

00:17:27   we've heard tips from so many different sources

00:17:30   and they all conflict with each other.

00:17:32   Every single tip we've heard

00:17:34   is different from a different one we've heard.

00:17:35   Some of them are in direct contradiction.

00:17:37   I've heard that the Mac Pro is already dead.

00:17:40   I've heard that the Mac Pro is on hold.

00:17:42   I've heard that the Mac Pro is not dead

00:17:44   but going to take a different form,

00:17:46   that the Mac Pro is very much alive,

00:17:49   and that the Mac Pro is coming

00:17:50   between last month and next summer.

00:17:52   (laughing)

00:17:53   - But see, I think all of those,

00:17:54   I think all of those things,

00:17:55   the reason I'm big on the iMac Pro rumor

00:17:57   is because I think it fits all of them,

00:17:58   because the people saying it's dead,

00:17:59   what they really mean is the trash can is dead, check.

00:18:02   People say it's coming but in a new form,

00:18:04   that's the iMac Pro form factor.

00:18:06   The dates, nobody knows those, so forget about it.

00:18:09   Well, what I haven't heard is anything like,

00:18:10   is it Skylake-E or not, because that's really,

00:18:12   I think that is really about the death of the Mac Pro.

00:18:14   If it's if it's not the Xeons if it's just a desktop trips with a better CPU then it literally is just a better iMac

00:18:18   Which you know hey we'll take what we can get but but anyway getting getting back to cooling

00:18:22   like one of the things you listed on your article of why we should have a Mac Pro is

00:18:25   So it doesn't you know how like a laptop when you push it hard and the iMac doesn't how like a laptop

00:18:31   It kind of moans like an iMac like it's not

00:18:34   quiet in the Mac Pro and I have to say that's that's not a I keep using like luxurious or elegant or whatever but like

00:18:43   There if you have hardware empathy empathy for the machine, which I think I've talked about on past podcasts

00:18:49   And you try to do something that stresses your computer and it is just that just the fans are just going you hear it worrying

00:18:56   There's a certain baseline level of anxiety that I feel about that

00:19:00   I mean, it's kind of an annoying sound first of all and second of all you're like is this is everything okay?

00:19:06   Am I you know, is it good to do this? What what if your laptop sounded like that?

00:19:10   you know, eight hours a day while you worked. Like, it can't be good for the thing to be—and

00:19:15   it is an annoying sound—it feels better to get a big honking machine that you can stress to its limits

00:19:22   and it, you know, and it doesn't make a big racket. And so the iMac does not fulfill that criteria,

00:19:28   and the reason I brought up to Marco about his article is like, that is an advantage of the Mac

00:19:33   Pro, the idealized Mac Pro, or of course the 2008 Mac Pro that I'm sitting next to, which is

00:19:39   humongous and weighs 50 pounds. But the Trashcan Mac Pro fulfills the quietness

00:19:44   ideal but not so much the not melting ideal, which is an important part of the

00:19:49   power and elegance formula for the Mac Pro is you can be quiet and have good

00:19:53   cooling but that also means the parts that are inside it you can't die from

00:19:56   excessive heat. And so the current Trashcan won the current. The 2013 Trashcan

00:20:00   has had a history of perhaps not doing so well on removing the heat but it's

00:20:05   It's pretty quiet.

00:20:06   Yeah, but anyway, I wrote this article

00:20:10   with the presumption that the Mac Pro is either dead

00:20:13   or quote, on hold, whatever that means.

00:20:16   And the point of this article is not to keep people's hopes

00:20:21   up that it's not dead yet.

00:20:24   The point of this article is to help convince the people

00:20:26   at Apple that if this thing is truly either dead

00:20:30   or postponed or on hold or whatever,

00:20:32   to try to convince them that I don't think

00:20:35   the right move and basically please don't do that. And it has gotten a large response,

00:20:41   very large response. And so I think I've hit on something here and when you see the

00:20:48   article in that way that's why at the beginning I assume that it's gone. And I didn't

00:20:55   bring up like, you know, here's why the current trash can overheats the GPUs because

00:21:00   That is a real problem, but that didn't really need to be in there.

00:21:04   I did mention, here's why the current trash can sales might not be very good, and why

00:21:09   you shouldn't use that.

00:21:10   - Yeah, I think the overheating is one of them.

00:21:13   I think highlighting, you know, it's not that we, you know, you did bring this up, it's

00:21:16   not that nobody liked the Mac Pro, it's that you changed it so much, and the ways that

00:21:20   you changed it were maybe not palatable to all the people who buy Mac Pros.

00:21:24   And it's not as if, you know, well, the Mac Pro's not for you.

00:21:27   It's like, well, it's gotta be for somebody, and apparently the trash can Mac Pro was not

00:21:30   for enough people. So and one of the things is reliability. You know, one of the things you expect

00:21:34   is quietness, able to handle high load, and reliable. That's why you got the ECC RAM,

00:21:39   that's why you have the, you know, workstation class components, whatever the hell you want to

00:21:42   call them, and you know, that is not super duper overclock, that is supposed to be a reliable piece

00:21:47   of hardware, and the trashcan never quite fulfilled that. So it's yet another reason to add to the

00:21:52   pile of why the trashcan might not have been successful that is not, oh, you know, there's

00:21:58   no market for a Pro or Mac anymore because I think there still is. It's small, it's as

00:22:02   small as it's ever been, but you have to actually serve that market if you want to sell into

00:22:05   it.

00:22:06   Exactly. But anyway, so in summary, my article was basically a letter to Apple presuming

00:22:13   that they've killed the Mac Pro, trying to shoot down reasons that they might be using

00:22:19   internally why they shouldn't make this computer anymore. And it just so happened to be also

00:22:25   wrapped up in some other things that prose my like

00:22:27   and everything else because that's how I feel.

00:22:29   And my love for Mac OS and not wanting to leave Mac OS.

00:22:32   'Cause like, what am I gonna do, go use Windows?

00:22:34   No, Windows is horrible.

00:22:36   Sorry all the people who responded to me

00:22:37   saying that that's a stupid thing to say.

00:22:39   No. - Oh, it's true.

00:22:40   - See? - It's true.

00:22:41   - Casey is an official Windowser.

00:22:42   - Well, I was and then I wasn't.

00:22:45   - More recently than me.

00:22:46   - Yeah, oh yeah, 'cause I installed Windows 10

00:22:48   just two weeks ago or something like that.

00:22:50   - What happened, are you okay?

00:22:52   - Don't even get me started.

00:22:54   I installed Windows 10 and I was genuinely, like, hand on heart, I'm not trying to be funny,

00:22:58   I was kind of looking forward to it in a way, because everyone...

00:23:02   Any time I'd ever seen anyone talk about Windows 10, I'd always heard, "Oh, you know, it's really good now. It's good. It's good."

00:23:07   You know, it's not bad at all.

00:23:08   And I installed it and it is just as bad as everything has always been.

00:23:13   And I think we talked about this already on the last show, so I won't belabor it anymore,

00:23:17   but it's terrible. Don't believe otherwise. It's terrible.

00:23:21   So anyway, moving on.

00:23:23   Moving on. So one of you put this in the show notes, and this is a genuinely great question.

00:23:30   What external monitors are Apple employees using with laptops?

00:23:33   Well, for now, they're probably using Thunderbolt displays, but this question or idea was brought

00:23:39   up in many different forms that a surprising number of supposedly completely independent

00:23:44   people came up with this one scenario. Hey, Apple's got their new Spaceship Campus with

00:23:48   the cool-looking office that's shaped like a ring and all this open seating or whatever,

00:23:53   they were trying to say like what would it be like to walk into this spaceship

00:23:57   campus and see the Apple engineers diligently working as if you would

00:24:01   actually be able to see where they work because you probably can't because it's badge entry.

00:24:04   But anyway, these are people writing and like and presumably those people would

00:24:08   have laptops because hey Apple doesn't make desktops anymore and who would use

00:24:11   an iMac and whatever whatever but you know people with laptops as we mentioned

00:24:16   even Apple laptops when they're sitting at a desk might like to have a bigger

00:24:20   screen to do stuff on, right? Because it's one of the advantages of sitting down or

00:24:23   standing in a standing desk or whatever. You can have a much bigger screen or

00:24:27   multiple screens or whatever. And for all these people asking this question, they

00:24:32   couldn't envision a scenario where Apple's headquarters was filled with

00:24:37   people using Apple laptops connected to non-Apple monitors. Is it because non-

00:24:41   Apple monitors are ugly? Is it because they wouldn't match? Is it because it

00:24:44   wouldn't fit their ideal of these architect sketches of this beautiful

00:24:48   pristine Apple place where everything is all happily and perfect and the tables

00:24:50   are made from one giant continuous piece of wood painstakingly manufactured in

00:24:54   Germany or whatever that's probably part of it but the practical consideration is

00:24:58   you know I was brought up before Apple's monitors for a while have been made to

00:25:03   connect to laptops if they don't make any monitors which it seems like they're

00:25:06   not anymore and if the Mac Pro either disappears or becomes an all-in-one what

00:25:11   are all the laptops going to connect to I guess the other connected question to

00:25:16   this is the question of target display mode for iMacs, which used to be a thing and then

00:25:21   wasn't, but now with the advent of Thunderbolt 3, which we'll talk about in a little bit,

00:25:26   in theory you can buy an iMac and just use it as a monitor when you sit down and connect

00:25:32   your laptop to it, which would be the world's most expensive monitor, not really actually

00:25:35   because the Apple 30-inch is probably still more money, but it would be a very expensive

00:25:39   monitor and a total waste of the internals, but technically it is possible and that would

00:25:44   be an out to let Apple's campus photos continue to be completely appley from top to bottom.

00:25:50   Realistically speaking, as for the campus pictures, you're not going to see any except

00:25:54   for a reception, and those are going to be iMacs, and they're going to be all in one,

00:25:56   and they're going to have a big Apple logo on them, and it'll be fine.

00:26:00   I think I speak for all of us in saying we have some friends at Apple, and one of my

00:26:04   friends at Apple I know for a fact is rolling the Dell 5K display as, I believe, a child

00:26:11   to his 5K iMac at the office.

00:26:14   - The LG or the-- - No, the Dell.

00:26:16   - Oh, the double cable one?

00:26:18   - Correct.

00:26:18   Maybe this is his home machine,

00:26:22   so I might be lying unintentionally,

00:26:25   but I am almost positive that this is his work machine.

00:26:28   It's a 5K iMac connected to this,

00:26:31   double cabled to this Dell 5K display.

00:26:34   And so in the future,

00:26:35   I would expect it would be the LG 5K display.

00:26:38   - And you're never gonna see that

00:26:38   because he can't take you to see his office anyway.

00:26:40   - Right, exactly.

00:26:42   I have no idea what an Apple developer office even looks like.

00:26:46   I don't think I've ever seen a single picture of one of anybody's ever.

00:26:49   You should go look at what they looked like in the 90s.

00:26:52   They were awesome.

00:26:54   The giant 1840 AVs with the CRT monitor with two big speakers on the bottom, because they

00:26:59   would hoard the fanciest Mac hardware.

00:27:01   I think it was more of a big deal back when Macs were just so much more expensive than

00:27:07   they are.

00:27:08   of the original purchase price of the Mac 2 FX

00:27:10   and convert it to 2016 dollars, you will be very surprised.

00:27:14   So, but if you worked at Apple,

00:27:15   you got access to that stuff.

00:27:16   So I remember a lot of like cubicle farm pictures

00:27:18   from the 90s, oh they had offices, not cubicles.

00:27:20   But anyway, very sort of, you know,

00:27:23   if you are listening to this

00:27:24   and you are a 90s era Apple employee

00:27:27   and have photos of your cool setups in your office,

00:27:30   just send them a couple of them,

00:27:31   send us a couple of them because I love seeing those.

00:27:33   And I'm sure they're not quite what they look like today.

00:27:36   I have not actually seen the inside of an actual human working person's office at Apple

00:27:40   in recent years, so I don't know what they're like, but I do know that Apple right now has

00:27:44   many different buildings that vary widely in how nice they are, how modern they are,

00:27:52   when they were built, what the accommodations are like, and the spaceship will be yet another

00:27:56   iteration.

00:27:57   I think in the spaceship they have a bunch of mockups, you can see pictures of what they

00:28:00   expect the work areas to be like and the offices to be like, but there is no like "what does

00:28:05   an Apple office look like, because Apple's campus is so much bigger than the giant one

00:28:09   infinite loop building.

00:28:10   It's so many other buildings scattered all over the place, and they are very different

00:28:13   from each other.

00:28:14   So, tell us, speaking of displays and cabling, tell us about DisplayPort.

00:28:21   Someone wrote in with a bunch of facts about DisplayPort, and we've talked about all these

00:28:24   bits and pieces before.

00:28:25   We've talked about how we didn't think there was going to be an external 5K display for

00:28:29   a long time, because you couldn't run it over DisplayPort at the current standard.

00:28:34   we were on display part 1.2 and it didn't have, it can only do up to 4k, and we're like

00:28:39   maybe when display part 1.3 comes but that's not gonna be out for a long time so what are

00:28:42   they gonna do?

00:28:43   we found out the answer to that was that they're gonna do this, you know, what they do with

00:28:48   the LG display.

00:28:49   it's one cable, it's not two cables, and they just stream multiple display part 1.2 streams

00:28:53   over it.

00:28:55   but this information we got sent as a summary brought home another reality which is that

00:28:59   even when display part 1.3 comes it still is not your savior, not that we need to save

00:29:03   because we have a solution but it is not your savior for connecting your 5k display because

00:29:07   display part 1.3 only does 5k at 60 frames per second at 8 bits per component whereas

00:29:14   display part 1.2 goes up to 4k at 60 frames per second at 10 bits per component which

00:29:19   is important if you're doing fancy photo and video work and don't want to see like color

00:29:23   banding and all that crap and also the alpine ridge thunderbolt chipset can't receive that

00:29:31   the display port 1.3 input anyway, so it's kind of a moot point. So we are going to be in the world of

00:29:38   two display point 1.2 streams being tunneled over FireWire for a while, because that's the only way

00:29:45   you can get 5k at 60 frames per second at 10 bits per component. So maybe display point 1.4 will do

00:29:53   it in a single stream, I don't know. And as for Thunderbolt, the Thunderbolt Angler, Thunderbolt 1

00:29:59   could send two DisplayPort 1.1 streams.

00:30:02   Thunderbolt 3 can send two DisplayPort 1.2 streams.

00:30:05   Obviously, we know it can do that

00:30:06   'cause it does it with the LG display.

00:30:08   And when Thunderbolt 3 does that,

00:30:10   it still leaves 10 gigabits per second

00:30:12   of bandwidth left over for other stuff.

00:30:14   So that is the magic that makes the laptops

00:30:17   being connected to LG display work.

00:30:18   And that is like, if you were to take that back in time

00:30:21   and show that to someone like 15 years ago,

00:30:24   you're gonna say, you're gonna output how much video

00:30:26   over this skinny little thing?

00:30:28   You know, we had, we were just connecting like the ADC connector or DVI or these

00:30:32   big hunk and multi-pin parallel things with big thick cables at resolutions that are,

00:30:37   you know, a tiny fraction of the current one. And now we're able to do this, you know,

00:30:41   which is still kind of a hack taking those two DisplayPort 1.2 streams and streaming them over

00:30:46   this one cable because the standards don't have enough to fill the whole screen and then putting

00:30:50   them back together with the display controller and everything. That is a, that's very impressive.

00:30:54   And we mentioned multi-streaming, sometimes abbreviated MST.

00:30:58   That actually refers to the part of the display point 1.2 spec

00:31:02   that lets you tunnel two DisplayPort 1.1 streams over it.

00:31:06   And I keep saying DisplayPort 1.2, 1.1, and 1.3,

00:31:08   but the abbreviation that's used frequently is HBR,

00:31:11   which hopefully stands for high bit rate.

00:31:13   And DisplayPort 1.1 is HBR, DisplayPort 1.2 is HBR2,

00:31:18   and DisplayPort 1.3 is HBR3.

00:31:20   I don't know if that has any clarification,

00:31:22   but that's how it's referred to in this email

00:31:23   some of the literature. Clear as mud. Yeah. Anyway, it's a good thing we didn't have to

00:31:29   wait for DisplayPort 1.3, and it's really cool what Apple did to get the external 5K display

00:31:33   working just in time for them to not introduce a new Mac Pro. And finally, somewhat tangentially

00:31:41   related to this, we got an anonymous as-yet-unconfirmed tip that no, the LG display does not have

00:31:46   a GPU in it, which makes sense in light of the DisplayPort stuff, because why would it need a GPU

00:31:50   If they can output two DisplayPort 1.2 streams over the single cable, the LG Display

00:31:52   can just receive them and make one image out of them, and Bob's your uncle, as they say.

00:31:59   Okay. And then as a final note, and this is clearly for John,

00:32:07   tell me about the MacBook Pro as the naked robotic core, if you please.

00:32:10   This is another topic that many listeners have brought up. The naked robotic core,

00:32:14   for brief review, is the idea for the iDevices, specifically the iPhone, that Apple

00:32:20   wants to make the smallest, skinniest thing possible, even if it doesn't function as a

00:32:24   complete phone and then allow people to augment it either with cases or battery cases or colors

00:32:29   or whatever, that they don't sell you the entire phone, they tell you the naked robotic core and

00:32:32   then you dress it up to be the phone that you really want it to be. Because if Apple made those

00:32:36   choices and put a rubberized rugged case on the thing for you, or made it thicker and bigger and

00:32:41   ruggedized, the people who wanted a skinny little silver thing couldn't have it. And the people who

00:32:45   wanted a different color couldn't have it and so on and so forth. So they're like, "Here you go,

00:32:48   here's the naked robotic core add to it whatever you want that's strategy has been discussed a long

00:32:53   time as a you know i was trying to get into apple's head about why they keep making their

00:32:57   phones thinner and slippery and all this other stuff um and so a couple people brought that up

00:33:01   for the macbook pro is the macbook pro a naked robotic core and my initial instinct to say was

00:33:06   no because you don't put a case on your thing although a battery case for a macbook pro would

00:33:10   be awesome but you don't like they do have external batteries for it but it's not it's not like you

00:33:15   you put a flowery case on it so when you accidentally drop it, it doesn't get dinged.

00:33:18   Like it's not, it's a different size class of item than a phone.

00:33:21   It doesn't seem like they're selling you the skinniest thing possible and allowing you

00:33:25   to bulk it up by adding stuff to it.

00:33:27   Although I suppose you could do that and I'm sure someone out there makes a case for the

00:33:30   MacBook Pro.

00:33:31   But I thought about it a little bit more.

00:33:34   One aspect of it does seem kind of naked robotic, Cory, and it gets into the idea of the Thunderbolt

00:33:39   ports that, again, as discussed last show, I'm in favor of going to a bunch of uniform,

00:33:45   very small multipurpose ports that can do everything. They're cool, they're multipurpose,

00:33:51   they can do a lot of things, but one of the aspects of Thunderbolt ports that makes them

00:33:58   so multipurpose is they are like an externalization of PCI or PCI Express. That necessitates the

00:34:05   the externalization of certain components.

00:34:07   For example, like this one little tiny plug,

00:34:09   I can plug in here and I can do video out to DVI,

00:34:12   to VGA, to Mini DisplayPort, to Thunderbolt display,

00:34:15   HDMI, look at all these different options I have.

00:34:18   I don't have to put 17 different video ports

00:34:20   on the side of my Mac.

00:34:21   I can just have this one little skinny port.

00:34:23   But the price for doing that is that you have

00:34:26   externalized all the circuitry required

00:34:29   to make HDMI output work, to make DVI output work,

00:34:32   because as we've discussed and seen in the past,

00:34:34   lots of these adapters have chips in them.

00:34:37   And those chips aren't just like optional

00:34:38   and will go away once the world gets fixed.

00:34:41   It's because the thing that's coming out of that port

00:34:44   that lets you do that is not video

00:34:47   if only my projector could understand it.

00:34:49   It is an externalization of the PCI bus.

00:34:52   So there needs to be some chips to deal with that.

00:34:54   And that's not true for all things.

00:34:56   Like USB, you could connect right to it.

00:34:57   So when we all convert to USB-C

00:34:58   on all our devices everywhere, we won't have that problem.

00:35:01   certain devices still have some part that could have been inside the computer

00:35:06   if there was a big honking port, moved to the outside of the computer. Now those

00:35:10   computers are small and often they fit in a little adapter that you wouldn't

00:35:13   even see and in theory they could also be moved into the devices eventually but

00:35:17   for a while I think one of the prices of this beautiful uniform future, not just

00:35:22   the fact that we have dongles, but that Apple is pushing some logic, some active

00:35:28   logic outside of their computer case. It used to be in the inside, and now they're giving

00:35:33   you the naked, even less robotic core, because some of the roboticness has been moved outside

00:35:38   the case. So I've been thinking about that and thinking, is there a future where you

00:35:42   plop down your super skinny Mac laptop and the only thing you ever plowed into it is

00:35:47   super skinny, beautiful, slender cables, none of which have a big white dongle brick that

00:35:54   contains the impossibly small active chip to do some sort of translation.

00:35:59   And one thing that I think is a necessary regression of this move, though, of the move

00:36:06   to externalizing all of these different little things and pouring all of the complexity and

00:36:14   capability of adapting to different ports and protocols and adding different things

00:36:18   onto external devices, one of the downsides of this is that the ones that you put in the

00:36:24   the computer you could control the quality of.

00:36:26   And oftentimes they came for free with the Intel chipset

00:36:29   or whatever else, and you could make pretty good things

00:36:31   like USB controllers and HDMI outputs and everything else.

00:36:35   In the current way of doing things,

00:36:38   of externalizing to all these dongles and adapters and stuff

00:36:41   you are basically forcing people to buy something

00:36:46   from someone, who knows who,

00:36:48   and who knows who's making the thing on the inside,

00:36:51   to get the capability it used to get

00:36:53   with nice, reliable, built-in stuff.

00:36:56   And some of the, or many of the things that you are

00:36:59   adding onto are these cheap, no-name brands

00:37:04   from Amazon or eBay or whatever.

00:37:05   And I feel like it's gonna be a similar problem

00:37:10   as finding a good USB hub, which is very difficult.

00:37:15   Good USB hubs do exist, but they're so hard to find,

00:37:19   reliably that they basically don't exist.

00:37:22   And so like USB devices in practice,

00:37:25   once you need more of them than what your computer

00:37:27   has ports for, they just become less reliable

00:37:29   because your hub is probably less reliable

00:37:32   and it's very hard to find one that isn't

00:37:33   or very hard to diagnose that problem.

00:37:35   And once you require fairly pricey Apple dongles,

00:37:39   and we will get to this, but fairly pricey Apple dongles

00:37:42   to do basic things everyone needs like,

00:37:46   or not everyone, basic things that a lot of people need

00:37:48   like USB-A adapters or HDMI or things like that,

00:37:52   because the first party ones are so expensive,

00:37:56   many people in reality are going to go buy

00:37:58   third party ones for Amazon or whatever,

00:38:00   and they're going to be less reliable,

00:38:03   they're going to be less controllable,

00:38:04   they're gonna be less predictable,

00:38:06   in many cases, not all, but many cases.

00:38:09   And I feel like that's kind of a step backwards

00:38:11   in a lot of ways.

00:38:12   Like we used to have these nice reliable internal ports

00:38:15   for all these things, and while it's great

00:38:17   to have the versatility of these kind of everything ports

00:38:19   now, and while it's great to save the thickness of them

00:38:22   if you want a thinner laptop, it is definitely a step

00:38:25   backwards to have to rely on some 50 cent chip inside

00:38:29   of a God knows who made it cable for something that you find

00:38:33   pretty important to getting your work done.

00:38:35   - Well, okay, that's certainly possible, but I don't know

00:38:39   if the sky is really falling yet, Chicken Little.

00:38:41   I mean-- - No, I didn't say it was.

00:38:44   - Well, we don't know what the quality of these things

00:38:46   going to be. And I think that in general, like, USB hub is a good counter argument that

00:38:50   I don't have a good answer for. But in general...

00:38:53   Well, the USB is built in though. That's the, that's the, the USB will be inside the thing.

00:38:57   It's when you externalize PCI express and say this adapter works by pretending it's

00:39:02   like a device on the PCI bus and it has a chip for translating the video, you know,

00:39:07   pulling the video off. And what was that one that had like, well, the iPad 100, like an

00:39:10   H.264 encoder thing in there or a tiny little iOS device and like that kind of stuff goes

00:39:17   on.

00:39:18   That's where you're moving stuff outside.

00:39:19   USB should be just a matter of everyone please update your connectors to not be those big

00:39:22   old things.

00:39:23   Like I see a light at the end of the tunnel for the USB angle, but I see less light for

00:39:28   things like display adapters or even something as people mentioned like Ethernet, which is

00:39:33   very common and standard and you expect to just work.

00:39:37   But if there has to be a chip in your Ethernet adapter,

00:39:40   then it's like Marco said,

00:39:41   you are kind of at the mercy of the quality of the adapter.

00:39:45   The bright side is if it breaks,

00:39:47   unlike the little chip breaking on your motherboard,

00:39:48   you just buy a new adapter.

00:39:49   So there's up and downsides.

00:39:51   - Yeah, and I don't think that we should go

00:39:55   and assume that the quality is gonna be subpar

00:39:58   right out of the gate.

00:39:58   And certainly there will be one or two

00:40:01   of any kind of device, one or two Ethernet adapters,

00:40:04   one or two SD card readers, et cetera, that will be crappy.

00:40:07   But I think it's a bit premature to just assume that anything outside of the case is going

00:40:11   to be crap.

00:40:12   And even if there's a glut of things that are crappy, I mean, that's, in principle,

00:40:18   why Amazon has reviews and why you can ask your friends, "Hey, does this one work for

00:40:23   you?"

00:40:24   And hopefully Apple would only carry things that they feel are of a decent quality, even

00:40:30   if it doesn't have the Apple logo on it.

00:40:33   It's certainly possible that this stuff will all be crap, but I think it's way too soon

00:40:36   to get worked up about.

00:40:37   - Well, Apple will make stuff anyway.

00:40:39   So if you just want the Apple quality ones,

00:40:40   Apple will make them and sell them to you

00:40:42   for way too much money.

00:40:43   - But there's an interesting side effect to that too.

00:40:45   If you noticed, they've outsourced

00:40:47   a lot of the current ones to Belkin.

00:40:49   Like they've outsourced the Ethernet to Belkin.

00:40:52   I think one-- - Dual lightning.

00:40:53   - Yeah, the dual lightning, that horrible splitter

00:40:56   that lets you charge and listen to your lightning headphones.

00:40:59   It's the worst thing ever.

00:41:01   You pay like 40 bucks for this thing.

00:41:05   this giant thing that has two lightning ports out,

00:41:07   one lightning port in, so that you plug it into your iPhone,

00:41:10   you have this giant dongle, and then you also have

00:41:13   to have the headphone dongle to plug that

00:41:15   into the second lightning port.

00:41:17   Why couldn't they just have it be lightning out

00:41:22   and headphone out?

00:41:23   Why did, ugh.

00:41:24   That thing-- - That's another angle,

00:41:26   and as I was like, I would mind the chips and the adapters

00:41:30   and the externalization of all this active logic

00:41:34   less if it was smaller. That adapter in particular is comically large for functions. I understand

00:41:40   you have to have active logic. Ideally it would be like the little, what do you call it, the

00:41:45   lightning head-foot adapter where it's like, "I didn't even know there was a chip in there,

00:41:48   it's so darn small." That's how they should all be. When it's a giant white brick, then it is,

00:41:53   you know, that makes me feel bad about externalizing it. I assume that stuff will go down

00:41:57   over time and they'll shrink and they'll get better and so on and so forth. So there is some

00:42:01   sunlight at the end of the tunnel there, but I still do think about the pushing

00:42:05   of the chips outside of the laptop case, especially since on a 15-inch laptop

00:42:10   that's a pretty big case. So at some point if we can't get the world to get

00:42:15   on board with putting these chips in their devices and we still have to have

00:42:18   an adapter with a dongle, it would be nice to maybe move one or two of the

00:42:23   most often used ones to the side of that thing. Or if you're not gonna do that, put

00:42:27   three more of those ports on the side because there's so much room on the 15-inch MacBook

00:42:32   Pro. Things are looking kind of lonely there with just those two tiny little openings.

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00:45:00   Since the last show, Apple has made a very curious move.

00:45:09   They have cut the prices on USBC peripherals.

00:45:13   And we'll put a link in the show notes to a post on iMore

00:45:16   from a friend of the show, Renee Ritchie, that breaks down

00:45:19   the price changes that have happened.

00:45:22   And so as a couple of examples, the USB-C to traditional USB-C went from $19 to $9.

00:45:30   The USB-C to Lightning cable went from $25 to $19, et cetera, et cetera.

00:45:35   But what's particularly interesting about this is that the LG displays, the 4K and 5K

00:45:44   displays are also getting discounted.

00:45:46   I don't recall how much the 5K was before.

00:45:48   Was it like $1,300?

00:45:49   I think it was $1,300, yeah.

00:45:51   And now it's $974.

00:45:53   Still not available for order quite yet, but it's going to be $974 until the end of the

00:45:58   year.

00:45:59   And that's how long all of these discounts will be going on.

00:46:03   That's a really interesting move.

00:46:07   And I feel like there's a pessimistic and an optimistic take on this.

00:46:11   The optimistic take is Apple's listening and they're responding and they're trying to make

00:46:19   all of our grumbling go, well maybe not go away, but make it easier on us for those of

00:46:25   us who are professionals or think we're professionals and need a whole bunch of dongles.

00:46:30   And so on the plus side, Apple's listening and they're trying to react.

00:46:36   That's one way of looking at it and I'm assuming that you guys will have alternative ways of

00:46:41   of looking at it?

00:46:42   - Well, I think it's damage control to some degree.

00:46:45   I think it's pretty clear that Apple

00:46:49   released these new MacBook Pros.

00:46:50   I think the reaction to the new MacBook Pros

00:46:54   has been less positive than Apple expected.

00:46:57   I think that's pretty safe to say.

00:46:59   And you can read between some lines on that,

00:47:01   and I think Phil even came just about to saying that

00:47:04   in some interview somewhere.

00:47:05   Basically, the reaction has been

00:47:09   not as positive as they wanted.

00:47:10   And so they're trying to do damage control.

00:47:12   And that's what, you know, they begin on their statements

00:47:14   basically by saying how well this MacBook Pro is selling.

00:47:17   That's great, and there's all these qualifiers,

00:47:19   like it's the best selling Pro laptop

00:47:23   that we've ever had on our website.

00:47:24   And you know, so there's all these qualifiers

00:47:26   and everything, but obviously it's selling well.

00:47:27   It's not gonna be a flop or anything.

00:47:29   But they are getting a lot of criticism for it.

00:47:31   So this is obvious damage control.

00:47:33   And I think, you know, I think Gruber's tip,

00:47:35   or Gruber's note about it, I think on Twitter somewhere,

00:47:38   was that he thinks maybe they don't want it to appear

00:47:41   like a money grab.

00:47:43   Like the reason they moved to USBC,

00:47:45   they don't want it to appear like it was purely

00:47:47   for profit reasons to sell a bunch of adapters and stuff.

00:47:49   And I believe that.

00:47:51   I think, you know, I'm sure Apple is not sorry

00:47:56   that they're gonna make a lot more money

00:47:57   from adapters and stuff than before.

00:47:59   I think that's a happy side effect.

00:48:01   I don't think that was the primary reason why they did it.

00:48:03   I think the primary reason they did it was to make

00:48:05   the laptop a thinner, lighter, and simpler,

00:48:07   save on component costs to enter onto the laptop,

00:48:09   make it easier to engineer by having fewer ports

00:48:11   on the outside, easier to service,

00:48:12   fewer things that will die or break

00:48:14   or have things stuck in them

00:48:16   or otherwise need warranty service,

00:48:18   and then finally, of course,

00:48:19   because they believe in the future of whatever.

00:48:21   I believe those are all reasons why they made only USB-C

00:48:25   plus a couple headphone jacks,

00:48:27   why they made those things all the standard ports

00:48:29   and nothing else.

00:48:31   However, you could very easily look at this

00:48:33   and you could say, well, you know,

00:48:35   they did this just to make money on adapters.

00:48:37   So I think that was probably one of the things

00:48:41   they were trying to combat with this.

00:48:42   I think they were also just trying to apologize

00:48:47   maybe to power users in a very small

00:48:50   and relatively inexpensive way

00:48:52   that doesn't admit any fault about anything.

00:48:54   You know, like it's basically, it's a PR feel good move,

00:48:58   similar to the free bumper case for the iPhone 4

00:49:00   with antenna gate.

00:49:01   Like it's a PR like make you feel better

00:49:05   and make it look like we're not just being greedy

00:49:07   for adapter prices.

00:49:08   That being said, these dongles and stuff

00:49:10   are still very expensive.

00:49:11   Like they're still Apple prices.

00:49:14   They're still more expensive than they need to be.

00:49:15   And I think it's weird that the price cuts are temporary.

00:49:19   The fact that it only runs 'til the end of the year,

00:49:23   like if they really wanted it to not look

00:49:25   like it was about dongle profits,

00:49:27   they should have made the price cuts permanent.

00:49:29   'Cause these price cuts are not,

00:49:31   they don't appear to be unsustainable.

00:49:34   Knowing roughly what margins tend to be at retail,

00:49:36   things like this, and knowing that most of these

00:49:39   probably have very few parts in them

00:49:41   and are probably very inexpensive

00:49:42   and are probably very profitable to begin with,

00:49:44   it wouldn't surprise me if most of these had

00:49:47   at least a 50% margin and probably a larger one.

00:49:50   And they've cut the prices by like 25 to 50% basically.

00:49:53   So I would be very, very surprised if any of these things

00:49:58   were actually losing money at the current prices.

00:50:00   - But that's not sustainable by Apple standards

00:50:02   because they need 40% margin on everything.

00:50:04   So I agree that the margins are probably way over 40% for accessories and they've cut them

00:50:08   down to what I think is below 40%.

00:50:10   Although I think they should maybe revisit that because if they can't make them, like

00:50:14   if they're getting 50% margins on these things, they're spending perhaps too much money making

00:50:19   them.

00:50:20   Not that I'm saying they should make them crappier, but...

00:50:22   Then 50%, that was being, that was a conservative estimate.

00:50:25   I'm guessing the margins are more like 80%.

00:50:27   They're a lot on this kind of stuff usually.

00:50:30   They do make like all their stuff.

00:50:32   They make their, even their little adapters very carefully.

00:50:35   Not so much in terms of reliability, as a million people who will send us pictures of

00:50:38   their totally destroyed things will come, but in terms of tolerances and industrials

00:50:42   on their precision engineered products.

00:50:46   There's not a lot of plastic mold lines on them.

00:50:49   All the edges are straight and crisp.

00:50:53   They look like little pieces of art, which also makes them bad adapters in many cases.

00:50:56   But I'm just saying like, it costs money to do that.

00:51:00   And they come in little, and the reason I know this is I bought a bunch of them, I'll

00:51:03   get back to the temporary pricing in a second.

00:51:05   They come in little rectangular boxes that are beautiful origami folded and you know,

00:51:10   they're just, they're not just like a little plastic bag that you get like with Amazon

00:51:14   Basics and the frustration free packaging of just this cable thrown in there, right?

00:51:18   And you know, and like I said, in terms of how they perform as actual adapters, I don't

00:51:22   think they're actually better than the other ones, but I do see that where some of the

00:51:25   money is spent on them.

00:51:26   So I think they would, in general, they would be better off finding a way to manufacture

00:51:32   their adapters for less money, giving up some of the beauty and elegance, and at the same

00:51:37   time making them more reliable adapters.

00:51:39   And the reason I bought a bunch of them is what you're getting at, the temporary pricing.

00:51:43   If you want a pessimistic take, this is what I thought when I saw it.

00:51:45   "Oh, it's nice.

00:51:46   They're doing something to be nice to all those people who are posting horror stories

00:51:50   that I bought a new MacBook Pro and also $300 worth of adapters so I could use the damn

00:51:54   thing."

00:51:55   Right?

00:51:56   So like now you won't have to spend $150 worth of adapters,

00:52:00   but only until the end of the year.

00:52:01   So what happens at the end of the year?

00:52:03   By the end of the year,

00:52:04   has everyone updated all their offices

00:52:05   to have connectors that don't require these dongles?

00:52:08   No, they just go back to the old pricing,

00:52:10   the old pricing, which was really, really expensive,

00:52:12   especially for some of the simpler adapters.

00:52:14   The reason I bought those, the USB-C to plain old USB-A,

00:52:18   because that's gonna,

00:52:19   I don't even have a computer with ports that require that.

00:52:22   I mean, I got my Apple TV, I suppose I could plug it into it,

00:52:24   but it would do nothing.

00:52:25   (laughing)

00:52:26   But someday I will have a computer that does that.

00:52:29   And they were half off basically.

00:52:30   It was like $19 to $9.

00:52:32   So I bought two of them because I'm going to use them.

00:52:35   And $9 is a price I will pay for that little adapter.

00:52:39   Will I pay $20 for that adapter?

00:52:41   Hell no.

00:52:42   I will not pay $20.

00:52:43   I'll go to Monoprice and find whatever,

00:52:45   you know, Amazon Basics was mentioned.

00:52:47   I'll find a cheaper one because it's not worth that much money.

00:52:50   $20 for a USB-C to USB-A adapter?

00:52:53   No.

00:52:54   So I bought them because they were temporary, maybe their system is working, adding some urgency or

00:52:59   whatever, but it would be much nicer if they didn't see this as a PR thing that needs to be addressed

00:53:06   in the short term, but rather as a long-term issue. Because I think they're going to be selling dongles

00:53:11   for a long time, and that's going to be factored into the price of people buying laptops, especially

00:53:15   the next laptop that people buy after this one, because they'll know, "Oh, when you buy an Apple

00:53:19   laptop also reserve 100 and X dollars for dongles maybe more and the prices

00:53:25   just go right back up it's it's not a good it's not a good situation I mean I

00:53:29   know they kind of get away with in the iOS devices where it's like oh you can

00:53:32   buy the iOS device because you want the one with lots of memory we're just gonna

00:53:34   add a couple hundred bucks and you want AppleCare and then you want the front

00:53:37   case in the back case in your iPad like it adds up really fast but for some

00:53:41   reason and maybe this is illogical the adapters seem like you know relatively

00:53:46   more expensive. And maybe it's because I don't see the little chips in there and don't understand

00:53:51   how expensive it is to get them all integrated into that, but this is a problem of Apple's

00:53:54   own making. And when I see third-party ones that can come in for less, especially for

00:53:58   the simpler adapters, it makes me think that Apple is choosing the wrong trade-offs when

00:54:03   it comes to making its own adapters. They're too expensive, too precious, and not sturdy

00:54:09   enough.

00:54:10   It's funny you say that you went and picked some of these up because on my to-do list

00:54:15   this week, which I haven't had time for,

00:54:18   is I wanted to go to the Apple Store

00:54:20   and pick up a handful of these adapters

00:54:23   because I have the exact same thought.

00:54:25   I probably won't have a MacBook Pro or a Mac

00:54:28   that uses USB-C for at least a year or two,

00:54:31   but that time will come,

00:54:33   so why not just pick up a few of these?

00:54:35   And I intend to do that very thing sometime soon.

00:54:39   - The reason I'm laughing is that I did that very thing.

00:54:43   Also, all three of us did this.

00:54:45   So none of the three of us have one of the new MacBook Pros

00:54:48   or have ordered one or likely are planning to buy one.

00:54:51   - Well you briefly ordered one.

00:54:52   - I did.

00:54:53   - You briefly ordered one.

00:54:55   - And I ordered it with two adapters,

00:54:58   a USB C to A and a C to Lightning.

00:55:01   Those both shipped and arrived

00:55:03   before I even canceled the laptop.

00:55:05   So and I'm like, well I could return them,

00:55:07   but well I'm gonna use them anyway.

00:55:08   And then the price drop was announced

00:55:10   and they credited me the difference.

00:55:11   I'm like, okay, that's even better.

00:55:13   And so I went and I bought, I now have two C to A adapters,

00:55:17   the C to Lightning, gigabit ethernet,

00:55:20   the SanDisk card reader, and the Thunderbolt 2 adapter,

00:55:23   'cause I have an external sound device

00:55:25   that we record ATP at WBC with at a Thunderbolt.

00:55:28   And 'cause I made all the exact same calculations

00:55:31   as you guys, it's like, well,

00:55:33   I'm gonna need these eventually,

00:55:35   and they're probably not going to get cheaper over time.

00:55:38   Like this is probably, I'm going to need these soon,

00:55:41   probably within the next two years,

00:55:43   I will need these adapters.

00:55:45   And things like the C to Lightning cable,

00:55:48   that's just the new Lightning cable.

00:55:50   I need tons of Lightning cables, they're all over the place.

00:55:53   So to pick up one of these at whatever it is,

00:55:56   $19 instead of $25, that was a small price drop on that one,

00:55:59   but like, well, I'm gonna need these,

00:56:01   so I might as well get one or two.

00:56:03   - You should make like a Papercraft MacBook Pro

00:56:05   and plug all your dongles into it.

00:56:07   (laughing)

00:56:08   Like you'll have like a pretend computer.

00:56:10   - Yeah, but again, I do admit though, I agree, John,

00:56:13   that it is very strange that these price drops

00:56:15   are only temporary in the dongles.

00:56:17   'Cause again, they're still not making them

00:56:19   like mono-price level pricing or anything.

00:56:21   Like they're still expensive compared to the no-name ones.

00:56:24   And that's fine, they are better.

00:56:26   - They dropped them down to the same price

00:56:28   as good quality third-party peripherals.

00:56:30   Like that's all you did.

00:56:31   It's not like it's a super duper bargain.

00:56:33   It's just like, oh, this is the price I would expect to see

00:56:35   if I found whatever the best third-party one is out there,

00:56:38   a similar price to this.

00:56:39   And they botched the PR on this too because they did the right thing and credited everybody,

00:56:44   but the way we found that out was like, "Oh, they're dropping the prices, but what about

00:56:48   the people who already ordered them?"

00:56:49   And then we had to wait for people to start getting credit.

00:56:51   That's got to be part of your message.

00:56:53   We've lowered all the prices, and by the way, if you bought one in the past X days, we're

00:56:57   going to credit you, which they obviously did.

00:56:59   They did the right thing.

00:57:01   When you're going to do the right thing, Apple, tell us about it because it's good PR.

00:57:05   leave people wondering like, "Oh, now I feel bad that I bought them. Hey, but what

00:57:09   happened to the poor suckers who bought them?" or whatever. And, you know, we found out a

00:57:11   couple hours or a day later that Apple did the right thing, but why, like, that was another

00:57:16   drop of all.

00:57:17   Yeah, but I, I don't know. Regardless, this is a good move. I wish they would make the

00:57:23   price cuts permanent. They might still do that. Like, they haven't, they said till

00:57:27   the end of the year, they could change their minds or they could cut the prices later,

00:57:31   you know, after some period of time, again.

00:57:33   The funny thing about the end of the year thing is that

00:57:37   I was honestly tempted to order the LG display too,

00:57:40   the big 5K display, because like,

00:57:42   well, that is only gonna be available for ordering

00:57:45   at this $300 discount for a couple of weeks maybe,

00:57:49   'cause you can't even order one yet.

00:57:51   The website currently says it'll become available

00:57:53   in December, and the price drop is till the end of the year.

00:57:56   So you're gonna have like a few weeks in December

00:57:58   when you can actually order this thing at a discount.

00:58:01   Who knows when it would actually ship and arrive?

00:58:03   And I'm thinking like, well, will there ever be a time,

00:58:06   like if they make a new Mac Pro next year,

00:58:09   I'm gonna want one of those displays

00:58:11   if it's still a standalone Mac Pro.

00:58:12   But I'm not confident enough that it will be

00:58:15   a standalone Mac Pro that will exist,

00:58:17   that will be out next year,

00:58:19   to actually order one of these things

00:58:20   like six months ahead of time.

00:58:22   - You just hook that up to your Papergraph MacBook Pro

00:58:24   and you'll have a complete setup of the computer part.

00:58:27   You'll have the dongles, you'll have the screen.

00:58:29   It'll be beautiful.

00:58:30   - You can use your iPad as the pretend touch bar.

00:58:33   - Yeah, right.

00:58:34   - It'll have the whole computer except the screen,

00:58:35   the keyboard, and the trackpad, and the CPU, and the GPU.

00:58:38   - Yeah, it's gonna be a rough transition.

00:58:40   Once we get to the other side,

00:58:43   we're in these heavy transitional eras.

00:58:45   First we went retina and SSD,

00:58:48   and we still have not finished those transitions.

00:58:51   We're close, but we still have not completed

00:58:54   those two large transitions completely.

00:58:57   you can still go out and buy not even just one,

00:59:00   but many Mac models that either don't have retina,

00:59:04   don't have SSDs by default, or even both,

00:59:07   which is embarrassing.

00:59:09   But those transitions are almost done.

00:59:13   Once you have a retina computer with all SSD storage,

00:59:17   not Fusion Drive, all SSD storage,

00:59:19   it is a thing of beauty, it is amazing.

00:59:22   It's such a good computer from that point forward.

00:59:24   And USB-C is gonna be the same thing for ports.

00:59:26   It's like we have this kind of cumbersome,

00:59:29   annoying transition that's going to break a lot of things

00:59:31   like old monitors that you won't be able to use anymore.

00:59:34   It's putting up this big barrier, changing all the ports,

00:59:37   requiring this dongle sale and everything else.

00:59:40   But once we get to that promised land of all USB-C ports

00:59:45   and all or mostly USB-C peripherals,

00:59:48   it's going to be really nice.

00:59:50   And the benefits of the new MacBook Pro,

00:59:51   like being able to charge it on both sides,

00:59:53   like that's cool, that's a useful thing.

00:59:55   It's going to be a really nice road when we get there, but the transition is going to be uncomfortable, just like all these other ones have been.

01:00:01   Well, you still have our new thing in our future world will be confusion about the USB-C to Lightning cable, which end is which, because they're different sizes, and you can tell if you look at them.

01:00:12   But if you're not paying attention, and you just pick the skinny little cable up with the two skinny little ends, we don't have the problem of like USB-A where you keep flipping it over three times to get it in right, because they're both bi-directional.

01:00:22   but you might find yourself sticking the lightning plug into the side of your MacBook Pro

01:00:26   maybe just once or twice before you realize what's going on.

01:00:29   We are sponsored this week by Hover and the upcoming .blogTLD. Go to hover.com/namemyblog

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01:01:48   [Music]

01:01:52   We had talked, I think, briefly last week, and then we ended up shelving it so we could

01:01:58   discuss this week, about the thought of ARM processors on the Mac.

01:02:04   And I think I might have brought this up because I was saying that, you know, if you look at

01:02:10   a lot of the angst that's been floating around the community with regard to the MacBook Pro

01:02:16   and the Mac Pro, there is a way that you can blame a lot of these troubles on Intel. Not to say that

01:02:23   Apple's blameless by any stretch of the imagination, but you can paint a picture in which Intel holds a

01:02:29   lot of the blame. And it's in Apple's... It's Apple's modus operandi to control everything it can.

01:02:36   and so it controls the chips on the iOS lines,

01:02:40   why wouldn't it make sense for them to try to control

01:02:44   the chip on the MacBook Pro, or really just the Mac lines?

01:02:48   And so that makes you think, well,

01:02:50   why wouldn't they use an ARM chip

01:02:52   like they have in the iOS lines and throw that on?

01:02:55   It's presumably going to be very low power,

01:02:59   and the modern iOS devices

01:03:03   are nearly as fast as modern Macs,

01:03:06   And so it seems on paper to make sense.

01:03:11   Why wouldn't they give it a shot?

01:03:14   I mean, the transition would stink,

01:03:15   but we've already done this once with the transition

01:03:18   from PowerPC to Intel and fat binaries and blah, blah, blah.

01:03:21   - Twice. - Why not try again?

01:03:23   Twice, right?

01:03:24   So why not try again?

01:03:25   - We need like an old Mac sound effect.

01:03:28   Whenever John schools us on something

01:03:30   that came across the Mac before 2004.

01:03:33   - PowerPC transition was awesome.

01:03:35   graphing calculator was a miracle.

01:03:37   - We could use a startup chime

01:03:39   since it's not a thing anymore.

01:03:40   - There you go.

01:03:42   So we discussed this ARM and the Mac thing so many times,

01:03:44   and we're probably gonna say all the same things here,

01:03:45   but the reason I think it was worth bringing up again,

01:03:48   the reason we delayed it to this show

01:03:49   is because like things change surprisingly quickly

01:03:52   in the world of ARM CPUs.

01:03:54   And just like to briefly summarize

01:03:56   all the things that we've said in the past,

01:03:57   x86 is important for Windows compatibility.

01:03:59   How important is that still, but it is a thing.

01:04:03   why would Apple spend money producing ARM chips for the Mac?

01:04:08   Because the Mac doesn't sell enough volume

01:04:09   to be worth creating your own chips,

01:04:11   whereas the iOS chips do.

01:04:13   And that leads to, okay, well, all you gotta do

01:04:15   is wait until you can do the investment,

01:04:18   design your own fancy ARM chip

01:04:20   that you use in your iOS devices,

01:04:22   and basically use that same chip or the same architecture,

01:04:24   maybe with more cores and more fancy stuff.

01:04:26   But basically, like the work you did for your iOS devices

01:04:29   transfers directly to the Mac.

01:04:30   And then you solve the investment problem

01:04:32   because you're like, oh, I'm doing this work anyway

01:04:34   for the next iPhone.

01:04:35   It doesn't cost that much more to make a bigger,

01:04:38   more parallel version of it and throw it in

01:04:40   to a Mac type thing.

01:04:41   It solves the problem of relying on Intel

01:04:43   like Casey was getting to,

01:04:44   because it's been a bad run lately with delays

01:04:47   and everything like that.

01:04:48   Apple's the master of its own destiny,

01:04:51   and you just have the x86 compatibility stuff to deal with.

01:04:54   And the reason I think it's worth revisiting again

01:04:56   is because just one year since the last time

01:04:59   we probably discussed it,

01:05:00   the chip that's in the latest iPhones is, I think,

01:05:04   faster than some Macs, and it's clocked lower in most cases.

01:05:09   And I think we're kind of at that, not quite at the point,

01:05:12   but getting close to the point where the work they do

01:05:15   for the iPhone CPU is directly transferable to the Mac

01:05:19   in terms of what kind of performance could you get out of it

01:05:23   with making a bigger version, clocking it higher,

01:05:26   maybe putting in a couple more cores.

01:05:29   I think we're there for the low-end Macs,

01:05:30   and if they don't even make any high-end Macs anymore,

01:05:32   maybe it doesn't matter.

01:05:33   So as this equation keeps changing,

01:05:36   and as we depressingly look at the Geekbench scores

01:05:39   for the latest phone and compare them

01:05:40   to whatever Mac we're sitting in front of and go,

01:05:42   "What is going on here?

01:05:44   The world is upside down."

01:05:46   The balance of all those factors that I discussed at Apple

01:05:51   have to be changing.

01:05:53   It really depends on the weight you give to them

01:05:56   to decide, is this the go or no-go moment?

01:05:58   And again, we all just assume that Apple has either been working on or understand the challenges

01:06:05   of converting macOS to ARM, if it hasn't done so already.

01:06:11   But especially with the integration of the ARM chip for the Touch ID, the viability and

01:06:16   desirability of an ARM-based Mac to both Apple and consumers only increases over time.

01:06:22   And I feel like this has to come to a head eventually, unless Intel gets back in gear

01:06:27   and there's another two process levels ahead of everybody else.

01:06:31   And I guess the wildcard is that 3D XPoint stuff, which I don't know if it's proprietary

01:06:36   in any way or tied to Intel in any specific way. But there are many ways that Intel could ensure

01:06:43   that it keeps Apple's business. But especially with this recent delay and the new MacBooks and

01:06:48   looking at the scores for the new iPhones, in my mind anyway, things are shifting much more towards

01:06:55   the possibility of Arm Max in the future than I would have thought of even just a year ago.

01:06:59   I completely agree with you.

01:07:01   And it's worth noting, as I have in the past, that to switch to Arm would incur some

01:07:08   pretty significant costs for a lot of developers, which admittedly are a very, very, very small

01:07:14   part of the market.

01:07:15   But doing virtualization on an Intel box for Windows, which is really now only running

01:07:23   on Intel again, that's easier than trying to do some sort of cross-compilation from

01:07:29   ARM to X86—I'm sorry, from X86 to ARM.

01:07:33   So if old me, the me that was still writing code in Windows, which actually happened earlier

01:07:40   today, but we'll leave that aside, the old me that was doing it professionally 40-plus

01:07:45   hours a week, I would probably have to go back to a PC, because presumably it would

01:07:49   be just awful to have to cross-compile or really—what's the term I'm looking for?

01:07:54   It's not cross-compile.

01:07:55   >>TIM

01:08:12   some people plugged into their Macs so they could run Windows on them. And so

01:08:16   there are definitely costs to this. There's costs in software, pain, you know,

01:08:20   you would have to have some sort of emulation layer for x86 or the... what was

01:08:26   the thing they did for PowerPC on top of Intel? What was the name of that?

01:08:30   Rosetta. Thank you. I've got just a solution for you, Casey. Yeah. It's a dongle, and inside it is a Raspberry Pi.

01:08:37   I mean, you just mentioned that basically PCI card, I think it was Anubis card.

01:08:44   You could fairly easily put a reasonably powerful x86 computer inside a dongle connected to

01:08:50   a Thunderbolt 3 port, and the only people who'd have to have that dongle are the people

01:08:53   who needed to do that.

01:08:56   It's not just that.

01:08:57   It's also people who want to run software on their – if you just want to run – I

01:09:02   ran into this at work recently, which is depressing.

01:09:04   Docker does not run on my Mac at work because it's too old,

01:09:07   because it doesn't have the hypervisor stuff or whatever.

01:09:09   But anyway, Docker is not gonna run.

01:09:12   Docker for deploying on x86-based servers

01:09:14   is not gonna run on our Mac.

01:09:16   And so I would need to get that down a little too.

01:09:18   - Yeah, fair enough.

01:09:19   I didn't think that that way.

01:09:20   Also doing a quick search,

01:09:22   it looks like the first time that we spoke about this

01:09:25   that I could quickly find was episode 35,

01:09:28   almost exactly three years ago on October 18 of 2013,

01:09:33   where we discussed, where is it,

01:09:36   how Touch ID could be used in Macs,

01:09:38   and whether ARM MacBooks would be worth the transition costs.

01:09:41   - So does that make this follow-up?

01:09:43   (laughing)

01:09:44   - We crossed over into topics, believe it or not,

01:09:46   when we talked about the peripheral price cuts.

01:09:47   Everyone in the chat room wants to tell us all

01:09:49   that Thunderbolt is an Intel thing.

01:09:51   Like all things are solvable with money though.

01:09:53   I truly believe this.

01:09:53   Like it's like we talked about last week.

01:09:55   Apple could make x86 chips and get off the Intel bandwagon.

01:09:59   And you know, there's lots of possibilities here

01:10:02   that involving money changing hands and licensing deals

01:10:05   and so on and so forth.

01:10:06   And another thing that factors into this,

01:10:08   I forgot to mention in the little summary,

01:10:10   is that for a long time, Intel has had

01:10:13   this massive advantage that they were on

01:10:15   the new process size before everybody else,

01:10:17   sometimes like a year or more before everybody else.

01:10:21   So everything they made had just like a built-in advantage

01:10:24   of being lower power and smaller, you know,

01:10:27   and like they were first at whatever the process size is.

01:10:31   And lately, I've been seeing lots of stories

01:10:35   and collecting them in the show notes,

01:10:36   then eventually deleting them or aging them off.

01:10:38   Lots of stuff about like,

01:10:39   well, Intel is not gonna be first to 10 nanometers

01:10:42   or Intel already is in first 10 nanometers.

01:10:43   Like, no, those are just promises.

01:10:45   Intel will still be first and Intel is the only one

01:10:47   who's gonna be able to proceed beyond that

01:10:48   because they've done the deep R&D.

01:10:49   And like, back in that show 36 or whatever,

01:10:53   one of the topics we've probably talked about is like,

01:10:55   does Intel just wanna be a fab for everybody else?

01:10:57   Because they have the best process.

01:10:59   Wouldn't it be great if Apple could have Intel fab

01:11:01   of its, you know, A-series chips on their fancy new process, and, you know, Intel is

01:11:07   making some of the chips in phones, but not the big one, not the A-series chip, they're

01:11:11   just making what, like a radio chip that is not as good as the Qualcomm one yet, but anyway.

01:11:15   Mm-hmm, yep, that's the one I have that doesn't work.

01:11:17   Yeah.

01:11:18   Same.

01:11:19   Well, I don't know if that's why you're having your drop calls, but either way, like, it

01:11:22   used to be that Intel was unquestionably the best place to fab your stuff, because Intel

01:11:25   was like, "We're not gonna just fab your stuff, we wanna sell you chips that we make,

01:11:29   because we make way more money off those.

01:11:30   We're not just gonna be a stupid fab.

01:11:31   That's not what we are.

01:11:32   We're not just a fab, we're Intel, we make chips.

01:11:35   And I'm not gonna say that Intel

01:11:37   is losing its lead in fab tech,

01:11:40   but it seems less clear cut to me

01:11:41   as a fairly casual observer of the Silicon chip industry

01:11:46   that Intel's lead on process

01:11:49   is no longer as big as it used to be.

01:11:51   And I forget what are the A10 being made at?

01:11:55   Are they 14 nanometer?

01:11:56   I forget what size they are,

01:11:57   but I keep reading stories about, you know, Taiwan's semiconductor will be at 10 nanometer

01:12:01   before Intel is and stuff like that.

01:12:04   >> 16 nanometer.

01:12:05   >> Is it 16?

01:12:06   Yeah.

01:12:07   Maybe they still have a lead, but it just doesn't seem as big to me as it used to be.

01:12:09   And also Intel seems to be more open now to fabbing things for other people.

01:12:13   There was some other story out in the show notes about that a while back.

01:12:16   So add that to yet another set of variables that are slowly shifting more towards being

01:12:23   in favor of Arm Max.

01:12:25   I don't think any of this stuff is at a tipping point yet,

01:12:27   but when we revisit this topic in a year,

01:12:29   it may be a slam dunk.

01:12:31   - Yeah, I mean, at this point,

01:12:32   I would say that the processor itself

01:12:36   is probably no longer the reason why they're not doing it.

01:12:39   It's everything around the processor.

01:12:41   It's all the memory controllers and the Thunderbolt,

01:12:45   if they want, they have to move away from Thunderbolt

01:12:47   in all likelihood, which, by the way,

01:12:49   yeah, I mean, Apple did just make a pretty big bet

01:12:51   on Thunderbolt with the USB-C transition.

01:12:54   That's a big bet, but Apple changes their mind

01:12:56   when they need to.

01:12:57   Like they can totally say, you know what,

01:12:59   Thunderbolt was great last year,

01:13:00   this year we can't do it anymore.

01:13:02   Too bad, buy new dongles.

01:13:03   - Wow, they don't have to change their mind.

01:13:04   Like I said, these are all solvable problems with money.

01:13:08   Like I'm sure Intel could come to some agreement

01:13:11   with Apple involving exchanges of money

01:13:14   that would allow someone somewhere to build

01:13:16   an ARM chip with Thunderbolt.

01:13:17   Like I don't think there's anything specifically

01:13:20   X86 specific about it, even if it's like Biodow and crap.

01:13:23   Like these are solvable problems technically and monetarily.

01:13:25   It could be another barrier and that's another variable like on the against side and maybe

01:13:29   it's a big barrier because Intel is like, "No, we're never going to license it and,

01:13:33   you know, tough luck."

01:13:34   Like we don't know the constants that apply to all these different factors, but I don't

01:13:40   say it rules it out.

01:13:41   And I wouldn't say that Intel is incredibly flexible on things like that.

01:13:46   But the other thing too is like it would be possible, although I don't think it would

01:13:51   would last very, I think it would be a transitional thing,

01:13:54   but it would be possible to only make some models

01:13:58   with ARM chips, like only the MacBook One,

01:14:00   or only the MacBook One and Escape.

01:14:02   And so you keep the pro models on Intel,

01:14:05   so they could just say, you know what,

01:14:07   if you need to virtualize Windows or whatever,

01:14:09   you could use the pro model, and if you need Thunderbolt,

01:14:11   use the pro model, and if you are willing to get

01:14:14   the smallest, lightest thing that doesn't have

01:14:16   all the pro features, then you can have these two models

01:14:20   that are ARM-based.

01:14:21   Maybe the Mac Mini becomes ARM-based as well, who knows?

01:14:24   They have lots of options there

01:14:25   if they wanted to go that route.

01:14:27   I don't know if, again, I don't know if they will,

01:14:29   I don't know if it makes sense for them to put

01:14:32   so much effort into this transition

01:14:34   if they're not really hurting badly from Intel,

01:14:38   but I think there have been times over the last couple years

01:14:41   where they have been really hurting badly because of Intel.

01:14:44   And I, especially, I mean, if they care about the Mac Pro

01:14:47   more, it would be even more pressing there

01:14:49   because the Mac Pro has been historically

01:14:51   even more limited by Intel,

01:14:53   even before Apple started skipping generations.

01:14:55   You're right, money does solve a lot of things,

01:14:57   they could make a deal,

01:14:58   but Intel really is pretty inflexible

01:15:01   on certain things these days,

01:15:02   and it doesn't seem like Apple is a large enough

01:15:05   or profitable enough Intel customer

01:15:08   for Apple to be able to dictate terms to them anymore,

01:15:10   if they ever were.

01:15:11   - Apple's big bargaining chip though is that they could say,

01:15:14   "Hey Intel, I know you don't wanna be a fab,

01:15:16   "but if you were gonna fab something,

01:15:18   the A-series chip that's in our iOS devices,

01:15:21   it's pretty good volume there.

01:15:22   (laughing)

01:15:23   - Fair point.

01:15:24   Also, to go back a half step, Marco, you had said,

01:15:27   you could make just the MacBook One have the new ARM chip

01:15:32   just for the sake of discussion.

01:15:34   And I agree with you,

01:15:36   but wouldn't we run into the same sort of problem

01:15:38   with this USB-C transition where,

01:15:40   if the MacBook One is running ARM, but nothing else is,

01:15:44   what is incentivizing the software developers

01:15:47   to rebuild their apps for the ARM platform and make fat binaries and blah, blah, blah,

01:15:53   if only one presumably low-volume Mac is on ARM and everything else is still on Intel.

01:15:59   The Mac App Store rules, if only Mac developers actually sold things for the Mac App Store

01:16:04   anymore.

01:16:05   Right.

01:16:06   But I mean, I'm sure they would do that.

01:16:07   That would be their thing.

01:16:08   They would mandate it in the Mac App Store.

01:16:09   And honestly, developers would do it, if it's as easily as just changing some settings and

01:16:13   filling some stuff around.

01:16:14   like at this point, most conscientious Mac developers should not have architecture specific

01:16:19   code. And like, they still had W2C sessions to say, how to tell if you're doing something

01:16:23   that relies on, you know, word size or byte order, and especially with Swift and stuff

01:16:27   with this stuff being abstracted away and not having to worry about C ints and shorts

01:16:30   and whatever the hell those are, right, you know, on different architectures and all that

01:16:34   crap. I think it wouldn't be that bad. And developers would do it because if you want

01:16:37   to sell to those people, you'll do it, right? Like, maybe the people making ProOps wouldn't

01:16:41   because they don't want to sell to the MacBook escape people, but it is surmountable and

01:16:45   I think there are incentives for people to get on board.

01:16:49   As time goes on, it becomes less and less difficult to make relatively portable code.

01:16:55   Like you know, we have moved up so many layers of abstraction in so much of our code. We

01:17:00   do so little custom assembly or byte order assumptions or you know, binary operations

01:17:04   at that level at all anymore that it's less and less work now. And you know, I think developers

01:17:10   I think developers are gonna do more work

01:17:12   to support the touch bar than they would need to do

01:17:15   to make an ARM version of almost any app.

01:17:17   - Except for game developers, they'd be screwed.

01:17:19   - What gets delivered to the App Store?

01:17:21   'Cause I haven't looked at this in a while,

01:17:24   but doesn't Swift compile to its own intermediate language,

01:17:27   then gets compiled to an LLVM intermediate language?

01:17:30   Is that what gets pushed to the App Store,

01:17:32   and then that's what bitcode is all about?

01:17:33   - I think you're mixing bitcode up with the CIL stuff,

01:17:36   which is a whole different thing.

01:17:37   - I think you're right, I think you're right.

01:17:38   - I forget what the Bitcode policy is.

01:17:40   Do you remember, Marco?

01:17:42   - Bitcode is required on the watch, I believe.

01:17:47   I think it's optional for iPhones still.

01:17:50   And I don't know if the Mac App Store,

01:17:53   may it rest in peace, even supports it?

01:17:56   I don't know.

01:17:58   Anyway, but Bitcode, a number of people

01:18:00   have looked at it and basically determined

01:18:02   that Bitcode is probably not a very good way

01:18:05   to just automatically generate a whole ARM thing,

01:18:09   'cause Bitcode I think is too low level.

01:18:12   It's beneath the compiled level,

01:18:13   and so basically assumptions about byte order and stuff

01:18:17   would not translate automatically.

01:18:19   - Gotcha, okay.

01:18:20   But you see where I'm driving at though.

01:18:21   I wasn't sure if this could solve that problem for you.

01:18:24   - I'm pretty sure Bitcode is not the answer

01:18:26   to an automatic ARM build of everything in the store.

01:18:29   If it doesn't work.

01:18:30   - Yeah, what was it?

01:18:32   Is it mostly, I used to know this about Bitcode,

01:18:35   but not running these OS X reviews for a long time

01:18:37   lets you forget all these things.

01:18:38   I don't remember the details,

01:18:38   but Apple's motivation for doing it

01:18:40   was so they have more flexibility

01:18:42   with fiddling with instructions

01:18:44   from one generation to the next of the S1 chip

01:18:46   or the S2 and so on and so forth,

01:18:48   that because you're not delivering machine code

01:18:50   that they just run as is.

01:18:52   They have some flexibility if they change an instruction

01:18:54   or remove an instruction and replace it with another one

01:18:56   that's slightly different,

01:18:57   that they can do the final machine code generation business.

01:19:00   Anyway, developers were all antsy about it

01:19:03   And who knows how long it will be a thing.

01:19:05   But on the watch, that's the one I was thinking on.

01:19:06   The watch, like it is a thing, it has been from day one.

01:19:09   Everything for the watch is delivered as bit code,

01:19:11   which gives Apple more flexibility with hardware design

01:19:14   than they would have if everyone was shipping

01:19:15   just binaries that are run as is.

01:19:18   - Yeah, I thought that the pitched reason for bit code

01:19:21   was that this way, as a user, you would only download

01:19:26   the version of the binary that's built for your platform

01:19:29   rather than having to get,

01:19:31   kind of building on what you were saying,

01:19:32   rather than having to get the A6 version,

01:19:34   A7 version, A8 version, or what have you,

01:19:36   you would just have the version of the app

01:19:39   built against the processor that you have.

01:19:42   - Yeah. - And thus,

01:19:42   it would be a smaller download.

01:19:44   - That's true too.

01:19:45   Although, like with binary, in most cases,

01:19:49   as most of Marco's apps prove,

01:19:50   because he doesn't like to include graphics

01:19:51   'cause he uses paint code for everything,

01:19:53   the size of your application is not determined

01:19:55   by the size of your code these days.

01:19:56   Like your icons are bigger than a lot of your code, right?

01:19:59   - I will say that a lot of apps

01:20:01   involve a large quantity of advertising and tracking SDKs.

01:20:06   And those can actually add a non-trivial amount

01:20:09   of binary size.

01:20:11   I mean, and a lot of their size is assets as well.

01:20:13   But yeah, a lot of those can get pretty sizable

01:20:16   and make the binary pretty ridiculous.

01:20:18   - Yeah, the Swift standard library,

01:20:19   I think which I think still has to ship

01:20:21   with the applications 'cause they haven't worked out

01:20:22   the ABI compatibility yet.

01:20:23   - That's true.

01:20:24   - Is another big thing that's in there.

01:20:26   But for applications of appreciable size,

01:20:29   when you're thinking of things like,

01:20:30   you know, a one gigabyte game. That's not code. That's all assets.

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01:21:44   betterment investing made better

01:21:48   there's been a couple of calls for a terrifying strategy from the past to

01:21:55   come back John should there be Mac clones again this is a was mentioned

01:22:01   last show as a measure of exactly how deep the dissatisfaction in some quarters

01:22:08   was about the new MacBook Pros. They're saying, "Look, if you're not

01:22:11   gonna make the Pro Mac that I want to make, how about letting other people make

01:22:16   Mac hardware? That way, Apple, you don't have to worry about it anymore. Someone

01:22:20   else will address my needs and everyone will be happy." Isn't that great? Mac

01:22:24   cloning was done. We did it once before. We can do it again. Just license the Mac

01:22:28   operating system, and I will gladly buy from some other company that actually cares about

01:22:32   my needs and will make me the big honking computer that I want.

01:22:36   And we've been down this road before in the past.

01:22:40   For most of Apple's history with the Mac, people have been clamoring for them to clone

01:22:44   it because that was IBM's half-accidental strategy.

01:22:48   IBM and Intel and Windows, like that whole big mess.

01:22:51   The way it ended up through no particular grand plan of anybody except perhaps Microsoft

01:22:56   that you could buy a PC from companies other than IBM.

01:23:00   They were IBM compatible, and they all would suit your needs.

01:23:05   They could all run MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows eventually and all that other stuff.

01:23:09   And so the hardware vendors would compete with each other and have their own little race

01:23:13   to the bottom until they all went out of business except for Dell and Lenovo and anyway, blah, blah, blah.

01:23:16   Everyone was saying during the go-go late 80s, early 90s, hey, Apple, IBM, Microsoft,

01:23:24   whoever are eating your lunch because they let anybody make hardware and they have competition

01:23:28   and capitalism and yay, 80s, you should license your operating system." And Apple said, "No,

01:23:35   we're not going to license our operating system." And every time Apple did something that someone

01:23:38   didn't like, it would say, "See, if you just license your operating system, you'd be doing

01:23:43   much better." In the end, eventually, I think Apple, now making so much more money than

01:23:49   the other PC makers, has come out the other side and saying, "I guess our strategy was

01:23:53   pretty good but in the middle there couple of Apple CEOs were convinced that

01:23:57   this is a good idea I think spindler started it maybe I forget I'm blaming

01:24:00   the wrong CEO for starting Mac cloning they said when Apple was getting

01:24:07   increasingly desperate I still didn't have a new operating system and Windows

01:24:10   95 98 and so on and so forth were taking over the world and I hadn't yet bought

01:24:13   next one of the panic plans they made was all right people keep saying license

01:24:18   in the Mac operating system let's do that and they did that with

01:24:22   predictable results because Apple was not licensing for a position of power.

01:24:26   It allowed a bunch of third parties to make Mac clones very often based on Mac or Apple-derived

01:24:32   reference hardware design. So these clone companies sometimes didn't even have to do the

01:24:35   hard work to build their own hardware. They could just sort of make hardware that was like Apple's

01:24:38   but a little bit better and do a little bit of work in addition to that. It didn't help Apple

01:24:43   make more money. The license fees did not make up for the loss in hardware sales. When Steve Jobs

01:24:48   Jobs came back, yeah I think it was Steve Jobs came back, he canned it.

01:24:52   It may have been canned before then, should have been canned before then.

01:24:56   And the brief MacClone experiment ended.

01:25:00   And for most people looking backwards on it, they're going to be like, "Oh, MacClone,

01:25:03   that was such a big mistake.

01:25:04   It didn't actually help Apple, it actually hurt Apple."

01:25:08   And it was kind of cruel to do MacClone's and then a year or two later say, "Oh, just

01:25:14   kidding, no more MacClone's."

01:25:15   And so all those companies that sprung up around making Mac clones had a brief moment

01:25:20   in the sun and then had to disappear because their entire business was gone.

01:25:23   Motorola even made them, for crying out loud.

01:25:24   Motorola made Mac clones.

01:25:27   And so I would imagine for you people who didn't live through it, you silly millennials,

01:25:32   it just seems like a cautionary tale.

01:25:34   But to me who lived through it, I do have some fond memories.

01:25:37   And I think most Mac users who lived through the cloner do have some fond memories of it

01:25:42   for just the reasons we just talked about, like with the MacBook Pro and dissatisfaction.

01:25:47   There was a time when if Apple didn't make a Mac that was like you wanted to buy, like

01:25:53   it didn't have the right balance of features and price and so on and so forth, there was

01:25:56   a chance there would be another company that would.

01:25:59   And these companies, the Mac cologne makers were no dummies, they tried to fill market

01:26:06   initiatives that Apple didn't want to.

01:26:09   And so they would clock their CPUs a little bit higher.

01:26:12   They would make boring looking tower boxes that were nevertheless much more expandable

01:26:16   than Apple's designs.

01:26:18   They would sell computers for less money than Apple.

01:26:21   They would do all sorts of things that Apple wasn't going to do or just giving you different

01:26:24   combinations of size and hard drive space and video capabilities.

01:26:29   It was actually a fairly exciting time to be a Mac user and I know a lot of people actually

01:26:34   bought those clones and were they as nice as Apple's computers? No. And the companies

01:26:39   weren't around very long because Apple stopped cloning but for a brief moment there we were

01:26:44   in that world where if you were an enthusiast who liked to run the Mac operating system

01:26:50   you had more choices and it was kind of fun. Now this doesn't mean we should do it again

01:26:56   now it's a silly overreaction to a new product that some people were mildly dissatisfied

01:27:01   with. But I guess maybe just my main point in this is to say that Mac clones weren't

01:27:09   actually all bad. And if Apple ever loses total interest in either the Mac entirely

01:27:13   or the high end of the Mac market, some kind of limited licensing plan could work. Just

01:27:23   like the LG monitor is currently the only one you can buy that works with a MacBook

01:27:26   Pro, and I assume there will be other ones. But imagine if one company was blessed as

01:27:29   the company that makes the pro Mac hardware and it was blessed by Apple and

01:27:32   it was the only it was it was no it's not like you had 50 more choices but

01:27:36   merely you had two choices where before you would have zero or before you would

01:27:41   just have one that's the thing I think pro users would find reasonably

01:27:47   acceptable and Apple might find advantageous why don't we make some

01:27:51   money off this mark and let someone else do the heavy lifting without increasing

01:27:55   our support burden too much. Obviously, this is totally outside the realm, philosophically

01:28:00   speaking of, I think, anything that Apple would ever consider, but from a consumer perspective,

01:28:05   it seems viable to me.

01:28:06   I don't see the Apple of today doing it, but everything you just said does make sense.

01:28:11   Craig Hockenberry had an article about it, Apple should pull Lenovo and this exact thing,

01:28:16   just have one company do its hardware stuff if Apple's not interested anymore. I think

01:28:20   mostly it's just an overreaction. "Oh, you're not going to make the hardware I want? Why

01:28:23   let somebody else do it. Like, totally an overreaction. But, they're kind of like the

01:28:28   arm on the Mac. Like, there's something to it, and it's not the time to do it now, but

01:28:33   we'll check back in five years and see how things have changed.

01:28:37   So for reference, I have configured a MacPro-like workstation at Dell.com.

01:28:45   I'm so sorry.

01:28:46   If you've tried to configure anything complicated at Dell.com recently, wow, my goodness. So

01:28:54   I have a few errors in my configuration that need to be fixed according to this popover

01:28:59   dialogue. Now, one of those is the PCIe solid state drive boot drive requires the hard drive

01:29:05   to be the PCIe boot drive. Please update it as needed. Of course, it can't update it for

01:29:08   me. The PCIe solid state drive is not compatible with the dual video card. Please update the

01:29:12   internal hardware configuration requires a PCIe boot drive and a PCIe solid state drive

01:29:16   boot drive, please update as needed.

01:29:17   Please be sure to update the selection for boot drive,

01:29:19   hard drive, and also the selection of boot option

01:29:20   from the PCI-E Solid State Drives.

01:29:22   That being said, if I could somehow make

01:29:25   this configuration work, I have configured

01:29:29   what I think would be a modern version

01:29:31   of the high-end Mac Pro, the 12-core Mac Pro.

01:29:33   Now the current 12-core Mac Pro,

01:29:35   which is three years old and slow,

01:29:37   64 gig, one terabyte PCI Express SSD.

01:29:41   Base video card, which is the D500-ish.

01:29:44   That is $8,800 for this.

01:29:48   - Holy cow. - And that D500, by the way,

01:29:50   I think is now less powerful than the GPU in the iPad Pro.

01:29:53   Or maybe it's close.

01:29:54   - Probably, yeah.

01:29:55   So the similar Dell with a brand new Broadwell E Xeon,

01:30:00   oh crap, I'm sorry, I had the eight core selected.

01:30:03   Let me change that.

01:30:05   Switch the Mac Pro to eight core.

01:30:06   All right, Mac Pro is $7,300 in the eight core config.

01:30:09   $7,300 for the Mac Pro, $5,400 for the Dell

01:30:13   with the brand new parts that are faster.

01:30:16   So there is a substantial price gain here

01:30:20   for if you wanted to do PC hardware

01:30:24   that was similar in many ways better.

01:30:26   - But don't let Dell do it.

01:30:28   I would like Lenovo or even HP or anybody else

01:30:32   would be better.

01:30:32   - No, the only reason I went to Dell on this

01:30:34   was I checked earlier in the week

01:30:35   and HP does not seem to offer the Broadwell EZ-ons yet.

01:30:38   They're all the V3s and Broadwell's V4.

01:30:40   Anyway, it doesn't matter.

01:30:41   But yeah, for the purpose of building hackintoshes

01:30:45   or workstations or anything else,

01:30:47   man, if Apple licensed the OS to clone makers,

01:30:49   even if they charged like $300 for it,

01:30:52   like some large price for the OS,

01:30:55   it would still be pretty price competitive

01:30:58   to go with a clone maker.

01:31:00   But that's probably the reason they're not gonna do it.

01:31:02   Now that being said, you can look at what they're doing.

01:31:04   As mentioned earlier, it is very noticeable

01:31:07   that they are outsourcing some of their dongles to Belkin,

01:31:10   that they are outsourcing their new monitor to LG.

01:31:14   I think it's very clear that Apple is trying

01:31:17   to get themselves out of businesses.

01:31:19   Like they're exiting businesses,

01:31:21   they're exiting the display business,

01:31:23   they're outsourcing that,

01:31:23   they're exiting some of these dongles, outsourcing that.

01:31:26   And like the Belkin Ethernet Adapter Box,

01:31:29   it looks like an Apple product.

01:31:31   It looks like an Apple product box,

01:31:32   it looks like the product itself.

01:31:34   Like this is clearly like Apple is trying

01:31:37   get themselves out of these non-core, maybe unprofitable businesses. It wouldn't surprise

01:31:45   me if they actually did do some kind of weird partnership with IBM or something to, or you

01:31:51   know, HP or whatever, to offer something like this. I mean, it seems crazy to tell Mac people

01:31:57   that Apple would ever do some kind of clone program again, but if you look at what they're

01:32:02   actually doing today, that isn't totally out of the question. Now, I still think it's

01:32:06   - I think it's incredibly unlikely, I do.

01:32:08   I would not count on it because I would assume

01:32:12   that if Apple wanted a computer like this to exist,

01:32:15   they would just make it themselves.

01:32:16   But there is now precedent in what they're doing

01:32:20   in their lineup to effectively outsource

01:32:24   less interesting parts of their business

01:32:26   to other companies to make it their problem

01:32:27   whenever something needs service

01:32:29   or to manage the margins or whatever else.

01:32:32   - That's the most interesting part of their business

01:32:33   to some people though, like the high-end hardware

01:32:35   kind of like getting back to the Halo car thing like that they should be making that

01:32:38   in house because as a even as just as a motivational tool for their for their internal tech team

01:32:43   and for their customers but I think it would have to be it couldn't just be like a licensing

01:32:47   arrangement because it's not just that Apple wants to make like 300 bucks in each one they

01:32:50   sell there's a support burden to every new model that's out there they have to support

01:32:55   with the OS and everything so I think it would have to be more of a partial ownership profit

01:33:00   sharing type thing which would probably mean that these machines would not be like the

01:33:04   Mac clones, they wouldn't be less expensive for the same hardware. They would be just

01:33:07   as expensive as if Apple made it. The only difference would be, like you said, that Apple

01:33:12   outsources some portion of it. And with stuff like the Belkin connector, and like I said,

01:33:16   the early Mac Pro, you wonder how much of that is Belkin's work and how much of it is

01:33:21   Apple's. A lot of the original Mac clones were Apple reference designs modified. And

01:33:26   a lot of companies do that, give you like a reference board and then you can tweak it

01:33:29   and add your thing. But like for the Belkin on the LG display, how much involvement did

01:33:33   Apple have in the creation of those peripherals? Was it purely, here you go company, you're

01:33:37   now allowed to make this, here are the specs, figure it out? Or did Apple cooperate with

01:33:42   them very closely? Surely for the software integration for the LG screen, they had to

01:33:45   do something. Was there any cooperation at the hardware level? Like, you don't really

01:33:48   know what goes on in these relationships. But as I said before, like monetary deals

01:33:52   could be worked out. And I would hope the Apple today, bargaining from a position of

01:33:56   strength and not from a position of Michael Spindler, would make the arrangement so that

01:34:01   it is very profitable to Apple and that the company that they're partnering with just

01:34:05   feel itself lucky to even be allowed to work with Apple because Apple is so awesome and

01:34:09   that Apple would come out ahead on it financially while removing whatever burdens they feel

01:34:14   are put on them. I think, by the way, for the high end, it's totally a wrong move because

01:34:17   Apple should totally be doing the high end in-house because, you know, we've discussed

01:34:22   this. I think we mostly discussed it in Slack, but all I'm just doing is reiterating my Halo

01:34:25   car thing in seven different ways to get people to understand how this works and having them

01:34:29   complained to me. Even Casey was like, "I don't buy my car because there's a high-end

01:34:33   car from the same maker." I don't know. I don't want to have that discussion again,

01:34:36   but we'll go along.

01:34:37   That's what I sound like?

01:34:38   Yeah, and Slack. You don't know you have that voice plug-in put on?

01:34:42   Wow.

01:34:43   Yikes.

01:34:44   That's unfortunate.

01:34:45   Wow. All right. I think that's it for this week. Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this

01:34:52   week, Betterment, Eero, and Hover, and we will see you next week.

01:34:59   Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin

01:35:04   'Cause it was accidental (accidental)

01:35:06   Oh, it was accidental (accidental)

01:35:09   John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:35:14   'Cause it was accidental (accidental)

01:35:17   Oh, it was accidental (accidental)

01:35:20   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:35:25   If you're into Twitter, you can follow them @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:35:34   So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:35:38   Auntie Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-Uza

01:35:46   It's accidental (It's accidental)

01:35:49   They didn't mean to accidental (It's accidental)

01:35:54   Tech podcast so long

01:35:59   Sorry for the people waiting for Surface Studio and Switch. I think we have exactly,

01:36:02   actually exhausted all the follow-up and tangential topics related to the MacBook Pro announcement

01:36:08   now, and I'm not going to take all the blame for this because people keep sending us feedback about

01:36:12   it. Because, so it's not just us that's like, "Well, you got to get off this MacBook Pro issue."

01:36:16   They, the listeners are still talking to us about it, but I think we're through it all.

01:36:20   So next week, for sure, unless something big happens, Microsoft Surface Studio, Nintendo Switch.

01:36:27   when are they gonna get to the fireworks factory?

01:36:29   - That's a Simpsons thing, isn't it?

01:36:32   - You got it, good job.

01:36:34   - The only reason I got it is because you've used that on,

01:36:36   it's like seven times since--

01:36:37   - Way more than seven, way more.

01:36:39   (laughing)

01:36:40   - All right, so what else is going on

01:36:41   other than the obvious that we'd really rather not discuss?

01:36:45   - I will say, you know, thank you audience and you guys,

01:36:49   this has been nice to, you know,

01:36:51   get my mind off of that stuff.

01:36:53   - Yeah, I agree.

01:36:56   Grand Tour is coming back, not this coming Friday, but a week from this coming Friday.

01:37:01   But coming back? Has it already aired the first episode?

01:37:03   Yeah, sorry. No, no, no, no, no. That was a poor choice of words. It's starting. I say

01:37:08   coming back because I think of it as Top Gear again. But anyway, that's a week from Friday,

01:37:14   so that's super exciting.

01:37:15   Yeah, you're going to remind me of that or else I'm going to miss it. Is it Amazon only,

01:37:19   right?

01:37:20   It's Amazon. I don't know what time of day it's happening, but it is the 18th of November.

01:37:28   They're streaming one episode per week for six weeks, and I believe there's going to be two seasons per calendar year.

01:37:36   So presumably we'll have a spring and a fall season since we're getting kind of a fall season now.

01:37:42   I'm really looking forward to it. It should be good.

01:37:45   Speaking of TV, although I don't want to get onto depressing politics topics, but one of

01:37:50   the analogies and the jokes and the snarks that have been made involving this election

01:37:55   has been the show Black Mirror, which is a show made in the UK.

01:38:00   I don't want to say it's a BBC show because then you get yelled at because there's other

01:38:03   places to make it.

01:38:04   Anyway, whatever.

01:38:05   It's a show made in England.

01:38:07   And it's like, do you guys remember Amazing Stories?

01:38:10   Maybe you're too young for that.

01:38:11   No, we're too young.

01:38:12   But I've seen some of Black Mirror episodes, and I think given what just happened, it's

01:38:18   going to be a long time before I'm in the mood to watch any more of them.

01:38:21   Yeah, yeah.

01:38:22   So, like, Amazing Stories is like—Twilight Zone is the older reference.

01:38:26   Every week there's a new episode, and it's a usually sci-fi-related premise, and there's

01:38:31   no carryover characters.

01:38:32   There's no, you know, through-line stories.

01:38:34   It's just like, "Here's a little sci—" It's like sci-fi short stories for TV.

01:38:37   And Twilight Zone had a particular bent to it, and so did Amazing Stories, which was

01:38:40   a Spielberg-esque thing.

01:38:42   mirror is bent is sci-fi-ish independent stories that are usually really depressing, like it's

01:38:47   Black Mirror, like it's right in the title, right? And so, like Marco said, maybe you're

01:38:51   not in the mood to watch them right now, and Black Mirror, me personally, I find it a little

01:38:56   bit silly and overblown because I've seen all these same ideas and stories before and

01:39:00   they take them to the nth degree and it just gets a little bit ridiculous, but sometimes

01:39:03   they're fun ones, whatever, I'm not as big a fan as other people are. But, on the specific

01:39:06   topic, this current season of Black Mirror, season three, that, they come out all at once,

01:39:11   like the uh the grand tour but they're not you know they make them ahead of time um and it's

01:39:15   a scripted show more scripted than anyway whatever um there is one episode of this season of black

01:39:24   mirror this third season of black mirror which is like all the previous seasons just a grim

01:39:28   terrible slog of overblown sci-fi but there's one episode that i think actually i watched it and i

01:39:36   felt good after watching it i'm not gonna say it's happy and you can judge for yourself whether it is

01:39:41   like you know the feel-good story of the century but I think it would be safe for

01:39:46   people to watch even if you're feeling bad and that episode is San Junipero

01:39:50   which I with my favorite episode of Black Mirror ever which probably means

01:39:54   that I just don't like Black Mirror because it is the least Black Mirror of

01:39:57   any Black Mirror episode but I would encourage you if you're looking for a

01:40:02   sci-fi short story on TV and don't want to be super depressed Black Mirror season

01:40:07   three San Junipero which is episode wait seven seconds for the chat room to look

01:40:12   it up for me episode number four episode number four Casey beat them to it

01:40:16   because he's listening to be in real time cheating and there's a chat room

01:40:20   and so what was the summary of this episode no no no no anything about Black

01:40:26   Mirror episodes you just start watching them so nothing you don't want to tell

01:40:29   us any no you can't no everyone's it no no spoilers Black Mirror my goodness I

01:40:34   My mistake. So I forget who it was. Shoot. It was one of the New York City-based developers, and I'm drawing a blank which one it was.

01:40:41   It might have been Brian Irais had

01:40:44   guilted me into watching

01:40:47   one of the episodes of Black Mirror, and the one that I watched, this was a couple years ago now, was

01:40:54   about the British Prime Minister being black.

01:40:57   Episode one. That's the first episode.

01:40:59   Yeah, that's I had no desire to go back. That's a tone that sets a tone for the show. That is the appropriate tone for the show

01:41:06   Except for Sanjana peril. I'm not saying it's a bad show. I'm just saying yeah, I still watch that and I was like

01:41:12   This is not for me. Nothing. Did you watch all season three yet Marco or no?

01:41:15   No, I've I don't think I'm even all the way through season two

01:41:18   I think we watched all of season one at least

01:41:21   It's a good thing like you can skip to any episode at any time because there is no through line

01:41:25   Yeah, you can just pick one out

01:41:26   But some of the season three episodes are just so grim.

01:41:29   Like it's almost a parody of itself at this point.

01:41:32   But "Sanjay De Pero," thumbs up.

01:41:34   - No, it's the kind of show, it's such a downer

01:41:38   and it's so dark that if you have anything bad

01:41:43   or stressful going on in your life,

01:41:46   it's not a good show to watch.

01:41:47   And so I have had not a ton of opportunities

01:41:50   where I really wanted to watch shows like that recently.

01:41:53   And that's not going to change in the next few weeks,

01:41:55   That's for sure.

01:41:56   I said try this episode.

01:41:58   It is not-- I think you will watch it and not curse my name

01:42:02   after you watch it.

01:42:03   I think it will make you feel better.

01:42:04   That's a high bar.

01:42:05   OK.

01:42:06   That's right.

01:42:07   You will improve your mood.

01:42:10   OK.

01:42:11   I will give-- I will maybe give a shot.

01:42:15   Part of the reason it improves your mood is the context.

01:42:17   It's like, wait, this is a Black Mirror episode.

01:42:19   It should be terrible and grim.

01:42:20   And it's not.

01:42:21   I feel awesome about it.

01:42:22   It's like you expect the worst, and then you

01:42:24   this thing that is like it like it like redeems the rest of Black Mirror briefly

01:42:28   who would have thought that this episode would end with a recommendation of an

01:42:32   uplifting Black Mirror episode yeah I was as surprised as anyone I got to the

01:42:36   end I even went to the internet to say maybe it's not actually uplifting and

01:42:40   I'm reading it wrong and so you go on the internet if you're like no actually

01:42:43   it's super dark here's the ending but the creators of the show were like no

01:42:46   it's actually uplifting just accept it yeah no I mean I I wouldn't be opposed

01:42:53   to watching an uplifting one, but after having watched the very first episode, like I said,

01:42:59   I decided it was not for me. Not to say it's not for you or anyone else, it just wasn't

01:43:02   for me. I have enough to be depressed about, and poor choice of words, I have enough to

01:43:07   be sad about. I don't need to be sad while I'm watching television as well.

01:43:11   Yeah, that's why Tiff and I, for our current casual series, we just restarted The Office

01:43:18   tonight. We just need something that's not, like, even Parks and Rec is too political

01:43:22   I was like, "Oh, God, I can't even do that yet."

01:43:25   It's just, it needs something light that is just not going to add to anything bad.

01:43:32   You used to watch some Miyazaki movies, which you've probably never seen any of, because

01:43:36   you've never seen anything.

01:43:37   That's true.

01:43:38   That's correct, yep.

01:43:39   You know me well.

01:43:40   If you still don't show Adam, you should be showing Adam Totoro by this point.

01:43:41   I feel like you're neglecting your duties as a parent.

01:43:44   Yeah, I still don't know what that is.

01:43:46   Totoro, just, you'll find it.

01:43:48   Just find it and show it to Adam and the whole family can watch it together and you'll be

01:43:53   happy.

01:43:54   Yeah, I downloaded Millennium whatever whatever when it was available on YouTube.

01:43:58   That's not a Miyazaki movie, but close.

01:44:01   It's all the same, John.

01:44:02   It's all the same.

01:44:03   Can we just start calling them Syracuse movies?

01:44:06   Yeah, that's fine.

01:44:07   That works for me.

01:44:08   So I downloaded that Syracuse movie, the Millennium whatever millennial whatever.

01:44:11   Actress?

01:44:12   Millennium actress, which is probably millennial actress.

01:44:14   I don't even know.

01:44:15   Millennium Falcon?

01:44:16   That's the millennial.

01:44:17   - She was not born from 82.

01:44:19   - Oh my God, is that the one with the wings

01:44:21   that are like in the X shape, is that right?

01:44:22   - Yes, the Y-wing.

01:44:24   - The sick thing is we're gonna get so many emails

01:44:27   from people thinking that we're serious

01:44:28   when we're deliberately trolling, Jon.

01:44:30   Anyway, point is I downloaded that,

01:44:33   but like forever ago when you and Merlin talked about it,

01:44:36   and I still haven't watched it yet,

01:44:38   so I need to get on that.

01:44:39   - You mean you watched it legally on YouTube

01:44:40   when it was legally available on YouTube?

01:44:42   - Yes, exactly.

01:44:43   - With commercials, with commercials.

01:44:46   (beeping)