ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► Why didn't you just build a gaming PC?

00:00:01 ◼   ► Your video card is slow.

00:00:03 ◼   ► (video game music)

00:00:04 ◼   ► - There's some quick follow-up about,

00:00:07 ◼   ► guess what, the Mac Pro.

00:00:09 ◼   ► - Well, come on, we did like a whole episode on it.

00:00:10 ◼   ► We can't, there's not gonna be zero follow-up.

00:00:12 ◼   ► - I know, no, that's fine.

00:00:14 ◼   ► - After we recorded last episode, somebody took it apart.

00:00:18 ◼   ► I think it was first OWC,

00:00:21 ◼   ► and then everyone else jumped on the reporting of it.

00:00:23 ◼   ► But basically, they discovered that the Mac Pro CPU

00:00:26 ◼   ► is socketed.

00:00:27 ◼   ► And it's the regular standard Intel CPU

00:00:31 ◼   ► with the heat spreader on top, so you can easily

00:00:33 ◼   ► take it out and replace it.

00:00:35 ◼   ► And so everyone told me, hey, you

00:00:37 ◼   ► can buy the CPUs you wanted.

00:00:38 ◼   ► And more usefully to everyone else, hey,

00:00:44 ◼   ► you can upgrade your Mac Pro CPU in the future.

00:00:47 ◼   ► Now, in all my history of building my own computers

00:00:52 ◼   ► back when I was a PC guy, and then ever since then owning

00:00:55 ◼   ► I have never once upgraded a CPU.

00:01:00 ◼   ► And the main reason why is because usually the CPU is not the only problem in a computer once it starts getting old and slow.

00:01:10 ◼   ► And secondarily to that, which is more limiting, usually you can't really upgrade the CPU very far.

00:01:16 ◼   ► Usually by the time there are CPUs that are substantially faster than what you have,

00:01:21 ◼   ► have, they either need a new socket or they need a different chipset on the motherboard

00:01:26 ◼   ► or they need to use a faster bus, more than what your board can do, something like that.

00:01:31 ◼   ► Usually within the socket that you have on your board and within what your board will

00:01:35 ◼   ► support CPU wise, usually it's not really worth any upgrades that are available within

00:01:41 ◼   ► that little narrow range.

00:01:43 ◼   ► So upgrading a CPU in this case is not going to be that common of a thing.

00:01:49 ◼   ► It also was pretty hard to get to.

00:01:51 ◼   ► It requires pretty substantial disassembly of the whole thing, including fiddling with

00:01:55 ◼   ► some very, very small, precise ribbon cables and stuff that connect all the big boards

00:01:59 ◼   ► together.

00:02:00 ◼   ► So it's not like replacing RAM.

00:02:03 ◼   ► It's not like you pop the slot and that's it.

00:02:05 ◼   ► So I don't really think it's really going to be a thing that anybody does.

00:02:10 ◼   ► What makes it a little bit different in this case is there is a pretty vast difference

00:02:15 ◼   ► in core counts that are available for this socket.

00:02:18 ◼   ► So if you start with the 4 core, and then in two years you buy the 8 core, that'll

00:02:24 ◼   ► be a big difference in parallel performance.

00:02:26 ◼   ► But even then, single-thread performance, you're probably not really going anywhere.

00:02:30 ◼   ► So it's probably not going to be worth it for almost anybody to actually do this.

00:02:34 ◼   ► Let's not forget the psychological trauma of opening up your beautiful trash can and

00:02:40 ◼   ► carefully prying it apart, especially the things that you're pulling heat from.

00:02:46 ◼   ► I know you don't have to take off the integrated heat spreader and everything, but anything

00:02:50 ◼   ► involving like, you have to make sure when you put it back together that all the correct

00:02:54 ◼   ► contact is made between all the right parts to keep things cool because bad things can

00:02:57 ◼   ► happen if it's not.

00:02:59 ◼   ► It's the type of thing you get good at if you do it a lot, but most of us don't do this

00:03:03 ◼   ► for a living, don't build computers for a living, don't upgrade computers for a living.

00:03:06 ◼   ► So how many computers do you even own throughout your life, even if you upgraded the CPU on

00:03:09 ◼   ► every single one of them?

00:03:10 ◼   ► It's not a skill that I count among the things that I'm confident I can do.

00:03:14 ◼   ► I've replaced heatsinks on graphics cards and stuff, but I've done it a handful of times

00:03:18 ◼   ► in my life, and I certainly don't want to crack open this five, seven, ten thousand

00:03:22 ◼   ► dollar trash can cylinder, yank out the CPU and put it in another one.

00:03:26 ◼   ► Maybe when the thing is like five years old and I feel like it's depreciated, but it's

00:03:31 ◼   ► not as bad as opening a laptop, but that's kind of part of the Apple experience is you

00:03:35 ◼   ► don't have to do that stuff.

00:03:36 ◼   ► You just buy it, it comes out of the box, it's pretty, everything's in it, it works,

00:03:40 ◼   ► and you use it.

00:03:41 ◼   ► Also, there is a lot of value in keeping your computer with the stock Apple parts.

00:03:50 ◼   ► Anyone who's been around Apple long enough has heard stories about how people say, "Send

00:03:55 ◼   ► in their laptops for service from Apple," and they get rejected because it has third-party

00:03:58 ◼   ► RAM in it.

00:03:59 ◼   ► Or Apple takes a third-party RAM out and doesn't return it, or something like that.

00:04:04 ◼   ► Having third-party RAM is always a little bit questionable whenever you need Apple service.

00:04:09 ◼   ► a non-standard or upgraded CPU in there, they probably wouldn't notice. But if they did

00:04:16 ◼   ► notice that would make it pretty hard to get service, even if something broke that they

00:04:20 ◼   ► should cover and otherwise would cover, that might cause problems for you.

00:04:26 ◼   ► And also, what if things go a little bit wrong? What if your computer is just being a little

00:04:30 ◼   ► bit unstable? Is it because you didn't apply the right amount or pattern of thermal paste

00:04:35 ◼   ► on the CPU or you didn't remount the heatsink properly? You never know.

00:04:39 ◼   ► And so you have all these things that can become your problem, and for what gain?

00:04:45 ◼   ► And if the gain is maybe you saved a couple hundred dollars on a $5,000 computer, or by

00:04:50 ◼   ► putting in some third-party thing, or the gain is maybe you extend the life by a little

00:04:55 ◼   ► bit longer, I don't know.

00:04:58 ◼   ► In most cases, it's not worth it.

00:05:00 ◼   ► Especially now, in the RAM example, Apple's RAM pricing in the last few years has actually

00:05:06 ◼   ► gotten pretty competitive.

00:05:07 ◼   ► It's not the cheapest, but the price difference between Apple and anybody else of actual good

00:05:12 ◼   ► quality like OWC or Crucial, the price difference between those is not that big for most configurations

00:05:19 ◼   ► for RAM.

00:05:20 ◼   ► So it actually is pretty plausible for the few remaining Macs that even have RAM slots,

00:05:25 ◼   ► it's pretty plausible to just pay Apple's price and be set for a while with that.

00:05:32 ◼   ► Okay, any other follow-up before we move on to some other things?

00:05:36 ◼   ► You mean before we talk about the Mac Pro even more?

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00:05:54 ◼   ► Now listen, it's not ATP this time, and I apologize to John and Casey for this.

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00:06:10 ◼   ► Again I apologize to the two of you.

00:06:12 ◼   ► You'll have to just deal with it.

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00:07:29 ◼   ► supporting ATP and back to work.

00:07:33 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:07:34 ◼   ► I think you should be apologizing to the listeners because now they have to type in your name

00:07:37 ◼   ► instead of ATP, which is the best coupon code that you could possibly enter.

00:07:41 ◼   ► It's short, it's memorable, there's no alternate way to spell it that people are going to be

00:07:44 ◼   ► confused with.

00:07:45 ◼   ► We got a new coupon code later for Hover, too.

00:07:47 ◼   ► This is really exciting stuff.

00:07:49 ◼   ► Is this the show?

00:07:50 ◼   ► That's what people tune in for.

00:07:54 ◼   ► Okay.

00:07:55 ◼   ► Are we really going straight to MacProTalk?

00:07:57 ◼   ► We're not going to do anything else?

00:07:58 ◼   ► I guess that probably makes sense.

00:07:59 ◼   ► else is there? Well, I put—I threw something in there because of reviewing Apple's 2013

00:08:04 ◼   ► because I did a blog post about it and because this is the first show of the new year, so,

00:08:08 ◼   ► you know, why not talk about last year, how Apple did last year? I am all for that, Jon.

00:08:14 ◼   ► Thank you for providing at least a small reprieve. Exactly. A brief oasis of non-macro talk.

00:08:20 ◼   ► All right, so Jon, tell me about how Apple did in 2013. Well, did either one of you—did

00:08:26 ◼   ► Do you remember my Apple 2013 to-do list post from early in 2013?

00:08:31 ◼   ► Nope.

00:08:32 ◼   ► I did, because I'm a huge fanboy.

00:08:34 ◼   ► There you go.

00:08:35 ◼   ► Well, when I was thinking of ways to look at Apple, I didn't want to do a wish list.

00:08:44 ◼   ► You know, those ones where like, "Here are the things that I really want," or like,

00:08:47 ◼   ► "The things that are wrong with their current products."

00:08:49 ◼   ► There's lots of different angles that tech sites take at the, you know, "What should

00:08:53 ◼   ► Apple do?

00:08:54 ◼   ► What should they do next?

00:08:55 ◼   ► they do this year or whatever.

00:08:57 ◼   ► And the angle I took at the beginning of last year was,

00:09:00 ◼   ► let me make a to-do list.

00:09:02 ◼   ► Like if I was to give Tim Cook this list and say,

00:09:04 ◼   ► here's what you gotta do this year.

00:09:05 ◼   ► And you're not gonna put crazy stuff on it

00:09:07 ◼   ► by like, make me a hoverboard or stuff like that,

00:09:09 ◼   ► 'cause that's not actionable, right?

00:09:11 ◼   ► And I'm not trying to predict what will Apple do,

00:09:14 ◼   ► like a rumor site, here's what we think Apple will do

00:09:15 ◼   ► in the next year, 'cause that's a totally different exercise.

00:09:17 ◼   ► I was trying to make a list of things

00:09:19 ◼   ► that I think are feasible, reasonable, not crazy,

00:09:23 ◼   ► they're gonna be pretty boring,

00:09:24 ◼   ► but that Apple should do, it's a to-do list for them.

00:09:26 ◼   ► They should just go down and during the year

00:09:28 ◼   ► make sure you do all this stuff,

00:09:29 ◼   ► check, check, check, check, check.

00:09:31 ◼   ► And I totally planned by the end of the year

00:09:33 ◼   ► to go back and see how they did,

00:09:34 ◼   ► and so that's what I did, I just looked at the items,

00:09:36 ◼   ► there were 10 items, and I went through each one of them,

00:09:38 ◼   ► and it's not surprising that they did pretty well,

00:09:41 ◼   ► because again, these are not predictions,

00:09:43 ◼   ► rumors, or wish lists, it's very straightforward stuff.

00:09:46 ◼   ► So I guess we'll just go through them

00:09:50 ◼   ► 'cause they're pretty quick.

00:09:51 ◼   ► ship OS X 10.9 and iOS 7, duh, like, you know,

00:09:55 ◼   ► keep doing that stuff that you're doing.

00:09:57 ◼   ► They did that stuff.

00:09:58 ◼   ► - That was really going out on a limb there, John.

00:10:00 ◼   ► - Well, it's gotta be on the to-do list,

00:10:02 ◼   ► because think of it this way, like going out on a limb,

00:10:04 ◼   ► iOS 7, you're pretty sure that's gonna happen,

00:10:07 ◼   ► but 10.9, you know, well, they could get thrown off,

00:10:10 ◼   ► or iOS 7 could turn out to be more of a problem

00:10:12 ◼   ► than they expected, and they could delay 10.9.

00:10:15 ◼   ► So it's conceivable they could have missed one of those,

00:10:17 ◼   ► or they could have done them really badly,

00:10:18 ◼   ► like if one of them was a disaster, right?

00:10:20 ◼   ► I also gave these items letter grades.

00:10:22 ◼   ► So if one of those things was a disaster,

00:10:24 ◼   ► it's like, yeah, you did that.

00:10:25 ◼   ► You shipped those two OSs, but one of them was terrible.

00:10:28 ◼   ► But they weren't, so that's fine.

00:10:30 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I have a bone to pick.

00:10:31 ◼   ► I think you're suffering a little bit

00:10:32 ◼   ► from grade inflation here.

00:10:33 ◼   ► I think some of these grades are too high.

00:10:35 ◼   ► - And lots of people think they're too low.

00:10:36 ◼   ► And so I should have thought harder

00:10:39 ◼   ► before doing the grades,

00:10:40 ◼   ► 'cause it's kind of like ratings on game reviews.

00:10:43 ◼   ► If you just review a game,

00:10:44 ◼   ► people will leave you comments like,

00:10:46 ◼   ► that they disagree or agree with some other part.

00:10:47 ◼   ► But as soon as you attach a number or a letter grade

00:10:49 ◼   ► a number of stars, people are like, "This is totally not a 9.753, it's a 9.755 easily!"

00:10:57 ◼   ► And they'll just argue forever about it, like the same way you argue about grades.

00:11:01 ◼   ► This is not an A-.

00:11:02 ◼   ► It's definitely an A or whatever.

00:11:03 ◼   ► And I'm kind of regretting putting those grades in there, because now that's all people can

00:11:08 ◼   ► see, even you.

00:11:09 ◼   ► So we'll get to your disagreements as we get to each other.

00:11:14 ◼   ► But do you think the A- is unwarranted for 10.9 and iOS 7?

00:11:18 ◼   ► No, I think that's actually... I would have even given that an A.

00:11:22 ◼   ► I put the minus in there just because I've linked to your thing about the button shapes

00:11:26 ◼   ► and all the options they're adding. That's a sign, as you wrote in your post and as we

00:11:30 ◼   ► talked about on the show, once you start having to add options and stuff, that's a sign that

00:11:33 ◼   ► maybe you didn't nail it quite the first time. And a lot of the times, no series of options

00:11:39 ◼   ► will fix the fundamental flaw in the philosophy of your design. You might have to go back.

00:11:45 ◼   ► are kind of a quick fix, but you kind of push one thing

00:11:49 ◼   ► in over here and something else pops out over there,

00:11:50 ◼   ► and then you push the other thing in and it's kind of,

00:11:52 ◼   ► you don't end up with a nicely shaped

00:11:54 ◼   ► sort of product in the end.

00:11:56 ◼   ► You end up with lots of lumps.

00:11:57 ◼   ► And so iOS 7's UI has a couple of those minor warts.

00:12:01 ◼   ► That's why I threw in the minus.

00:12:02 ◼   ► Next item was diversify the iPhone product line.

00:12:06 ◼   ► That's a vague item.

00:12:08 ◼   ► I didn't want to be particularly specific.

00:12:09 ◼   ► I said, yeah, just gotta do something.

00:12:10 ◼   ► It's gotta be more than one iPhone, more than one new iPhone,

00:12:13 ◼   ► not just last year's model and the new one,

00:12:15 ◼   ► you have to diversify.

00:12:16 ◼   ► And I've been talking about that for years and years,

00:12:18 ◼   ► they did it with the 5C.

00:12:20 ◼   ► I gave it a B+ only because the 5C is like,

00:12:25 ◼   ► it's a little bit disappointing

00:12:26 ◼   ► in that it's not more different.

00:12:28 ◼   ► My whole thing was that if you make a purpose-built,

00:12:31 ◼   ► cheaper phone, you can do it better

00:12:34 ◼   ► than simply offering last year's model.

00:12:36 ◼   ► And they kinda did that, I guess,

00:12:38 ◼   ► by going with plastic and stuff

00:12:39 ◼   ► and maybe putting a little bit bigger battery,

00:12:40 ◼   ► but otherwise it's basically just an iPhone 5 in there.

00:12:42 ◼   ► I feel like there's an untapped potential in a purpose-built second-tier iPhone.

00:12:47 ◼   ► So maybe the next run at it, they'll do a little bit better, but we'll see.

00:12:50 ◼   ► Are we getting the impression that the 5C isn't actually selling that well?

00:12:54 ◼   ► I don't even know if Apple's going to break that down.

00:12:56 ◼   ► We'll have to wait for their earnings calls.

00:12:57 ◼   ► But it seems like since the iPhone is a high-end product that, I mean, well, like the lines,

00:13:04 ◼   ► all the people lining up the early adopters, obviously they're going to want the fancy

00:13:07 ◼   ► phone.

00:13:08 ◼   ► And it seems like the people in line, when they had people going through and surveying

00:13:11 ◼   ► We're there for the 5s, not the 5c.

00:13:14 ◼   ► But everyone has said, "Okay, well that's fine for the people who'd line up in the first

00:13:17 ◼   ► week or whatever.

00:13:18 ◼   ► What about over the long term, people who just wander into the store and want to replace

00:13:21 ◼   ► their iPhone or want to try an iPhone for the first time?

00:13:23 ◼   ► Maybe they're all buying 5cs."

00:13:24 ◼   ► I don't even know if Apple will give us that breakdown.

00:13:28 ◼   ► This to-do item is not predicated on the particular success of that model, merely that it has

00:13:32 ◼   ► to exist.

00:13:33 ◼   ► I'm sure Apple will tweak the pricing, the power, and the mix.

00:13:36 ◼   ► I think they can diversify further.

00:13:38 ◼   ► In fact, I haven't made a 2014 to-do list for them, but it's hard for us to know, and

00:13:43 ◼   ► I'm not even sure Apple's going to tell us, so I think we just have to wait on that.

00:13:46 ◼   ► Can I create a 2014 to-do list for you that includes one item of creating a 2014 list

00:13:52 ◼   ► for Apple?

00:13:54 ◼   ► You can create it, but you have to wait a year to rate me on how well I did, how well

00:13:57 ◼   ► I accomplished that.

00:13:59 ◼   ► I can be patient.

00:14:00 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:14:01 ◼   ► Wait, can you?

00:14:03 ◼   ► I already gave up.

00:14:04 ◼   ► I already bought the Mac Pro, for God's sake.

00:14:08 ◼   ► Oh, seriously.

00:14:09 ◼   ► So for the next item was keep the iPad on track,

00:14:12 ◼   ► which is a boring one, but it's something you have to do.

00:14:15 ◼   ► And it's on the to-do list.

00:14:16 ◼   ► You can't, because if it's not on the to-do list,

00:14:18 ◼   ► you go through, yeah, I did everything I needed

00:14:19 ◼   ► to do this year, right guys?

00:14:20 ◼   ► And Tim Cook says, and we said, no,

00:14:22 ◼   ► you forgot to put out iPad updates.

00:14:24 ◼   ► So the iPad Air is pretty great.

00:14:27 ◼   ► The iPad Mini, one Retina.

00:14:30 ◼   ► I gave it an A minus because the iPad 2 is still there,

00:14:33 ◼   ► and it's kind of creaky that they're still selling it

00:14:34 ◼   ► for that price, even though there are customers for it.

00:14:36 ◼   ► Again, I think a purpose-built model for that market

00:14:38 ◼   ► would be better.

00:14:40 ◼   ► And the iPad Air really, really needs more RAM.

00:14:43 ◼   ► That's the one thing keeping me from-- not the one thing

00:14:45 ◼   ► keeping me from buying the iPad Air,

00:14:46 ◼   ► but one of the many things keeping me from buying the iPad

00:14:48 ◼   ► Air is it's kind of a shame that they didn't bump the RAM up

00:14:52 ◼   ► over the iPad 4 and I think even the iPad 3.

00:14:54 ◼   ► All of a sudden, gigabyte.

00:14:56 ◼   ► And with the power that's in the A7 and everything,

00:14:58 ◼   ► that deserves more RAM.

00:15:00 ◼   ► So A- there.

00:15:02 ◼   ► Introduce more better retina max.

00:15:05 ◼   ► Kind of.

00:15:05 ◼   ► The ones I was kind of talking about were the portables,

00:15:08 ◼   ► where they did finally put the Iris Pro graphics

00:15:10 ◼   ► in the MacBook Pro to give the integrated GPU enough power

00:15:15 ◼   ► to handle the screen.

00:15:17 ◼   ► And more things can go on the integrated GPU.

00:15:19 ◼   ► They don't have to go to the discrete.

00:15:20 ◼   ► And actually, the discrete is only on the high-end model,

00:15:22 ◼   ► but it's still there.

00:15:23 ◼   ► So that's all good.

00:15:24 ◼   ► But the AR and the iMac, no retina at all.

00:15:26 ◼   ► And the worst part, as we will probably talk about later,

00:15:30 ◼   ► the Mac Pro's retina abilities are, at this point,

00:15:33 ◼   ► extremely limited and that's disappointing.

00:15:35 ◼   ► So we already talked about giving up on Retina, giving up on the Retina dream for last year

00:15:40 ◼   ► and maybe next year.

00:15:43 ◼   ► This turned out to be a particularly controversial one, "make messages work correctly."

00:15:52 ◼   ► And I wrote "messages" but then I referenced iMessage.

00:15:56 ◼   ► I was mostly talking about the application messages that's on the Mac.

00:15:58 ◼   ► I think it's probably called "messages on the phone" too, but iMessage is what people

00:16:02 ◼   ► think of it when they use it on iOS.

00:16:03 ◼   ► Anyway, what I was saying is like,

00:16:07 ◼   ► it's an instant message service.

00:16:08 ◼   ► You type text and it appears in someone else's screen.

00:16:10 ◼   ► You have little conversations with little bubbles.

00:16:12 ◼   ► It's basically the replacement for iChat.

00:16:14 ◼   ► And it was pretty crappy in beta,

00:16:16 ◼   ► and it was pretty crappy when it came out for real.

00:16:19 ◼   ► And I said, you've got to fix this.

00:16:20 ◼   ► Because it's an instant message client.

00:16:22 ◼   ► It's got to work.

00:16:24 ◼   ► And as I said in the report card here, is it fixed now?

00:16:28 ◼   ► It's hard for me to tell because I

00:16:30 ◼   ► I don't have a representative survey of every single person who's using messages in the

00:16:34 ◼   ► entire world, but in my own personal experience and in the experience of the people who send

00:16:37 ◼   ► me emails, tweet at me, and in people who I know, there are still routinely really embarrassing

00:16:43 ◼   ► dumb problems with messages, like messages being in the wrong order or clicking on a

00:16:49 ◼   ► conversation in messages and the right-hand pane showing you a different conversation.

00:16:54 ◼   ► And those types of fundamental errors are what's the big deal?

00:16:56 ◼   ► It's a small little bug, right?

00:16:58 ◼   ► You just can't trust an instant message program that does that.

00:17:03 ◼   ► It's kind of a degree of difficulty type of situation where, okay, so in some crazy, obscure

00:17:07 ◼   ► situation with 20 different devices, maybe it does this weird thing, fine.

00:17:10 ◼   ► But this is like just from one person to another, one Mac to another, having a simple conversation

00:17:15 ◼   ► where you type something and it appears and they type something and it appears and it

00:17:18 ◼   ► can't even handle that correctly.

00:17:20 ◼   ► And that's why I gave them a D because their task was make messages work correctly and

00:17:25 ◼   ► I think they still haven't done it.

00:17:26 ◼   ► I still routinely see reports from people.

00:17:28 ◼   ► I routinely experience myself really basic bugs

00:17:32 ◼   ► with messages.

00:17:33 ◼   ► And it's not that they're the end of the world.

00:17:34 ◼   ► It's not deleting all my data.

00:17:36 ◼   ► It's not hosing my hard drive or causing kernel panics.

00:17:39 ◼   ► But it's failing to be a competent instant message client.

00:17:43 ◼   ► If that happens to you once a month, once a year,

00:17:45 ◼   ► is that okay?

00:17:46 ◼   ► What if you clicked on a conversation and start typing

00:17:49 ◼   ► and don't realize until a minute or two later

00:17:51 ◼   ► that you're actually typing

00:17:52 ◼   ► in a totally different conversation,

00:17:54 ◼   ► you've said something you didn't wanna say in that window.

00:17:56 ◼   ► or things being in the wrong order

00:17:57 ◼   ► and not being able to make sensible conversations

00:17:59 ◼   ► or messages like inserting themselves up into your history

00:18:02 ◼   ► or losing your entire scrollback, that's unacceptable.

00:18:05 ◼   ► It's acceptable in a beta,

00:18:07 ◼   ► it's maybe acceptable in a 1.0,

00:18:08 ◼   ► but at this point, the basics should be sorted out.

00:18:11 ◼   ► Now I've used like every IAM client,

00:18:14 ◼   ► you can high profile one,

00:18:16 ◼   ► Yahoo Instant Messenger, AIM, ICQ, Google Talk,

00:18:20 ◼   ► custom Jabber servers, you name it, I've used them.

00:18:25 ◼   ► And I'm not dinging Apple for not getting the really hard stuff right.

00:18:28 ◼   ► I'm dinging them for not getting the basics right.

00:18:30 ◼   ► And some people say, "Oh, it works fine for me."

00:18:32 ◼   ► I send messages all the time.

00:18:33 ◼   ► It works perfectly.

00:18:34 ◼   ► That's great.

00:18:35 ◼   ► But there's still enough people for whom it doesn't work correctly that I gave them

00:18:39 ◼   ► a D on the task of "make messages work correctly."

00:18:42 ◼   ► So yeah, I disagree there.

00:18:44 ◼   ► Well, I shouldn't say I disagree.

00:18:45 ◼   ► I just don't see any of those issues.

00:18:47 ◼   ► So if I saw those issues, I would rate it the same way.

00:18:49 ◼   ► But I actually, I am going to ruin things for myself by saying this out loud, but I

00:18:56 ◼   ► almost never have problems with iMessage and I almost never have problems with the Messages

00:19:00 ◼   ► app.

00:19:01 ◼   ► I don't ask a lot of iMessage, I don't ask a lot of my IM client on the Mac, but

00:19:06 ◼   ► I very rarely, in fact, I can't even remember the last time I've had an issue with either.

00:19:12 ◼   ► And so I'm stunned that not only are you saying, well I shouldn't say stunned, but

00:19:15 ◼   ► I'm surprised that not only are you saying that you're experiencing all these issues,

00:19:19 ◼   ► you've clearly collected a lot of feedback from regular people saying, or other people

00:19:24 ◼   ► saying that they're also experiencing the issues.

00:19:26 ◼   ► I mean, that's what I was getting on Twitter was one person was objecting this as, "This

00:19:29 ◼   ► never happens to them and it's an unfair grade or whatever." And then a few other of my random

00:19:33 ◼   ► followers saw that and one guy said like, "I just took a survey of 10 iPhone users in

00:19:38 ◼   ► this room and all 10 have seen problems like these recently." And there's other people

00:19:44 ◼   ► who I follow who are just having a months-long, years-long battle with messages and constantly

00:19:49 ◼   ► post the screenshots of the screw-ups or whatever and people send me email. It doesn't happen

00:19:52 ◼   ► to everybody. It's not widespread. It's not an epidemic. It's not a big deal. But it's

00:19:56 ◼   ► a big enough deal. Like Casey said, it's never happened to you. Say it happened once, just

00:20:00 ◼   ► once, where you clicked the conversation, started typing, and didn't realize it was

00:20:04 ◼   ► the wrong conversation. After that, you're going to look at messages a little bit differently.

00:20:08 ◼   ► And say it happened maybe not just once, maybe like once two years ago, and then once six

00:20:14 ◼   ► months later and then once a couple months after that. Eventually you start to say, "Look,

00:20:18 ◼   ► this program, it's not terrible. It works fine most of the time, but I have to constantly

00:20:22 ◼   ► be watching it." And other programs you don't have to constantly be watching. How? Even

00:20:25 ◼   ► Skype for crying out loud. You type a message and it appears. It doesn't misdeliver, it

00:20:29 ◼   ► doesn't deliver it twice, it doesn't send it to the wrong person, the messages are sorted

00:20:34 ◼   ► correctly in the scrollback. All those things that we just take for granted. I mean, for

00:20:37 ◼   ► crying out loud, if Skype is doing it correctly, then Apple can't. It's not because this is

00:20:43 ◼   ► big deal, but this was a to-do item, which was, you know, "Apple, bring your instant message

00:20:47 ◼   ► client help. Bring it up to the reliability standard established by iChat even."

00:20:51 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer** Using AOL's servers.

00:20:53 ◼   ► **Brett Harned** Right. And they haven't even. They haven't

00:20:55 ◼   ► even got up to, you know, there were fewer problems with iChat. So I give that one a D.

00:20:59 ◼   ► **Jaren

00:20:59 ◼   ► Well, and the most interesting thing to me about this is that, to me, these are the kinds

00:21:04 ◼   ► of problems that Apple doesn't, from the outside, seem to care about at all.

00:21:08 ◼   ► You know, they'll care about an antenna gate, which actually wasn't a problem, but they'll

00:21:12 ◼   ► care about something that everyone's screaming and yelling about.

00:21:14 ◼   ► But when it's an intermittent thing, it seems like it never, ever, ever gets fixed.

00:21:20 ◼   ► Or if it does, it's just a happy accident riding along with some other bug fix that

00:21:23 ◼   ► was unrelated.

00:21:24 ◼   ► Yeah, I feel like these are the sorts of things that they ignore constantly.

00:21:27 ◼   ► Well, it's so hard to debug this, though, because people file radars on it.

00:21:31 ◼   ► It's like, this one time I launched messages and it did this crazy thing.

00:21:34 ◼   ► And here's a screenshot of the crazy thing.

00:21:36 ◼   ► How can they debug that?

00:21:37 ◼   ► They have no idea.

00:21:38 ◼   ► Like, it's a client, it's a server issue, there's data involved, all of which is gone

00:21:42 ◼   ► by that point.

00:21:43 ◼   ► It's so—I understand it would be difficult for them to debug it.

00:21:46 ◼   ► It's not like, well, there's some obvious fix they're not doing.

00:21:49 ◼   ► But it's their job to just make something that works.

00:21:51 ◼   ► Like, many people have made instant message clients that work, you know, again, ISQ, AIM,

00:21:57 ◼   ► using the native clients, using Adium for them, Jabber, Google Talk. Google Talk has

00:22:01 ◼   ► a web component. Google Talk I have fewer problems with, and that does like a thing

00:22:04 ◼   ► in the web browser, plus I'm using Adium at the same time. They have to figure out what's

00:22:09 ◼   ► going on here and fix it. And I didn't give this one an F, because I think they did make

00:22:12 ◼   ► messages work better. They just didn't make it work better enough.

00:22:16 ◼   ► I should no longer be experiencing the type... Someone asked me, "When did this happen to

00:22:20 ◼   ► you?" And I said, "Matter of fact, it just happened yesterday. My parents were here,

00:22:23 ◼   ► and I was trying to demonstrate something with messages and sending a message from one

00:22:26 ◼   ► computer to another to show I wanted to show how like you when you don't have

00:22:30 ◼   ► messages launched you can still get the notifications and stuff and I was just

00:22:33 ◼   ► demonstrating messages from one Mac to another and I couldn't get a message to

00:22:37 ◼   ► go from one Mac to another both of them using messages both signed in with two

00:22:40 ◼   ► different Apple IDs and two different computers and I would send messages and

00:22:44 ◼   ► they wouldn't appear and I would send messages and they wouldn't appear and I

00:22:46 ◼   ► quit and relaunch the programs into this to that and all of a sudden they started

00:22:48 ◼   ► working but the messages that I sent that didn't appear never appeared maybe

00:22:53 ◼   ► they'll appear next month out of order or somewhere and I don't know but that's

00:22:56 ◼   ► That's inexcusable.

00:22:57 ◼   ► Coming to the end here.

00:23:00 ◼   ► Make iCloud better?

00:23:01 ◼   ► I actually gave this one a C, because I think they have made iCloud better.

00:23:05 ◼   ► I wrote about it in Mavericks, where the Cloud Core Data team got a chance to regroup.

00:23:12 ◼   ► Maybe it's too late for them to win back the hearts and minds of people, but they are at

00:23:15 ◼   ► least trying to fix the problems that they had.

00:23:18 ◼   ► But in general, I don't think iCloud still has a good reputation, mostly because what

00:23:22 ◼   ► What they provide, the kind of control they provide to you is like go into a preference

00:23:26 ◼   ► pane and check a checkbox or something simple like that.

00:23:29 ◼   ► And when it doesn't work, you're just going to have to stare at it until it does.

00:23:33 ◼   ► Like oh, just wait, maybe it'll appear.

00:23:35 ◼   ► Just launch iPhoto and let it sit there.

00:23:36 ◼   ► Maybe stuff in PhotoStream will appear eventually.

00:23:38 ◼   ► If it doesn't, I don't know what to do.

00:23:40 ◼   ► There's no visibility.

00:23:42 ◼   ► So if you're not going to provide any visibility or any sort of way to debug, which is fine,

00:23:47 ◼   ► all for not letting people see all the gears and touch all that stuff, but you've just

00:23:50 ◼   ► got to make it work all the time, and iCloud still doesn't.

00:23:53 ◼   ► I still also disagree that the iCloud-- and the word iCloud

00:23:58 ◼   ► applies to lots of different things.

00:24:01 ◼   ► Talking specifically about the files and documents and data

00:24:05 ◼   ► storage within apps and syncing all that,

00:24:07 ◼   ► I still disagree that that's even a well-designed system.

00:24:11 ◼   ► That I think conceptually, the whole idea of each app

00:24:14 ◼   ► being its own silo and having this iCloud container in it

00:24:17 ◼   ► that's pretty much opaque to everything else,

00:24:21 ◼   ► or completely opaque to everything else.

00:24:23 ◼   ► On iOS, it almost makes sense.

00:24:27 ◼   ► On the Mac, it's really confusing and really clunky.

00:24:31 ◼   ► And I would even say on the Mac, it's badly designed,

00:24:36 ◼   ► conceptually.

00:24:37 ◼   ► And I still don't see this really taking off

00:24:40 ◼   ► or going anywhere in the future.

00:24:42 ◼   ► - Yeah, they haven't really made another run at that.

00:24:44 ◼   ► I think they're still in the deep think stage.

00:24:46 ◼   ► Well, there are two stages.

00:24:46 ◼   ► One is make the existing stuff work correctly and reliably, which is a totally separate

00:24:51 ◼   ► issue.

00:24:52 ◼   ► And the second is let's think about how we can deal with the whole silo thing.

00:24:55 ◼   ► And I don't think they're going to—I'm hoping eventually they'll come back and say, "We've

00:25:00 ◼   ► thought about this, and here's our solution to that."

00:25:02 ◼   ► And it will be kind of a big picture solution, not just like some kind of weird Band-Aid

00:25:06 ◼   ► or hack that enhances the silo system, so there's like this little straw being drawn

00:25:11 ◼   ► between silos where you can send things—I don't know.

00:25:14 ◼   ► So I hope they're considering that, but that wasn't what I was getting at with to-do-it,

00:25:18 ◼   ► and I was mostly just saying, mostly going for reliability and speed and stuff.

00:25:23 ◼   ► Maybe next year's list was something like that.

00:25:25 ◼   ► We'll see.

00:25:26 ◼   ► I wouldn't hold my breath.

00:25:27 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:25:28 ◼   ► If there is a list.

00:25:29 ◼   ► Next one was Resurrect, iLife, and iWork.

00:25:32 ◼   ► And they did that, but they kind of did it Pet Sematary style.

00:25:35 ◼   ► Well, I don't know if either one of you read that book or saw the movie.

00:25:39 ◼   ► iLife and iWork are back, but they're not really the applications we thought they would

00:25:45 ◼   ► be.

00:25:47 ◼   ► They're new, they're different, but sometimes they have fewer features, and it's not kind

00:25:52 ◼   ► of like, "Wow, this makes the old versions like crap."

00:25:55 ◼   ► It's more like, "Boy, I hope I can still get my work done with these new versions because

00:25:59 ◼   ► they removed a lot of features and they changed the file format and all this other stuff."

00:26:03 ◼   ► So it's not really what I was looking for, but they did resurrect it, right?

00:26:08 ◼   ► They're back.

00:26:09 ◼   ► Although, not the names, but the individual apps.

00:26:12 ◼   ► And hey, they're free, why not?

00:26:14 ◼   ► - Yeah, I don't know.

00:26:16 ◼   ► I actually use the iWork apps,

00:26:19 ◼   ► I don't use Microsoft Office,

00:26:20 ◼   ► I don't even have it installed.

00:26:21 ◼   ► I use the iWork apps for work.

00:26:23 ◼   ► And granted, my kind of work does not require

00:26:25 ◼   ► frequent use of them.

00:26:27 ◼   ► At least numbers I do use frequently, actually,

00:26:28 ◼   ► for accounting stuff, and the occasional graph.

00:26:31 ◼   ► But I have not found anything in the new versions

00:26:36 ◼   ► that I think is better than the old versions.

00:26:38 ◼   ► And I want to like these so much and I just can't.

00:26:42 ◼   ► I'm having a really hard time having any faith in Apple

00:26:48 ◼   ► to do right by their application software anymore.

00:26:50 ◼   ► You know, their OS is doing great,

00:26:52 ◼   ► both OSes are doing great.

00:26:54 ◼   ► Their hardware is doing great, as I've said in the past.

00:26:57 ◼   ► Their application software is really suffering.

00:26:59 ◼   ► And they, you know, I looked at the apps by Apple page

00:27:04 ◼   ► on the Mac App Store to see, oh, let me get a list

00:27:06 ◼   ► all their major application software.

00:27:08 ◼   ► And it's not a very long list.

00:27:10 ◼   ► It's basically iLife, iWork, Final Cut, Logic,

00:27:14 ◼   ► Aperture, and a couple of little administrative things.

00:27:16 ◼   ► There's really not a lot there.

00:27:19 ◼   ► And it seems like every major update they've done recently

00:27:23 ◼   ► has been either mediocre or downright destructive

00:27:28 ◼   ► to their applications.

00:27:29 ◼   ► And I really question what's going on there.

00:27:32 ◼   ► Why is it that they don't have enough time to do this?

00:27:35 ◼   ► Like are they in too much of a crunch every year and they want to hit this release cycle?

00:27:39 ◼   ► Is it a problem of one of the leaders of one of the groups in the company?

00:27:44 ◼   ► Is it a problem of priorities?

00:27:45 ◼   ► Is it a problem of design?

00:27:48 ◼   ► What is causing them to…

00:27:51 ◼   ► Now I'm scared.

00:27:52 ◼   ► Any Apple app I use, iLife, iWork, Pro, I am actually scared to see what Apple does

00:27:58 ◼   ► to it next.

00:27:59 ◼   ► It's reached that point.

00:28:01 ◼   ► And that's really bad.

00:28:02 ◼   ► I think they're in the same corner as Microsoft found itself in.

00:28:07 ◼   ► The barrier to entry, the price of being part of this market, is now higher and different

00:28:12 ◼   ► in ways they're not prepared for.

00:28:14 ◼   ► And what I mean by that is when Microsoft kept revising Office, or Windows for that

00:28:20 ◼   ► matter, and the internet aged on, their reaction was, "I guess this means we have to add internet

00:28:25 ◼   ► crap to Microsoft Word or something, I think, guys?

00:28:28 ◼   ► Is that what we have to do?"

00:28:30 ◼   ► And the next thing is like, all right, well, I think it means we have to make a web version

00:28:34 ◼   ► of Office or something.

00:28:36 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:28:37 ◼   ► And I think of this, and I think of Google back there kind of smiling and gloating, like

00:28:40 ◼   ► we have one version of Google Docs or a spreadsheet or whatever.

00:28:45 ◼   ► And it's not a fancy version, it's not amazing, but we just have one.

00:28:47 ◼   ► And we can put all our resources behind that.

00:28:50 ◼   ► But now Apple has to make the iOS version and the OS X version and the stupid web versions.

00:28:55 ◼   ► They have to make three versions of their programs.

00:28:57 ◼   ► and this release seemed to be about synchronizing them,

00:28:59 ◼   ► feature-wise and file format.

00:29:01 ◼   ► It was embarrassing when you had like,

00:29:02 ◼   ► oh, the web version can use the,

00:29:03 ◼   ► you can edit the file, you can just view the files

00:29:05 ◼   ► or edit the ones you made on your Mac,

00:29:06 ◼   ► but when you put them on iOS, some features don't work,

00:29:08 ◼   ► and that was embarrassing when they had the three versions

00:29:10 ◼   ► and they weren't in sync,

00:29:12 ◼   ► and some of them you could create some things

00:29:14 ◼   ► that couldn't be viewed in others and vice versa.

00:29:16 ◼   ► And so this release is more about,

00:29:17 ◼   ► we have to synchronize, but look what they're doing.

00:29:19 ◼   ► They're synchronizing three,

00:29:19 ◼   ► well, it's basically three entirely different applications.

00:29:22 ◼   ► God knows how much code they share, if anything,

00:29:24 ◼   ► between iOS and the Mac, maybe some there,

00:29:26 ◼   ► but the web version, who knows?

00:29:28 ◼   ► And that's what they've got.

00:29:29 ◼   ► And they've gotta be feeling like,

00:29:32 ◼   ► but we must be doing something wrong here,

00:29:33 ◼   ► because I know native software is great and everything,

00:29:36 ◼   ► but Google just has to make one version of these,

00:29:37 ◼   ► and we have to make three, and that feels wrong,

00:29:40 ◼   ► and we're spread too thin, and we have trouble hiring,

00:29:42 ◼   ► and this is not a big priority, and so,

00:29:44 ◼   ► and we need to hit our deadlines.

00:29:45 ◼   ► And talk about the yearly deadline.

00:29:47 ◼   ► Like, iWork, the latest version was '09, right?

00:29:49 ◼   ► And iLife, it was like 11.

00:29:51 ◼   ► - Yeah, iLife was like a mix of like 10 and 11.

00:29:53 ◼   ► I looked everything up when I made that post,

00:29:55 ◼   ► it's like it's really it basically the iPad came out and then all development

00:30:00 ◼   ► on Mac applications stopped because all the teams seriously because all the

00:30:04 ◼   ► teams were like then oh my god a rush to create iPad version and then oh iPhone

00:30:09 ◼   ► version and and you know it's very clear that Apple is using very small teams we

00:30:14 ◼   ► and we know that from talking to people there we know that they use very small

00:30:17 ◼   ► teams on stuff like this and it's clear this is like they were distracted by

00:30:22 ◼   ► having to make iOS versions and then having to update the iOS versions and now all of

00:30:27 ◼   ► a sudden now they're back to the Mac having to make something because it's been almost

00:30:32 ◼   ► four years without having made anything really. They have to make some kind of update but

00:30:37 ◼   ► it's not like they've been working for four years on the Mac version straight. They've

00:30:40 ◼   ► been working on the Mac version for maybe a year and on top of all this having to cram

00:30:45 ◼   ► all this in, it's very clear that they're not handling their size well at all.

00:30:52 ◼   ► I know we're not talking about software methodologies right now, but this gets me back

00:30:57 ◼   ► to one thing about software development that I've always believed, and I find it frustrating it's

00:31:01 ◼   ► not the case, is that I'm a big proponent of leaving developers on a product. So if you have

00:31:10 ◼   ► a team that builds some application, when the application is done and it ships, don't

00:31:16 ◼   ► take those people off and assign them to a new product and repeat that process.

00:31:21 ◼   ► It doesn't mean that people can't work in different products or whatever, but in general,

00:31:25 ◼   ► there must always be a team working on X.

00:31:28 ◼   ► That's the cost of having a product.

00:31:30 ◼   ► The cost of having a product is the team that builds it, and you've got to have a team there

00:31:34 ◼   ► that supports that product and makes the next version.

00:31:36 ◼   ► And that team's only job should be to make that product as awesome as it can.

00:31:39 ◼   ► Now maybe that product becomes irrelevant, then you gotta move them.

00:31:41 ◼   ► That product has to change in a certain way.

00:31:43 ◼   ► But you can't just shift them like, "Oh, hey, we did that.

00:31:46 ◼   ► Yay."

00:31:47 ◼   ► Now, it seems like from the outside that Apple has these A players, and wherever the fire

00:31:52 ◼   ► is, wherever the most important thing is, the A players get swooped off to there.

00:31:55 ◼   ► It's exciting, it's fun.

00:31:56 ◼   ► Like, "Hey, now we're doing iOS, but it's a secret project, so pull off all the best

00:31:59 ◼   ► Coco guys and bring them over to iOS."

00:32:01 ◼   ► And "Hey, now we're doing the amazing holographic watch levitating hoverboard.

00:32:04 ◼   ► Everybody pull them over to the secret project."

00:32:08 ◼   ► not a good way to support your products. You have to leave a team in place. It's like,

00:32:13 ◼   ► "Well, but if we do that, everything has these teams in place. They're stuck there. Those

00:32:16 ◼   ► development resources are basically dead to us." They're not dead. They're there making

00:32:19 ◼   ► a new version and a new version to make them better and better.

00:32:22 ◼   ► We all see the point where that kind of stopped. iPhoto got better and better up to about two

00:32:26 ◼   ► versions ago, and then it just got worse and worse. Same deal with many other products

00:32:32 ◼   ► that we're talking about, where we could tell when there was teams actively working on them,

00:32:35 ◼   ► and each new version was a big thing.

00:32:37 ◼   ► For example, iOS has teams actively working on it,

00:32:39 ◼   ► and each new version is like, wow,

00:32:41 ◼   ► look at what they've done, right?

00:32:42 ◼   ► Or the compiler team.

00:32:43 ◼   ► They didn't take those guys off.

00:32:46 ◼   ► The compiler team was, hey, we did this, we're done.

00:32:48 ◼   ► No, every year they have new stuff.

00:32:50 ◼   ► That team, it's probably a small team,

00:32:51 ◼   ► and that's fine or whatever.

00:32:52 ◼   ► I'm not saying you need Microsoft-sized teams

00:32:54 ◼   ► with hundreds of people, but every year,

00:32:56 ◼   ► there is a compiler team.

00:32:57 ◼   ► It's probably good that you can't take the compiler guys

00:32:59 ◼   ► and make them do the next version of numbers

00:33:02 ◼   ► for iOS or something, 'cause they're just compiler guys,

00:33:04 ◼   ► and what else are they gonna do?

00:33:05 ◼   ► - Might work better.

00:33:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, but every year they make, you know,

00:33:10 ◼   ► the programming language, Objective-C runtime,

00:33:12 ◼   ► the compilers, they make that better a year.

00:33:13 ◼   ► And the Xcode team, I'm assuming,

00:33:15 ◼   ► just does Xcode year after year, and that gets revised.

00:33:18 ◼   ► But you're right, it seems like the guys

00:33:19 ◼   ► who were doing iLife, it's like,

00:33:20 ◼   ► oh no, but now we gotta make all these for iOS.

00:33:22 ◼   ► And maybe it's not the same guys or whatever.

00:33:24 ◼   ► Oh, now we have to make these things, like,

00:33:26 ◼   ► and so who's left on the iPhoto team?

00:33:27 ◼   ► Well, your job is to use a couple of the new controls

00:33:30 ◼   ► that make it look more like iOS,

00:33:32 ◼   ► and keep it running on the new version

00:33:33 ◼   ► of the operating system, and take away keywords

00:33:35 ◼   ► under photos because you want to drive John Syracuse crazy.

00:33:40 ◼   ► Do you think there's like one guy at Apple somewhere whose job it is to just drive you

00:33:45 ◼   ► crazy?

00:33:46 ◼   ► I want to find the person who took keywords out from underneath photos and find the person

00:33:49 ◼   ► who's keeping them away.

00:33:50 ◼   ► Because maybe Steve Jobs took them away.

00:33:52 ◼   ► Fine.

00:33:53 ◼   ► Now he's gone.

00:33:54 ◼   ► We can put them back.

00:33:55 ◼   ► I will give you one word that will solve your problem.

00:33:58 ◼   ► Light room.

00:33:59 ◼   ► It's too late for me.

00:34:01 ◼   ► It's not.

00:34:02 ◼   ► It's never too late.

00:34:03 ◼   ► It's too late.

00:34:04 ◼   ► Look, I used iPhoto for years.

00:34:05 ◼   ► I then used Aperture for years. Lightroom, trust me. It is night and day. I mean, this

00:34:13 ◼   ► is ultimately what I'm doing here is I'm replacing Apple's software.

00:34:17 ◼   ► With Adobe's software. Look what you're doing to yourself.

00:34:20 ◼   ► I know.

00:34:21 ◼   ► That's an improvement.

00:34:22 ◼   ► To be fair, Lightroom is, I would say, possibly Adobe's best product. It's a really good

00:34:27 ◼   ► product. It's nothing like their other ones. It's really good.

00:34:31 ◼   ► All right, so that's, I made, it's my own fault for not being clear on the to-do item.

00:34:38 ◼   ► Resurrect iLife and iWork, and what I meant was like, they hadn't been updated in so long,

00:34:41 ◼   ► and now they've been updated, and like I said in the post, I gotta be careful what I wish

00:34:43 ◼   ► for.

00:34:44 ◼   ► They did resurrect them!

00:34:45 ◼   ► Oh well.

00:34:46 ◼   ► Yeah, I think B- was optimistic on that grade.

00:34:50 ◼   ► Eh, I just said resurrect, they did resurrect them, right?

00:34:53 ◼   ► I didn't say resurrect them and make them, I should have been more specific.

00:34:56 ◼   ► So they get a B-.

00:34:58 ◼   ► Because I am glad that they're like, at least, what if there was no new version of iWorker?

00:35:01 ◼   ► What if it was just that web thing that no one cares about?

00:35:03 ◼   ► Like that would be a lower grade.

00:35:05 ◼   ► Next item was to reassure Mac Pro lovers.

00:35:08 ◼   ► I give that one an A, because you've got a, you know, the dramatic intro video at WWDC.

00:35:14 ◼   ► Remember that thing with all the deep bass in that room and the cool video?

00:35:18 ◼   ► And like, you know, that's, it's reassuring.

00:35:21 ◼   ► Apple is totally in the Mac Pro business again, but you know, the whole nine yards and the

00:35:26 ◼   ► factory in the US and yep, definitely an A there.

00:35:30 ◼   ► I'm gonna choose to just be quiet here. Better get used to it.

00:35:35 ◼   ► I'm kidding. No, I'm totally kidding. I'm totally kidding.

00:35:41 ◼   ► And my final item was do something about TV, which was conceivable last year. They could have

00:35:47 ◼   ► done something about TV. And what I meant by that, if you look back at the original item,

00:35:50 ◼   ► I have specific examples of what I was talking about. It's like, do something,

00:35:55 ◼   ► something different than what you've been doing instead of just having a little Apple TV box.

00:35:58 ◼   ► You know, make a TV set, buy Netflix, make an app store on the TV, something that we all recognize

00:36:03 ◼   ► as a big move in the television world, because Apple has been hinting that they're interested

00:36:10 ◼   ► in television, they want to do something there, they see lots of potential blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:36:13 ◼   ► And I thought it was time for them to actually do something. But they didn't. We don't know why,

00:36:19 ◼   ► maybe we'll find it next year. That's the only one I gave an F because they totally didn't do that.

00:36:23 ◼   ► But that was kind of a stretch anyway, and it was kind of vague. That was the closest thing to a wishlist item.

00:36:27 ◼   ► But overall, I'd say I'd give this a pretty good rating. It was a pretty good year for them.

00:36:33 ◼   ► They did pretty much most of the things they were supposed to do to varying degrees of success,

00:36:38 ◼   ► but I would give them checkmarks. I'm like, "Yep, we did this, did this, did this." They did all the things they had to do.

00:36:42 ◼   ► No big stumbles, just a few minor ones here and there that most alien nerds care about, so...

00:36:47 ◼   ► Good year for them.

00:36:49 ◼   ► Now, do you want to give any hints on if you made a 2014 list, what that might include?

00:36:55 ◼   ► I think it might be harder for me, because last year I was trying to look for a way into

00:37:01 ◼   ► this other than saying, speculating about what they might do or doing a wish list.

00:37:06 ◼   ► And "to do" seemed appropriate at the time, because it seemed like they had a lot of work

00:37:09 ◼   ► cut out for them.

00:37:10 ◼   ► That was kind of at the beginning of Tim Cook's run, and it's like, "Well, what do you

00:37:14 ◼   ► got to do?

00:37:15 ◼   ► What do you got to do if you want to wrap?"

00:37:16 ◼   ► of product lines and you have to sort of hit all of them, and a couple of them are in various

00:37:20 ◼   ► states of crisis, other ones haven't been updated in a while, so you gotta do X, Y,

00:37:24 ◼   ► and Z.

00:37:25 ◼   ► Going into next year, I don't know if a to-do list is the right format.

00:37:29 ◼   ► Maybe now it's starting to start thinking of a different angle on this.

00:37:32 ◼   ► So I'm not sure what I'm going to do for that, if anything, but I want to think about it

00:37:37 ◼   ► some more, because if I was going to make a to-do list, I think it would be kind of

00:37:41 ◼   ► boring, and I think I would have to start to go into the speculation type stuff of new

00:37:45 ◼   ► product categories and TV mumbo-jumbo, so I don't know if this is the right format for

00:37:50 ◼   ► next year.

00:37:51 ◼   ► I mean, the funny thing is you can copy and paste this list with very few changes and

00:37:54 ◼   ► just say, "All right, do this again."

00:37:55 ◼   ► Yeah, well, there's the things they have to do every year. But, like, for example, I would

00:38:00 ◼   ► gladly not put OS X 10.10.0 on there, say, like, "Look, I don't think you need X 10 next

00:38:05 ◼   ► year. You could do X 10.9s and march your way up through the single digits there and

00:38:09 ◼   ► do X 10.10 in 18 months. The world would not end. If that gives you enough time to do a

00:38:13 ◼   ► new file system, I'm all for it." You know what I mean?

00:38:15 ◼   ► Oh, god.

00:38:17 ◼   ► Of course.

00:38:19 ◼   ► And iOS 7, you can imagine an iOS 8 that is a lot like iOS 7,

00:38:23 ◼   ► but with a few new frameworks and features

00:38:25 ◼   ► and some minor UI tweaks.

00:38:27 ◼   ► And that's what iOS 8 is going to be.

00:38:29 ◼   ► They're going to call that iOS 8, but it's not--

00:38:32 ◼   ► I think that's fine.

00:38:33 ◼   ► And all the rest of the stuff about diversifying the iPhone,

00:38:36 ◼   ► if they go another year with just two phones,

00:38:37 ◼   ► I think that's fine.

00:38:38 ◼   ► You don't have to do that.

00:38:39 ◼   ► Keeping the iPad on track, I think

00:38:42 ◼   ► there's room for an iPad Pro in there,

00:38:44 ◼   ► but maybe not next year, like, you're right,

00:38:47 ◼   ► it's a lot of the same stuff.

00:38:47 ◼   ► They have certain product lines they have to keep up,

00:38:49 ◼   ► but I tried to be specific about what I was expecting,

00:38:51 ◼   ► like, you know, what are they gonna do with Mac line?

00:38:53 ◼   ► You gotta bring more retina out.

00:38:55 ◼   ► That's gonna be repeated next year too.

00:38:57 ◼   ► And messages in iCloud, I don't even know what to say

00:39:00 ◼   ► about those things anymore.

00:39:01 ◼   ► - We are also sponsored this week by a new sponsor.

00:39:05 ◼   ► It is the Omni Group.

00:39:07 ◼   ► And you probably know the Omni Group software.

00:39:08 ◼   ► They've been around forever.

00:39:09 ◼   ► They make really good stuff.

00:39:12 ◼   ► They make productivity apps,

00:39:13 ◼   ► including the new OmniGraffle 6.

00:39:16 ◼   ► OmniGraffle is a great way for beginners or professionals

00:39:18 ◼   ► to work on diagrams, layout pages for print,

00:39:21 ◼   ► or create website and app mockups.

00:39:24 ◼   ► It's for students, designers, engineers, whomever.

00:39:27 ◼   ► They actually wrote whomever in this copy.

00:39:29 ◼   ► I assume that either it's correct,

00:39:33 ◼   ► or they listen to the show and like Casey, or both.

00:39:35 ◼   ► So, whomever.

00:39:38 ◼   ► Just go have a look.

00:39:40 ◼   ► OmniGraffle 6 is the easiest way to get your information

00:39:42 ◼   ► ideas into a beautiful document to share. Go to omni-group.com.

00:39:49 ◼   ► OmniGraffle 6 is now available on both the Mac App Store and their own store. You can

00:39:53 ◼   ► buy either way. It has a bunch of cool features. You can mask images right on the canvas so

00:39:59 ◼   ► you don't need to crop them before you place them down. They have new fill and stroke styles

00:40:03 ◼   ► that specifically created four quick and dirty mockups.

00:40:07 ◼   ► So for instance, if you're a designer, you want to bring in a quick mockup to a client.

00:40:11 ◼   ► You want to show it off, but you don't want it to look like it's too done yet and set

00:40:16 ◼   ► expectations accordingly.

00:40:17 ◼   ► Or you want to make it look rough so that you protect your original assets that you've

00:40:20 ◼   ► made for the final version in case they want to go copy it with somebody cheaper or something

00:40:24 ◼   ► like that.

00:40:26 ◼   ► Very nice and easy to create quick mockups and quick and dirty styles.

00:40:31 ◼   ► It's fantastic.

00:40:32 ◼   ► But beyond that, you can do all sorts of professional, final looking things.

00:40:36 ◼   ► If you go to, just go to omni-group.com.

00:40:39 ◼   ► You got to check this out.

00:40:41 ◼   ► What this app can do, it's hard to explain in a one minute ad spot all the features of

00:40:46 ◼   ► OmniGraffle.

00:40:48 ◼   ► It's just fantastic.

00:40:49 ◼   ► And to give you some idea of how good the Omni group is, they charge real prices on

00:40:54 ◼   ► iOS and they sell.

00:40:56 ◼   ► That's how good they are.

00:40:58 ◼   ► This is not actually a joke or anything.

00:41:01 ◼   ► They charge real sustainable software prices.

00:41:04 ◼   ► They've been around forever.

00:41:05 ◼   ► They have ridiculously good quality, ridiculously good support.

00:41:08 ◼   ► They have a very long history of this and it shows.

00:41:12 ◼   ► Their apps are professionally made and I mean,

00:41:15 ◼   ► heck, I had OmniGraffle.

00:41:18 ◼   ► OmniGraffle came with my first Mac.

00:41:19 ◼   ► Like they had some deal with Apple around 2004, I guess,

00:41:22 ◼   ► when I bought the Mac where it came with like a basic version

00:41:25 ◼   ► of it and this stuff's just so good.

00:41:27 ◼   ► It's been around forever.

00:41:28 ◼   ► Great history, great company.

00:41:30 ◼   ► Go to omnigroup.com and check

00:41:32 ◼   ► out these very professional apps,

00:41:34 ◼   ► especially the new OmniGraffle 6.

00:41:36 ◼   ► Thanks a lot to OmniGraffle and OmniGroup for sponsoring.

00:41:39 ◼   ► I remember the days when I got to make all my graphics for my OS X reviews in OmniGraffle.

00:41:43 ◼   ► And now they have sort of a chart format at ours and they want you to use other software

00:41:48 ◼   ► for the charting, but OmniGraffle, I still have it and I still use it, is amazing.

00:41:53 ◼   ► I use it a lot if you're a programmer and you want to make those programery kind of

00:41:56 ◼   ► diagrams, it can do that for you too.

00:41:58 ◼   ► I use it as a poor man's Adobe Illustrator, even though it's not really made to be Adobe

00:42:02 ◼   ► Illustrator.

00:42:03 ◼   ► Here's the thing about OmniGraph on a lot of the Omni applications. They look kind of like Keynote,

00:42:07 ◼   ► like where it doesn't seem like there's a lot of features there, but believe me, there are a ton

00:42:12 ◼   ► of features. I liken it to the days when I used to use, I think it was AutoCAD way back in the day,

00:42:18 ◼   ► with a command line. I don't know if you ever use AutoCAD where you'd sort of type in commands to do

00:42:23 ◼   ► sort of... It's not obvious. You'd look at the tools that were on the screen, it didn't seem like

00:42:26 ◼   ► you could do a lot, but if you knew what to type at the little prompt, you could do amazing things.

00:42:31 ◼   ► Well, if you just look at OmniGraffle, it just looks like a palette of tools and a bunch

00:42:34 ◼   ► of stuff or whatever, but there are so many keyboard commands, keyboard shortcuts, weird

00:42:39 ◼   ► tools where you can copy and paste subsets of styles from one place to another and duplicate

00:42:44 ◼   ► items aligned and rotate them and reconnect things to magnets.

00:42:47 ◼   ► It is like, if you've ever seen someone who's really good using OmniGraffle, it is amazingly

00:42:51 ◼   ► impressive and I feel like I've only barely scratched the surface of what this program

00:42:55 ◼   ► can do.

00:42:56 ◼   ► And I keep buying the upgrades, like to say, in the upgrade price wagon.

00:43:00 ◼   ► Even though I almost never use it,

00:43:02 ◼   ► I use it like maybe once or twice a year,

00:43:03 ◼   ► I just love the program,

00:43:04 ◼   ► I just love having it on my computer.

00:43:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, their stuff is really,

00:43:08 ◼   ► these are pro apps.

00:43:09 ◼   ► You know, everything you described

00:43:10 ◼   ► about having this deep potential

00:43:13 ◼   ► for learning new shortcuts, learning new features,

00:43:15 ◼   ► that's how pro apps are.

00:43:17 ◼   ► And these are really, truly pro apps.

00:43:20 ◼   ► And they're really great.

00:43:21 ◼   ► So thanks a lot to the Omni group for sponsoring.

00:43:24 ◼   ► - All right, so we should probably get

00:43:29 ◼   ► to an Antex Mac Pro review.

00:43:32 ◼   ► - Well, if you insist that you would like

00:43:34 ◼   ► to talk about this.

00:43:35 ◼   ► - I would love, I would like nothing more

00:43:38 ◼   ► than to talk about the Mac Pro.

00:43:40 ◼   ► - Did you read it, Casey?

00:43:41 ◼   ► - I did.

00:43:42 ◼   ► - Wasn't it good?

00:43:44 ◼   ► - The review was very good.

00:43:45 ◼   ► I know you're saying that half seriously, half joking.

00:43:48 ◼   ► The review was very good,

00:43:49 ◼   ► and all his reviews are really good.

00:43:50 ◼   ► You know, as a quick aside, it made me think,

00:43:52 ◼   ► I feel like he's a much better

00:43:56 ◼   ► and perhaps more Apple-friendly version of Tom

00:44:00 ◼   ► from Tom's Hardware.

00:44:02 ◼   ► Did you guys read that back in the day?

00:44:03 ◼   ► Well-- - Yep, I remember.

00:44:05 ◼   ► It's still there, isn't it?

00:44:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's still there, yeah.

00:44:07 ◼   ► - Does anyone ever read it anymore?

00:44:08 ◼   ► - I mean, it looks radically different now,

00:44:10 ◼   ► but yeah, I'll occasionally land there

00:44:11 ◼   ► from Google searches about processors,

00:44:13 ◼   ► and yeah, it's still around.

00:44:15 ◼   ► - Well, anyway, so yeah, an Antec,

00:44:17 ◼   ► and I'm probably pronouncing that wrong, and I'm sorry,

00:44:18 ◼   ► but an Antec seems like a modern,

00:44:22 ◼   ► you know, a 2010s-era Tom's Hardware,

00:44:24 ◼   ► and the review was very good,

00:44:26 ◼   ► and I've come to really enjoy their hardware reviews.

00:44:29 ◼   ► They're not quite to Syracusean level,

00:44:32 ◼   ► but they're very, very good.

00:44:34 ◼   ► And the Mac Pro review is good,

00:44:36 ◼   ► it's just about something

00:44:36 ◼   ► that I'm not terribly interested in.

00:44:38 ◼   ► But with that said, I know that you guys

00:44:41 ◼   ► and many of the listeners are anxious to talk about this,

00:44:43 ◼   ► so let me have it.

00:44:46 ◼   ► - So first, John, I'm curious,

00:44:49 ◼   ► when you read it, what did it make you think

00:44:52 ◼   ► about a potential Mac Pro purchase for yourself?

00:44:55 ◼   ► It probably made me push me more towards not getting one.

00:44:59 ◼   ► Although it pushed me more towards not getting one for a lot of reasons, but at the same

00:45:04 ◼   ► time it made me think that the big reason is still how much it costs.

00:45:09 ◼   ► Because that's what it always comes down to.

00:45:10 ◼   ► Because I would love to have a Mac Pro.

00:45:11 ◼   ► Who wouldn't want one?

00:45:12 ◼   ► Right?

00:45:13 ◼   ► Well, I can think of one of us.

00:45:14 ◼   ► It may be a case of who wouldn't want one.

00:45:15 ◼   ► But I like if someone gave it to you for free or for some really cheap price or whatever,

00:45:19 ◼   ► you'd take it, right?

00:45:20 ◼   ► Because it's awesome.

00:45:21 ◼   ► It's an amazing thing.

00:45:22 ◼   ► But since it costs so much, I constantly have to be weighing it against my other options

00:45:26 ◼   ► for similar or less money.

00:45:28 ◼   ► And learning more about this machine pushed me more towards, "I have to find some alternative."

00:45:35 ◼   ► Both in looking at the performance figures, both CPU and GPU, mostly GPU, and also just

00:45:41 ◼   ► thinking about, "Does this look like...

00:45:46 ◼   ► Is this a compromised machine?"

00:45:48 ◼   ► And I think it is a compromised machine.

00:45:51 ◼   ► The one thing that's really pushing me towards getting it is like, well, you had the first

00:45:53 ◼   ► Power Mac G5, and don't you want the first one, like the first cheese grater, the first

00:45:59 ◼   ► trash can.

00:46:00 ◼   ► Like, my Mac collecting type thing is pushing me towards that.

00:46:03 ◼   ► But on the other side, I'm looking at what's inside this thing, and there are lots of weird

00:46:06 ◼   ► compromises inside there.

00:46:07 ◼   ► I mean, he talked about them in review, and the ones we've always known about the server

00:46:11 ◼   ► CPUs being off cadence, but just the way the thing is built internally and the decisions

00:46:15 ◼   ► they had to make, it makes me think, I'm going to spend all this money, and I'm going to

00:46:20 ◼   ► accept these compromises in performance and stuff that doesn't really matter, but that

00:46:24 ◼   ► just seems awkward to me.

00:46:27 ◼   ► Not having USB 3.0 in the chipset, which I didn't realize until I had read the review,

00:46:31 ◼   ► is that going to be the end of the world?

00:46:32 ◼   ► No, but it's a compromise.

00:46:33 ◼   ► And in this case, it actually is a compromise for real world consequences, which we'll talk

00:46:38 ◼   ► about in a bit, I think.

00:46:39 ◼   ► But it's pushing me away, I think.

00:46:42 ◼   ► Let's assume that it's a year from now.

00:46:45 ◼   ► And we have, well, to make it safe,

00:46:48 ◼   ► let's say it's two years from now,

00:46:50 ◼   ► and we have available a 27 inch Retina iMac

00:46:53 ◼   ► with the screen resolution we want,

00:46:55 ◼   ► or a Mac Pro with an external resolution,

00:46:59 ◼   ► an external Retina monitor with the same resolution.

00:47:02 ◼   ► So we can get Retina on both,

00:47:04 ◼   ► so that's now no longer a factor.

00:47:06 ◼   ► At that point, I would have a hard time

00:47:10 ◼   ► not choosing the iMac.

00:47:12 ◼   ► And I think for you, it would be no question

00:47:16 ◼   ► you should get the iMac for what you actually want.

00:47:19 ◼   ► - I think it would be an easier time two years from now

00:47:21 ◼   ► for me to not get the iMac because I'm all about the GPU,

00:47:26 ◼   ► Marco, and the only reason I'm looking at this thing

00:47:29 ◼   ► is 'cause I need to have a fast GPU,

00:47:30 ◼   ► and in fact, I'm saying, well, for this amount of money,

00:47:33 ◼   ► this GPU better be the fastest possible, and it's not.

00:47:36 ◼   ► And that's one of the things pushing me away, right?

00:47:38 ◼   ► So the iMac is never gonna have the fastest possible GPU.

00:47:41 ◼   ► the Mac Pro is always going to have more GPU power. I'm just hoping, again, because the

00:47:44 ◼   ► GPUs are one revision back from AMD's current chips, right? So even there, it's a compromise

00:47:49 ◼   ► where they selected them before the new revision of the, what do you call it, the GCN cores

00:47:56 ◼   ► or whatever they are came out, so they have an old revision there. It's, I don't know.

00:48:00 ◼   ► And again, it's just because it costs so much money. If it was two grand, I'd get one in

00:48:03 ◼   ► a heartbeat, right? Like, who wouldn't?

00:48:05 ◼   ► Right, and that's the thing, I think for your purposes, for your expressed interest in Windows

00:48:12 ◼   ► gaming, I mean first of all you can look at this and you can say "Oh great, well it has

00:48:16 ◼   ► like the dual card, whatever it's called for ATI."

00:48:19 ◼   ► Crossfire X.

00:48:20 ◼   ► Right, so according to the AnandTech review, the Mac Pro is configured to do that for Windows,

00:48:27 ◼   ► but OS X does not support that.

00:48:29 ◼   ► And that's not really that big of a problem, OS X really doesn't care much about game use,

00:48:34 ◼   ► that's mostly used for games as far as I know. I don't think pro apps really support

00:48:39 ◼   ► that very much. So I could be wrong, I don't know. But the point is, I still think that

00:48:43 ◼   ► for your purposes, you would be much better served buying a new iMac every two years than

00:48:49 ◼   ► buying a Mac Pro every four or five.

00:48:52 ◼   ► Well, the other thing that I'm still thinking about is enhancing my ancient Mac Pro in various

00:48:58 ◼   ► ways that it's able to be enhanced, and pricing those out.

00:49:01 ◼   ► Yeah, but I don't know. That kind of feels like putting a brand new transmission into

00:49:05 ◼   ► a 10-year-old car.

00:49:06 ◼   ► It is, but wait to see. Should I get a new car? Should I continue to soup up this one?

00:49:11 ◼   ► Anyway, let's talk about some of the compromises here. One of them that I was surprised about,

00:49:15 ◼   ► that it seems like NN was surprised about as well, was that there's ECC RAM on the video

00:49:20 ◼   ► cards, but that the ECC is disabled when you run under OS X?

00:49:25 ◼   ► Yeah, there were actually some interesting comments on the article. I don't know anything

00:49:29 ◼   ► about pro-GPU stuff, but the comments basically indicated, one guy seemed to know quite a

00:49:34 ◼   ► lot and he was saying how ECC, unlike when it's supported in the main memory chips, ECC

00:49:41 ◼   ► on workstation video cards is actually just a software implementation of it basically.

00:49:46 ◼   ► It's not like a hardware difference. And it basically just uses the RAM a little bit like

00:49:51 ◼   ► a RAID 5 array, which is like there's like a parity area and then a regular area, so

00:49:56 ◼   ► you lose some of the space in the memory in exchange for getting this benefit.

00:49:59 ◼   ► And so it's all done in software, and it apparently is not universally praised because the loss

00:50:10 ◼   ► of the RAM is a factor.

00:50:12 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that should still be an issue because, again, with the ECC RAM, and another

00:50:16 ◼   ► reason I like the Mac Pro is because they come with ECC RAM, it's like, well, who cares

00:50:19 ◼   ► about that?

00:50:20 ◼   ► Well, as the amount of RAM that you have installed increases, it becomes a factor.

00:50:24 ◼   ► It's kind of like, you know, bit rot.

00:50:26 ◼   ► Maybe it's not that big a deal when you have a two megabyte hard disk,

00:50:28 ◼   ► but once you have a three terabyte hard disk, that same percentage of bit rot,

00:50:31 ◼   ► assuming it's the same and not, you know, worse, it's an issue.

00:50:36 ◼   ► So when you have 512 megabytes, one gig of VRAM, who cares?

00:50:41 ◼   ► But when you have 12 gigs of VRAM, you're like, well,

00:50:43 ◼   ► for the same reason I would like to have ECC on my main RAM,

00:50:46 ◼   ► wouldn't I like to also have it on my VRAM?

00:50:47 ◼   ► But if it's a software only thing and there's other compromises,

00:50:49 ◼   ► I can understand why Apple disabled it.

00:50:53 ◼   ► So that's a little bit disappointing.

00:50:54 ◼   ► I think the most disappointing thing is that the four USB 3 ports are all connected up

00:50:59 ◼   ► to a single PCI Express 2.0 lane.

00:51:01 ◼   ► So you have 500 megabytes a second for all four of those ports combined, which is not

00:51:06 ◼   ► great.

00:51:07 ◼   ► Right.

00:51:08 ◼   ► The PCI Express layout, I thought, was one of the most interesting parts about this.

00:51:11 ◼   ► Because I had heard a while ago, like back when they announced the thing, somebody told

00:51:14 ◼   ► me that they had heard from somebody and somebody and somebody that the reason why there was

00:51:19 ◼   ► there was only one SSD in there.

00:51:22 ◼   ► 'Cause the SSD mounts to the back

00:51:24 ◼   ► of one of the graphics cards.

00:51:25 ◼   ► And so the obvious question is, well,

00:51:27 ◼   ► can't they just put a second slot

00:51:28 ◼   ► on the other graphics card and give you two SSDs inside,

00:51:30 ◼   ► which would give you a lot more capacity potential?

00:51:33 ◼   ► And the reason that I was told back then

00:51:35 ◼   ► was that they're out of PCI Express lanes,

00:51:38 ◼   ► and that's why there's only one SSD,

00:51:40 ◼   ► that they're using all the PCI Express lanes

00:51:42 ◼   ► possible by that CPU and chipset for other purposes.

00:51:46 ◼   ► And looking at this diagram, that looks correct.

00:51:48 ◼   ► But the SSD has four lanes, and so it's two gigabytes per second.

00:51:53 ◼   ► And it seems like the current SSDs they're using are maybe pushing about a gigabyte a

00:51:57 ◼   ► second, maybe two gigs gives it headroom for faster flash going forward, right?

00:52:03 ◼   ► But the main reason the USB thing is a problem is a lot of the notions before this review

00:52:10 ◼   ► were like, "Well, if you get a Mac Pro, I know Thunderbolt hardware is really expensive,

00:52:13 ◼   ► but remember it's got USB 3, and USB 3 is a great way to get cheap storage.

00:52:17 ◼   ► So just hang all your storage off your USB ports.

00:52:20 ◼   ► You're not gonna do that.

00:52:21 ◼   ► You get one fast SSD, you've saturated all your entire USB 3 bus.

00:52:25 ◼   ► Because it's just one, and they're out of lanes.

00:52:27 ◼   ► Where are they gonna pull lanes from?

00:52:29 ◼   ► If they pulled like one lane from the internal SSD and brought it down to 1.5, then gave

00:52:33 ◼   ► you like...

00:52:35 ◼   ► And what's taking up most of those lanes?

00:52:37 ◼   ► These honking video cards, they each have 16 lanes, I think.

00:52:39 ◼   ► I don't have the diagram in front of me.

00:52:43 ◼   ► And why, you know, it's interesting also how they're sort of multiplexing the PCI Express,

00:52:50 ◼   ► where they have like, well, it's PCI Express 3.0 to the CPU, but it's 2.0 to the devices

00:52:54 ◼   ► and there's a multiplexer so that even though it looks like you don't have enough bandwidth

00:52:57 ◼   ► to support it because you're multiplexing down more than one connection into a fewer

00:53:00 ◼   ► number, the fewer number of connection is 3.0, so that's how you're able to do it.

00:53:04 ◼   ► Lots of weird stuff going on.

00:53:06 ◼   ► And again, because USB 3.0 is not in the chipset for the server chips because they're a generation

00:53:09 ◼   ► behind. There's lots of weird stuff going on inside that box or that cylinder.

00:53:13 ◼   ► Well, and I think the reason why, the PCI Express diagram tells you everything you need

00:53:17 ◼   ► to know. It tells you that this machine is made for OpenCL. That's what this is. It's

00:53:23 ◼   ► made for extremely high bandwidth between the CPU and the two GPUs, and everything else

00:53:30 ◼   ► is, oh, and I should point out Thunderbolt. They're pretty generous with the Thunderbolt

00:53:34 ◼   ► bandwidth. And everything else is secondary. So they're telling you USB 3 is a legacy concern,

00:53:41 ◼   ► basically. It's like all of the USB 3 ports together share the same amount of bandwidth

00:53:48 ◼   ► as the Wi-Fi chip.

00:53:50 ◼   ► Yeah, that's what I was going to say. The thing is they have to do that. They have gig

00:53:56 ◼   ► Ethernet, and so those have one lane each because they have dual interfaces. That makes

00:54:02 ◼   ► sense. And they have the Wi-Fi, because Wi-Fi is getting up to gig Ethernet standards in

00:54:05 ◼   ► ideal conditions these days, minus overhead, I suppose. And, you know, they threw a whole

00:54:10 ◼   ► bunch of the SSD, assuming, like, storage is always going to matter, and someday we

00:54:13 ◼   ► may have an SSD that can saturate two gigs a second, and then whatever the hell we have

00:54:18 ◼   ► left hang four USB ports off of it.

00:54:21 ◼   ► Well, and I think it's a safe assumption that most people's USB devices, all taken together,

00:54:28 ◼   ► really push 500 megabytes a second most of the time.

00:54:31 ◼   ► Usually you're talking about external platter hard drives

00:54:34 ◼   ► and various other much slower devices,

00:54:37 ◼   ► things like keyboards, mice, card reader, stuff like that.

00:54:40 ◼   ► But the fast bandwidth use things over USB

00:54:42 ◼   ► are usually just platter hard drives,

00:54:44 ◼   ► which you're not going to get anywhere near that speed.

00:54:46 ◼   ► So I wouldn't be that concerned about that.

00:54:49 ◼   ► - You have a USB 3 RAID,

00:54:50 ◼   ► or like, and I would imagine the things

00:54:53 ◼   ► that it could attach to USB, like the quick throw,

00:54:54 ◼   ► where these little bus powered SSD, that's conceivable.

00:54:58 ◼   ► you could saturate that with a high quality bus power SSD.

00:55:01 ◼   ► Well, but they want you to use Thunderbolt for that, though.

00:55:03 ◼   ► The thing about the Thunderbolt market is, even in the pro market, I guess they have

00:55:08 ◼   ► those Pegasus Raid things and stuff, but I would be more expecting to see them like,

00:55:12 ◼   ► I don't know, what the hell, are people buying Thunderbolt storage? It doesn't seem like

00:55:16 ◼   ► it's a burgeoning market with Thunderbolt peripherals, even in the pro space.

00:55:20 ◼   ► Well, but until today, Thunderbolt was not even available on the Mac Pro. So, like, all

00:55:26 ◼   ► all of Thunderbolt's best potential customers,

00:55:29 ◼   ► all these people with high-end computing needs

00:55:31 ◼   ► that used Macs, were all using computers

00:55:34 ◼   ► that didn't even have Thunderbolt ports.

00:55:35 ◼   ► So I think even though you've had Thunderbolt ports

00:55:38 ◼   ► on every other Mac for a while,

00:55:39 ◼   ► I don't think we can really judge

00:55:41 ◼   ► Thunderbolt's maturity or widespreadness yet

00:55:45 ◼   ► because it just came to the Mac Pro.

00:55:48 ◼   ► - Yeah, and even on the Thunderbolt front,

00:55:50 ◼   ► that's the part that's doing the multiplexing,

00:55:51 ◼   ► where they've got these Thunderbolt 2 things

00:55:53 ◼   ► Connected to what seems like an inadequate number of pipes back to the CPU

00:55:58 ◼   ► But actually it is adequate because the CPU talks to that bridge through PCI Express 3.0

00:56:02 ◼   ► And then the Thunderbolt 2 is a reach on 2.0 buses and they have this multiplexer chip in the middle

00:56:06 ◼   ► It's it's a pretty when I looked at all this stuff and figured that saw all the extra crap

00:56:10 ◼   ► They had to add in there like it's not just a stock Intel server motherboard cleverly arranged

00:56:15 ◼   ► But they had to add these extra multiplexers for the Thunderbolt crap and the USB chip and all that other stuff

00:56:19 ◼   ► It's a pretty amazing packaging job inside that cylinder because there's a lot of a lot of extra stuff in there

00:56:25 ◼   ► It's not like it's not like the GameCube motherboard where everything is so neat and tidy and you've got your you know

00:56:30 ◼   ► CPU GPU and RAM and it just is this beautiful little square this stuff all over the place and

00:56:34 ◼   ► connected with ribbon cables and circle shaped boards and

00:56:38 ◼   ► It's it's a very it is very g4 cube

00:56:41 ◼   ► Like people have made that comparison before but now having seen the guts and everything and how it's put together. That's pretty apt

00:56:46 ◼   ► Yeah, you know I will say that the thing that fascinated me the most about...

00:56:50 ◼   ► Who the hell are you?

00:56:51 ◼   ► Who the hell is Casey?

00:56:52 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly. I just woke up.

00:56:55 ◼   ► The thing that fascinated me the most about the Nantec review was the talk about the

00:57:00 ◼   ► the multiplexers and all the stuff they had to do to get all these PCI Express

00:57:06 ◼   ► liens squared away. It was really fascinating and if you, even if you're

00:57:09 ◼   ► like me and don't really care that much about the Mac Pro, I would encourage you

00:57:12 ◼   ► to read at least that part of the review. It is really, really, really interesting.

00:57:16 ◼   ► Well, you know, and what they're, you know, you could tell by this layout, what they are

00:57:20 ◼   ► emphasizing here is high-speed, modern, and future throughput. You know, you have Thunderbolt

00:57:26 ◼   ► being connected directly to the CPU, so, you know, as Anand pointed out in the review,

00:57:31 ◼   ► like, that's pretty amazing that you have, like, this external cable interface, six ports

00:57:36 ◼   ► in the back that basically plug directly into the CPU. That's pretty awesome. And so you

00:57:40 ◼   ► So you have that crazy interface, plus you have these workstation class GPUs being able

00:57:46 ◼   ► to run OpenCL stuff over these incredibly fast buses.

00:57:50 ◼   ► Because one of the big challenges with general purpose computing on GPUs is just getting

00:57:56 ◼   ► the data back and forth in a way that doesn't make the whole thing take more time.

00:58:00 ◼   ► Like if you can just do something quickly on the CPU, that's going to be faster than

00:58:04 ◼   ► shifting it over to the graphics card, doing something there and shifting it back.

00:58:08 ◼   ► So in order to make graphics card computing better and more useful in practice, you have

00:58:13 ◼   ► to keep making those transfer pipes bigger and faster.

00:58:17 ◼   ► And clearly this machine is made specifically and primarily for that, which is something

00:58:23 ◼   ► that none of us are going to use probably.

00:58:24 ◼   ► You know, the three of us, none of us are really going to use that.

00:58:27 ◼   ► It makes perfect sense in light of the demo they gave at WWC for the Mac Pro was the lunchtime

00:58:33 ◼   ► session.

00:58:34 ◼   ► I don't know if either one of you went to it.

00:58:35 ◼   ► Mm-hmm.

00:58:36 ◼   ► Yep.

00:58:37 ◼   ► I believe we sat with you.

00:58:38 ◼   ► Well, there's a lot of nerds there.

00:58:41 ◼   ► Many nerds look alike, so check your nerds to make sure they're yours.

00:58:45 ◼   ► But yeah, so it was someone demonstrating, you know, doing painting on a 3D model.

00:58:51 ◼   ► Someone from Pixar doing some stuff from Monsters University that you can download from the

00:58:55 ◼   ► Apple's developer site, I think.

00:58:56 ◼   ► I'm not sure.

00:58:57 ◼   ► But anyway, what they were showing there, and they had to take pains to point out, was,

00:59:02 ◼   ► "Oh, it just looks like you're drawing on a 3D model.

00:59:05 ◼   ► Big deal."

00:59:06 ◼   ► with like humongous textures using all 12 gigs of VRAM, things that are just, you know,

00:59:12 ◼   ► not possible on a regular computer just because of the sheer volume of data. You know, we're

00:59:17 ◼   ► not just doing like, oh, this just needs to be good enough quality to display, you know,

00:59:22 ◼   ► in a video game or something. This is artwork that's going to be rendered at high-res, you

00:59:27 ◼   ► know, 4K or whatever for movie purposes. And the assets that go into it alone are just

00:59:33 ◼   ► gigantic. And so it's amazing that it can do it at all, right? But that's not what most

00:59:37 ◼   ► people are doing. Most people are not dealing with that huge volume of data. But that's

00:59:40 ◼   ► what the machine is designed to do. Be a small little cylinder thing that amazes—kind of

00:59:43 ◼   ► like the old SGI, like the octane machines or whatever—be this little tiny thing that

00:59:47 ◼   ► can do these amazing things with the huge volume of data that other machines can't do.

00:59:53 ◼   ► So for that purposes, and for, you know, if you work at Pixar, it seems like this is a

00:59:57 ◼   ► great machine for that purpose, compared to what you would have had to buy before to do

01:00:00 ◼   ► the same thing.

01:00:01 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know. I mean, after I read it, I was a little sour on the idea of keeping

01:00:08 ◼   ► my order and not cancelling it. I thought about cancelling my order, because it looks,

01:00:16 ◼   ► from all accounts, it looks like this is a machine with power that I'm paying for that

01:00:22 ◼   ► I'm probably not going to use. And I keep thinking, you know, what if... One of the

01:00:30 ◼   ► I frequently do is convert videos that we're going to watch somewhere or rip Blu-rays so

01:00:36 ◼   ► we can watch them on the Apple TV with other stupid menus and all, you know, stuff like

01:00:39 ◼   ► that.

01:00:40 ◼   ► And or like I'll have like a giant folder of images that we've shot that I want to convert

01:00:45 ◼   ► and I'll run ImageMagick from the command line in parallel, so you know, maxing out

01:00:49 ◼   ► all the cores to do that.

01:00:51 ◼   ► And I think, like, hey, what if ImageMagick, what if their OpenCL support improves and

01:00:58 ◼   ► it starts becoming like five or ten times faster on this computer.

01:01:01 ◼   ► I would love that.

01:01:02 ◼   ► What if Logic starts using OpenCL for something?

01:01:06 ◼   ► That would save me tons of time when editing this show.

01:01:08 ◼   ► What if Lightroom improves its OpenCL support and imports don't take as long, conversions

01:01:15 ◼   ► to DNG don't take as long?

01:01:17 ◼   ► All this stuff that I do fairly frequently that is highly parallelized, I'm not going

01:01:23 ◼   ► to see savings every day that are going to be noticeable, but I'm going to see, you

01:01:28 ◼   ► know, maybe once or twice a week potentially big savings by having lots of parallel CPU

01:01:33 ◼   ► power. But the GPU side is still a big question mark, and I think mostly still like half done

01:01:40 ◼   ► or not done by most big software packages. And I wonder, is that going to change in the

01:01:45 ◼   ► lifetime of this machine, or, you know, maybe we'll be looking at buying a Mac Pro with

01:01:50 ◼   ► tons of GPU power in three to five years when tons of stuff takes advantage of that, maybe

01:01:54 ◼   ► that would be a better idea than buying one now.

01:01:56 ◼   ► Well, you need to buy one now just to replace your current Mac Pro, because what you're

01:02:00 ◼   ► -- think of it this way, like, you should think of it as what you're doing is you're

01:02:03 ◼   ► getting a smaller, quieter version of what you already have that also happens to be faster.

01:02:08 ◼   ► Like that is another thing that pushes me towards finding a way to buy this thing is,

01:02:14 ◼   ► will it be better than my current Mac?

01:02:15 ◼   ► Yes.

01:02:16 ◼   ► And it won't just be better in ways like performance-wise and spec-wise and number-wise, it'll be

01:02:20 ◼   ► be better in the touchy feely ways of being nicer to look at, taking up less room, making

01:02:25 ◼   ► less noise, using less power, producing less heat, maybe. Yeah, it's got to be producing

01:02:29 ◼   ► less heat. All those advantages are there. Maybe you didn't need to get the D700. You

01:02:35 ◼   ► could go away with less GPU, but you're just, you know, and plus, you have to buy the expensive

01:02:39 ◼   ► things that we can't afford. It's your job. You should not cancel your order.

01:02:44 ◼   ► I guess somebody has to do it. Yeah, seriously.

01:02:46 ◼   ► I mean, one thing I've thought about is, like, is, because I ordered the 8-core with the

01:02:50 ◼   ► D700, because the 8-core is really great. And one thing I thought about was, what if

01:02:56 ◼   ► I just downgrade to the stock 6-core config, plus the big, plus the terabyte, basically.

01:03:03 ◼   ► But once you add the terabyte and the RAM that I want, I want the 32 gigs of RAM, once

01:03:09 ◼   ► you add those, it's not, you know, it's all price relativism. Yeah, it's like a $1500

01:03:15 ◼   ► which is a lot of money, but it's like,

01:03:18 ◼   ► "Well, if I'm gonna spend 4,500,

01:03:20 ◼   ► "might as well spend six."

01:03:21 ◼   ► You know, it's like, I want this computer to last.

01:03:25 ◼   ► And if you look, one of the great things

01:03:27 ◼   ► about the NN Tech article is that it shows you

01:03:31 ◼   ► how much value Mac Pros hold over time,

01:03:34 ◼   ► because the ceiling of performance

01:03:37 ◼   ► really does not move very quickly.

01:03:40 ◼   ► And the rest of the Mac lineup

01:03:42 ◼   ► is actually hitting a similar wall, which he talks about,

01:03:44 ◼   ► which is the thing about how single threaded CPU gains

01:03:48 ◼   ► have really hit a wall and are really slowing down

01:03:52 ◼   ► dramatically across the industry in desktop.

01:03:54 ◼   ► In mobile, they still have a while to go,

01:03:56 ◼   ► but in the desktop, we have maxed out

01:04:01 ◼   ► single threaded potential and the only ways

01:04:04 ◼   ► we can realistically make gains are by shrinking

01:04:06 ◼   ► the process down and making a few little

01:04:10 ◼   ► instruction efficiency gains here and there,

01:04:12 ◼   ► But the gains are coming very slowly

01:04:15 ◼   ► in single-threaded performance.

01:04:16 ◼   ► So what Intel did, and what everyone else is doing,

01:04:19 ◼   ► is let's just throw more cores in the die.

01:04:21 ◼   ► We can make the process small enough

01:04:23 ◼   ► that we can make that work.

01:04:24 ◼   ► So they threw a whole bunch more cores in the die.

01:04:26 ◼   ► So now we have these-- now you can get a quad-core laptop.

01:04:31 ◼   ► That's crazy.

01:04:32 ◼   ► Imagine telling somebody that 10 years ago.

01:04:37 ◼   ► That would have sounded nuts.

01:04:39 ◼   ► But that's normal now.

01:04:40 ◼   ► You can get a four-core laptop.

01:04:42 ◼   ► That's crazy.

01:04:43 ◼   ► And so on the desktop, you're basically just maxing out

01:04:50 ◼   ► power.

01:04:51 ◼   ► Like, how much heat can you dissipate in this enclosure?

01:04:53 ◼   ► That's basically it.

01:04:55 ◼   ► And so you have these 130-watt chips.

01:04:59 ◼   ► And that's your limit there.

01:05:00 ◼   ► So you're limited basically just by-- well,

01:05:03 ◼   ► you've maxed out single-threaded performance.

01:05:05 ◼   ► You've put as many cores on there

01:05:06 ◼   ► as you can while still staying under the power envelope.

01:05:09 ◼   ► So now you just kind of basically wait for minor improvements to efficiency in instruction

01:05:15 ◼   ► level stuff and process shrinks to be able to cram more on there or make it run faster.

01:05:21 ◼   ► And so the era of having these giant jumps is gone.

01:05:24 ◼   ► So the CPU I have in mind was released in 2010.

01:05:29 ◼   ► And the new one I get for nearly $7,000 CPU-wise is only going to be about 50% faster.

01:05:37 ◼   ► Well, 100% faster, roughly, in multithreaded, but single-threaded only about 50% faster.

01:05:43 ◼   ► And that's, like, I kind of expected more for a 2010 CPU going to a 2013 CPU.

01:05:49 ◼   ► Well, I think what you would feel more is the storage speed.

01:05:52 ◼   ► I don't know what speed your SSD is or whatever.

01:05:54 ◼   ► These SSDs do seem reasonably fast, and that would probably give you a more day-to-day

01:05:58 ◼   ► experience.

01:05:59 ◼   ► And Apple, to its credit, as Anand points out, is trying to walk the walk with its software,

01:06:05 ◼   ► heavily optimizing Final Cut, which is the application they keep showing in their own

01:06:08 ◼   ► advertising for like, "Hey, buy a Mac Pro, get Final Cut," you know, with the 4K video

01:06:13 ◼   ► support. They're trying to use all that GPU with Final Cut. They're using the CPU and

01:06:17 ◼   ► the GPU. It's not just a GPU. It's not just... They're trying to use all the hardware that

01:06:21 ◼   ► they've built. So if there's... If you're not talking about Maya or something, if there's

01:06:24 ◼   ► a piece of software that Apple makes that's trying to be tailored for the Mac Pro, it

01:06:28 ◼   ► seems like Final Cut is the flagship there. But other software, less so. But even in the

01:06:33 ◼   ► case of other software it's like well at least you won't have any you know it's

01:06:36 ◼   ► got fast memory it's got a lot of it you're you won't be processes won't be

01:06:41 ◼   ► waiting on a core if you buy one of the models with lots of cores and

01:06:43 ◼   ► hyper-threading and everything it should still it should still feel significantly

01:06:47 ◼   ► snabbier and in a smaller package that like makes less noise and everything

01:06:50 ◼   ► like that and the GPU is not bad in terms of like what it just like normal

01:06:55 ◼   ► you know what do you want to use GP for what do I want you just gaming or boring

01:06:59 ◼   ► stuff like that it's it's fine it does pretty well like it's up there with the

01:07:03 ◼   ► big boy GPUs. It's not the top of the stack of the big boy GPUs. But it's okay. But for

01:07:10 ◼   ► the price of a Mac Pro, you could buy like seven high-end PCs with the same video card

01:07:16 ◼   ► in them, and that's kind of depressing.

01:07:18 ◼   ► Well, here's what I keep telling you to do.

01:07:21 ◼   ► Well, I don't want a PC.

01:07:22 ◼   ► Well, you don't need seven. You can just buy one.

01:07:24 ◼   ► Well, but see, the thing is, looking at it in terms of GPU performance or gaming, it's

01:07:29 ◼   ► It's great that it has a crossfire in Windows and stuff like that, but I'm comparing it

01:07:35 ◼   ► to upgrading my thing.

01:07:37 ◼   ► I'm not comparing it to an iMac, because the D700 still stomps all over the iMac.

01:07:45 ◼   ► I keep looking at an iMac, pricing it out, and it ends up being like, we did it before,

01:07:48 ◼   ► like three grand and not really great for my purposes.

01:07:52 ◼   ► So I keep just looking at, "Can I hold out another year?

01:07:55 ◼   ► Can I put stuff in my Mac Pro to hold out another year?"

01:07:57 ◼   ► And what am I expecting another year?

01:07:58 ◼   ► The new CPUs might not even be out, but maybe they'll be able to rev the GPUs, because then

01:08:02 ◼   ► they'll have, you know, it's like, the GPU rev, fine, just swap in the new GPU, it shouldn't

01:08:06 ◼   ► be that big a deal.

01:08:07 ◼   ► Maybe lower the price a little bit because the CPUs aren't updated and you're kind of

01:08:10 ◼   ► offering the same machine, so maybe you can bring the price down.

01:08:13 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:08:14 ◼   ► I don't know what I'm waiting for.

01:08:15 ◼   ► I haven't decided yet.

01:08:18 ◼   ► Half of me looks at these GPU benchmarks and goes, if your current Mac was on there, it

01:08:22 ◼   ► wouldn't show up on the diagram.

01:08:23 ◼   ► It would be like a one-pixel-wide line, or it did not finish.

01:08:28 ◼   ► Why do I care that, okay, so it's not as fast as the very fastest GPU you can buy in any

01:08:33 ◼   ► computer ever right now, but it's in the ballpark, right?

01:08:37 ◼   ► And then on the other hand, it's like, why not just get, as many people suggested, a

01:08:41 ◼   ► high-end GPU and jam it into my current Mac Pro?

01:08:44 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:08:45 ◼   ► So what you should care about, or what we should all care about, ignoring this gaming

01:08:49 ◼   ► stuff is, what is the Retina situation like on the Mac Pro?

01:08:53 ◼   ► And we already discussed how it can't drive the big quad 27-inch display that doesn't

01:08:57 ◼   ► exist because of, what do you call it, the display port limitations and stuff.

01:09:01 ◼   ► Right, and we don't even know that it can't do that.

01:09:04 ◼   ► There isn't a display out there of that resolution to test with.

01:09:07 ◼   ► Right, and maybe you could with dual-length or whatever, but the question was, "All right,

01:09:10 ◼   ► so say you buy one of these 4K displays that Apple offers you from Sharp or whatever.

01:09:15 ◼   ► Can you run it in retina mode?"

01:09:17 ◼   ► And the answer seems to be—

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01:11:59 ◼   ► So Retina.

01:12:01 ◼   ► Yeah, not so much.

01:12:04 ◼   ► Moving on.

01:12:05 ◼   ► This is a part that has me a little bit worried.

01:12:08 ◼   ► So what Anand found was that the monitor that comes with it,

01:12:14 ◼   ► yeah it works fine, but it's, and for the same reason that I didn't order one, and I think John, you probably wouldn't either,

01:12:20 ◼   ► that 4K at 32 inches is too many pixels for its size to be useful at 1X, but not really enough to be useful at 2X.

01:12:32 ◼   ► It's basically useful for 4K video editors to see an output of their 4K video, but as a general purpose display, this clearly is not a great solution.

01:12:43 ◼   ► And what's interesting, so Dell recently released, there's a few other companies that do this,

01:12:48 ◼   ► but I think the most popular ones for a while are going to be these ones from Dell that

01:12:52 ◼   ► it's like the UP24Q something, they have the worst product names.

01:12:58 ◼   ► It's Dell's 24 inch 4K display and it's only like $1200 bucks.

01:13:03 ◼   ► So we've talked about it before, I'm not going to get too into it.

01:13:07 ◼   ► But that apparently, he got one of those from Dell for the review and he plugged it into

01:13:10 ◼   ► the Mac Pro and it was just garbled and didn't work right.

01:13:14 ◼   ► And so it appears as though, you know, there's all these standards that we talked about to

01:13:18 ◼   ► multiplex two signals into either one cable

01:13:22 ◼   ► or into two cables that go into one monitor and have the OS see

01:13:26 ◼   ► it as two different monitors and then merge it in software so it behaves properly to

01:13:30 ◼   ► overcome various limitations and stuff like that to be able to get these super high

01:13:34 ◼   ► resolutions on one monitor. And it sounds like

01:13:39 ◼   ► Apple kind of made special support for the Sharp one to work that they're selling

01:13:43 ◼   ► and didn't make any support for this Dell one. And that

01:13:47 ◼   ► that's worrying because that means

01:13:51 ◼   ► well it's worrying in that this is now

01:13:55 ◼   ► going to be a question. You can't just buy any 4K monitor and plug in and expect it to work right.

01:13:59 ◼   ► So that's a problem right there. This also rules out

01:14:03 ◼   ► these particular monitors which if you wanted dual 24s

01:14:07 ◼   ► a single 24 instead of a big 27 or 30 you could have retina today if this monitor worked.

01:14:13 ◼   ► But it doesn't, so you can't, and there's no saying whether it will in the future.

01:14:18 ◼   ► Did he say that even on the Sharp one you couldn't put it into high DPI mode though

01:14:21 ◼   ► at 2x?

01:14:23 ◼   ► I think he said he hacked it, but it would only do like one-to-one high DPI mode, so

01:14:28 ◼   ► it would like exact, so it was 1920 by 1080.

01:14:33 ◼   ► So it wouldn't, or whatever it is, so it wouldn't...

01:14:36 ◼   ► I thought when he said that it wouldn't even do that one.

01:14:38 ◼   ► That it wouldn't do that mode.

01:14:40 ◼   ► No, it did that, but everything was too big, of course.

01:14:42 ◼   ► And the problem was he couldn't get any of the scaling modes

01:14:46 ◼   ► to work, the ones where it renders it higher and then

01:14:49 ◼   ► scales it to the native pixels the way the MacBook Pro does.

01:14:51 ◼   ► He couldn't get any of those working.

01:14:54 ◼   ► So basically, for Retina use, the current Sharp 32 inches

01:14:58 ◼   ► is not what really anybody's looking for.

01:15:00 ◼   ► And the Dell, which is what a lot of people are looking for,

01:15:03 ◼   ► doesn't work.

01:15:04 ◼   ► and it might never work, it might work next week, who knows, we don't know.

01:15:07 ◼   ► Yeah, there could be driver issues to sort that out. So I don't think it's hopeless on this front,

01:15:11 ◼   ► but what it's using to support these 4K displays through a single cable is the multi-stream support,

01:15:18 ◼   ► which seems like it was originally designed so you could daisy chain monitors together,

01:15:21 ◼   ► so you'd have a Thunderbolt display go into one monitor and then add that monitor into a second

01:15:25 ◼   ► monitor. So you'd have to send two monitors with a signal down this one Thunderbolt display,

01:15:29 ◼   ► how would you do it? You'd do this multi-stream thing. So they make a single monitor

01:15:32 ◼   ► that consumes two streams and displays them in the right place.

01:15:35 ◼   ► And that's why you might need some kind of driver support to correctly talk to the monitor

01:15:39 ◼   ► using multiple streams, say, "I know I'm sending within the multi-stream protocol,

01:15:42 ◼   ► but both of these images are for you, and here's how you should arrange them and display them and

01:15:45 ◼   ► synchronize them," and all that stuff. So it's, again, talking about a compromised machine.

01:15:50 ◼   ► Are the standards out there ready now for even just existing 4K displays,

01:15:56 ◼   ► let alone a quad 27 size thing? And the answer is no, they're not. DisplayPort 1.2 can't handle

01:16:01 ◼   ► those types of resolutions, and even at plain old 4K, it's kind of a hack on top of the

01:16:05 ◼   ► multistream support to get this resolution to a monitor and it's monitor dependent.

01:16:08 ◼   ► So again, it looks like a compromised machine, not sort of, "We waited until we could do

01:16:14 ◼   ► it all cleanly and elegantly and here it is."

01:16:16 ◼   ► They didn't, and they did it however they—they did what they had to do, but all these areas

01:16:21 ◼   ► we see were just that close, just so close to getting everything the way it's supposed

01:16:25 ◼   ► to be, but we're not quite there yet.

01:16:27 ◼   ► Exactly. And so, you know, the big question is, will Apple release the display we want

01:16:37 ◼   ► anytime soon, first of all? And if they do, will it even be compatible with this Mac Pro?

01:16:40 ◼   ► And we don't really know that yet.

01:16:42 ◼   ► I still think you should buy one, though. Maybe two. Send me one.

01:16:47 ◼   ► No, I mean, and I did keep my order, because, you know, looking at this, assuming that nothing

01:16:54 ◼   ► comes out that's going to make something really incompatible. You know, you can look

01:16:58 ◼   ► at his CPU charts to see the progress of Mac Pros over the years, how slow it really is.

01:17:05 ◼   ► The side effect of that, you know, one thing is you should almost never buy two Mac Pros

01:17:10 ◼   ► in a row. Like, you should almost always skip generations. But the upside is that you buy

01:17:17 ◼   ► one and it lasts a long time. And when you're ready to sell it, it's still worth something.

01:17:20 ◼   ► Which is true of all Macs, usually, but in particular, the Mac Pros really hold their

01:17:24 ◼   ► value very well. And so I want to buy this computer that's going to last me at least

01:17:32 ◼   ► two years of being top of the line and probably four or five years of usability of still being

01:17:38 ◼   ► a high performance computer relative to new software for at least four or five years if

01:17:43 ◼   ► I still choose to use it for that long. Which I might not, maybe I'd sell it before then,

01:17:46 ◼   ► but because you know it's a joke I sell everything hahaha. And if I choose to use it for a long

01:17:53 ◼   ► time I can. You know, like, John, you're using your 2008 Mac Pro, and it's fine.

01:17:57 ◼   ► >> John

01:18:00 ◼   ► This seems like it's going to go even longer, yeah. But I would say if you're buying this

01:18:02 ◼   ► machine, buy it for what it can do for you today. Like, don't buy it with the expectation

01:18:06 ◼   ► that you're going to be doing a 5,000 by something screen, because maybe you never will. But

01:18:11 ◼   ► if you want a small, quiet, powerful computer that's faster than your existing Mac Pro that

01:18:16 ◼   ► drives your existing monitors in non-retina resolution, and that you can use for years

01:18:20 ◼   ► and years and not feel like you have a slow machine, this is it.

01:18:23 ◼   ► But if you're buying it with the expectation then in a short time I'll be able to connect

01:18:27 ◼   ► up this amazing new display and do all these, maybe you won't, maybe you will, but don't

01:18:31 ◼   ► buy it for that purpose.

01:18:32 ◼   ► Like this 2008 Mac Pro, I don't know what I was thinking in terms of what it would do,

01:18:38 ◼   ► but what it's doing now is the same thing it was doing on day one.

01:18:40 ◼   ► It's running the same monitor, it's running similar software with similar features.

01:18:45 ◼   ► It doesn't do anything amazing or new, it just keeps doing what it always did very well

01:18:49 ◼   ► and is amazingly problem-free and is very expandable and all the other good things going

01:18:53 ◼   ► for it.

01:18:54 ◼   ► So maybe it will just be under my desk here for another year.

01:18:59 ◼   ► On this topic, we got a good question from a person who gave their name as AGains, and

01:19:06 ◼   ► he or she said, "Can you talk about why you guys would never use an iMac for work

01:19:11 ◼   ► development, etc.

01:19:12 ◼   ► I think it has many advantages to the pros in MacBooks."

01:19:15 ◼   ► So this fits right in here with like, you know, why we buy Mac Pros and why we like

01:19:19 ◼   ► Mac Pros and why John refuses to buy an iMac even though it actually serves as a way better

01:19:23 ◼   ► and be way cheaper over time.

01:19:24 ◼   ► Not that I'm bitter, but you know, I think if you have never used a Mac Pro, you're fine.

01:19:32 ◼   ► Keep not using them.

01:19:33 ◼   ► It's like using a giant monitor.

01:19:35 ◼   ► Once you use one, you're ruined and you will keep wanting to buy those big expensive things.

01:19:39 ◼   ► But you know, an iMac or a laptop, they're fine.

01:19:44 ◼   ► If I had to use those things, I would use those things.

01:19:48 ◼   ► The Mac Pro is just better in a few pretty key ways for what I do.

01:19:53 ◼   ► And people always say, "Do I need X or Y for development?"

01:20:00 ◼   ► Most development, especially if you're doing web development, you're just typing into a

01:20:03 ◼   ► text editor.

01:20:05 ◼   ► There's very few IDEs that are really going to stress the computer for any modern hardware.

01:20:10 ◼   ► If you're doing web development, you can do it on pretty much anything.

01:20:13 ◼   ► You can do it on an 11 inch MacBook Air if you want to.

01:20:15 ◼   ► You can do it on anything, it doesn't matter.

01:20:17 ◼   ► Screen space is always nice to have.

01:20:20 ◼   ► But performance wise, it doesn't really

01:20:22 ◼   ► matter what you're using for web development.

01:20:24 ◼   ► For iOS development, you can do it on everything else.

01:20:29 ◼   ► Again, you need a lot of screen space,

01:20:30 ◼   ► especially for iPad development.

01:20:32 ◼   ► And for iOS stuff, Xcode is a bit of a hog.

01:20:37 ◼   ► So there's a lot of smart things that it will do.

01:20:39 ◼   ► And I don't know if this applies to the other big IDEs

01:20:42 ◼   ► in the market like Eclipse or all the Windows crap. I don't know if it applies to that stuff,

01:20:47 ◼   ► but IDEs can be very heavy and slow. Also, just the compilation process is not quick

01:20:53 ◼   ► if you have a major project or if you're using big libraries in it. So you can start hitting

01:20:58 ◼   ► performance bottlenecks when doing iOS development, but even then, if you're doing it on a modern

01:21:04 ◼   ► MacBook Pro or iMac, you're fine. You're not going to see massive gains in most cases for

01:21:09 ◼   ► most projects by going to a Mac Pro.

01:21:11 ◼   ► I think you can do iOS or Mac development very easily if you just get a Mac Mini with

01:21:17 ◼   ► an SSD and stuff it full of RAM.

01:21:20 ◼   ► Is it going to be the fastest?

01:21:21 ◼   ► No, it's not going to be the fastest.

01:21:22 ◼   ► You're going to wait a little bit longer.

01:21:23 ◼   ► But if you don't have another Mac to compare it to, you don't know how long that compile

01:21:26 ◼   ► would take on a Mac Pro.

01:21:28 ◼   ► It's fine.

01:21:29 ◼   ► SSD, lots of RAM, big screen, and you can get away with a Mac Mini.

01:21:32 ◼   ► I know plenty of iOS developers who made amazing, great apps, and their first Mac was a Mac

01:21:37 ◼   ► mini and that's what they did all their development on. Once you get a faster Mac, then you realize,

01:21:41 ◼   ► okay, I can't go back to developing on that Mac mini. But you can get it done. That's

01:21:45 ◼   ► the amazing thing about development these days is the bottom of the bottom of the line

01:21:49 ◼   ► Mac can, physically speaking, do development. Whereas it used to be like you needed to have

01:21:53 ◼   ► the super high, you needed a Lisa to develop for the Mac because you needed more RAM. So

01:21:57 ◼   ► it's like, when they say, can you do development on iMac? Of course you can. Of course you

01:22:01 ◼   ► can do development on iMac. In fact, most people probably should do development on iMac

01:22:05 ◼   ► because you don't need a Mac Pro for that.

01:22:07 ◼   ► You definitely don't need a Mac Pro to compile stuff.

01:22:09 ◼   ► The compiler is not using your GPU.

01:22:11 ◼   ► Yet, not yet anyway.

01:22:13 ◼   ► Also consider that in the new versions of Xcode, what is the--

01:22:17 ◼   ► I forget what they call it, but they basically

01:22:20 ◼   ► have this system by which you can compile regularly

01:22:24 ◼   ► on a completely different computer, which I believe was basically--

01:22:26 ◼   ► they never came out and said it, but it was basically designed for Mac Mini.

01:22:29 ◼   ► Do you guys know what I'm thinking of?

01:22:31 ◼   ► Yeah, the continuous integration thing, it's

01:22:33 ◼   ► the Jenkins ripoff. It's not a Jenkins ripoff. But you know, whatever.

01:22:37 ◼   ► Yeah, that's not just—you're talking about distributed builds, which they used to have.

01:22:41 ◼   ► Yes, distributed builds. I'm sorry. I don't know if they still do.

01:22:44 ◼   ► Yeah, but no, there's ways to farm out. That's one of the reasons why a lot of Mac development

01:22:49 ◼   ► shops can get away with giving their developers less powerful computers, because if you have

01:22:53 ◼   ► a bunch of spare hardware and you can set it up as this continuous integration farm

01:22:57 ◼   ► and have it doing your builds and everything. To basically be answer this guy's question,

01:23:03 ◼   ► IMAX can do everything.

01:23:04 ◼   ► They can do everything you would want to do, and in many cases they can do it extremely

01:23:07 ◼   ► well.

01:23:08 ◼   ► The only few things that you would suffer for having an iMac for is if you're a gamer,

01:23:14 ◼   ► you will suffer because the GPU is not...

01:23:16 ◼   ► If you care about super duper fast, best 3D games and full resin, blah, blah, blah, you're

01:23:21 ◼   ► not going to get that out of an iMac.

01:23:22 ◼   ► Well, by a PC at that point.

01:23:24 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:23:25 ◼   ► Well, or a game console or whatever.

01:23:27 ◼   ► And if you're doing something that requires those big, massive GPUs for non-gaming purposes,

01:23:32 ◼   ► Like you're doing Maya or Final Cut with 4K video or any other application that takes

01:23:37 ◼   ► advantage of all that GPU power, that's when you need a Mac Pro.

01:23:41 ◼   ► But the iMac CPUs are faster in single thread than the Mac Pros for the most part, if you

01:23:45 ◼   ► buy the super high-end ones.

01:23:47 ◼   ► Like the iMacs really are amazing machines, and just because I don't want to get one because

01:23:51 ◼   ► I don't want to have a wimpy GPU, that's like the edgiest of edge cases.

01:23:57 ◼   ► The iMac is a great desktop machine for anybody.

01:24:01 ◼   ► And it's getting better all the time now that, you know, once it goes completely SSD, like,

01:24:05 ◼   ► the Fusion Drive seems to be great.

01:24:06 ◼   ► Although I did see some reports on the web about it having trouble with audio recording,

01:24:11 ◼   ► which gave me some pause.

01:24:12 ◼   ► But anyway, in a couple of years, the spinning disks will be gone from the iMac.

01:24:15 ◼   ► It'll probably be even thinner.

01:24:16 ◼   ► It'll just be amazing fantasy future computer type thing.

01:24:21 ◼   ► Everyone—that's the machine that everyone should look at.

01:24:22 ◼   ► When you go into the Apple Store, don't look at the Mac Pros.

01:24:25 ◼   ► They're way too expensive.

01:24:26 ◼   ► Look at the iMacs if you're on a desktop machine.

01:24:30 ◼   ► That said though, there's a few...

01:24:32 ◼   ► So I wrote in some post this week, a couple days ago, I forget which one, that in our

01:24:37 ◼   ► household we've had an iMac, we've had multiple laptops, and we've had a few Mac Pros over

01:24:42 ◼   ► the years.

01:24:44 ◼   ► And I've regretted buying almost all of them, except the Mac Pros.

01:24:50 ◼   ► I've never regretted a Mac Pro purchase.

01:24:52 ◼   ► And one of the reasons is how these things age, and what happens at the end of their

01:24:58 ◼   ► life and how soon that the end of their useful life comes.

01:25:03 ◼   ► The laptops and the iMacs are... and the Mac Mini, but... oh, I did have one of those.

01:25:08 ◼   ► I soldered after a year to Dan Benjamin.

01:25:10 ◼   ► Because I tried to have this closet computer to do accessory tasks, and it turns out that

01:25:15 ◼   ► sucks.

01:25:16 ◼   ► And it's really a pain in the butt, so I didn't want to do it anymore.

01:25:20 ◼   ► But it's very clear when using these computers that these are consumer grade parts.

01:25:27 ◼   ► And that they're, you know, if they're made to be used by one household for a few years

01:25:33 ◼   ► and then they're basically worthless and they're made to be, you know, discarded, donated or

01:25:38 ◼   ► recycled.

01:25:39 ◼   ► And so certain things don't age very well.

01:25:43 ◼   ► I've had with IMAX, our IMAX had a couple of screen issues especially by the time it

01:25:48 ◼   ► was like three years old.

01:25:49 ◼   ► It had some various screen issues that it was out of warranty, like rather it went out

01:25:55 ◼   ► warranty, like part of the screen had like a dead line and stuff like that. There was

01:25:58 ◼   ► like weird stuff. And there was like this big giant pile of hard drives hanging out

01:26:05 ◼   ► the back of it because we couldn't get to the internal one easily enough to upgrade

01:26:09 ◼   ► it and needed more performance out of the disk I/O. And the RAM was maxed out and we

01:26:15 ◼   ► wanted more RAM and we couldn't do it. And whenever it would get under load, the fan

01:26:20 ◼   ► would spin up and you'd hear it. So, and most of that applies to laptops as well.

01:26:25 ◼   ► And so some of those needs are removed or minimized now. Disk I/O is a great

01:26:32 ◼   ► example. Disk I/O used to suck, now it's great because SSDs are everywhere. And so

01:26:38 ◼   ► you know there's less of a difference. SSDs close the gap tremendously between

01:26:43 ◼   ► the kind of performance you can get out of a big desktop and what you can get

01:26:46 ◼   ► everywhere else, especially in laptops,

01:26:49 ◼   ► close the gap tremendously.

01:26:50 ◼   ► So that's great.

01:26:51 ◼   ► But all of those limitations are still there.

01:26:54 ◼   ► If a screen goes bad in an iMac or a MacBook Pro,

01:26:57 ◼   ► you're screwed.

01:26:58 ◼   ► You better hope it's under warranty, if you're screwed.

01:27:03 ◼   ► If you want to change the screen size

01:27:06 ◼   ► or upgrade it two years in, you're screwed.

01:27:08 ◼   ► You can't do it.

01:27:10 ◼   ► If you had to buy a computer today

01:27:13 ◼   ► and you want to retina monitor, well,

01:27:16 ◼   ► Tough luck, you know, you better buy a Retina MacBook Pro, but even then, like,

01:27:20 ◼   ► the current Retina MacBook Pro probably won't be able to drive

01:27:24 ◼   ► the panel that we're talking about over Thunderbolt 2 unless it was made for it

01:27:28 ◼   ► and they never mention it, but there's special stuff in the Mac Pro to enable this and I don't think

01:27:32 ◼   ► the Retina MacBook Pro has that, at least not at 60Hz.

01:27:36 ◼   ► So, if you want to buy a computer today that will

01:27:40 ◼   ► last you very happily for the next 2 to 4 years,

01:27:44 ◼   ► years. The Mac Pro is it. The iMac might, but you're taking a lot of risk there. And

01:27:50 ◼   ► at the end, you can sell a three or four year old Mac Pro for over a thousand bucks, easily.

01:27:58 ◼   ► And the three year old iMac, maybe a few hundred. You're not talking a whole lot there. And

01:28:05 ◼   ► the iMac might have more problems that you can't get to. And again, some of that is minimized

01:28:09 ◼   ► now from the reduction of hard drives and stuff like that, but there's still a lot of

01:28:15 ◼   ► those cases where over time you might come to regret having chosen the iMac if you have

01:28:22 ◼   ► high-end needs.

01:28:23 ◼   ► Yeah, that's why I almost think that the high-end iMacs are kind of a sucker's bet, because

01:28:28 ◼   ► they cost so much money.

01:28:30 ◼   ► Like, you can push an iMac up towards four grand.

01:28:32 ◼   ► Oh, you can go right past four grand.

01:28:35 ◼   ► If you configure the iMac with the same hardware as the cheapest Mac Pro, or as close as you

01:28:41 ◼   ► can get to the same hardware, it's not that different in price.

01:28:45 ◼   ► I think I said it on my site somewhere, I think it's like $500 difference at that point.

01:28:48 ◼   ► Of course you get the free monitor mix then.

01:28:50 ◼   ► But the Mac Pro gives you dual GPUs, and the higher end Thunderbolt, more Thunderbolt ports,

01:28:57 ◼   ► the dual network ports, if you'll ever use that, there's a lot more advantages to the

01:29:01 ◼   ► Pro that partially offset that screen thing.

01:29:05 ◼   ► And if you have those kind of needs and if you find yourself like I was, if you find

01:29:08 ◼   ► yourself in the iMac configurator cranking everything up, then it's probably time to

01:29:11 ◼   ► look at another machine.

01:29:12 ◼   ► I think the sweet spot of the iMac is kind of in the middle range where what you're getting

01:29:17 ◼   ► is you're getting a computer that you're going to run iLife apps on and browse the web.

01:29:21 ◼   ► You're getting a really nice looking big screen and you're getting like a sealed little thing

01:29:24 ◼   ► that just looks like a monitor with like a wireless keyboard and mouse attached.

01:29:27 ◼   ► And that's all it's ever going to be.

01:29:28 ◼   ► You're going to use it like that until the day it dies.

01:29:31 ◼   ► And that's where I think regular people can easily get four or five years out of an iMac,

01:29:35 ◼   ► because they're never going to attach anything else to it.

01:29:37 ◼   ► Maybe they're never going to have anything connected to any of the ports, except for

01:29:40 ◼   ► maybe some USB dongles.

01:29:41 ◼   ► It's just going to be this sleek, sealed silver panel with a nice screen on it.

01:29:47 ◼   ► They look at it and they do their computer stuff.

01:29:48 ◼   ► And it's got more than enough storage in there to last them forever.

01:29:51 ◼   ► You get a fusion drive of three terabytes.

01:29:53 ◼   ► They're never going to fill that.

01:29:54 ◼   ► It's reasonably priced.

01:29:55 ◼   ► It seems nice and snappy for the three apps they use all the time.

01:29:59 ◼   ► They're never going to upgrade it.

01:30:00 ◼   ► never going to care about the GPU, they're never going to attach anything to it, that's

01:30:03 ◼   ► your good deal. Once you start cranking that stuff up and you've got a 4 gram machine,

01:30:06 ◼   ► it's obvious that you want more. You're like, "Oh, but I've got to have more or better."

01:30:10 ◼   ► That's not a more better machine, because you will start to get the itch a couple years

01:30:14 ◼   ► down the line of wanting to do more. "Well, I've already maxed out the RAM, I can't have

01:30:17 ◼   ► any more. Now I can't have that, everyone else has it." The people who just have their

01:30:20 ◼   ► iMac sitting on their desk as their little home computer don't care about those things,

01:30:25 ◼   ► for them it's a great machine. Or if you just, you know, you don't have the kind of money

01:30:29 ◼   ► to upgrade, if you're just going to do development on iMac, I think you could get five years

01:30:32 ◼   ► out of an iMac, a mid-range one, and you'd be perfectly happy with it.

01:30:35 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, again, it depends on what you're doing. And, like, I know myself well enough

01:30:40 ◼   ► to know that if I bought an iMac instead of a Mac Pro, first of all, as soon as there's

01:30:45 ◼   ► a retina monitor, I would feel like an idiot. So, you know, for me, the value option would

01:30:54 ◼   ► be to just wait until there's a retina iMac and buy that.

01:30:59 ◼   ► But I'm not sure we're getting that this year.

01:31:01 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:31:02 ◼   ► I mean, if you look at where the technology is, where the pricing is for these panels

01:31:05 ◼   ► and GPU driving them and stuff like that, I wouldn't necessarily say a retina iMac in

01:31:10 ◼   ► 2014 is a sure thing.

01:31:11 ◼   ► I don't think so either.

01:31:13 ◼   ► I mean, probably 2015's iMac.

01:31:15 ◼   ► I bet we'll have it then.

01:31:17 ◼   ► But 2014, I don't know.

01:31:20 ◼   ► I would give it maybe a 50% chance of happening.

01:31:24 ◼   ► Can I ask a really stupid question? Why is retina so important? And before you answer,

01:31:31 ◼   ► what I mean by that is…

01:31:32 ◼   ► Hi.

01:31:33 ◼   ► I have… what?

01:31:34 ◼   ► Nothing.

01:31:35 ◼   ► Oh. Oh. Took me a second to realize what you were doing. Anyway, sorry. Moving on. So,

01:31:42 ◼   ► the reason I ask is because the obvious trump card answer is you just want more real estate

01:31:47 ◼   ► for developing retina apps. But…

01:31:49 ◼   ► What? That's not it at all. It's because it looks good.

01:31:52 ◼   ► See, and maybe it's just because I have terrible eyes, but at a distance in which I sit from,

01:31:58 ◼   ► say, take my high-res anti-glare pre-retina MacBook Pro.

01:32:03 ◼   ► I can tell the difference between a retina MacBook Pro and a not-retina MacBook Pro,

01:32:08 ◼   ► but it is not night and day different, and I don't find it to be as egregious and as

01:32:12 ◼   ► frustrating as you do.

01:32:13 ◼   ► And it doesn't make you wrong, and it doesn't make me right.

01:32:17 ◼   ► To me, it seems like an odd thing that you're so obsessed over.

01:32:21 ◼   ► I don't know if maybe that's a statement rather than a question.

01:32:25 ◼   ► It's that good.

01:32:27 ◼   ► So I work a lot with text, which looks awesome on Retina, and I work a lot with images.

01:32:33 ◼   ► When you see a photo, like, it's so funny.

01:32:37 ◼   ► So I take my laptop and we go on trips of course, and I'll take a little camera and

01:32:43 ◼   ► I'll import the photos while I'm still on the trip into Lightroom to see how they turn

01:32:48 ◼   ► out and maybe play with them and maybe post one.

01:32:50 ◼   ► And I see these photos on my retina screen on the laptop and I'm like, "Wow, these photos

01:32:55 ◼   ► are amazing!

01:32:56 ◼   ► I can't believe how good this is!

01:32:58 ◼   ► Look at how great this looks!"

01:33:00 ◼   ► And then I get home and I import them to my desktop and they just look so drab and disappointing.

01:33:05 ◼   ► And part of it's because my monitor is drab and disappointing, but part of it's also that

01:33:08 ◼   ► massive resolution difference.

01:33:09 ◼   ► And oh man, it makes such a difference.

01:33:12 ◼   ► Browsing the web.

01:33:13 ◼   ► Like, I was redesigning my site this weekend, just giving it a new font and a few minor

01:33:17 ◼   ► updates and just looking at text that closely for a while, text looks like such crap on

01:33:25 ◼   ► non-retina once you've seen it on retina. It's just one of those things. It really

01:33:30 ◼   ► is a very big difference when you're doing certain things.

01:33:34 ◼   ► And a lot of, you know, just like if you look at the iPads, you know, we talked before about

01:33:38 ◼   ► how a lot of people don't see the difference with the retina iPads versus the old ones

01:33:42 ◼   ► or they don't care, or they can vaguely be like, "Well, I guess the text is sharper," or something,

01:33:47 ◼   ► but they don't really care. For a lot of people, that's going to be true forever, and they won't

01:33:52 ◼   ► care. I'm one of the people that cares, shockingly, and I'm sure Jon is similarly

01:33:59 ◼   ► observant and picky. And so, I care, and if you don't care, that's great. You're going to save

01:34:07 ◼   ► a bunch of money over the next few years by not caring. Or by switching to Geico.

01:34:11 ◼   ► No, it's not that I don't care.

01:34:13 ◼   ► I think maybe it's just that because I've never used a retina computer for any duration

01:34:19 ◼   ► of time, more than like 10 minutes, maybe it's just ignorance and maybe I just don't

01:34:23 ◼   ► realize what I'm missing.

01:34:25 ◼   ► And again, I can absolutely recognize that it is better.

01:34:31 ◼   ► It's not that I don't recognize it.

01:34:33 ◼   ► It's just, I don't know, to me it didn't make a big difference.

01:34:38 ◼   ► I think that's because I'm not sitting with this display between 4 and 12 inches

01:34:44 ◼   ► from my face like I do with my iPad or my iPhone.

01:34:48 ◼   ► But whenever I get another computer, it will surely be some sort of Retina MacBook Pro,

01:34:54 ◼   ► and ask me again after a month with that, and maybe I'll tell you that me asking that

01:34:59 ◼   ► question was the dumbest thing I've ever done.

01:35:00 ◼   ► But sitting here now not knowing any better, I just don't see why it's that big a deal.

01:35:05 ◼   ► Here's how I think about it.

01:35:07 ◼   ► If you're into technology, like I am,

01:35:10 ◼   ► and I think like how we all are,

01:35:11 ◼   ► technology kind of advances and fits and starts,

01:35:15 ◼   ► and there's these little discontinuities,

01:35:17 ◼   ► and if you're a technology nerd,

01:35:18 ◼   ► you never wanna be caught

01:35:19 ◼   ► on the other side of the discontinuity.

01:35:20 ◼   ► You wanna be using like,

01:35:22 ◼   ► whatever the new thing is on the other side

01:35:24 ◼   ► of the next little leap,

01:35:26 ◼   ► you wanna be there living in the future, right?

01:35:28 ◼   ► So monitor resolution size is one example

01:35:31 ◼   ► where monitors got color,

01:35:35 ◼   ► and that was a big discontinuity,

01:35:36 ◼   ► like, oh, you have a monochrome display,

01:35:37 ◼   ► wanted a color. If you knew color displays existed, you clearly knew that A) every display

01:35:42 ◼   ► was going to be colored pretty soon, right? And so that's like, it's going to happen.

01:35:45 ◼   ► Color monitors are coming. It's not like this forever there will be black, you know. And

01:35:49 ◼   ► B) that you wanted to have one of those and you wanted to be living in the future now.

01:35:53 ◼   ► If someone out there has got a color monitor for a year enjoying color monitor type games

01:35:57 ◼   ► and you're still in black and white, you feel bad. You want to see that new thing. And then

01:36:01 ◼   ► the monitors got bigger and the pixels got smaller and that's kind of incrementally getting

01:36:04 ◼   ► bigger and bigger and smaller and flatter and bigger.

01:36:06 ◼   ► Flatness is another thing.

01:36:07 ◼   ► Flat panels are out.

01:36:09 ◼   ► Do you want to have that gigantic 21-inch CRT on your desk

01:36:11 ◼   ► taking up all that room?

01:36:13 ◼   ► If flat ones exist, that was another discontinuity.

01:36:15 ◼   ► You want it to be on the other side of that.

01:36:17 ◼   ► And you wanted to get there as soon as possible.

01:36:18 ◼   ► When can I change my life from a person

01:36:20 ◼   ► who has gigantic CRTs to a person who has no gigantic CRTs?

01:36:23 ◼   ► You know that everyone's gonna be like that.

01:36:25 ◼   ► You know CRTs are going away.

01:36:26 ◼   ► You want to be on the other side of it.

01:36:27 ◼   ► Well, retina's the next one of those things.

01:36:29 ◼   ► So the flat panel monitors get bigger and better

01:36:31 ◼   ► and bigger and better.

01:36:33 ◼   ► And then all of a sudden there's this discontinuity.

01:36:35 ◼   ► 4x the number of pixels.

01:36:37 ◼   ► That's not just like a little bit bigger,

01:36:38 ◼   ► that's just a total change, like a qualitative change.

01:36:41 ◼   ► And you know everything's gonna be written.

01:36:43 ◼   ► You just know it, like it's going to happen, right?

01:36:45 ◼   ► And you're like, well, let me,

01:36:47 ◼   ► I wanna be living in the future with everybody else.

01:36:48 ◼   ► I don't wanna wait, I don't wanna be the last person

01:36:50 ◼   ► to get a color TV.

01:36:52 ◼   ► I don't wanna be the last person to get a flat panel TV.

01:36:54 ◼   ► I wanna be among the first.

01:36:55 ◼   ► I want to live in the future with this amazing new thing.

01:36:58 ◼   ► And you have to balance that with layout.

01:37:00 ◼   ► Maybe the first flat panels TVs are bad,

01:37:01 ◼   ► or the first high definition televisions

01:37:03 ◼   ► still CRTs or whatever your problem is there, but that's the thing that's driving me.

01:37:10 ◼   ► That's another reason I get a Mac Pro.

01:37:12 ◼   ► I want to see what is it like to be on the cutting edge of technology, to have the fastest,

01:37:16 ◼   ► best, most amazing thing, but tempering that with when is the right time to buy.

01:37:21 ◼   ► Do I want the compromise machine?

01:37:22 ◼   ► Do I want to wait until they have it all sorted out?

01:37:26 ◼   ► That's the balance I'm going for.

01:37:28 ◼   ► My eyesight is good enough to see the difference in Retina.

01:37:31 ◼   ► I would never go back to a non-retina iOS device because that would be crazy and I think

01:37:34 ◼   ► Casey would agree with that now.

01:37:35 ◼   ► You can't hold a non-retina phone up to your face anymore and be like, "Ugh, no, you can't

01:37:39 ◼   ► forget it."

01:37:40 ◼   ► And even an iPad, I would not use a mini when it was in retina.

01:37:43 ◼   ► I don't like the mini anyway.

01:37:45 ◼   ► With the monitors, am I suffering?

01:37:46 ◼   ► Do I not have any retina one?

01:37:48 ◼   ► No, but if I know that other people are out there, it pains me even to people with laptops

01:37:52 ◼   ► to get to look at a retina screen all day and I don't.

01:37:54 ◼   ► That's the way everything is going and I want to be there with them.

01:37:57 ◼   ► And so I think that's the big driving factor.

01:37:59 ◼   ► It has to do with not whether you can tell the difference between retina, not whether

01:38:03 ◼   ► you find it more comfortable, or you can appreciate retina, or whatever.

01:38:06 ◼   ► I think it mostly has to do with being interested in technology and wanting to live in the future

01:38:11 ◼   ► with your jetpack.

01:38:14 ◼   ► If other people are doing it and you're not, you feel like you're missing out, because

01:38:17 ◼   ► having futuristic things is cool and exciting to people who like technology.

01:38:22 ◼   ► That genuinely does make sense.

01:38:24 ◼   ► I guess I'm struggling to find a way to properly explain, but to me, it makes sense to want

01:38:33 ◼   ► retina, Marco's dying urgency to get it now, now, now, that I don't share that.

01:38:42 ◼   ► But again, it doesn't mean I'm right, doesn't mean he's wrong.

01:38:44 ◼   ► I just don't see what the urgent need is to have it yesterday.

01:38:48 ◼   ► Other than that, it's new and shiny.

01:38:49 ◼   ► Well, there's a hierarchy of things that you need in your life.

01:38:52 ◼   ► And Marco's at the point in the hierarchy where retina is actually really near the top

01:38:56 ◼   ► of the stack.

01:38:57 ◼   ► Well, I also, you know, because I have the Retina MacBook Pro for travel, every time

01:39:03 ◼   ► I travel and then come back, I'm like, "Oh, I get back to my old monitor and it's terrible."

01:39:08 ◼   ► Yeah, you're lowering half.

01:39:10 ◼   ► It's like if, you know, if you had a bunch of flat panel displays, but also one giant

01:39:14 ◼   ► CRT monitor.

01:39:15 ◼   ► And every time you come back to the CRT, you just want to be like, "Oh, this thing again."

01:39:19 ◼   ► I mean, granted, this is not a severe problem in life, relatively speaking, but John's

01:39:25 ◼   ► right. We've come past all of these major changes in computing, and I think SSDs and

01:39:34 ◼   ► high DPI are kind of happening at the same time with SSDs being a couple years ahead.

01:39:38 ◼   ► And I've crossed the SSD point. I've chopped down my storage needs on my desktop so that

01:39:45 ◼   ► I can have all SSD storage, I don't need to use Fusion Drive, which is good because I

01:39:49 ◼   ► tried Fusion Drive and it was inconsistent, which is a problem. And that's probably why

01:39:54 ◼   ► it's a problem for audio recording, is that it's inconsistent.

01:39:59 ◼   ► And so, you know, high DPI is just, you're right, it's the next big thing. And after

01:40:05 ◼   ► that, I'm not seeing any obvious next big thing that's going to change computer hardware

01:40:11 ◼   ► for a while. I'm not saying there's never going to be one, that would be short-sighted,

01:40:15 ◼   ► But there isn't an obvious one coming up shortly.

01:40:18 ◼   ► Memory unification.

01:40:20 ◼   ► You think?

01:40:21 ◼   ► Well, yeah, sure.

01:40:22 ◼   ► That's the next obvious move.

01:40:24 ◼   ► I mean, it's not going to be anytime soon, but if you look at the way a modern computer

01:40:28 ◼   ► is made and you squint your eyes a little bit, you're like, "This is ridiculous.

01:40:31 ◼   ► Let's squish those diagrams together.

01:40:32 ◼   ► Hey, there you go!" and everything's better.

01:40:35 ◼   ► I mean, the way we're doing it now...

01:40:37 ◼   ► So to be clear, you're talking about similar to how the Xbox One was designed, the first

01:40:43 ◼   ► Xbox One. No, nothing about it will be similar to the first Xbox. The CPU and

01:40:49 ◼   ► GPU both shared one giant fast bank of VRAM and so there was no separate video

01:40:55 ◼   ► RAM and main RAM, it was just one big bank of fast RAM that everything had

01:40:58 ◼   ► high-speed access to. Is that what you're talking about? Game consoles have been

01:41:01 ◼   ► like that, right? And PlayStation is the same way, it's all one shared, but I'm

01:41:03 ◼   ► talking more about like memory unification across, you know, "disk"

01:41:07 ◼   ► quote-unquote "disk" and RAM storage, you know, so maybe you're right, maybe

01:41:11 ◼   ► Maybe it'll come first as the stuff of the PlayStation and all the other game consoles

01:41:14 ◼   ► do, like having a single pool of memory between the CPU and GPU.

01:41:19 ◼   ► Because that's kind of silly.

01:41:20 ◼   ► You're going to put 32 gigs of RAM in your Mac Pro, and then 12 gigs are hanging off

01:41:23 ◼   ► the GPU, and there are important technical reasons for it now, but it would be nice if

01:41:28 ◼   ► you had virtualized video memory.

01:41:31 ◼   ► And once video memory is virtualized, well then why do you have two separate pools of

01:41:34 ◼   ► virtualized memory?

01:41:35 ◼   ► Wouldn't it be nice if you could combine them?

01:41:36 ◼   ► And then God knows what the process size will be, and we could have, you know, we already

01:41:39 ◼   ► have integrated GPUs and they keep getting bigger, so eventually you end up with a situation

01:41:43 ◼   ► where you have your compute and your big pool of RAM, and then the next one is you have

01:41:46 ◼   ► your compute, your big pool of RAM, and your storage all unified into a single memory space.

01:41:52 ◼   ► And that you can make, especially if process sizes continue to shrink, you can make some

01:41:57 ◼   ► very interesting computing devices where everything is addressable as a 64-bit address somewhere

01:42:04 ◼   ► in some big virtualized pool of RAM, and that's your disk, and that's your VRAM, and that's

01:42:10 ◼   ► your main memory, and that's your everything.

01:42:12 ◼   ► Hm.

01:42:13 ◼   ► That's...

01:42:14 ◼   ► I would never have assumed that that would be a thing that would happen, just because

01:42:17 ◼   ► of the economies.

01:42:18 ◼   ► It's like...

01:42:19 ◼   ► That's like saying that eventually everything is going to be L2 cache, you know, or everything's

01:42:23 ◼   ► going to be a register, or taken to the extreme.

01:42:25 ◼   ► It's like, no, that's never really going to happen because of various economies.

01:42:28 ◼   ► Nope, it'll happen.

01:42:31 ◼   ► We will live to see what I just described, I think, of it.

01:42:34 ◼   ► like the path that we already see in video game consoles. So that's not fantasy. It's like,

01:42:38 ◼   ► go buy a PlayStation 4. You have this GDDR5 "VRAM" is the entire RAM for the system. Like,

01:42:44 ◼   ► it's one big thing, right? The hardest one is bridging the disk RAM barrier with the storage

01:42:50 ◼   ► thing. But if we all live long enough, that will inevitably happen too, because certainly we all

01:42:54 ◼   ► agree that spinning disks are gone goodbye, right? And so now we just have a series of chips with

01:42:59 ◼   ► addressable memory using different technologies. That's fine. You're always going to have a

01:43:03 ◼   ► have a hierarchy. There's always going to be registers L1, L2, L3, Flash, you know,

01:43:08 ◼   ► DRAM. Like, whatever the technologies are in the hierarchy, that will all be there.

01:43:12 ◼   ► But like, that's – I'm talking, you know, distant future stuff. Like, as we're

01:43:16 ◼   ► on our deathbeds, the unified single-chip everything addressable as RAM machine will

01:43:22 ◼   ► probably be out.

01:43:24 ◼   ► And we'll be complaining that it doesn't support some new retina display.

01:43:26 ◼   ► No, we'll be complaining because you can't make a text size big enough for us to see.

01:43:31 ◼   ► And with that, thanks a lot to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Omnigroup, and Hover,

01:43:36 ◼   ► and we will see you next week.

01:43:38 ◼   ► [Music]

01:43:39 ◼   ► Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, 'cause it was accidental.

01:43:47 ◼   ► Accidental.

01:43:48 ◼   ► Oh, it was accidental.

01:43:50 ◼   ► Accidental.

01:43:51 ◼   ► John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, 'cause it was accidental.

01:43:57 ◼   ► Accidental.

01:43:58 ◼   ► It was accidental.

01:44:00 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM And if you're into Twitter, you can follow

01:44:07 ◼   ► them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's K-C-L-I-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:44:18 ◼   ► Anti-Marco-R-Men S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-S-A

01:44:28 ◼   ► It's accidental.

01:44:30 ◼   ► Accidental.

01:44:31 ◼   ► They didn't mean to.

01:44:34 ◼   ► Accidental.

01:44:35 ◼   ► Accidental.

01:44:36 ◼   ► Tech podcast so long.

01:44:41 ◼   ► Why do they have to make everything so small?

01:44:43 ◼   ► I can't see a thing on these things.

01:44:45 ◼   ► That's all we care about is the accessibility features

01:44:48 ◼   ► when we're old.

01:44:48 ◼   ► God.

01:44:49 ◼   ► Hey, you kid about the accessibility zoom,

01:44:52 ◼   ► but when I don't have my contact lenses in,

01:44:54 ◼   ► that's the only way I can see a computer

01:44:56 ◼   ► from any reasonable distance.

01:44:57 ◼   ► and I'm not trying to be funny at all.

01:44:59 ◼   ► - Just gotta wait until you get a little bit older

01:45:00 ◼   ► because as you get older, your vision starts to get worse

01:45:03 ◼   ► in the other direction and suddenly you can start

01:45:06 ◼   ► to see close up a little bit better.

01:45:08 ◼   ► - Well, the way I'm headed, I'm looking at corneal

01:45:11 ◼   ► transplants in my future, so any time I can buy

01:45:15 ◼   ► until I can just get some dead guy's eyeballs

01:45:17 ◼   ► is a positive improvement.

01:45:19 ◼   ► - Get the ones with lasers.

01:45:21 ◼   ► - I'll get right on that.

01:45:23 ◼   ► - Gotta think about the options that the person selected.

01:45:25 ◼   ► It's like going to the BMW dealer.

01:45:28 ◼   ► "Hmm, cold weather package, pick up display.

01:45:31 ◼   ► I'm getting that, definitely."

01:45:32 ◼   ► I like this part of the premium package though, so you're going to have to get a spoiler on

01:45:35 ◼   ► your butt.

01:45:36 ◼   ► Oh my goodness.

01:45:41 ◼   ► You guys are going to make great old men.

01:45:43 ◼   ► I really hope I still know you and talk to you regularly when we're all ancient, because

01:45:48 ◼   ► it's going to be hilarious.

01:45:49 ◼   ► And by that time, nobody else will care to listen, but it'll be funny.

01:45:53 ◼   ► Oh, I genuinely, I'm not trying to be funny, not trying to be snarky, I genuinely cannot

01:45:58 ◼   ► wait until I'm old.

01:45:59 ◼   ► Because then I can, then I have an excuse-

01:46:02 ◼   ► That's such an old man thing to say, then.

01:46:03 ◼   ► That's great.

01:46:04 ◼   ► Well, I have an excuse for going to bed early, I have an excuse for eating early, I can be

01:46:08 ◼   ► the curmudgeon bastard that I really want to be and get away with it instead of just

01:46:12 ◼   ► getting yelled at for ruining the fun about the Mac Pro.

01:46:14 ◼   ► Oh, it's going to be fantastic.

01:46:16 ◼   ► I can't wait.

01:46:17 ◼   ► So what you're saying is you look forward to getting old so it justifies all of your

01:46:22 ◼   ► existing behavior.

01:46:23 ◼   ► Basically, yes. Also, I plan on buying a 1960s-era Buick and just driving into people that don't use

01:46:30 ◼   ► their signals. Because 1960s-era Buicks are invincible. I mean, what could possibly harm

01:46:37 ◼   ► a 1960s Buick? They weigh 85 tons. But they crumble up like a house of cards. They're death

01:46:43 ◼   ► traps. There's going to be some like 1,500-pound smart car that's going to crush your BMW.

01:46:49 ◼   ► Don't ruin my moment, John.

01:46:51 ◼   ► Yeah.