706: No One Is Getting a Good Deal Tonight
27 Aug 2026M5 Ultra and M6, new Mac Mini and Mac Studio, John’s new app, and yes, even a new Polishing Cloth.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco’s casement windows
- Screen clips
- Screen clips, installed (white prototypes for visibility)
- TPU for AMS
- 🗣️ New Member’s Special: ATP Movie Club: Nausicaä and the Valley of the Wind
- Follow-up:
- macOS 27 UI tweaks
- LLM determinism when
temperature = 0 - 𝓍OS 27 Photos Shared Album gotchas
- Other people’s phones
- Not sped up! All 1×!
ivs.I
- Apple iPhone event announced
- New Mac mini and Mac Studio
- Core size comparison
- SME replaces AMX in the M6
- Marketing page section (via Daniel Luz)
- High Yield diagram
- M3 Ultra vs. M5 Ultra vs. M5 Max
- Mac mini
- Mac Studio
- John’s purchasing journey
- New […ish] keyboards!
- MacRumors coverage
- Apple Part Number:
MJM4LL/A - Previously:
MXK83LL/A - John’s keyboard (previously)
MMMR3LL/AA2520
- New polishing cloth!
- Post-show: John’s new vibe-coded app
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Is macOS slower than Linux when performing file system operations?
- Theo Browne: Your Mac Isn’t Actually Slow, It’s MacOS Fault
- Benchmark 1
- Benchmark 2
- Linus Torvalds on using C (timestamp link to 22m7s)
Sponsored by:
- Tailscale: A secure network that just works
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- Four seconds
- Victory 🖼️
- Special: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind 🖼️
- macOS 27 UI tweaks
- LLM determinism
- Shared-photos storage
- Kids are fast
- Sponsor: Tailscale
- iPhone event announced
- M6
- M5 Ultra
- Mac Mini
- Mac Studio
- “New” keyboards
- New Polishing Cloth!
- Ending theme
- John’s new vibe-coded app
- The icon 🖼️
Four seconds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I don't want to spoil the main chunk of this episode, but John, you're welcome.
⏹️ ▶️ John Four seconds is up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I said I had a four second pre-show before we started recording.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I knew better than to say that to John Syracuse, but here we are. You're welcome, not only for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey taking longer than four seconds, but also yesterday I wore my Mac Pro Believe shirt,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I have had since it was new, but have only worn a handful of times.
⏹️ ▶️ John You didn't wear it enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apparently not enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It's your fault.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But see, here's the thing. Here it is. I think I'm giving you the gift of new computers. And in reality, I'm getting flack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I didn't give you the gift of a new Mac Pro. I see how it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, t-shirts can last a long time if they're lightly worn. So, you know, it could rise again in a decade or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, what do you have?
Victory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have um a much more victorious situation, and and nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will care about this unless on the off chance you out there, somebody out there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might care about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, wasn't that the John Syracuse biography? Nobody cares about this but me, but I care about it a lot or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey close but anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, what can top installing a ceiling fan, though? So let's see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Same room, same category of general home improvements and and life improvements.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay. I have in my office here, I have casement windows. Generally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I cannot say I enjoy casement windows.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Now, remind me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I've heard this term, but what does that mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's the kind that rather than being able to open and close up and down, they have a little crank and they swing out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you. And there's, I know people like these. I don't like these. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of the many reasons that casement windows are, you know, a weird trade-off is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, how do you attach a screen to a casement window? And they all have these weird little like clips
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and levers and crap. And I've never found one that was attached in a good way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The ones here have these little metal clips that hold them on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have to, as part of the warranty for the windows, we have to get them cleaned every so often. And we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to get them serviced every so often. And these screens are taken off multiple times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco per year for one of those two tasks. The problem is these little tiny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stupid metal clips. First of all, good luck ever putting one, ever putting a screen back yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even the window service people don't really do a very good job of it. Secondly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these little clips get lost all the time because they fall out whenever you try to pop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the screen you know, back in. Like if you like jostle the clip a little bit, it'll fall off the window and fall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to its doom somewhere and get buried in sand. And so you never find them. And every single time I had the window service, I'm like, please,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can you bring like 50 of these? I'll buy them. Just please. There's never enough clips
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to hold the screens on. And as a result, the screens in my office are usually like crooked or there's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a small gap somewhere in like between like the screen ridge and the window
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such that mosquitoes can come in. So I'm just like, okay, this, please, for the love of God, I just need these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be good and to be effective and to be able to hold my screens against my windows. I decided
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to stop waiting. Stop waiting for the window guys to bring more that they never do or they'll bring one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even though I'll say like, please bring 50. I'll pay for them. Like they're just little metal clips. These
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are the most scarce items in my house. I can now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 3D print them. I took it upon myself a few days ago to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco replicate the shape of one of these clips using some semi-rigid TPU,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bamboo TPU for AMS. So it is very easy to print. It is a little bit rigid, but it's a little bit flexible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and very strong. And so that means I can now have as many of these as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want. I printed 30 of them earlier tonight. And my screens being held up perfectly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I have tons of them. And they're a little bit flexible so that when I'm attaching the screens, I don't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cut my fingers. And they're actually it's actually like a reasonably pleasant experience. And instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of having three of them on one window, I have to conserve them. I have eight of them on this one. It's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing. Again, people wonder, like, how do I, what do I use my 3D printer for? It's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little crap like this. Like we have a we have a gate, and sometimes the wind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will blow the sliding piece so that it kind of blows it half open. And then deer can get can get in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and eat all of our plants. And so I made a little clip.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, a 3D, little custom 3D printed thing. And I just made a little clip that holds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the two pieces of the gate together. So the wind does not blow them open. That's the kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of thing. I love having little solutions to little problems like this. It is so incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco satisfying. So that's my victory lap. I know John has a bit of a different victory lap, maybe coming up later, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, if you can call it victory. It might be a complex emotion, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least this, for almost no money, I solved a very big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's incredible. That's super cool. I'm a little surprised that plastic does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the trick. Like for some reason, I feel like this should be metal, but I'm not trying to argue with you. If it works, it works.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that's really great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it's, and there's obviously like different, forgive me, I'm going to get briefly very nerdy about 3D
⏹️ ▶️ Marco printing, but I swear it's going to be brief.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is it going to be four seconds?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, long enough. There's a lot of different properties that you can optimize for with both the material selection and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design of a print. So like even just things like what direction on the plate that you print, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these prints standing up because the layer adhesion between layers is usually the weakest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bond in a 3D printed part. And also by using a TPU material,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also have very strong layer adhesion. And by it being flexible, it makes it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually pretty difficult to destroy or crack or otherwise break it. I will say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for those of you out there who are 3D printing people, don't sleep on the bamboo TPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for AMS filament. If you go into it expecting it to be very, very flexible like TPU, you're
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be disappointed, but it's incredibly easy to work with. It is, as the name suggests, compatible with the AMS, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's very easy. And it is surprisingly useful. It is one of my most used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco filaments because if something can be a little bit flexible, you can make it almost indestructible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you make it out of this stuff. And to answer your question, Casey, like whether it can be metal or not, the advantage of the metal clips is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they can be very, very thin.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there's part of the clip that like, like kind of the part that goes like vertically up and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down, like in the middle of it, that has to be very, very thin because the thicker that is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'd be creating a gap between the screen and the window frame.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with metal, that can be very, very thin. This is as thin as I can make it with a printer, like the one I have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that is the trade-off. But so far, mosquitoes cannot get through that gap. So I'm very happy still.
Special: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know what else is exciting? Is a new ATP member special, which we have. We have your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey August member special. This is ATP Movie Club Nausica of the Valley
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the Wind. This is a Miyazaki film. John, why don't you tell us a little more about this, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is, I think, the third one we've done in our series on Miyazaki, introducing
⏹️ ▶️ John both of you to it and seeing what your reactions are. Tune in to find out how it went
⏹️ ▶️ John and what the future holds for Studio Ghibli slash Miyazaki Club on ATP Movie Club.
⏹️ ▶️ John The last one we did was a while ago, so we don't do them very often. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, we might come back to this well in the future. And if you like these kind of movies and you want to hear
⏹️ ▶️ John two newbies watch it for the first time along with an old grizzled veteran, that's
⏹️ ▶️ John me, tune in and definitely watch the movie. Like all these things, obviously we talk about the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John movie and everything that happens in it. So the idea is that you should watch the movie before listening to the episode. And you
⏹️ ▶️ John may think, I'm never going to watch this movie, but hopefully we do some kind of job of making you
⏹️ ▶️ John at least interested in the movie. So watch it ahead of time. It's a good one, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. You should check it out. Marco, if one is not a member, but this sounds deeply appealing, what should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one do in order to become a member and get access to this and all of our other member specials?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just go to ATP dot FM slash join today, right now. It's ATP dot FM slash join ATP dot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco FM slash join. Sunday,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So many of our sponsors want us to repeat the call to action three times.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco normally one of them is spelled out in this case, well, I guess slash J-O-I-N, I could say, but it's already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spelled out otherwise.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yeah, if you want to hear the back catalog, like obviously we have tons of member specials and we've done a bunch of movies
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can listen to the other movies as well if you want to get caught up on our Miyazaki
⏹️ ▶️ John Studio Ghibli run through.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We don't have a count of all the member specials on slash specials, do we? We have the list of all of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, we don't. I think it's like 35, 40 now. I don't know, something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now I'll have to file a ticket with the website administrator, the webmaster, if you will.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe we can burn a bunch of AI tokens somewhere trying to count up rows on a page.
macOS 27 UI tweaks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's do some follow-up. And we have some more macOS 27 UI tweaks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And starting with Mario Guzman, who writes, Golden Gate got redesigned window control buttons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Beta 6. They sort of grow and shrink when you click. And Mario included a video.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, tell me more about this, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John So first of all, Golden Gate's coming out soon, as we'll soon find out in this episode.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, you know, fall is approaching. This is really late to be changing the window widgets, don't
⏹️ ▶️ John the type of thing that, like, when they first introduced the OS, like, these are the window widgets, and maybe they tweak
⏹️ ▶️ John them slightly, but usually not at all. Really late for UI change. Not that I'm complaining, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's cool and fun or whatever. But anyway, the window widgets look more glassy
⏹️ ▶️ John than they did. They used to be kind of just their regular, you know, red, yellow, and green colors.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now they look like little red, yellow, and green gems. There was also a video posted
⏹️ ▶️ John of someone like, presumably, I can't, I don't think you can see the cursor in it, but clicking
⏹️ ▶️ John on them and then dragging and they stretch out a little bit, like they're flexible, like they become ovals instead of circles,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then they spring back. I haven't been able to do that. We'll link to the video in the
⏹️ ▶️ John notes and you can see what it's supposed to look like. But I even tried it on touch. even went to macOS 27, beta 6.
⏹️ ▶️ John I connected my iPad through Sidecar because that's all like the AppKit touch controls and everything are exposed
⏹️ ▶️ John if you use a, that's that's how they presented a WWC. Hey, support Sidecar. Not Touch Max.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I tried it with my finger. It didn't do it. So I'm not sure what the deal is with that video, but you can
⏹️ ▶️ John watch it and see. Maybe in a future beta, they'll start getting all squishy and it'll be the
⏹️ ▶️ John equivalent of, what is it, Casey? The fried egg headlights on the,
⏹️ ▶️ John which the model is that the 996 that had the fried egg headlights? Oh, God. The
⏹️ ▶️ John egg headlights. All the car people are yelling at us. I'm sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm so triggered by this because the group chat that I brought up many times on the show, and I think I talked about this when I was in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my car search. All they do is send 911s back and forth to each other. And one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two people in the group, or one of the two other people in the group chat, hates the fried egg headlights.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand what you're saying. I don't know what generation it was, and I don't care. I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I think I got it right.
⏹️ ▶️ John you go. Anyway, that if you want window widgets that used to be circular, but become not circular
⏹️ ▶️ John when you poke at them with something, maybe that'll come in a future beta. But yeah, real real late for
⏹️ ▶️ John changes in macOS look and feel, but they're tweaking it down to the last minute.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And honestly, I think this is, I mean, so far, it seems like they're not really breaking it by
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they're just cosmetic changes, really.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And I think like this to me is, this bodes very well, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the future of Apple's design, their software design, because, you know, I think obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Steve LeMay's ascent to power here and whether it's related to John Ternus'
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own ascent to power, maybe who knows. This is all like relatively recent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so some of these changes, I think, are kind of coming in hot, but they're good. Like so far, all the changes they've
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made in Golden Gate to Liquid Glass and to the system design, they've all been for the better. I can't think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a single change they've made that's been that's been worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John the little Siri blob that's next to everything
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that's text all the time. Although I
⏹️ ▶️ John just saw someone post how to get rid of that, so maybe that'll be in next week's episode if I try it and it works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, those little like Siri like flaps that are next to all the text areas, that has to go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like those are awful. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no option to turn them off.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, there is. That's what I was saying. I think there's an option to turn them off. System-wide? Like, Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. Someone just posted about it. I haven't had a chance to test it yet because it was literally like minutes before we sat
⏹️ ▶️ John down. But apparently it's screen time, content, privacy settings and turn off Siri writing assistance And that
⏹️ ▶️ John removes them, supposedly. I haven't tried it yet. I'll confirm for next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Anyway, so uh i i think it's I think it bodes well because these changes are all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, not only are they good, but I think they show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more of a return to what we love about Apple and the design of what used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be called OS X. Like it is getting a little bit more aqua-y, but like a modern version of Aqua.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, last year when 26 series OSes came out and Liquid Glass was debuted and it was very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controversial because it was some ways good and some ways bad. There was a lot of it that we liked.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And a lot of it was like, oh, wow, this is nice to have a modern look. We just didn't like a lot of the implementation details
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it. And granted, some of the foundations of it, I think, needed to be rethought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or thrown away, but there was good stuff there. And I think what we're seeing in the 27
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generation now is the design team not getting rid of all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems of 26's design, but of actually giving us like, here's the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco best of Liquid Glass. Here's like the promise of it being better realized.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It still is modern. It still is glassy. It still has some of the good things that Liquid Glass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brought, but they're sending off a lot of the rough edges. They're getting rid of a lot of the worst of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and evolving it in a direction that not only is more Mac-like in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, but is also just better overall and has a lot fewer of those major downsides.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along with more UI stuff, macOS 27 also has the new preview icon in beta
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and this preview icon, I'm not a big fan of it, but it is better than the one that came before it. So yeah, moving in
⏹️ ▶️ John the right direction.
LLM determinism
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Then uh, last episode, I think it was, we were talking about how uh, LLMs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are not deterministic. and, And you had made a kind of offhanded comment, if I recall correctly, that even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at temperature zero, they're not entirely deterministic.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I gave a temperature zero example of them being deterministic and how
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that's not pleasing.
⏹️ ▶️ John We were talking we were talking about the, the, uh, AI watermarking thing, like Anthropics AI watermarking thing. That was the
⏹️ ▶️ John topic. And uh, yeah, we have discussed the the role of temperature and LLMs in past episodes,
⏹️ ▶️ John including temperature zero, but we have some more feedback on that now, which is just basically reiterating something we discussed
⏹️ ▶️ John before, but we didn't mention it last week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So when it comes to setting the temperature to zero, you know, things are still non-deterministic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You need to consider that floating point is all over these things, and floating point is weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there's also a really good blog post that John pointed us to, John Saracusa pointed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us to, by Horace He Hey, who at thinkingmachines.ai, who writes, One common hypothesis
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that some combination of floating point non-associativity and concurrent execution leads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to non-determinism based on which concurrent core finishes first. While this hypothesis is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly wrong, it doesn't reveal the full picture. And there's a very long blog post that follows that. That's very good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, you can check out the IEEE standard for floating point arithmetic, which is IEEE 754,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which we'll link in the show notes. That talks about why floating point is weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we got this feedback after maybe the first time we talked about LLMs, and someone said, hey, even at temperature zero,
⏹️ ▶️ John they're not deterministic because of weird floating point errors in the hardware. And you're like, oh, yeah, that totally makes sense because, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John a floating point arithmetic being non-associative when the mathematical operation is theoretically associative is
⏹️ ▶️ John a problem. Floating point in general is really weird. The more you know about how floating point works on computers,
⏹️ ▶️ John the more you think, how does anything ever work? It's just, you know, there are finite resources. We have to come up
⏹️ ▶️ John with a way to represent floating point numbers that can span a huge range. And there's just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's kind of like hashing, like that you can't get blood from a stone. Like you want to hash
⏹️ ▶️ John all the world's data into this number of buckets. Well, you're going to have hash collisions, right? And with floating
⏹️ ▶️ John point, it's like you want to represent how many numbers in what range and how many bits do you have to do it? Well, guess what?
⏹️ ▶️ John There's going to be holes. And not only are there going to be holes, there's going to be weird, because there are holes, there's going to be weird rounding, and
⏹️ ▶️ John there's going to be mathematical operations that aren't associative. I mean, you occasionally see this when someone naively programs a
⏹️ ▶️ John calculator and they use floating point, and you can do certain additions and subtractions of simple decimal numbers that
⏹️ ▶️ John an elementary school student could do, but your calculator will get it wrong because of the magic of floating point. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John all LLMs are doing is just tons of math all the time. And it makes sense that these floating point
⏹️ ▶️ John weirdnesses would accumulate. So yeah, temperature zero theoretically means completely deterministic
⏹️ ▶️ John according to the algorithm that LLMs are running, but practically speaking, because of the realities of the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John and floating point representations and possibly also due to concurrency, it's not actually the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's almost deterministic, but not quite.
Shared-photos storage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so with regard to the new photos shared album, where you can get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like full resolution photos in that in, in all the iOS 27, Tim Hardwick at Mac Rumors writes: For
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years now, Apple has allowed you to store up to 5,000 photos and videos and shared albums without impacting your iCloud storage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey limit. That's no longer the case in iOS 27. Perhaps more significantly, if you invite someone to a shared album and they add their own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey photos and videos to it, as the owner, this too will count against your iCloud storage limit. On the plus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey side, the iOS 27 and introduce a free alternative. You can create temporary shared albums that allow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey users to collaborate on short-term projects without eating into your iCloud storage. But after 30 days, any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey photos and videos not saved in your library are deleted. Apple has made it easier to invite people to shared albums.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The company says friends and family can now join and collaborate on the web, even without an Apple account or Apple device. Existing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shared albums are unaffected by the changes, but the Photos app does include an upgrade shared album option for those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who want to improve the quality of its contents at the cost of iCloud storage. Friend of the show, Greg Pierce, also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes: It's worth noting that if you create a shared album on iOS 27 or any of the iOS 27,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it's not shareable with devices on older OS versions.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I think all these trade-offs are reasonable acceptable, although it has always annoyed me that the way
⏹️ ▶️ John they count storage is I think, well, it doesn't say it here, but I'm assuming they're continuing the practice of counting
⏹️ ▶️ John it towards everybody's storage. You know what I mean? Like, oh, it counts
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco towards your
⏹️ ▶️ John storage, but I think it also counts towards their storage. And even though we know Apple's only storing one copy of this, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John um, yeah, I had totally forgotten that those 5,000 photo limits don't count against your iCloud limit.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they were lower resolution and they didn't count against your limit. So Apple didn't have to, you know, give
⏹️ ▶️ John you too much free storage. But now that you get full res, it's back on you. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John guess it's encouraging more people to buy more iCloud storage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, one of these days we'll get more than five gigs, right? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not this year, I don't think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Probably not this decade.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, well, honestly, like when you have a new CEO. this on his list
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you know, Tim Cook had like had a list of things that he changed immediately, like you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charitable giving, you know, stuff like that. Like maybe that's on turnus's list. I doubt it. I can't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco imagine. I really can't imagine, but you never know. let's say Say they change it. Say
⏹️ ▶️ John they make it, they multiply it by five. So you get 25. Does that really make it?
⏹️ ▶️ John it's embarrassing they haven't changed it in a long time, but basically the way it exists is you get a non-zero amount
⏹️ ▶️ John for free, but that non-zero amount is basically useless if you really start using it for any of its
⏹️ ▶️ John intended purposes, in particular using it for backups. So it's like, it's like they want you to have storage,
⏹️ ▶️ John but not enough to do anything particularly useful. Like, if you, no matter how stingy you are with storage,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you use Apple's anything, like if you take photos in your phone, like you'll fill it and then they'll want to get money from
⏹️ ▶️ John you. So I don't think they're ever going to give you so much storage that it changes how many people need to buy the storage.
⏹️ ▶️ John It will just change the timer on how long it takes before their phones fill up and they get frustrated. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what's going to happen first? Apple is carbon neutral by 2030, or we get more than five
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigs of iCloud storage. Carbon neutral.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, honestly. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, one is a lot easier than the other, um but they're not going to do the easy
⏹️ ▶️ John one because it'll be too expensive. like Because they haven't done it in so long. Obviously, nobody cares. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, maybe if it's on ternus's day one list, then that's the only way it'll happen. But if it's not on his day one list, I don't see that bubbling
⏹️ ▶️ John up to his attention in the first five years or so that he's CEO. Hey, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is our last episode with Tim Cook as CEO. It is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that's true. I didn't even think about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we don't even know the day one list could literally be in time for our next episode. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John some stuff could start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happening. I mean, it's unlikely that we would hear about it or that it would be done that fast. But
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you wouldn't think there would be anything happening until like after the iPhone event, which we'll get to. But yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some people did ask if we wanted to do like an exit interview
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I kind of think we've covered that well. I think mine would kind of be more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a, you know, don't let the door hit you kind of kind of thing. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John should find maybe over next week we'll try to find the episodes. But we did, we basically did an exit interview of Tim Cook over multiple episodes.
⏹️ ▶️ John We really covered this topic thoroughly once we knew he was out the door. And since then,
⏹️ ▶️ John done anything additional worthy of discussion, I feel like.
Kids are fast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Continuing with follow-up, with regard to last week's overtime where we spoke about Stephen Robles'
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video showing how his son uses his first iPhone, a lot of people wrote in to say, oh, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clearly that was sped up because the implication being nobody could use an iPhone that quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Stephen wrote to us and said, I didn't speed up anything. I blurred some things for privacy, but everything was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 1X, which was incredible to me. And then additionally, a lot of people thought it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was very interesting, his son's preferences with regard to lowercase I versus capital I, especially in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey combination with the fact that autocorrect was turned off. And Stephen said also on lowercase I versus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uppercase I, that's not a text replacement. He actually presses the shift key to capitalize it manually every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. But I told him about text replacement and he seemed intrigued.
Sponsor: Tailscale
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iPhone event announced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we got some news early today as we record this. The Apple event surprise and shine has been announced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Wednesday, September 9th at 1 p.m. One true time zone. uh Your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three intrepid hosts will be watching at home as per usual. uh And I don't know, I don't have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too much more to say about that. I don't know what you guys have.
⏹️ ▶️ John Rupert pointed out that the reason it's on Wednesday instead of Tuesday is because of Labor Day. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey when Labor Day
⏹️ ▶️ John falls on the Monday, they shift it. uh So that's why it's one day off. It's a surprise and shine
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Like, I mean, this event, as usual with September events these days, like everyone knows every single
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that's going to be announced except for like minor stuff that nobody cares about. You know, right down to the
⏹️ ▶️ John specific size, measurement, appearance, potentially the colors, everything about the foldable phone. If it's not named
⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra, that'll be a surprise. But anyway, here's the invitation here. What's the surprise
⏹️ ▶️ John and shine? Like, I get it's a rise and shine pun, but like, is there anything particularly shiny or involving light
⏹️ ▶️ John that is supposed to be announced?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is there anything even surprising? I mean, this is the least surprising Apple event of the entire year, usually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We can almost always predict almost to the day, if not exactly to the day, when it will be. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know pretty much everything that's going to be announced in it. Like, it's like, because the iPhones leak more than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything else leaks.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even the leaks of like, are the AirPods with the camera is going to be there? German says no, they're delayed until next year. So
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, uh but yeah i don't I don't know what shine. I don't know what the shine is about. I don't i don't quite get Are the screens really
⏹️ ▶️ John bright or something? I don't know. We'll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, in the sun, they can they can be reflective, which is actually not a great thing usually. but Yeah. I
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I mean i guess the main, uh there's german had a whole big story about uh people who had supposedly used the foldable
⏹️ ▶️ John phone, but like, you know, but we're not ever going to cover it because by the time we do
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco another episode,
⏹️ ▶️ John they'll have been announced. Uh, But one of the open questions, it's not that much of a
⏹️ ▶️ John question, but anyway, like uh, the foldable phone, the crease, what does the screen feel like? I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, the expectation is that it will be like all the other phones that use all the same components that Apple's using and that they don't have
⏹️ ▶️ John anything special that anybody else doesn't have. By this point, Samsung has already come out with their own exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John like the Apple foldable phone, phone, you know, like the same size and shape, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, that same form factor, presumably using the same screen technology they're selling to Apple, unless Apple has some
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of exclusive deal. So that'll be interesting. Like, does Apple even make an announcement
⏹️ ▶️ John that like, oh, our foldable phone is better than the other ones because of X, Y, and Z? Because at this point, like, not only is it leaked so
⏹️ ▶️ John much, their competitors have had time to already release their iPhone fold clones.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple hasn't even released theirs yet. So when theirs comes out, it's like, oh, that's exactly like the Samsung, whatever. It's like, yeah,
M6
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then we have some big and semi-breaking news. This all happened yesterday. Thank you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple, for considering ATP's recording schedule. New Mac Minis, New Mac Studios.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we'll put links to the newsroom posts in the show notes. But, John, I figured you were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to want to drive this. I will just try to quarterback as best I can. And you wanted to start with the chips.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there are a bunch of new chips announced, including the M6. Interrupt me when you're ready.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is 2 nanometer. It has dual 16 core neural
⏹️ ▶️ Casey engine, up to two times the peak compute over previous generations. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is one of the most interesting things about the M6. Again, this is a plain M6. And remember, there's not going to be, according to the rumors,
⏹️ ▶️ John there's not going to be an M6 Pro, and M6 Max, or M6 Ultra. This is it. This is the only M6. And there
⏹️ ▶️ John are a bunch of interesting things, interesting things about this, but I think Apple basically led with this is like they doubled the
⏹️ ▶️ John neural engines. And I think this is the only one with double, other than obviously the ultras, which are two maxes
⏹️ ▶️ John stuck together. So then you get double neural engines. But uh, yeah, the littlest no suffix plain M6
⏹️ ▶️ John has double the amount of neural engines in it. I mean, it makes sense. Like they use them a lot. AI is popular.
⏹️ ▶️ John What can we do to beef up the plain M6 on AI tasks without putting on
⏹️ ▶️ John a honking GPU that would make it too big, too hot, too expensive? The neural engine is not that big. Put two
⏹️ ▶️ John of them in. And so they did. And again, this is the very first two nanometer chip from Apple. So maybe that gives them a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit of room and leeway to put in a second neural engine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Righto, they have 12 core CPUs, which is two more cores than the plain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M5. There are two super cores. If you recall, we talked about this a few months ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's two less than the M5's four super cores, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the M6 has four performance cores, which is the same as the M5. Or excuse me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm sorry, but the M5 has none. And then six efficiency cores, which is the same as the M5.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I remember the confusion about this. Like, I wish I got myself confused and had to re-Google
⏹️ ▶️ John for all this again. When we say performance cores in 2026,
⏹️ ▶️ John we mean the M cores, the medium ones. They're in between. The super cores are the big ones. The efficiency cores are the little
⏹️ ▶️ John ones. The performance cores are the medium ones. And so this has fewer
⏹️ ▶️ John big cores, a bunch of medium ones that the M5 didn't have, and then same number of the small ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still hate this naming of these cores
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We should just say big, medium, and small.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, so this, the M6 has really thrown a monkey wrench into what I hope would happen, which is like, oh, there's this
⏹️ ▶️ John transition period where they rename them and some of them have the old ones and new ones. But like, eventually they'll all get on the
⏹️ ▶️ John same page and we back to two sizes, the big and the little. But nope, nope, they're keeping three sizes. They're keeping
⏹️ ▶️ John three sizes with the same stupid names. We're never going to escape it. And it's just, it's big, medium, and small.
⏹️ ▶️ John If they had just called the medium one something with medium in it, like they're called M cores under the cover. So it's clear someone was thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John medium. But alas, that is not the case. So we have this, these stupid names are going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John with us for a while because they're pumping out chips with three different kind of cores and it seems like they're not going to stop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And it still bothers me that like the P cores used to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the used to be the big ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco them. The M5 used to have the M5 was
⏹️ ▶️ John announced with P cores,
⏹️ ▶️ John same cores changed names to super cores once Apple decided the big ones have to be called super cores. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God. Yeah. But anyway, I think I don't mind there being three different kinds of cores.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the temporary, uh, and by temporary, I might mean like years long,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John weird transition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco period of us getting used to what these names now mean Cause they now mean something different. But actually having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three different cores, I don't think we I don't think we really know yet how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this matters. Like, cause obviously like, you know, as you say, the M6 has actually reduced the number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of its largest cores uh, from four to two. But
⏹️ ▶️ John mediums and it had no mediums before. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty capable. So like how does this, I mean, this arrangement, like Apple presumably knows what kind of workloads
⏹️ ▶️ John do these chips experience and what's the best combination of cores to handle those workloads with the
⏹️ ▶️ John minimum power. So I trust them. This doesn't look like a ridiculous combination for a plain no suffix M chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this will be good, especially with the two neural engines. But yeah, well, we'll see when people start getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because as far as we know, there's no benchmarks out anywhere yet, right? I haven't i wasn't able to find any.
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven't seen them lately Maybe they leaked while we're recording this, but I haven't seen any yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because so we really have no clue how this actually performs besides Apple's kind of you know lofty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco claims, which Apple's claims for performance usually are correct,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but maybe narrow. And like it's hard to get a really good idea of how it performs broadly until you actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see it in lots of different applications.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So there is a quote from Apple. The world's fastest single-threaded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey performance and up to 1.2 times faster multi-threaded performance as compared to M5.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that makes it sound like the super cores are exactly the same speed as the M5 super cores,
⏹️ ▶️ John because the only thing they're touting in terms of like an increase is 1.2 times faster multithreaded.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, you know, it's the world's fastest, just like the M5 was, which is fine. Single core was good in the M5. It's good in the
⏹️ ▶️ John M6 and a little bit faster in multi-thread. And a little bit faster in multithread is like it does have two more CPU cores.
⏹️ ▶️ John Granted, it has two fewer big ones, but it has four mediums. So it works out to be better. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that's a reasonable claim. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, because well, it says the world's fastest single-threaded performance, but that could technically be true, even if it's tied
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the M5. right? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it's probably a little bit faster, but I mean, it depends. Like, you know, they have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco process shrink here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann How did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they, you know, how did they, quote, spend, you know, the additional capacity of a process shrink?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They probably, you know, they added cores, it looks like, you know, so they probably spent some of the some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the gain just putting more transistors down and having more cores. um But, you know, did they also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ramp up speeds in any different ways? Or is there more cash somewhere on the chip? You know, that I think that all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remains to be seen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey High yield on Blue Sky writes, what's out in apple s core or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in all new p core While size isn't everything, silicon area per CPU core can tell you a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot. That's why I made this handy chart, and we'll put a link in the show notes. The E core
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is roughly square, maybe a little bit less than square and not that big by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey comparison. The P core is another, like, I don't know, third bigger. And then the S core is, I don't know, another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 40% bigger than the P core, maybe more. These are quite different in size,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially the difference between the E-Core and the S-Core. Quite a big difference. There is a 12-core
⏹️ ▶️ Casey GPU, which is two more cores than the M5, which is a roughly 30% increase in peak GPU compute
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for AI as compared to M5. 50% increased geometry rates for complex graphics.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It also includes updates to the shader core architecture, dynamic caching, and hardware accelerated ray tracing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can get up to 32 gigs of RAM with 170 gigabytes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey per second memory bandwidth, which is up 10% from the M5. Additionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SME replaces AMX in the M6. John, can you make heads or tails of this for me,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this was from a bunch of other people. I hadn't really thought about this, but there was a post from Taras
⏹️ ▶️ John Zakaro saying the M4 was the first Apple chip to support ARM scalable matrix extensions.
⏹️ ▶️ John That's SME, scalable matrix extension. Although Apple has included Matrix Accelerator in its devices since
⏹️ ▶️ John 2019, it used a proprietary instruction set called AMX. The developers had to use Apple-provided numerical
⏹️ ▶️ John frameworks to take advantage of the hardware. The M4 chip with SME changed this by allowing programmers to write
⏹️ ▶️ John low-level code that directly targets the matrix hardware. So AMX has been around forever. And that has been a frustration
⏹️ ▶️ John of everybody. It's like, oh, AMX, it's these secret instructions. You can't know about them. It's Apple matrix instructions, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you're not allowed to write to them. Like, yeah, the CPU supports it, but I think they might reject you from the App Store if you
⏹️ ▶️ John directly use them. Obviously, you're outside the App Store, you can do whatever you want, but they're like, don't use these instructions.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they're private. We reserve the right to change them. What you're supposed to use is Apple has frameworks that
⏹️ ▶️ John under the cover use the AMX instructions. And they're like, Apple, just use these frameworks. But obviously, that's somewhat limiting,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially if you're doing really low-level stuff. SME is ARM, like the people who make the architecture
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple's chips are based on, the ARM company, they have their own scalable matrix
⏹️ ▶️ John extensions. And those are not specific to Apple. They're on any ARM chip. They're available to anybody who wants to make
⏹️ ▶️ John them. And Apple has incorporated them. And now they're basically replacing AMX. So Longhorn
⏹️ ▶️ John on Mastodon said, goodbye, Apple AMX. It was certainly interesting, but SME takes things further from
⏹️ ▶️ John here. M4 and M5 both had both SME and AMX present hardware, but
⏹️ ▶️ John AMX and SME run on the same compute units, but support for the AMX instruction
⏹️ ▶️ John set has gone in the M6. So they have this transition period where the chip supported both of them, but the M6
⏹️ ▶️ John is say goodbye to the AMX instruction set. It's all SME from here out. And I think the reason Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John did AMX is like either SME wasn't available or wasn't satisfactory to them. So they made their own thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And part of the reason they were trying to keep it private is like, we would prefer to maybe switch to the standard, the
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM standard matrix instructions when they're available. And so they kept AMX on and
⏹️ ▶️ John they kept it private. They said, please, you go through this framework. And presumably now, if you use the framework on a chip that doesn't support AMX,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will just use SME under the covers. So a pretty good technical transition for Apple, but it's worth
⏹️ ▶️ John noting that M6 is the first one that no longer supports AMX at all. So if you did write directly to the AMX
⏹️ ▶️ John instruction set and broke Apple's rules, your thing is not going to run on M6.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So a very quick side quest introduction here. We are asked, or people imply to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us on a regular basis, you know, you know that all the people at Apple listen to this show. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we know that there are some people at Apple that listen to the show. And my understanding is most of them are, you know, engineers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are just trying to get their job done. I don't think we have any like executives that listen to us or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But then well i don't know we have. I mean, we've had executives on the show, but.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don't know if we still do, but I know we have.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Well, either way, occasionally something will happen in the world of Apple, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey occasionally it makes me think, huh, that's weird. So Daniel Luce
⏹️ ▶️ Casey points out uh with with a very, very specific chart from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple, M6 compared to previous Mac Mini models. Faster long-form
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio transcription. Mac Mini with M6, 10.3x. Mac Mini with M4,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 4.8x. Mac Mini with M1, not very good. I guess that's 1X. This,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I genuinely have no idea if this is pointed at Marco slash us or not, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it's not. I mean, the reality is that long-form audio transcription
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done at large scale is a problem that not just Overcast has.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although I will say, for earlier today, I was looking at some of my numbers, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overcast transcribes about 30,000 hours of audio per day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it's kind of a lot that I do, but ultimately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are lots of problems out there that need long-form audio transcription
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as part of their problems. Think about how many business meetings there are and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many products there are out there to try to take your business meeting notes and summarize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. And every, you know, Zoom and all those different platforms that host video conferencing and everything, they all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have this. Like, this is a very common need. What about, don't forget the entire,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the intelligence community? They might have uses for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of uses that are less than above board, but there's a lot of need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for long-form audio transcription. And it's a it's a pretty exciting, you know, recent thing that computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recently have gotten a lot better at than they used to be. Plus, chances are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it probably shows off the capabilities of the new, you know, the new neural
⏹️ ▶️ Marco engine architecture or the new GPUs, like, you know, whatever it is. like they, That probably happens to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a very, very strong benchmark for these chips. And that's probably why they chose it. Not because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Anand Lal Shimpi listens to this show and decided to do this for this part of the thing. like Probably
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and this is the biggest benchmark for this is like, uh, M six. Uh, well, I mean, they're comparing it to
⏹️ ▶️ John M4, I guess, but like it's double from M4. They don't compare it to M five, but it shows that they are getting
⏹️ ▶️ John dividends from that second neural engine, uh, presumably. Cause I don't think this, this could come from the
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU and GPU changes alone. But who knows? Maybe it does. Like, That's the thing about these benchmarks
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, does audio transcription use the neural engine at all? Does it depend on
⏹️ ▶️ John what engine you're using? We just see the bar charts. We don't have the real benchmarks from people yet. So we'll wait and see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. By the way, it doesn't take 48 Mac minis to transcribe 30,000 hours of audio a day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It turns out I have dramatically over-provisioned how many Mac minis I need. You? Well, because remember
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mentioned during the story that at some point I fixed a bug that was causing repeat work to be enqueued?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, when I did that, the usage dropped by like two-thirds. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco actually those
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Minis are just going up in value. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it's like getting a bunch of solid gold bars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the reason I was doing these numbers earlier, I was trying to figure out like, you know, what, how can I best use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this excess capacity that I have. So should I do things like you know, summarization
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and auto chapterization? You know, What does that look like? How, How can I do that on a bunch of 16 gig
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M4 machines? Like, What are my options for that? Should I outsource it? And that's why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was doing that math.
M5 Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's talk M5 Ultra. There is now an Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the M5 generation, which uses UltraFusion to connect two dual-die
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M5 Max chips to form the quad die architecture. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that the same as the M3 Ultra or is that different?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the M5 is the first one that uses the chiplets, the M5 Max and M5
⏹️ ▶️ John separate the CPU and GPU die. So this is really just a sort of cruel twist of fate of like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you finally got the quad. No, not the way we wanted. It's still just two maxes stuck together. It just so happens
⏹️ ▶️ John the max itself split into two pieces into a CPU and GPU die. So they do tout it
⏹️ ▶️ John as a quad die architecture, which is accurate, but it's still two maxes. They just can't stop sticking
⏹️ ▶️ John those maxes together. They love it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was briefly very excited, and then I'm like, oh, wait, no, that's not what I want it to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. This has a 36 core CPU. The M3 Ultra has 32,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 12 super cores, 24 performance cores,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no efficiency cores, which is just like the M5 Maxes that it's comprised of.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The M3 Ultra has 24 of the old performance cores and eight efficiency
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don't know why there were so many efficiency cores in the Ultra back in the day, but it's such a weird comparison. I mean, setting aside what
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple compares to, they love to compare things to the M1 to show big numbers or whatever, but they also compare to the M3 Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John because that's the previous Ultra. There never was an M4 one. So you get some weird comparisons, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the core names in the comparison don't even match anymore. So yeah. And, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's pretty easy for the M5 Ultra to beat up on the M3 Ultra because, you know, it's a two generation later,
⏹️ ▶️ John those maxes that are stuck together, but it sure does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Compared to the M3 Ultra, up to 1.25 times higher single-threaded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey performance, up to 1.3 times higher multi-threaded performance,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is not bad. In terms of GPU, it is the same as the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M3 Ultra, 80 cores, 80 cores, which is bananas,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up to four and a half times the peak GPU compute for AI versus the M3 Ultra.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that's such a, like you look at those numbers, 1.3 times, 1.25 times for the CPU, it's like,
⏹️ ▶️ John all right, the CPU is better, but like, you know, not that much better. But then you get to the GPU thing, same number of cores,
⏹️ ▶️ John up to four times. That's because all these, the cores have like the neural accelerators in them and it's a totally different
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU architecture. This is the big leap in the M5 Ultra is that the GPU, even though it looks, even
⏹️ ▶️ John though it has quote unquote the same number of cores, those are not the same cores at all. And there is a big difference in that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, in the Apple press release they said like, oh, everything's great for AI and local AI and blah, blah, blah. And yeah, the M5
⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra is going to be a lot better at that stuff with its GPU than the M3 was. M3 Ultra, rather.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There is a quote unquote more capable media engine. It has dedicated hardware-enabled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey H.264 and HEVC encode-decode, four ProRes encode-decode engines, hardware-accelerated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AV1 decode only. But John, what's up with that?
⏹️ ▶️ John I read that in the press release and I was trying to figure it out. And then I went to Apple's compare page and it was like, this is exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John the same as the M3 Ultra. Like they do say like, oh, they're better or updated or improved. But like
⏹️ ▶️ John on Apple's own compare page, they use literally the same text for the M3 Ultra's media
⏹️ ▶️ John engine and the M5 Ultra's media engine. Maybe the media engines are the same. Maybe they just have the same number
⏹️ ▶️ John of components, but those components are clocked higher or more capable. Again, we'll find out with the benchmarks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then there is up to a half terabyte of RAM with 1.2 terabytes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey per second memory bandwidth. So that means you can dump all of your RAM in a second.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Am I reading that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, sure, yeah. Dump it where?
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU and out of it again.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, it's just the point is that you can move it so much. You can move faster than all of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Oh, one second is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey if it only goes
⏹️ ▶️ John up to 512 gigs and it does double that per second of memory bandwidth. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's bananas. Anyway, Apple says that it's 50% higher than before. The M3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ultra, John, you noted in our show notes, the M3 Ultra was 819 gigs per second. So this is roughly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 32% faster by John's math.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don't know where they're getting the 50% higher than before. Maybe I'm doing the math wrong. Maybe they are. But again, we'll see when the
⏹️ ▶️ John benchmarks come out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we are, though, before we leave this little segment, I think we are kind of seeing, though, maybe why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we're not getting the quad chip that we wanted, which I guess now would be the Octo chip with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this new construction method. Um, Because when you look at how the CPU performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is scaling between the max and the ultra, the M3 max to ultra,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead you know, it didn't get a hundred percent faster by doubling the number of cores with that whole second chip. It got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about 58% faster on Geekbench. So if that's whatever that's representative of, you know. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, there is some losses as as you scale up. It doesn't scale linearly up with CPUs. GPUs scale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot better. CPUs really don't. Um, By that math, though, with Apple's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco claim here that it's up to 1.3x higher multi-threaded performance, when you compare the performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the M5 Max, which we do have benchmarks for,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that's actually scaling worse than the M3.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, how can you? I think you have to do more math to figure that out because this is compared to the M3 Ultra. It's 1.2
⏹️ ▶️ John times faster than the M3 Ultra and 1.3 times faster in multi-thread than from the M3 Ultra. And then you have to go,
⏹️ ▶️ John all right, so the M3 Ultra had 32 cores and this is 36. I haven't done all this math to figure out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that's what I was doing when you were talking about memory bandwidth. So instead of listening to that, I did this. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 1.3 times the M3 Ultra multi-threaded performance would be about 50,000
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Geekbench. But the same ratio scaling up from the M5 Max would be about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 55,000. So it's actually scaling, I think, kind of significantly worse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that way than the M3 Max did, if this math is all right and if these claims line up to what what they should. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we'll know more with the benchmarks. But it does seem like the Ultra, similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to how the Ultra has always been, the Ultra really scales CPU performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly poorly. And so if what you need is maximum CPU, that's it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a very efficient way to get that. It's much more efficient to cover larger resources and larger
⏹️ ▶️ John But like what Apple does with the Ultra is they always say this, and it's true. Where else are you going to go? It's our fastest chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, yeah, it's not as efficient as you could imagine. It doesn't scale linearly, but it still is the fastest.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you want the best performance, this is what you have to buy. And it's a shame. And I don't agree with it. That's why I was hoping
⏹️ ▶️ John so much that this would be the year that the Ultra would not be two maxes stuck together, but it totally is. And
⏹️ ▶️ John with all the tradeoffs and compromises that brings, and Apple gets away with it because it still is
⏹️ ▶️ John their fastest chip. It is faster than their previous fastest chip. And if you want the most performance, this is the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that gives it to you. So tough luck.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey High Yield has another diagram this time with a visual explanation of how the M5
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ultra is designed. We will put a link to that in the show notes for you to check out.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't know if this is based on knowledge, but it shows basically the GPU sides touching each other. So you've got a CPU die and a GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John die on your Max, and you take the two maxes and you stick them together. And it seems like the GPU side is
⏹️ ▶️ John the side that's touching with the silicon interposer. Presumably this is known because you could look at the interposer on the maxes or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, this is the only diagram I saw of this, so I included it.
Mac Mini
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, the Macs. Both will ship with macOS 27 Golden Gate, as you would expect.
⏹️ ▶️ John As you would expect, maybe not, because that OS is not done yet. So now that puts a timeline on all this stuff, It's
⏹️ ▶️ John like they're going to ship with a beta OS? No, they're going to ship with the release version of the OS, which means Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John to finalize the release version of the OS in time to stick it on these computers in time to stick them in boxes
⏹️ ▶️ John in time for them to be sale on their for sale date, which we'll get to in a little bit. So this puts a line in the sand and says,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, macOS Golden Gate, it's shipping soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so they will have, or the Mac Mini will have the M6 or the M5 Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the M6, you can get, with regards to RAM, 16, 24, 32 gigs, or with the M5
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro, you can get 24, 48, or 64 gigs. Storage for the M6, 256,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 512, 1 terabyte, 2 terabyte. for the M5 Pro, 512, 1, 2, 4, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, as you go through these, you can see the strangeness that Apple has brought on themselves, which is the one
⏹️ ▶️ John with the higher number after the M is the low-end Mac Mini. It's the M6 and the M5
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, but the M5 Pro is the more capable, more powerful, more expensive, has more RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ John has more storage. The M5 Pro is the quote-unquote good Mac Mini, but it doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ John have the double neural engines and the other, you know, differences we just talked about.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there may be some benchmarks I can imagine that might actually run faster on an M6 than on an M5 Pro if they
⏹️ ▶️ John take advantage of the neural engines. That'll be interesting to see the benchmarks as well. But yeah, the M5 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John is the fancy, good, expensive, more capable Mac Mini, even though it's got a 5 after the M
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to connectivity, both have the Apple M1, which is Wi-Fi 7 Bluetooth 6. They both have 2.5
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gig Ethernet, but 10 gig is available. Two USB 3 front ports.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then the M6 has three Thunderbolt 4 back ports. The M5 Pro has three Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John This is usually the case with the no-suffix M chips. They don't get as much like PCI E-lanes or whatever. So they
⏹️ ▶️ John have lesser Thunderbolt capabilities. And so you get an M6 with Thunderbolt 4, but
⏹️ ▶️ John an M5 Pro with Thunderbolt 5, that's the way it shakes out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep, which means that if I get more base model Mac minis with the M6, I still can't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that thing where they cluster together to run big LLMs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, they want you to get a studio for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or an M5 Pro version, which can also work. yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to video, Tim Hardwick had a really good summary over at Mac Rumors. The M6 Mini can run two displays
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at up to 6K60 or 4K 165 hertz, up from 144
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hertz in the M4, plus a third display at up to 5K60Hz over Thunderbolt or 4K60Hz
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over HDMI. The M5 Pro can run all three displays at up to 6K60
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or 4K 165, which is up from 144 again. In a two-monitor setup, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M5 Pro model's second screen now supports 5K 120 or 4K 200,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whereas the M4 Pro supports 6K 60 or 4K 144. The M5 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mini supports all three displays through one Thunderbolt port, while the M6 supports two per port.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Single display support is unchanged. Both M6 and M5 Pro support 8K 60, 5K 120, or 4K
⏹️ ▶️ John I like that Apple continues to push this. Like, oh, we did 144 hertz last time. Now we're up to 165. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John keep going. But Apple sells nothing to help them like Apple is not selling
⏹️ ▶️ John 240 hertz displays, 200 hertz displays, 165 hertz displays. They don't sell
⏹️ ▶️ John any of that at any price. Other people do, and you can connect them to your Macs. But it's fascinating that
⏹️ ▶️ John the people who work on the video on Macs and the video drivers and the video hardware are just pushing as much as they
⏹️ ▶️ John can, increasing the specs. Again, these are minis. This is not a video powerhouse, but they keep increasing
⏹️ ▶️ John the numbers. Meanwhile, the team that makes the displays is like 60 hertz is probably fine for
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody. All right. If you have $3,000, you can get $120. $3,500.
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget how much that one costs. It's so much. Luckily, the rest of the monitor market exists.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to pricing, the M6 starts at $900, which is $200 more than the M4 Mac Mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The M5 Pro starts at $1,700, which is $200 more than the M4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac Mini. And some people have done some science and mathematics with regard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the quote-unquote best config available for pre-order. The M5 Pro, 64 gigs RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 8 terabyte SSD, $6,800. There's also a chart with pricing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just pause that for a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John A $6,800 Mac Mini. What are we doing here? I
⏹️ ▶️ John I could figure out some things to do with it. The
⏹️ ▶️ John is really just like, distorting products beyond all reason because like, in
⏹️ ▶️ John the old days when, you know, when RAM and storage were not inflated by multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John times their normal price, the Mac Mini kind of stayed within a Mac Mini-ish
⏹️ ▶️ John range, no matter how you specced it, because like, they would confine the options. right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And you couldn't make a Mac Mini that expensive. But now it's like, I'm sorry if just, you know, as you add RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John and storage, it very quickly just dwarfs everything else that has to do with this product and
⏹️ ▶️ John the prices become ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And, And as usual with the Mac Mini, the base model has always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been by far the best value. And as you try to scale things up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you very quickly explode the price of that computer into something way larger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the than the initial price suggests that it's like in the class of. Um, But I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, this is why I own a very large number of base model Mac minis and almost none i
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i think Oh, I have one. My one that I use as like my archive uh server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my house has like the 512 SSD. And that's it. like I have only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco base models because the base model is a great value compared to everything else. And you spec
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it up at all and that starts quickly becoming less of a good value.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 95 Mac also has a really great uh chart of pricing history, which is worth checking out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then, John, you took the liberty of doing inflation adjusted versions of that same chart. Again, both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these will be in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So like the pricing on the Mac Mini, it started at $499, which is the lowest that it's ever been, but that
⏹️ ▶️ John was back in 2014, right? And the chart just showing the number shows it goes up and then down and then it
⏹️ ▶️ John goes back up again. And you're like, wow, it's the highest that it has ever been. with The base model being $899. And it makes sense, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, the RAM crisis, storage, blah, blah, blah, the highest it's ever been. And that's why I was interested in doing an inflation-adjusted
⏹️ ▶️ John one. Inflation-adjusted shows that no, the 2018 model was the highest that it's ever been. Inflation
⏹️ ▶️ John adjusted, the 2018 base model was $1,000 76 dollars and uh yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John that's that's higher than the current 899 But it has gone up and down. the the The lowest
⏹️ ▶️ John price ever base model is $712 in today's dollar. So the actual lowest one is the 2024 model
⏹️ ▶️ John and inflation adjusted at $650. um So, I mean, that's that's kind of the changing
⏹️ ▶️ John face of what the Mac Mini is and how much it costs to field any kind of computer with any kind of chip, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel chips in it. But um yeah, the base model is still trying to be a good deal,
⏹️ ▶️ John but just everything is every every uh reasonable uh concept of pricing
⏹️ ▶️ John is thrown out the window because RAM and storage are the only thing that matters anymore in terms of pricing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then uh this Mac Mini is not available for lease through Apple Upgrade. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I checked. I saw people saying that. I went to the Apple Upgrade page and there's no Mac Minis there. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't know why. then Again, it can go up to like seven thousand dollars but nope, can't lease it. That could be
⏹️ ▶️ John a yet thing. Maybe. I mean, I checked a couple times today. Maybe by the time you hear this episode, it'll
⏹️ ▶️ John be on there, but it wasn't when I checked.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can pre-order right now as we record this. You could pre-order that same day when it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey announced. They arrive starting on September 22.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there you go. Mac OS 27 Golden Gate. I'm assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John be released to the general public by September 22nd. If not, people who get
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple hardware with Golden Gate on it are going to have their own private copy
⏹️ ▶️ John of Golden Gate that nobody else has and nobody else can get. So I would imagine, yeah, that's
⏹️ ▶️ John their deadline. Assuming people get their hardware on day one, which is September 22nd, Golden
⏹️ ▶️ John Gate should be released to the public by then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I'm guessing it should be released to the public probably on September 18th or somewhere around there because You know, we have, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mentioned, like the iPhone event is September 9th. And usually they give us, yeah, maybe about a week between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone event and the OS releases. So I'm guessing, yeah, sometime around September 18th, probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Golden Gate and all the 27 releases.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to pricing, the CPU for the new Mac Minis,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is over, if you want to get the M5 Pro instead of the M6, that's adding $800 for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey binned one or $1,000 for the unbinned one. That's a difference of $20 bucks over the M4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro. RAM, 24 gigs is plus $200.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excuse me, 32 gigs is plus $400. 48 gigs is plus $600.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That one is $60 more than it was for the M4 Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so those other ones you're reading, like those offsets, Apple did, I think, a good job of cranking the prices on the previous
⏹️ ▶️ John model so that now we get the new ones. And it's like, well, the upgrades are ridiculous, but they're almost
⏹️ ▶️ John the same as they were on the previous one. Like you'll see this in a lot of the pricing comparisons. It's
⏹️ ▶️ John $20 more expensive than the upgrade was to the Pro chip before. $20?
⏹️ ▶️ John What? And this is $60. You can see Apple, like, Apple likes round numbers, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they're they're also trying to like hold the line on these increases. So again, it's not increasing by, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John $47 or something, but $60 and $20 are weird increases. And it's
⏹️ ▶️ John only the 48 gig upgrade that that is $60 more expensive than it used to be. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, I see that and I see like Apple's pricing wizards
⏹️ ▶️ John struggling to try to like, because I think their plan was, hey, we'll increase the prices on everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then when the new models come out, we don't have to increase them again because we already did it. That's not true of the phones, by the way. But
⏹️ ▶️ John for the Macs, they did increase all the prices. But it turns out they couldn't actually hold the line. And for some like
⏹️ ▶️ John the larger RAM configuration, they're like, no, actually, we undershot a little bit. RAM prices still go up. We have to
⏹️ ▶️ John be $60 more expensive than that upgrade used to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be. With regard to storage for the M6 over the base 256
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigs, it's $200 bucks for a half gigabyte, excuse me, half terabyte, $500 bucks for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a terabyte, which is $30 more than it was for the M4, and a thousand dollars for two terabytes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is $80 more over the M4. For the M5 Pro, this is over the base
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 512 gigs. A terabyte is 300. Two terabytes is 800. Four terabytes is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 1,808 terabytes. If you're a fool and did that last time when you bought a computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is now $3,800, which is $380 more than the M4.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, look at these deltas. 30, 80, 180, and 380. This is some weird numbers.
⏹️ ▶️ John some weird increase. But like, that's that's what the that's what the market will bear at this point. They would have liked
⏹️ ▶️ John to have kept these increases the same as they were before, but they couldn't. And, you know, again, eight terabytes, it's going to be $380
⏹️ ▶️ John more than it used to be for a nice round 3800 bucks added to the price of your Mac Mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to be fair, eight terabyte SSDs from Apple have always been absurdly expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is more expensive than I think they have been, but yes it is but not by,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I mean, what's the… I mean, it's pricey. I think it used to be 2400 bucks wasn't eight terabytes. I forget what it was, but here's the thing. Or maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe 3000 i mean i think I think when they first were introduced, they were probably actually near this price,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they've always been like multiple thousands of dollars. So this is more than they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were, but it's not, we're not talking 10 times more. We're not talking that level of a difference here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, when this was first happening, everybody's RAM prices and storage prices were going up, but Apple's weren't yet because they hadn't
⏹️ ▶️ John done their price increase. It was like, hey, Apple's prices are starting to seem reasonable, but Apple fixed that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. With regard to Ethernet, you can get 10 gigabit for 100 bucks, which is 10 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more than it used to be. With regard to Mac mini pricing, Gruber writes, if you configure an M6
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac Mini with two terabytes of storage, the SSD upgrade alone, which is a thousand bucks, costs more than the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entire base model computer, which is $900. bucks So too, with the four terabyte SSD
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upgrade for the M5 Pro Mini, which is an $1,800 upgrade for a $1,700 computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cool. Just because you want more storage, you're like, oh, the price will go up a little bit if I add storage. And now it's like, if you touch
⏹️ ▶️ John that storage tier thing in the configurator, you double the price of your computer as soon as you touch it. Don't do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There's also a new Mac Mini ad, which is like the stop motion thing, which is very cute and very cool. There's also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey behind the scenes Instagram reel, which you should check out. Good stuff. I really enjoyed
Mac Studio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Max Studio, maybe this will be John's future computer. The SoC is an M5 Max or M5 Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regard to RAM. The M5 Max comes in 36, 48, 64, or 128
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigs with different CPUs uh for the 48, 64, 128. That requires the big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey boy CPU. M5 Ultra has 96 gigs, 256, 512 gigs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh if you have the M5 Ultra with the 80 core gpu additionally a 5 the 512
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gig memory option for the M5 Ultra is coming in late October for reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, yeah, it's not available in the configurator now. You can't even see how much it's going to cost. The answer is more than you want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly right. If you have to ask, it's too much.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and they, and so this, when I was doing this price comparisons, like, obviously the, like the Mac Studio,
⏹️ ▶️ John the configurations that you could get the Mac Studio in have just been disappearing over the past month or two,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And when I went to do the comparison, it was like there was nothing left of the M4-based Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Studio. It's like you get like one RAM configuration per CPU and that's it. And the M5
⏹️ ▶️ John model has increased your options again, but you're still constrained. So if you want the binned M5
⏹️ ▶️ John Max, which is like the one with 32 core GPU, you get one RAM choice and that's it. The
⏹️ ▶️ John second you want any more RAM, you just got to go with the unbinned one, which increases the price a lot. So a lot of people have been tripped up
⏹️ ▶️ John by this. Gruber had a post where he's like, oh, my math on the pricing was wrong because it says, oh, add $300 for
⏹️ ▶️ John the CPU choice. Oh, I should do that. That's a good deal. But as soon as you touch that option, it's like, well, a bunch of other stuff is changing too. uh
⏹️ ▶️ John You can't have the binned one uh thing anymore. Anyway, but there are more, all I'm saying is there are more options
⏹️ ▶️ John than there used to be, but there's still not as many options as there was back in the day when RAM and storage wasn't messed up.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it is a relief from the end of the M4 days, which is like you got choices of like
⏹️ ▶️ John two computers and that was it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With storage, the M5 Max gets 512 gigs, one, two, four, or eight terabytes. The M5
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ultra gets one, two, four, eight, or even 16 terabytes. I shudder to think about how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much 16 terabytes will cost.
⏹️ ▶️ John We'll find out in a little bit, but yes, the answer is too much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, connectivity. Thunderbolt 5 in RDMA, which is remote direct memory access. That's the thing where you can chain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them together, right? To make
⏹️ ▶️ John Put a big stack of Mac Studios and connect them together so they can run a model bigger than any single one of them could run. It
⏹️ ▶️ John works on Thunderbolt 5. That's what you can do with your Mac Studios if you have a lot of money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The next generation SSD architecture is built on PCIe Gen 6, according to Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple's N1, as we said, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6. These are the first time, this and the mini are the first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time these have come into Mac. Up to eight displays or up to four studio display XDRs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Who even cares about those anymore? Anyway, at full 5K resolution and 120 hertz.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Actually, by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On one of my XDRs, I actually don't even know which one it is, whether it's the mainland John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one or the Beach one, but I'm still paying for the annual AppleCare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco renewal because I have it like on the annual. You should. I wish I had not let mine lapse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's like $180 bucks a year. I'm like, And I'm wondering, like, what happens if it breaks? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do they give me a new one somehow? I bet they have parts. Maybe? Like, i I'm just, I'm going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to keep paying it as long as I can. Like, how long will they let it go? I i have no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I really wish I was still paying for that, but i'm I let it lapse, totally forgot about it, and now
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm just living in fear.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Great. Let's see. This also supports Genlock over USB-C for precise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey synchronization between a display and a professional camera capture like the iPhone 17 Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the Mini does too. I think Genlock might be on both models, but yeah, this is not a feature that I'm interested in, but they're
⏹️ ▶️ John touting it on their new Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Quote from Apple. Simultaneously play up to 33 streams of 8K ProRes 422
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at 30 frames per second on M5 Ultra, which is cool. Pricing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The M5 Max starts at $2,500, which is $200 more than the M4 Max. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M5 Ultra starts at $5,500, which is $600 more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than the M3 Ultra Max Studio. Lease pricing, M5 Max starts at $49
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a month. M5 Ultra starts at $110 a month. The quote-unquote best config
⏹️ ▶️ Casey available for pre-order. Everyone better sit down. M5 Ultra, 256
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigs of RAM, 16 terabyte SSD. The just eminently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey affordable $18,300. Holy shit balls.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is an expensive computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do wonder. I mean, we're not aware of these prices cause we don't shop for these things. And
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, not these prices. The prices I'm about to say, like the, the prices that people pay for
⏹️ ▶️ John like the big giant cost as much as the car NVIDIA things that run LM training
⏹️ ▶️ John and inference, you know, those things, those have always been tens of thousands of dollars. But I'm assuming those
⏹️ ▶️ John have also increased. I mean, I don't know how it works, It's like the whole reason the RAM crisis is there is because they bought up all the RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John for those. So maybe those prices are steady. But anyway, when I see like an $18,000, $20,000 M5 Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John config and it's only got 256 gigs of RAM, I'm like, well, if I have $20,000 and I want to do LLM
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, why don't I buy like one of those Rackmount Nvidia things that has way more RAM and is way
⏹️ ▶️ John more powerful? And that's like $30,000. Maybe you're getting more bang if like if that's what you care about, if
⏹️ ▶️ John running, obviously, like they don't run macOS, like you can't use them as your desktop computer. So I get it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But at these prices, once you start saying $18,000 for 256 gigs of RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John and 16 terabyte SSD, which is probably you know, the main thing is inflating this price, it's like, that's not that great
⏹️ ▶️ John a deal if you just care about AI stuff. And, you know, like to Marco's point earlier, you're probably better off getting some
⏹️ ▶️ John lesser M5 something Mac Studios and connecting them together with that RDMA thing than buying
⏹️ ▶️ John the one big Honkin one. But if you want to, Apple will sell it to you for almost $20,000.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can pre-order now arrives September 22nd. Gruber has some comments here as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It kind of stinks that there are no RAM options for the studio between the 96 gig base and the $4,000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 256 gig upgrade. Jesus.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, 96 gigs is basically enough for anybody who's using it as a desktop computer, but if you want to use it for
⏹️ ▶️ John AI stuff, that extra RAM really pays. And yeah, you jump from 96. Next choice in the
⏹️ ▶️ John little configurator is add $4,000 to go up to 256. Which again, 256
⏹️ ▶️ John gigs of RAM used to not be that obscene. Like the computer I'm sitting next to, in theory, supports 1.5 terabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John of RAM. Obviously, a lot slower than the RAM that they're talking about here, but still,
⏹️ ▶️ John hate going backwards. I hate having things that are, the numbers are lower than they used to be,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if, again, it's not the same kind of RAM. And the prices are way higher. So that's not great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I recently was looking, I was looking earlier, like, I wonder, could I, with my next purchase, could I fit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comfortably into 96 without noticing a degradation of performance? Because I currently have 128
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because when I bought this, you know, M3 Max MacBook Pro, whatever it was three years ago, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 128 at that time was a lot, but it wasn't like obscene. It was like just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, that's that's like a high-end desktop. um And I currently use about 92
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gigs most of the time. So it's like, well, I can i can fit into 96. Like I, it would, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would still feel like annoyingly like a downgrade, though. So I, I just, what a,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what a shame to have to buy a computer in this day and age, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, it must really suck. Then before we move on, there's a new Mac Studio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ad, which I actually kind of liked. And they do a lot of like play with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the words on the screen. It's a brief ad, and I think you should check it out. Not as fun as the Mac Mini one, but still
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think that Mac Mini Mat is really fun and interesting. I mean, I don't know how well it sells
⏹️ ▶️ John the computer or even relates to the computer, but it's a cool looking short piece of animation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do we want to save your trip down the configurator for overtime? No. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, most of our listeners don't care about this, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. I'm so tempted to legitimately do that, but I'm not that evil. So, John, all right, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey handle this however you choose. I know I speak for me and probably Marco to say I am dying to know if you've pre-ordered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything. I did ask you to walk us through your thought process
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regard to configurations. If you want to jump to the end and tell us what you've done, or if you want to walk through.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait, wait. Before he does, Casey, do you want to take bets on what he did, if anything, and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ooh. I do. I do, but I'm not prepared to answer this question. So I'm going to have to walk through the configurator
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco All right. Hold on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let's do it together. Okay. So, first of all, I'm going to bet that he did place an order
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today. Or at least, hmm. He probably, okay. So indecisive. He's going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to buy this Mac Studio, but he probably wants to wait until somebody gives him some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like insider discount. And that might not be available yet this second. That might That might take like a week or two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something. I'm guessing, though, he has decided he will buy this and he has decided what configuration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he will buy. So let's step through the configurator now together.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think M5 Max, not M5 Ultra.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I disagree. He'll absolutely go for the M5 Ultra. Really?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, let's see. Before we get there, let's see, because maybe some of his storage options might require it. Okay, so I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to say memory. I'm going to say he probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey went… Wait, hold
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John. How much memory is in your Mac Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you clicking? You should both be clicking on the options because as Marco said, this stupid configurator changes stuff all the time
⏹️ ▶️ John and throws up. Oh, you want to change that? Well, you got to change these. It's exactly like buying a car. You need the premium package
⏹️ ▶️ John now. My Mac Pro has 96 gigs of RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I'm going to say he went either 96 or 128. Let me see. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is no 128. There is 128 on the Max chip, not on the Ultra. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm going to say he went 128 max.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I disagree. I think he's going 256 uh Ultra.
⏹️ ▶️ John What are you clicking on? that You clicked Max, but then you have to pick. I hate this. You have to pick options before the other ones like ungray.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, yeah. which
⏹️ ▶️ John did you Did you click on the binned or unbind max?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i I think I just clicked unbind because I think unbinn's required to hit 96 or to hit 128.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco See, if he goes…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The problem is if he goes, let's see. If he wants 96, he has to get the ultra.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John He's going ultra,
⏹️ ▶️ John like cars, man. You need the you need the leather package and the all-weather package if you want the heated mirrors, but if you want the heated steering
⏹️ ▶️ John wheel, you can't get the sunroof. No, you're exactly right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. So, Casey, you're, so you're, you're betting ultra.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Unbind with 256 gigs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And eight terabytes. That's my vote.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think the eight terabytes is probably a given. um, Either way. So you're going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go, you're going ultra unbinned. I already lost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 256. 256. 8 terabyte. What's your total on that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait, wait, wait. What about trade-in? Do you click in the trade-ins thing? We're going to skip
⏹️ ▶️ John skip that. That's an essential part of the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I don't have your serial number and all that jazz.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm going to say no. You don't trade anything and you keep it in the attic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that's true. Yeah. Either way, you're not going to trade in. uh So mine says buy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it's so funny to me because John is the cheapest. Sorry. One of the more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey frugal people I know. But when it comes to this and only this, John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knows no limits. And so I think we are looking at at least $14,300
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for his computer. It would not surprise me if he actually spends more than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. I'm going to go with M5 Max, unbinned. So the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 18 core and 40 core. It's like the best M5 Max, because I don't think John can accept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a binned chip. I think he wants the best version of whatever chip he has. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M5 Max, full cores, 128 gigs, 8
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terabytes for $8,059.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is a much better deal, bang, for well, it's both of these are hilariously overpriced.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No one's getting a good deal here tonight.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no. But given that you are a little bit less or a little bit more than half of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I've got, that's a much better choice. But I know, I feel like I know John. And I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as frugal as John is, there is no turning back when it comes to his computer. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is how he's going to get over the fact that there is no Mac Pro anymore is by buying a truly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asinine Mac Studio. So, all right, we will, I will leave the configurator up because I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knowing me, I will forget what I've selected in the next five minutes. John, walk us through what your thought process was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you are ready, or if you'd like to take this a different direction, that's fine too. All right. Well, so
⏹️ ▶️ John the first thing I did was I looked at the configurator as you were doing and and got frustrated with the limitations and the
⏹️ ▶️ John options. But anyway, I immediately went to the storage section to see like, what are the storage options? And
⏹️ ▶️ John the storage options on both of the models of the Mac Studio are unchanged
⏹️ ▶️ John in price. Like if you want a four terabyte, it's at $1,800. If you want an 8 terabyte, it's at $3,800
⏹️ ▶️ John if you get the Max. And the Ultra is at $1,500 and at $3,500 because of the vagaries.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, these are exactly the same as they were for the M3 Ultra and the M4 Max.
⏹️ ▶️ John So storage prices for the Mac Studio are the same as they have ever been. They're awful,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco increased the storage
⏹️ ▶️ John prices on the M4 Mac, M4 slash M3 Ultra Mac Studio
⏹️ ▶️ John before, they were able to hold the line on those. And so they're not worse than they were, but they're not
⏹️ ▶️ John good, obviously. um, for the, um, for the,
⏹️ ▶️ John the CPU and stuff, mostly unchanged, like there are things tied together.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you get like an unbinned 64 gig with four terabytes, um, it's like 5,300
⏹️ ▶️ John bucks or eight terabytes is 7,300 bucks. If you bin the chip, you get minus 300
⏹️ ▶️ John for the bin CPU, which is not that big of a savings, but then you have to go down to 36 gigs of RAM. Like you can't,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the RAM is tied to the, it's just, it's super annoying. Um, for the M five ultra,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, if you go with the binned M five ultra, it's seven grand, which is more than the M three Ultra was.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you go bin 96 gig, it's seven grand. These are configs that I was trying. Um, It's $200
⏹️ ▶️ John more than the M three Ultra config was. And if you go eight terabytes, it's nine grand, which is, again, $200 more than the
⏹️ ▶️ John M five Ultra. So these combos of like bin 96 gig, if you want an Ultra, but you're not going to get the fancy
⏹️ ▶️ John one, but you want 96 gigs of RAM, like that's $200 more.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then unbin 96 gig, the prices are the same as they were on the M3 Ultra, which is nice because like M3 Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John to M5 Ultra is a big upgrade in the CPU. You know, four terabytes is 8,300 and 8 terabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John is 10,300. So these are, these are like the configs I first looked at. M5
⏹️ ▶️ John Max, binned uh unbinned 64 and bin 36, because I have to. Like I'm never going to get a bin
⏹️ ▶️ John 36, but just FYI, they make you do that. um And then M5 Ultra, bin 96,
⏹️ ▶️ John and unbinned 96. And then I looked at all those numbers and then I looked at everything over. um
⏹️ ▶️ John and like i I don't know. I mean, I thought about this a lot before these computers came out, but it really depended on what the prices did. And having
⏹️ ▶️ John the prices not move too much with the exception of a couple of $200 more expensive options.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, those $200 more expensive options are for a big upgrade from an M3 Ultra to an M5 Ultra.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know, I didn't buy the M4 Mac Studio because I waited too long.
⏹️ ▶️ John By the time I realized there was going to be nothing else, by the time the Mac Pro was killed, so on and so forth,
⏹️ ▶️ John by the time I realized nothing new was coming anytime soon, it was like, well, now it's too late to get an M4 Mac Studio.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although I tell you, I did think about it a lot because for reasons I'll get into later in the show, like I'm doing
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of development stuff. macOS 27 I have to test my things on I can't
⏹️ ▶️ John do it on my Mac because macOS 27 doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Mac so then I had
⏹️ ▶️ John 27 on the MacBook Air and then as we discussed in an earlier episode now I've got 27 my wife's computer so I'm using her computer
⏹️ ▶️ John and she doesn't like that I love like you could solve this problem by buying a MacBook Neo and you won't do that
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean that's what I'm saying I thought about that I was looking at Mac minis what's the cheapest ARM Mac mini I was looking at eBay
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac minis you know like I was looking for like literally anything
⏹️ ▶️ John not that cheap you'd be surprised I know that's what I'm getting at so and even and even the neo like
⏹️ ▶️ John the neo yeah it's like is that the cheapest arm mac even that one increased in price and I don't want that with a laptop and it come with
⏹️ ▶️ John not a lot of RAM and if I'm going to be doing stuff I mean I just the Neo was kind of out and the minis
⏹️ ▶️ John like again I'm looking for like used Mac minis like I don't care I just needed something ARM
⏹️ ▶️ John on my desk that I could just plug into my monitor and have a thing but they were just not that they're super expensive but it's
⏹️ ▶️ John like well if you're thinking about getting a new computer sometime soon don't spend 800 bucks on a computer you're going to use
⏹️ ▶️ John for two months you know what I mean
⏹️ ▶️ John but I'm kind of desperate for something arm I need something arm in my life um
⏹️ ▶️ John and the price is not changing is like oh this actually kind of makes it more difficult because like
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't know like I mean a couple things make this more difficult for my decision making one that the M5 ultra is just two
⏹️ ▶️ John maxes stuck together so it's not interesting or novel the scaling is not better than it
⏹️ ▶️ John used to be it's you know it's not exciting it's the kind of chip that's probably not going to get a
⏹️ ▶️ John chip design on the back of a future t-shirt just saying
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann if they had done
⏹️ ▶️ John something exciting I might have drawn another chip on the back but now it's not happening there'll still be a shirt though don't worry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I won this bet I think you did win this bet I'm
⏹️ ▶️ John so uh and then I'm looking at these configs and I'm like you know this is
⏹️ ▶️ John this this goes into my well two things one as discussed in past episodes I screwed
⏹️ ▶️ John up I waited too long I made poor decisions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think Marco and I have told you that for the last three years running
⏹️ ▶️ John right sure but like it just like I mean and the thing is like oh my god Casey he bought a used
⏹️ ▶️ John by the time we saw the AI RAM crisis coming it was already too late you know what I mean like by that point
⏹️ ▶️ John it wasn't too late to buy like I could have bought you know a Mac at that time but it was too late for me in the cycle it was
⏹️ ▶️ John like I said it was too late to buy an M4 Mac Studio because the new ones were coming out but it was also like
⏹️ ▶️ John hey if you wanted to save money you should have bought them before they increased all the prices right so I was I was in a fix and it was
⏹️ ▶️ John it's like in a way that I remember everyone on the internet and YouTube are all making fun of me like oh you bought a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro and then they changed chip architectures haha this thing has lasted like a champ like longer than most people's computers
⏹️ ▶️ John last ironically Apple transitioning chip architectures was less of a disruption
⏹️ ▶️ John to my normal buying patterns than the AI-induced RAM and storage crisis because that has screwed things
⏹️ ▶️ John up screwed me over way more than the chip architecture change ever did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you buy enough Macs to qualify as a buying pattern
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah I do I mean if you go over from 1984 till now you know it definitely counts as a pattern
⏹️ ▶️ John and the pattern is I keep them for a long time that's the pattern yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean this is this Mac Pro is going to end up being like six seven years seven years old or so by the time I get something new
⏹️ ▶️ John so all this is to say kind of like with my constant monitoring of the TV world and
⏹️ ▶️ John the automotive world this is the not, not the right time to buy a new computer
⏹️ ▶️ John it's the from in my from my perspective you know from with my rule set the way I buy computers I'm always looking
⏹️ ▶️ John is this the right time to buy is this the right you know with my TV is this the right one to buy or should I wait till the next one or should I do it like when is the
⏹️ ▶️ John right time to buy for me this is not the right time to buy a new computer on multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John even before you get into the RAM and storage you know crisis with pricing
⏹️ ▶️ John it's still not the right time to buy Apple kind of agrees that it's not the right time to buy a new computer because Apple's
⏹️ ▶️ John like hey we think the M7 and like the AI stuff we're doing according to the rumors
⏹️ ▶️ John the the AI stuff we're doing in the M7 are so good that we are just
⏹️ ▶️ John as Casey would say poop canning the the M6 Pro Max and Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John just so we can accelerate the timeline on the M7s because we think we did such a good job on those that we
⏹️ ▶️ John want to get those out ASAP and just forget about the M6 Pro Max and Ultra that that's like unprecedented
⏹️ ▶️ John and part of that is probably the RAM crisis and chip crisis and blah blah blah but also I feel like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John given the timelines on their chips like the whole the you know the ascendancy
⏹️ ▶️ John of the importance of doing local inference and stuff on Macs if you extrapolate that timeline
⏹️ ▶️ John backwards for typical silicon design timelines it makes sense that the M7 is the first one that's like oh no
⏹️ ▶️ John local inference like that's like that's where all we need to spend our transistors and the rumor is the m7
⏹️ ▶️ John is really good at that this is exactly the wrong time to buy a new powerful computer because
⏹️ ▶️ John apple itself according to the rumors is like yeah our our good our good super
⏹️ ▶️ John powerful computers this isn't it it's great that we upgraded it's great that you know we never had the m4 ultra but now we have the m5
⏹️ ▶️ John ultra and it's fine and it's good and it's better than the m3 one and it is the best most powerful chip we have and if you need one right now now
⏹️ ▶️ John now this is the best we have so tough luck but the m7 would be the one that i would want to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are you gonna wait is it not that you're gonna buy a used one but you're just gonna keep freaking waiting so i could
⏹️ ▶️ John clearly not choose the wine in front of me casey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he's going to switch to a desktop laptop and get the new ultra touch screen because you love laptops and touch screens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much yeah i love them so much
⏹️ ▶️ John um so all that said it it demands a
⏹️ ▶️ John specific strategy from me what should i do in this situation again i screwed up i'm in a
⏹️ ▶️ John bind i i'm in a tight situation this is the wrong time for me personally to buy a new computer
⏹️ ▶️ John according to everything that i believe in in terms of new product buying again cars tvs computers everything
⏹️ ▶️ John uh and yet somehow i need some new thing should i go back on ebay and find one of those mac minis and buy i
⏹️ ▶️ John was scouting i almost like a lot of these on ebay are scams obviously so i got to be careful but there was like a
⏹️ ▶️ John and i think it was like an m2 ultra max studio with a huge amount of ram and like a like
⏹️ ▶️ John a four terabyte ssd or something for like a thousand bucks or something i'm like this has to be fake
⏹️ ▶️ John but i was interested right like not that i'm you know cause again you can't find a mini
⏹️ ▶️ John like you feel you feel bad buying a crappy like M two base mini or something for like 900 bucks but then you're like
⏹️ ▶️ John M two ultra max studio for like less than two grand you know like with a buy it now but it
⏹️ ▶️ John seemed like it was a scam so you know you gotta be careful out there people and if it looks too good to be true it probably is but
⏹️ ▶️ John i i looked into a lot of that and so here i am should i go back to ebay and find something different and let me tell you
⏹️ ▶️ John things have not gotten better on ebay in the time since i've been making these decisions um
⏹️ ▶️ John so this here's the strategy i came up with i need something
⏹️ ▶️ John that i normally never get which is a laptop no
⏹️ ▶️ John never which is a short term mac a tide me over computer
⏹️ ▶️ John i need something to just get me over this hump we're in a difficult period sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John when the chips are down you got to do whatever it takes to survive like in goodfellas when you're in
⏹️ ▶️ John the slammer you can do whatever it takes to survive but when you come back on the outside you got to leave the junk alone so paulie says
⏹️ ▶️ John right you know understand you got to do and so i'm i'm in the slammer i got to do what it takes to survive
⏹️ ▶️ John until until my m8 or m9 ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John mac studio whatever arrives because that's the computer i want to buy i don't want to buy
⏹️ ▶️ John an m5 anything mac studio i want to buy something that's after the m7 after it's
⏹️ ▶️ John like they really figure out what these things are going to be for because like this is basically the turn here you know
⏹️ ▶️ John unless something dramatic changes uh apple is still not particularly interested in gaming but apple seems
⏹️ ▶️ John to really be pointing their high performance computing at
⏹️ ▶️ John ai related stuff which makes sense in the world that we're living in and it just so happens that apple's hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John is actually pretty good at ai related stuff and i can see a future for myself where instead of paying
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever dollars per month to some company for their coding agent i can
⏹️ ▶️ John run something that is as good as what i'm currently paying them to run on their servers on my M nine
⏹️ ▶️ John based mac studio at some point in the future right
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey obviously by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then you're you're not going to buy a computer for like five years is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that what we're concluding just
⏹️ ▶️ John we're getting there oh
⏹️ ▶️ John but this is this is this is what i'm thinking this is my strategy here which is like obviously by then
⏹️ ▶️ John the ones that run the servers will be better still so i'll still probably want to use them but there is a certain baseline
⏹️ ▶️ John utility of like let's say like a you know current and former sponsor anthropic
⏹️ ▶️ John fable 5 level model that you could run on your mac locally in some years
⏹️ ▶️ John in the future again the server ones are going to be better by then right but
⏹️ ▶️ John something fable caliber locally basically for free a fable
⏹️ ▶️ John caliber thing can do a lot of mundane tasks coding wise like not maybe your super hard ones not
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe find the obscure bug or whatever but like just run of the mill like write me this automation script do this thing whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John i think that is going to be attainable locally on macs at some point in the future but only for people who have
⏹️ ▶️ John the big honking max so it's like why do you ever buy a big honking max my answer used to be so i can run pc games at high frame
⏹️ ▶️ John rates when i reboot into windows that answer is not the case for so many reasons now
⏹️ ▶️ John um but my answer in the future i think will be and this is this is a use case that was not a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing before coding agents existed and were good right now it's like i would like to be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to run powerful coding agents locally at some point in my future that's the big honking computer i
⏹️ ▶️ John want to buy again and m8 m9 m10 like who knows what the future holds
⏹️ ▶️ John but i feel like in that timeline that's the one i want to buy but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey i do have to buy a
⏹️ ▶️ John now because i can't keep running intel i have to i have to buy something so
⏹️ ▶️ John what do i buy i need a tide me over computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of marco's mac minis
⏹️ ▶️ John no he should probably if i had known it all he had all these spares i should have just seen if i get the friend price that would have really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right i mean we could talk about it but you they're all base models you wouldn't want any of them
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem that's the problem so and oh and as we've discussed on past episodes like i've got the eight terabyte problem like i have a four
⏹️ ▶️ John terabyte ssd and it is absolutely full which is why i made a program that saves disk space and i use my own program all
⏹️ ▶️ John the time to save me from death constantly i'm at the ragged edge of constantly
⏹️ ▶️ John every time we do an episode it's another few hundred megabytes it's not helping like i'm so close to filling
⏹️ ▶️ John my drive and i have a four terabyte drive and the only choice above four if you want an internal drive from
⏹️ ▶️ John apple is you got to go to eight and then you're mortgaging your house so how do i deal with this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay so i'm guessing well
⏹️ ▶️ John you already had your guess you don't need
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to guess now
⏹️ ▶️ John after I've explained everything
⏹️ ▶️ John all right so here let me just tell you what i've done i have ordered a computer and i ordered it like
⏹️ ▶️ John very early in the day because i i had sort of gone through this process in my head multiple times then once i saw the reality
⏹️ ▶️ John i'm like it slotted into one of my decision trees um i ordered myself
⏹️ ▶️ John a mac studio because i'm not going to get a laptop We're not going to get a mac mini
⏹️ ▶️ John i ordered myself a mac studio the m5 max because it's a
⏹️ ▶️ John tide me over computer Mm hmm. 64 gigs of ram which is less
⏹️ ▶️ John wait which m5 max the binn or unbinned well so i got the unbinned
⏹️ ▶️ John because that's the one nice thing i did for myself because as you are correct
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you cannot abide a partial processor i cannot stomach a bin
⏹️ ▶️ John cpu if it comes with parts they should all work
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly so and and in the grand scheme of things going from bin to unbin with my other specs wasn't
⏹️ ▶️ John that bad so yeah the the unbinned one 64 gigs of ram which is less than my
⏹️ ▶️ John mac pro has but i mean the thing is my wife's computer has 64 gigs of ram OK, and so i'm
⏹️ ▶️ John using golden gate with 64 gigs of ram it constantly has four people logged into it all families logged into
⏹️ ▶️ John it because we're all home right now um and with everybody logged into it and everybody doing what they normally
⏹️ ▶️ John do on the computer and then me using xcode 64 gigs i'm able to get by with four people logged
⏹️ ▶️ John in so i think i mean again 96 what i got on the mac pro that was part of my like indulgence for myself and i basically said
⏹️ ▶️ John it means i never have to think about ram and it's true what i do on a mac pro ram becomes not a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that is in my mind at all i don't even know if i even touch swap so i don't need 96
⏹️ ▶️ John unless i was doing llm stuff which again i'm not um 64 and you know basically it's
⏹️ ▶️ John your only real option because of the configurator and a four terabyte ssd
⏹️ ▶️ John okay why because that's what he has now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes but you hate it
⏹️ ▶️ John i know so here's here's the strategy okay so first of all let me just tell you what that that config costs max
⏹️ ▶️ John studio m5 max unbin 64 gigs ram four terabyte SSD is $5,300. obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John i'm going to get discounts okay um leasing it's 106
⏹️ ▶️ John per month for three years and if you did that lease at the end you'd have about 1500
⏹️ ▶️ John bucks left to pay on it i didn't really seriously consider the lease mostly because i
⏹️ ▶️ John don't know how it works with like apple discounts you know what i mean and i didn't want to navigate
⏹️ ▶️ John that like getting to other people being nice and helping me get discounts i'm like oh but can i also do the lease i didn't
⏹️ ▶️ John like i don't know what the deal with that is so i just didn't bother figuring it out also because i
⏹️ ▶️ John don't know what the delivery timelines are going to be like which is why i ordered this computer within like an hour and a half of it being announced
⏹️ ▶️ John and i did get september 22nd delivery
⏹️ ▶️ John now here is the strategy how am i going to live with this have i just screwed myself yeah you got a tide me over computer but you haven't improved
⏹️ ▶️ John anything you're getting computer with less ram and the exact same amount of storage now you're screwed well here's what i did
⏹️ ▶️ John because i looked at that eight terabyte option a lot but it's just it's just so much it becomes not a tide me over computer
⏹️ ▶️ John it becomes like a you know a big beefy computer but it's not a big beefy computer that i want so what i
⏹️ ▶️ John did was i bought a samsung ssd samsung four terabyte ssd
⏹️ ▶️ Casey god that's so much cheaper than it is from apple
⏹️ ▶️ John now that ssd used to be like 300 bucks before all this happened so it's doubled in price from what it used
⏹️ ▶️ John to be but compared to apple's prices compared to getting a four terabyte internal and a four terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ John external from samsung it's like a rounding error compared to getting an eight terabyte internal and
⏹️ ▶️ John my plan is photo library on the external disk so right away because
⏹️ ▶️ John my photo library is more than half of my four terabyte ssd it's more than 50 of my drive is just the photo
⏹️ ▶️ John library okay so it makes a lot of sense immediately i have a less than half filled
⏹️ ▶️ John main drive and i have a roughly half filled photos
⏹️ ▶️ John drive so i got the uh it's a samsung 990 evo we'll put a link in the the show notes i
⏹️ ▶️ John think there's only like one or two left in stock but it may be lower price than it used to be i just put in
⏹️ ▶️ John the chat room if anyone wants to buy the lone remaining one um it's not a particularly fast fancy
⏹️ ▶️ John ssd but you can't beat the price it was it was like 40 something percent off on amazon that's why i got that
⏹️ ▶️ John okay and i got uh i had to find a case for it which was way harder than finding the ssd
⏹️ ▶️ John um i wanted a thunderbolt 5 case i didn't care about usb
⏹️ ▶️ John the case like you can get a case for these like a thunderbolt 5 enclosure for for an ssd
⏹️ ▶️ John that costs like 200 bucks so you're paying 600 bucks for the ssd and 200 bucks for the case it's
⏹️ ▶️ John rough so i found a cheaper one i got this for like 150 bucks from owc it's it is thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John 5 but it doesn't like the i don't either doesn't have usb at all or if it does it's super slow
⏹️ ▶️ John i think this is the one that doesn't have usb at all so if you don't have a thunderbolt computer you can't use this but i don't care it's going to be permanently
⏹️ ▶️ John attached to the back of my mac studio so i don't care about it so yeah that's my
⏹️ ▶️ John tide me over computer and i can tell you with the discounts that i ordered it i got out the door for the
⏹️ ▶️ John just for the mac studio not counting like the the external SSD. i got out the door for less than five grand
⏹️ ▶️ John this is my tide me over m5 max mac studio with the only indulgence that i
⏹️ ▶️ John gave myself was an unbinned soc everything else is cut down to the
⏹️ ▶️ John bare minimum i think 64 gigs of ram will be fine again based on my experience i think the split
⏹️ ▶️ John ssd thing will be annoying to me again my strategy with that is like uh the reason i always like to have it all in one is because
⏹️ ▶️ John it's just so much simpler from a backup perspective but i'm just gonna have to deal with the complexity because the savings
⏹️ ▶️ John are significant if i had if the only change that i had made from on this computer has gone
⏹️ ▶️ John from four to eight it becomes a $7,300 retail computer from a 5300 just two thousand dollar
⏹️ ▶️ John difference and i took you know less than like a quarter of that two thousand dollar difference
⏹️ ▶️ John and put it towards the external drive and enclosure and everything like that so yeah not a great
⏹️ ▶️ John time for me to be buying a computer but i did have to buy a computer and i did buy a computer and it's
⏹️ ▶️ John not the computer of my dreams but it is a computer and oh here's my other strategy with this this is my wife's next computer
⏹️ ▶️ John she's got a Mac studio now it's fine for her now by the time the m8 or m9 is
⏹️ ▶️ John out that probably won't be fine anymore maybe macOS will drop it she's got an m1 max max studio with 64
⏹️ ▶️ John gigs of ram performs
⏹️ ▶️ John everything she needs perfectly fine it's a great computer it's faster at xcode than my computer obviously right
⏹️ ▶️ John like everything about it is great she has no problems with it but someday support for it will drop this is her future computer
⏹️ ▶️ John an m5 an unbin m5 max max studio with 64 gigs of ram and a four terabyte SSD.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all right that that i was going to try to talk you out of doing this but that last bit with replacing your wife's on that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cycle i think that actually makes a lot of sense
⏹️ ▶️ John that's also the reason that i'm
⏹️ ▶️ John too uh too worried about not having the lease because a lease would make sense oh it's a tidy me over computer you should totally lease it and
⏹️ ▶️ John then give it back that's perfectly what you do but it's like no this computer has a future purpose in life
⏹️ ▶️ John and it will be fine for that purpose for her computer especially if three years from now one or both
⏹️ ▶️ John of my children are out of the house we'll see how that goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah i think the the only thing i would caution you against is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if your assumptions about three years from now or whenever that is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if one of two things happens either it doesn't go in that direction and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know and they they're just incrementally better with three regular years of progress or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and or what if three years from now computer resources are even more expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the the expected fall from from you know an increase in supply either hasn't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happened or demand has just continued to increase and so we still haven't caught up with supply
⏹️ ▶️ John i mean i mean you kind of know the answer to that because i do feel like an m an unbinned m5
⏹️ ▶️ John max with 64 gigs of ram and a total of eight terabytes of storage attached to it can
⏹️ ▶️ John last me a pretty long time again i'm on seven years of using an intel mac pro
⏹️ ▶️ John uh that was like similarly specced with like you know half the storage and you know ancient cpu
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything i i i could use this computer this tide me over computer i could use it for seven years easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i'm not saying you can't use it i i'm just saying like if your plan right now is all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right i'm gonna i'm gonna sacrifice i'm gonna compromise john you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a man of compromise
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not with your computer you're not
⏹️ ▶️ John here's the thing waiting waiting is a compromise when the when i'm not buying stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John i'm not getting fancier faster hardware that is a compromise like i always want to buy at the right
⏹️ ▶️ John time to buy but in the times in between especially the end of it i'm using older slower crappier
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that is a compromise like there's no there there's no free lunch here you're always taking trade-offs like i
⏹️ ▶️ John will be i mean if it's not three years if it's four years if it's five years like i'm fine with that um
⏹️ ▶️ John because that's what i'm forced to do in this situation like i i think put it this way i would be less happy with
⏹️ ▶️ John like a mini or something because i do want something first of all i want it to be you know
⏹️ ▶️ John faster than any of the max that we have faster than like because i do feel like the m5 max is
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be faster than you know this is the other thing people like why didn't you just get a laptop at that point my
⏹️ ▶️ John my own brother even said to me you you end up buying this computer you could have just bought a laptop like three months ago
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah but here's the thing if you if i was to get the 14 inch version of this same specs that's 800
⏹️ ▶️ John more and if i was to get the 16 inch it's uh 1100 more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John because they have
⏹️ ▶️ John like it makes sense that they cost more but there's no way in hell i'm going to pay even 800 extra
⏹️ ▶️ John for a screen keyboard and trackpad that i despise not the screen the screen is good but like whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John i was never going to get a laptop so with me getting this m5 max it is the fastest
⏹️ ▶️ John especially if you can't sustain performance mac that you can buy that's not the ridiculous ultra and so i think
⏹️ ▶️ John i'll be happy with it in that regard i mean and part of the the reason i know i'll like this is using my
⏹️ ▶️ John wife's m1 max and xcode i'm like wow this computer is fast like because i'm using i'm using
⏹️ ▶️ John my intel computer like certain things in xcode takes so much longer um my you know again
⏹️ ▶️ John is slower than an iphone right so i i'm i'm sure when i get this i will be
⏹️ ▶️ John overjoyed and everything will be fast and the storage that's the other reason i didn't want the m4 model because i knew the m5 models have
⏹️ ▶️ John faster storage the storage is faster i don't care about the ultimate speed of the photo library that's
⏹️ ▶️ John more about bulk storage so i i think this will work out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah i guess i i guess my my my worry here is that your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tide me over computer is just one of your computers like this is just going to be your computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the next x years and if x is you know more than a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh i feel like you you might be disappointing your future self by compromising now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in ways that if you were buying it to be your your next six to seven year computer you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would not necessarily want those same compromises
⏹️ ▶️ John well so here's the thing uh i also have expenses even though i only have one child in college i
⏹️ ▶️ John still do have two and a half more years of paying for that college and her college is more expensive than my son's college
⏹️ ▶️ John uh there are other there are other expenses in my life that make it not the right time for me to buy
⏹️ ▶️ John a eight to ten thousand dollar computer or
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco anything like that as much as Casey thinks i would love to get that computer
⏹️ ▶️ John like it's just it's just not financially responsible for me to be doing that i'm I'm paying for
⏹️ ▶️ John a whole bunch of things especially like in these you know this part of the year and it's just maybe you know
⏹️ ▶️ John it's just it's not it's not the right time for multiple reasons so this compromise is
⏹️ ▶️ John something i have to do and if i if i use this computer for five years and then replace it i will still consider
⏹️ ▶️ John it a tide me over computer if i use it for seven i'm like well tidy me over lasted longer but i still think i'll be
⏹️ ▶️ John i won't be as in dire straits as i am with this mac pro now in seven years because seven years from now
⏹️ ▶️ John first of all the M five max is not in any danger of being obsoleted or no longer supported by mac
⏹️ ▶️ John os because it is basically their second newest chip that they have or third newest i guess cause you've
⏹️ ▶️ John got the ultra and the m6 um and it'll certainly have enough power and i don't i expect
⏹️ ▶️ John there not to be another architecture transition in the next five to seven years so yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John this basically gives me the leeway to wait and like if the m7 comes out and it's not exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John what i want i'll be like oh i'll wait to see what the m eight does and if the m8 isn't what i want to go, i'll wait till the m9 once the n10
⏹️ ▶️ John comes out i'll be like well maybe i have to buy this one but it's not ideal but sometimes you got to do what
⏹️ ▶️ John you got to do and this is what i have to do right now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey i am quite shocked to be honest with you i'm not saying that you're making the wrong choice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey i i i don't love the way you're handling storage but i do understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you're saying and it is certainly the more frugal well not even frugal it's the it's the more intelligent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey approach i would argue is to do what you're doing uh i just i i wouldn't want to be bothered
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn't work out and like having the split storage and third party external storage for my drive ends up being a disaster
⏹️ ▶️ John it'll be good content for the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is true uh no i think this does make a lot of sense i am very surprised this is the route you're going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but i think it makes a lot of sense so you think sitting here today and obviously you don't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what what the future will bring but you think this is a two to three year computer would be your guess
⏹️ ▶️ John no it's at least three years i would say three to five is my guess somewhere between three and five um and if it goes to seven
⏹️ ▶️ John then i will have uh miscalculated but uh you know like i said even if it goes to seven i think i'll
⏹️ ▶️ John be fine because i won't be in a crisis like i am now you know what i mean like in seven years like it's not gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John like oh my god i need a new computer i can't get anything done on this i'm using my wife's computer it's too slow it's not like i won't be like that
⏹️ ▶️ John in seven years i'll just be like oh i guess this wasn't a tide me over after all but like that's that's kind of my line between
⏹️ ▶️ John what's a tide me over and honestly after the you know the discontinuation of the mac pro
⏹️ ▶️ John like that dream ended with the mac pro and like any computer i was going to get was going to be like well
⏹️ ▶️ John i'm forced to get the lesser offerings like the same thing with the m2 ultra mac pro like that would have i would have considered
⏹️ ▶️ John that a weird compromise and a lesser offering that i never would have bought anyway because it's the same as a studio for my purpose right
⏹️ ▶️ John so i'm kind of out of that phase for a while and like we said before with your Believe shirt hey in a decade
⏹️ ▶️ John if they reintroduce the mac pro maybe i'll be back in business but i'm it's i'm in a down period now i'm
⏹️ ▶️ John like it's like the rebuilding decade for like sports teams it's like
⏹️ ▶️ John you're not going to win any championships anytime soon so just hunker down do what you got to do and then wake up in a decade
⏹️ ▶️ John and see if apple has changed its mind about high-end computing wow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well i'm shocked i am genuinely shocked clearly marco gets the win on this one even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though both of us were wrong i feel like marco was much closer to the right
⏹️ ▶️ John he had the right instinct but he just didn't lean as heavily into how much this is not the right time for me to buy a computer
⏹️ ▶️ John feel that how much this is not it's wrong it's the wrong time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah i i don't know if i can do the rest of the episode I'm truly shocked
“New” keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I will soldier on for you, the listener. We do have a few more things that were announced. There are new keyboards,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mark Ehrman writes. Apple also launched new Mac external keyboards, but they're virtually identical to the prior
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ones. Minor labeling changes on the keys to match the recent MacBook Neo or Air updates.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you've done some science and some research. The old one is the, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just bought like a month ago, maybe two months ago, is MXK83LL
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash A. And you can tell that that's the one because the home button, this is for the um, extended
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keyboard, the home button has the word home on it, page up and page down have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the words page up and page down, and so on. The new one is MJM74LL
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash A, where the home and page up, page down, among other things,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are all symbols now. Um, This is the magic keyboard with Touch ID and numeric keypad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Mac models with Apple silicon USB-C, US English black keys. We'll put a link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't, I'm assuming this is what they did on the Neo. Like, again, they added FN on the FN key, whereas like the older
⏹️ ▶️ John model doesn't have it. It's just got the globe. Both of these don't have control in the lower left corner. They have
⏹️ ▶️ John the stupid globe slash FN key there. I hate, really hate that they don't say home
⏹️ ▶️ John end and page up and page down anymore because, first of all, the home and end symbols, it's like they
⏹️ ▶️ John don't read as home and end to me. But second, page up and page down are up and down arrows.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I know they don't use
⏹️ ▶️ John on the arrow keys. They use triangles, but it's like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ John say page up or page down. If someone looked at that keyboard, they'd be forgiven for thinking that was the up and down arrow,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it's not. Just below it is the actual up and down arrow. I think this is a big regression. I don't like the symbols.
⏹️ ▶️ John I i mean, maybe this helps with like internationalization or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like clear doesn't say clear anymore. It has like a a box with an X in it. It looks like someone typed a, like the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John Unicode character or it's like the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco character encoding.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like there's no character in this font. Like it's just shift doesn't say shift. It's just got the up arrow. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it just seems like a savings for money where like they don't have to put words on it. And there's,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't like it at all. But I will reiterate, as we discussed in past episode, I, in anticipation
⏹️ ▶️ John of me getting a new computer, saw this when it came up recently. I was like, oh yeah, they screwed up the keyboards, didn't they?
⏹️ ▶️ John They got rid of the, in particular, I can't stand not having the control key in the lower left. I mean, it's there, but it's half
⏹️ ▶️ John size and it's not in the corner anymore. So I bought on eBay the model that
⏹️ ▶️ John I like, which is MMR3LL-A or slash A.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's the A2520 model, but that's the particular Apple part number for the particular color and
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah. But the point is, is an extended keyboard. It's got touch ID. The control key is full
⏹️ ▶️ John size, the full double width thing in the lower left corner, and it says home end and page up and page down on
⏹️ ▶️ John it. That's what I want. And that's what I got. It's sitting here next to me sealed in the box. When my Mac Studio
⏹️ ▶️ John comes, that is what I'm connecting to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that's lightning, isn't it? Or is that also USB-C?
⏹️ ▶️ John It's lightning on one end, but it's USB-C on the other. And the Mac Studio doesn't know or doesn't care what's on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And I can do it through
⏹️ ▶️ John Bluetooth if I wanted, but I don't.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it's gross. I don't love it, but I mean, I hear the logic there. I don't love it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Especially if you're using it wired. It doesn't really matter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer. It's like, the wire is not impairing my keyboarding, believe me.
New Polishing Cloth!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then we have possibly the biggest news of this entire episode. There is a new polishing cloth. Emma
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Roth at The Verge writes: Apple just dropped a new polishing cloth, and unlike its refreshed Mac Mini
⏹️ ▶️ Casey models, it comes with price cut, as spotted earlier by Mac Rumors. The polishing cloth is still made with soft,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey non-abrasive material, but costs $9 instead of $19. Doesn't look like anything else has changed as the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey description matches the archived version of Apple's old polishing cloth, which it no longer lists on its
⏹️ ▶️ Casey website. And we'll put a link to both The Verge and Mac Rumors in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh Starry Horizon says that the new polishing cloth is about the same size as the old one, but a lot less
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stiff. They say it's more like the Nanotexture or Apple Vision Pro polishing cloth.
⏹️ ▶️ John That's my complaint about Apple's polishing cloths. Like I got one with my Pro Display XDR, and they were just so stiff. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John who you, how do you even use this? It's just like, you know, normally you take a polishing cloth and like you wrap
⏹️ ▶️ John it around your fingers or hands so like you're you're touching the screen with a small area so you can get some force on it. But this thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John so stiff, it's like you have to put the entire pad against the screen or something. It's just, it's weird. I'm not a fan of the polishing cloths,
⏹️ ▶️ John but yes, they continue to update them and sell them, apparently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, I would be remiss if I didn't mention uh, our friend Quinn Nelson's shop, Copeland dot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey supply, not a sponsor, but a friend, uh, where he has the Cloth Pro Max for $18,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is a very, very good. I have one and it's great.
⏹️ ▶️ John He just got undercut by Apple on price, though. Yeah, sure did. Because he was 18 and they were 19. Look, it's cheaper, but now they're down to
⏹️ ▶️ John nine. you know, if there's one thing getting cheaper on Apple's website, it's the polishing cloth. Well, it doesn't have any RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thank you to our sponsor this episode, Tailscale. And thank you to our members who support us directly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can join us at ATP.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic in addition to all those specials that we talked about earlier, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also do a weekly bonus topic after every episode, a little bit more that we just couldn't fit into the main show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This time we're going to be covering a recent benchmark to suggest: is macOS slower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than Linux when performing file system operations? Join Underlisten, atp.fm slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco join. Thank you so much, everybody. We'll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's KC Liss, M-A-R-C-O,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann A-R-M, E-N-T, Marco, Armen, S-I-R-A-C,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann U-S-A-S-Ira. It's accidental, accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann They didn't mean to accidental, accidental. Check
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann the podcast so long.
John’s new vibe-coded app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you've been busy apparently, and I genuinely know almost nothing beyond that. So, what have you been up to?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I apologize in advance for having a casey like wind up for this, but I feel like it's important for
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, calm down. It's just, it's a point of pride. It's just uh, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John so, uh, we'll link in the show notes to my blog post about my three existing Mac apps: front and
⏹️ ▶️ John center, switchglass, and hyperspace. And if you read through those blog posts, like they're like the announcement posts
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, here's this app and here's why I made it and stuff. And with the exception of hyperspace,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially the explanation for front and center and switchglass, it's basically like um, I
⏹️ ▶️ John used to use a bunch of apps on my Mac and then, uh, you know, and one particular drag
⏹️ ▶️ John thing by James Thompson. It stopped being developed and I kind of needed the functionality
⏹️ ▶️ John was provided because I'm so used to using my Mac with that functionality and it was hard to find in other apps. And so I'm like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that's what got me to do Mac development in the first place. That's what finally got me to do it after all these years. It's like, no
⏹️ ▶️ John one is making this weird little app that I want. I'm going to make it myself. I used to use DragThing for this. Dragthing
⏹️ ▶️ John is no more. I used to use a bunch of other apps for it. They're also gone. I'm going to have to make this myself. So Front
⏹️ ▶️ John and Center was the first one. like the simplest little app you can possibly imagine. And then switch glass was the second one. And
⏹️ ▶️ John drag thing. Uh, people who don't know back in the day, both on Classic Mac OS and on a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS 10, um, let you put, make like these little palettes on the screen with
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff in them. And one of the kind of palettes you could make was an application switcher palette. And also, just as
⏹️ ▶️ John a side, inside the DragThing settings, there was like a checkbox that said, and by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John make a Mac OS 10 look work like classic Mac OS when clicking on Windows. So the features
⏹️ ▶️ John of front and center used to be in dragthing. And the features of Switch Glass used to be in DragThing. And DragThing did tons
⏹️ ▶️ John more stuff too. But I'm like, these are the features that I missed the most from DragThing. I missed the
⏹️ ▶️ John front and center thing, which is when you click on a window for another app, what happens is it brings just that window to the front or all the windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John They changed that behavior in macOS 10. I could never get used to it. Both behaviors are useful, but I wanted to have the option
⏹️ ▶️ John to use one or the other and switch between them by shift clicking, which is what DragThing gave me. So I made front
⏹️ ▶️ John and center. Switch Glass. I wanted a little application switcher. Why do you want that? Don't you just use the dock? It's just, I just
⏹️ ▶️ John could not live without it. I just got used to it. The dock has stuff besides other apps in it. It's got the trash.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's got folders. I do use those features. I just wanted an app switcher. So I'm running Switch Glass with my app switcher in the upper
⏹️ ▶️ John right and the dock also visible. It's just the way I want to do it. These are the weird little apps I made, but you can see how the first
⏹️ ▶️ John two apps I made were just entirely motivated by DragThing goes away.
⏹️ ▶️ John Blame James Thompson because I needed that functionality. And they were just very
⏹️ ▶️ John focused. It was like, why don't you combine Switch Glass and Front and Center? You know, DragThing just had a checkbox in there. Why not just make Front and Center
⏹️ ▶️ John a checkbox in Switch Glass? I'm like, no, I just want little turdy apps that just do one particular thing. They're paid
⏹️ ▶️ John up front. There's no subscription. You buy them once. People bought front and center five years ago for eight bucks or five
⏹️ ▶️ John bucks or whatever I was charging for it. Then they just have this app forever. And Switch Glass, it's
⏹️ ▶️ John just an application switcher. And it's ridiculously configurable in appearance because this is what I wanted,
⏹️ ▶️ John but whatever. People probably just use the defaults and probably nobody uses it but me, but I like it. And I run these
⏹️ ▶️ John apps 24-7. When I'm using my Mac, front and center and Switch Glass are running. And Hyperspace, of course, I'm using to try to save my
⏹️ ▶️ John disk space, which is, and hyperspace was like, hey, this is my first real app that's not super weird because
⏹️ ▶️ John it's like, nobody wants front and center and Switchglass except for me. OK, But hyperspace, that's
⏹️ ▶️ John potentially useful to a lot of people. A lot of people have want to save disk space without deleting files. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm like, finally, I'm out of this stupid corner of making weird little apps that
⏹️ ▶️ John are just for me. Hyperspace, even though it is still, you know, it's a Mac app, first of all. So right away, I'm eliminating
⏹️ ▶️ John most of the population of the planet because it's just the way it is. And also it's a pretty nerdy Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John app, but it's not as, you know, narrowly focused as front and center and Switchglass. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought I had gotten out of the dark alleyway of making tiny little apps
⏹️ ▶️ John that only satisfy some need for me. But when was Switchglass out?
⏹️ ▶️ John Wow, six years ago, 2020. Jeez. Anyway, Switchglass apparently has been out for six years.
⏹️ ▶️ John And during that time, lots of people would have feature requests for Switch Glass. You should add this. You should add that. And I was like, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John it just switches apps. It's right in the name. It's just, it's a switcher. Yeah, I could add other stuff, but I'm not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to. But here's the thing. There's one more feature from DragThing that Switch
⏹️ ▶️ John Glass doesn't do because it's narrow and focused that I miss. I basically just use the app switcher,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I also had like another DragThing palette that had like some folders in it. And in the macOS
⏹️ ▶️ John X age without DragThing, what I do instead is I put folders on the lower left corner of my desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ John I generally keep a mostly clean desktop, but I always just have like permanently like the stupid on-screen climate
⏹️ ▶️ John controls and your touchscreen EV. Permanently in the bottom left corner of my screen, I
⏹️ ▶️ John have a set of folders. But you know, unlike a DragThing
⏹️ ▶️ John palette or something else, the desktop gets covered sometimes and you can't get to the folders. And I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I should just extend Switch Glass with a feature that says, oh, and by the way, you can also make a little palette with some folders
⏹️ ▶️ John on it and put it somewhere else. And I like, I basically implemented this like in a branch
⏹️ ▶️ John of Switch Glass. Like, I don't know. I'm so bad at guessing. If you'd ask me how old is Switchglass, I would never have guessed
⏹️ ▶️ John six years. But probably three or four years ago, I implemented in Switch Glass this feature.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's like, oh, and you can also have one other palette for the hell of it that you can put some folders in and click them and they
⏹️ ▶️ John open the folders in Finder. Like, that's it. That's the whole freaking feature. Okay. But I was like, oh, what
⏹️ ▶️ John like Switch Glass is supposed to be focused? I don't want to add this on. And like, how confusing
⏹️ ▶️ John is it going to be? It's like, so you have an app Switchglass is an app switcher and also a little place where you can
⏹️ ▶️ John put folders. Like, what the hell? Like, it doesn't make any, and like, how do I fit it into the preferences? Do I make another dialogue
⏹️ ▶️ John box for it? How do I explain the functionality? Like, it's incoherent. And so even though I implemented
⏹️ ▶️ John it, I'm like, this is not the right place for Switchglass. Also, I don't know if you remember, but Switchglass, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John 2020, it's Swift UI, like the view itself is Swift UI. But SwiftUI in 2020
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac was garbage. It didn't do anything. It's still not great. But
⏹️ ▶️ John like all of like the drag reordering of like collection views and stuff that you
⏹️ ▶️ John take for granted like UIKit and AppKit and stuff did not exist in any way. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John hand rolled every single part of it. It's like an entirely custom UI. Hand rolled
⏹️ ▶️ John at like great pain and expense to look and behave exactly the way I want it to.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is, this is like, this is ancient SwiftUI code. This predates at observable. It is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John remember at state object versus
⏹️ ▶️ John Remember at published? That's what Switchglass is.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It is the oldest,
⏹️ ▶️ John creakiest uh, Swift UI code you've ever seen. It supports OSs like back
⏹️ ▶️ John really far. Okay. It was like, obviously it's smarter than the OS that was, that was new in 2020, but it supports even back
⏹️ ▶️ John even farther. Like, And I don't want to cut off support for that. It's like, it's like, you should modernize Switchglass. It
⏹️ ▶️ John would be so much easier to write with modern APIs. But like, I don't want to just like abandon the old OSs at this point. And maybe I should eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway. But like, that still doesn't solve the problem of where to add this functionality. So I was just stuck. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I'll just go back to the folders on the desktop. Like, I've, I've been using the little folders in the corner of
⏹️ ▶️ John my desktop forever. I'll survive without it. And here's the thing. Folders in the corner of your desktop, nobody wants
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, that's even worse than front and center. It's like, you're going to make that a separate app? You're not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to put it into Switch Glass. You're not going to modernize Switch Glass. Switch Glass does what you want it to do. Why would you go in there and add new bugs
⏹️ ▶️ John by modernizing? And like, So I was just stuck. Along comes the magic
⏹️ ▶️ John of vibe coding. I'm like, this is the solution to my problem. I'm just going to vibe code
⏹️ ▶️ John a new modern app to make a little palette with like five folders in it and stick it in the corner of my
⏹️ ▶️ John screen. That'll be my solution. No one else ever needs to use this app. It'll be just for me. I won't muck
⏹️ ▶️ John up Switch Glass. It's not going to screw up like the purity of my apps. It's not going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John hard to explain. No one else even needs to know it exists and it will solve my problem. And, you know, and I know this is totally
⏹️ ▶️ John within the realm of vibe coding because how hard is this? It's the easiest thing in the world. So I did. I vibe coded two seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, okay, there you go. It's a little thing and you put make a little palette and you put some folders in it
⏹️ ▶️ John and it's great. um And then, you know, because vibe coding is fun and you're
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, you know, I went off and did it and did some other things. Then you argue with it about stuff and blah, blah, blah. And then eventually, all right. So it's
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. You're like, you know, I've got some other ideas that I was interested in trying.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I was doing this on macOS 27, so I could use
⏹️ ▶️ John all the fancy new APIs. And I told the my little coding
⏹️ ▶️ John agent, I said, you know, the materials that you get in macOS that I give in Switch
⏹️ ▶️ John Glass and everything of like the various like different tints of backgrounds and stuff, like and and in Tahoe, they
⏹️ ▶️ John added clear glass and regular glass and tinted glass to add to that collection.
⏹️ ▶️ John None of those materials is what the dock looks like. Like Apple does something custom for the dock.
⏹️ ▶️ John so I'm like, oh, coding agent, I know you love to decompile. Figure out how the doc oh my
⏹️ ▶️ John what it does And then make me a material that does what the doc does.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it went off and did its thing. And it found like there's like these recipe files and materials
⏹️ ▶️ John files in the dock. And there's also a whole bunch of private APIs, as you could imagine, that only the doc uses that are not available.
⏹️ ▶️ John you know like And it found all this stuff and it was like, hey, uh I've implemented the doc
⏹️ ▶️ John material. And it was close. And I was like, it's not quite the same. And I, you know, I worked out this whole thing of like, here, you can tell whether
⏹️ ▶️ John you're exactly the doc. Like make it, make it just like the doc. And eventually it did. Obviously using
⏹️ ▶️ John private APIs and all sorts of like, you know, unholy things that would never fly in the Mac App Store or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, But now I had this modern app with modern Swift UI that gave
⏹️ ▶️ John me the little feature that I wanted that I could also make it look like the dock, which was fun. And then I
⏹️ ▶️ John got a little bit mad with power and I was like, but that's the dock in macOS 27. The dock looks different in macOS
⏹️ ▶️ John 26 and it looks different again in macOS 15. So I need to make like a little toolkit to
⏹️ ▶️ John let it figure out with how the dock worked on all those other computers and simulate those. And so I did. I
⏹️ ▶️ John said, hey, do that. I want to be able to pick dock on the current
⏹️ ▶️ John dock on macOS 27, dock on macOS 26, dock on macOS 15.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the fun of vibe coding because I'm like, I'm not sitting in front of the computer while it's doing this. I'm like doing other things. And it
⏹️ ▶️ John did that. I was like, oh, what am I doing here? This is supposed to just be like my toy project
⏹️ ▶️ John for me. And I already have what I want out of it. And all this cool doc stuff, like no one's ever going
⏹️ ▶️ John to see this. Like, I can't put this on the Mac App Store, obviously. It's all private APIs. Nobody cares. Like, basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John what these LLM coding agents did is they made me like one 10,000th of a Gearambo. You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, this is not a skill that I have. Like, I can't reverse engineer these things.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't know how to go spelunking in their files and figure it out. He could do it. And obviously the LLM
⏹️ ▶️ John can do it somewhat, but like, like this is just like a glimpse of what it's like to have like, again, one 10,000th
⏹️ ▶️ John of the skill of someone who actually knows how to do this stuff. But it was fun. It was a thing. Here's, I'll put it this way.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's a thing that I personally could not have done without a coding agent because I don't
⏹️ ▶️ John have those particular skills at all. And yeah, you could learn them, but like I feel like at this point in life, like I'm
⏹️ ▶️ John never going to become one 10,000th of a Gear Rambo. I've just, I've got the coding agent for that. But it was fun.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I had this thing and I just didn't know what to do with it. And so like I went on a couple of different directions here. I could say, well, that was
⏹️ ▶️ John fun. I'll use it myself and it'll be fine. But like at that point, I felt
⏹️ ▶️ John like I had built up a significant amount of functionality. In particular, I did
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I didn't tell you how I started this project, but the way I started it was I said, hey, coding agent, here's
⏹️ ▶️ John the source code to Switch Glass. Do that, but over here and use modern SwiftUI.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I'm basically, I'm pointing it to my existing all handwritten, you know, ancient, all
⏹️ ▶️ John handwritten code. And I'm saying, see that? Do exactly that. Like, I want
⏹️ ▶️ John it to look like that. I want it to behave like that. I want it to everything, but don't use, you know, at published
⏹️ ▶️ John and at state object and all this other crap. And I said, and if you can use the modern, like reordering APIs
⏹️ ▶️ John in Mac OS 27, you should do that. I had to support back to 15 because I wanted to use it on my Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John My Mac is stuck on 15. So I said, support back to 15. So you can't use 27 only
⏹️ ▶️ John APIs entirely, but use them if you can. And anyway, I told it to do that. And that was, that was
⏹️ ▶️ John an interesting, just a brief aside on that. That was an interesting LLM experience you're like, I'm pointing it at my own source code. I'm saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John basically copy that. Like I've already figured it out. And like, it would take a cut at it. And then I would try it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like, I don't know if it's a context window thing or something, but it was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you missed all of like the performance enhancements I spent so much time tweaking my stupid Switch last
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. So it has decent performance on slow old Intel Macs. And the like, and I'm, I'm developing it on
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 Max. So the first time I brought it over to my Intel Mac and I like resized the icons, it was
⏹️ ▶️ John like a half a frame per second. Like, what the hell, LLM? Like, I gave you
⏹️ ▶️ John the source code to a thing that performs amazingly on Intel CPUs and you missed all of my optimizations
⏹️ ▶️ John and did like the dumbest, most naive thing. So I had to go back to the computer and be like, hey, look at this file
⏹️ ▶️ John in this area. See where I'm doing? I was just like, you're not, I did this already. Just copy it. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it's just anyway, you can't, it's like a black box, but it didn't, like, it got the gist
⏹️ ▶️ John of what Switchglass does. But even given the source code, it did not literally copy all of my
⏹️ ▶️ John options. So I had to go back in for each thing and say, do this like this. Do this like this. Do this like this. Like, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John copy all these optimization, a file at a time. Look in this file. That's where this thing is. Look in this file. That's where this thing is. The animations
⏹️ ▶️ John weren't as smooth or as good. Look in this file. See when I did this. See, there's the reason I did this over here. Like, it's all in the comments.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, eventually I got it to work like Switch Glass. And it just, it just felt like
⏹️ ▶️ John that I had something that seemed like it might have some kind of value besides just this weird thing that works for myself.
⏹️ ▶️ John But of course, it's all private APIs and crap. So what am I supposed to do with this? And so I said, I could have gone in
⏹️ ▶️ John two directions, which is one, just keep it for myself and whatever. But the other direction I felt like I could go in
⏹️ ▶️ John is, what if I turn this into an app that basically
⏹️ ▶️ John supersedes Switchglass, that it does everything that Switchglass does, but with modern APIs,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also makes it have little folders in the corner or whatever, like it basically a general purpose
⏹️ ▶️ John way to make a bunch of palettes around your screen. And I know you're thinking, are you just
⏹️ ▶️ John making drag thing Is that what you're doing? There's the whole thing of like, you're just going to reinvent drag thing. You're just keep making Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John apps till you reinvent drag thing. I think I'm not doing that. James Thompson,
⏹️ ▶️ John correct me if I'm wrong. Yet? I think I'm not doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think, Casey? Next year?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, seriously.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I'm really approaching it because once you can make a bunch of arbitrary palettes
⏹️ ▶️ John all around your screen that have different things in them, that's basically drag thing. The only difference is the drag thing
⏹️ ▶️ John can let you put tons of stuff there and do all sorts of interesting things. And I'm doing a much smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John set of less interesting things, at least for now. So I just decided
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to make this into an app. And also, by the way, this is related to the computer that I just bought. My
⏹️ ▶️ John tradition seems to have been, my tradition, my one-time tradition, which is buy a
⏹️ ▶️ John really expensive computer and then make a bunch of Mac apps that eventually pay for that computer over the course of the next several years, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John what I did with my Mac Pro. That's my plan here is like make a new app and try to
⏹️ ▶️ John pay for my computer over the next three to five years. Because that's the
⏹️ ▶️ John of income things make. Your apps make enough to pay for a computer? Yeah, over the course of
⏹️ ▶️ John several years. Like that's what we're talking about here. Okay. And so that's my plan. I'm like, I'm going to ship
⏹️ ▶️ John this as an app. And it's going to be an app that lets you put a little bunch of little palettes all around your screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you use Switch Glass, this will do exactly the same thing as Switch Glass, but like, again, better with more modern APIs
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff, with better code and stuff. But also, it'll let you have a bunch of folders in the corner.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can have another little palette over there with other stuff in it. And you can have like whatever. Like, it's just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's not a great idea. Again, it's not drag thing. It's still fairly limited, but it is no longer like Switch Class,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is like, this is an app switcher and that's it. This is instead arbitrarily arbitrary
⏹️ ▶️ John little palety turds all around all your screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You really need to work on that messaging.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that's basically what it is. Like, I don't even know if anybody wants this, but i i once I had
⏹️ ▶️ John the ability to do this, I'm like, well, I could, those folders over there, that's not the only thing I might want on the screen, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John if they're auto hidden and they just pop up when they come when I go to the edge of the screen. Like, I can think of other potential
⏹️ ▶️ John uses for this. um And then I just kept adding stuff to it. because And by
⏹️ ▶️ John I, I mean almost entirely my coding agent. The only code that I wrote in this is basically all of the UI, because I
⏹️ ▶️ John don't know what it is with coding agents, but they cannot lay out a dialogue box to save their life. And like, I'm like, don't even bother. Just I will do
⏹️ ▶️ John the dialogue boxes. there. It's it's the dialogue boxes are not complicated. It's like, you know, a label
⏹️ ▶️ John and a toggle control. Like, that's it, but they cannot handle it. So I did. Other than that, they're doing everything and I'm just
⏹️ ▶️ John directing them. Um, But what do I do about the doc material? Like, what, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was all excited about that. Obviously, I can't ship that in the Mac App Store. And I'm absolutely not going to send this direct to people and make
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey own payment.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly what I was going to ask. Are you going to do some sort of other payment processor?
⏹️ ▶️ John If this was an app that I thought people were actually going to buy and then the appreciable numbers, I would have considered it. But this is not that app.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, no, I'm not doing that. It's Mac App Store, which means I can't do any of the private APIs and stuff like that. But I have
⏹️ ▶️ John some precedent in dealing with this, which if you remember in Switch Glass, again, it's just a little app switcher.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it does have little right-click menus on all the apps and stuff that have various actions you can perform. And the obvious thing that you
⏹️ ▶️ John would want them to do, like when you right-click on an app icon in the dock, you can quit the app, right? Right-click and quick
⏹️ ▶️ John on an app in the dock. That's a reasonable thing to want to do. Mac App Store says, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, so you can do a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little daemon thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there's an entitlement that you need to do that that Apple will not give you and did not give me. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so you can't do that. And so my solution to that was, okay, well, I am
⏹️ ▶️ John just going to make an unsandboxed, notarized, direct download free
⏹️ ▶️ John app that Switch Glass will look for if it happens to be there, launch it if it is
⏹️ ▶️ John there, and talk to it and tell it to quit the apps. And so that app is called Quitch Glass. It's like quit, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Switch Glass, Quitch Glass. It is a free download. If you have Switch Glass and you want to quit apps, you just download Quitch Glass,
⏹️ ▶️ John launch it once. It is totally invisible. It doesn't have a dock icon. It doesn't have a menu bar icon. You never have
⏹️ ▶️ John to launch it manually. Switch Glass will do all the management for you. The point is, if you have Quitch glass installed to have
⏹️ ▶️ John launched it one time ever, Switch Glass will have a quit in the menu that will work because Switch Glass
⏹️ ▶️ John communicates to Quitch glass and says, hey, you do the quitting for me. And it does. The magic of not being sandboxed.
⏹️ ▶️ John So how can that strategy help me get a doc material
⏹️ ▶️ John on my app? Not quite as easy because it's not like, you know, I'll
⏹️ ▶️ John send you a message and you'll do the work. Like it's the material that's showing behind the little palettes. And that's, I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, again, if I was Guy Rambo or somebody clever, there's probably some way to like have things rendered
⏹️ ▶️ John by another process and put back into yours and blah, blah, blah. But I'm never going to figure that out.
⏹️ ▶️ John But here's my strategy. And this is probably why, I mean, if Apple, again, if Apple does listen to this, they're probably going to
⏹️ ▶️ John shut me down and this will never be a thing. But until Apple stops me, which may be very soon,
⏹️ ▶️ John here's my strategy. Ship my app in the Mac App Store with the things that Mac App Store apps can do.
⏹️ ▶️ John So no quitting, no doc materials, just tons of other limitations that suck. And even more
⏹️ ▶️ John new ones that I discovered as I submitted builds and they kept rejecting me and I had to remove entitlements, remove entitlements,
⏹️ ▶️ John remove entitlements. They don't like me. I've been rejected more on this app so far. It's not even released just on test flight
⏹️ ▶️ John builds. Anyway, get something that will go up on the Mac App Store. Then
⏹️ ▶️ John also make from the exact same Xcode project another version of this same
⏹️ ▶️ John app with all the forbidden features and forbidden
⏹️ ▶️ John all that good stuff and make that a free download on my website. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John trick is that that free download will not run unless you have purchased
⏹️ ▶️ John my Mac App Store app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that sounds unfun, but like a pretty decent solution to the
⏹️ ▶️ John problem. And I mean, I'm sure Apple hates this, but like, as far as they're concerned,
⏹️ ▶️ John the app on the App Store is perfectly legitimate. It does only the things that it's allowed to do, and that's
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I'm not going to link to the, I obviously from the app, I can't tell anybody from my Mac App App Store
⏹️ ▶️ John app. I can't say, hey, go get the, I can't say mention it. I can't link to it. I can't acknowledge that it exists.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can't do anything. And the other thing is, my Mac App Store app has no idea that other app exists, doesn't communicate
⏹️ ▶️ John with it, doesn't look for it, doesn't do anything. It just has to be there on the disc.
⏹️ ▶️ John it's like Mac App Store receipt, you know, the cryptographic receipt that like it happens when you buy an app, like a paid up
⏹️ ▶️ John front app. Meanwhile, if you were to wander over to my website
⏹️ ▶️ John and find this other unsandboxed app that is free for
⏹️ ▶️ John anyone to download, but is entirely useless unless you have installed this Mac app from the Mac App Store,
⏹️ ▶️ John just run that app. And that app can quit apps, can resolve aliases
⏹️ ▶️ John to servers, can do dock materials, can do all of the fancy features that you'd
⏹️ ▶️ John always want to do, but couldn't do before. And so this is my first foray into non-sandboxed Mac app development.
⏹️ ▶️ John And once I knew I could do that, I basically made, I'm working on making this app not a
⏹️ ▶️ John dock replacement, but I'm doing stuff that I didn't even think was possible. Like I've always said, people
⏹️ ▶️ John always say, hey, Switch Glass should show the notification badges that are in the dock. There's no API for that. There's
⏹️ ▶️ John not even like, there's nothing for that. But I'm like, well, if I'm out of the sandbox, I'll do
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Hey, coding agent, find a way to do that. And the answer is always, as always, is accessibility.
⏹️ ▶️ John Accessibility exposes the badges. And so my app will look at the accessibility view of the dock. And when it puts a
⏹️ ▶️ John badge, I'll put a badge. Same thing for the quick command is easy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So you can make a very convincing dock lookalike
⏹️ ▶️ John with my app that a regular person could even forgive him for thinking was the dock. There are
⏹️ ▶️ John still some features that things the dock does that I can't do because there's they're not exposed from accessibility.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like basically I'd have to inject into the process or something. But anyway, this is my plan.
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm going to put this app out. once it's It's not even close to done, but like I'm going to put this Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John app out on the Mac App Store and I'm going to have an unsandboxed version of the app that
⏹️ ▶️ John is free for anybody who has bought the actual app. And then if Apple doesn't stop me, I'm just going
⏹️ ▶️ John to continue doing that until they do stop me. If they do stop me, I'm not sure what I'll do, but like honestly, this is not a very mass market app. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I just I just had so much fun making this and adding functionality to it. I'm still having fun. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John so yeah. And my plan is as, as Casey pioneered on ATP, I'm going to offer the access
⏹️ ▶️ John to the test flight to any ATP member. I will warn you, ATP members, this app is rough.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's not done. The good thing about it is unlike hyperspace, like it doesn't, shouldn't really destroy your
⏹️ ▶️ John files or anything. Like The beta is not, it's like, it's a little palette, a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of palettes on your computer where you put stuff in it. Like it's not, it's not modifying your files. Like it's,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's the, the danger. That's probably, one of the reasons that I'm very comfortable vibe coding this is like
⏹️ ▶️ John it's not it's not a consequential app it is just a UI frivolous little UI
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that you may or may not like but if you want to try it and find bugs and report bugs or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John um at some point maybe by the time you listen to this but certainly before next episode if you log into
⏹️ ▶️ John atp.fm and go to your member page it's just atp.fm slash member or click on membership in the navigation
⏹️ ▶️ John you will see a section appear on your member page as it has in the past that says hey do you want to join the tesla
⏹️ ▶️ John for john's new app click here and then you will join it i'll also have a link to my slack for the
⏹️ ▶️ John app if you want to join and complain about stuff there um yeah i'm not sure how i'm going to describe
⏹️ ▶️ John this app or pitch it or anything like that but it is basically you can make a bunch of little dock things all
⏹️ ▶️ John over all your screens and have them contain whatever you want including the trash can like you can put a trash
⏹️ ▶️ John can in it and all that stuff like you can you could i'm not suggesting that you make a dock like i'm not going to use it for that
⏹️ ▶️ John but i have replaced switch glass in my daily use with this because it is like switch glass but better oh
⏹️ ▶️ John the other one i forgot to mention is custom icons man that their situation i've found so many feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John saying please make an api for this but like even without being sandbox there's no
⏹️ ▶️ John way to get a lot of these things i did get the calendar because if you use like a doctile plugin and if you're apple i can load
⏹️ ▶️ John apple's doctile plugins but i'm not going to load doctile plugins from third-party apps because i just feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like loading third-party libraries into my process is just a bridge too far i could do it but i'm not going to but anyway calendar
⏹️ ▶️ John will show the right icon and i might do custom stuff for things like ivory that use like the catalyst set custom
⏹️ ▶️ John icon but the the the icon apis the private icon apis
⏹️ ▶️ John on mac os just do not expose this stuff but still my switch glass
⏹️ ▶️ John replacement is currently showing a badge for slack right now if i had calendar in there it would show the correct calendar
⏹️ ▶️ John date uh and it uses all modern apis and my little folders in the side they're looking beautiful
⏹️ ▶️ John they will raise when my cursor goes of them over them so they have auto raise on them so they'll go in front of other things
⏹️ ▶️ John if i slam my cursor against the bottom of the screen it's all looking good so yeah that's my
⏹️ ▶️ John uh that's my new app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wow all right so i have a question what's going to happen first you completely subsume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of drag thing functionality or apple is carbon neutral
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey never gonna do
⏹️ ▶️ John everything that drag thing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey did like that's the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco problem with this
⏹️ ▶️ John app people are going to see it and they're going to be like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i want to do this i want to do that and now i no longer have
⏹️ ▶️ John an excuse other than i don't want it to do that no
⏹️ ▶️ John just messing with you yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i honestly i don't think i foresee this drawing attention from apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco negatively because what you're doing first of all it's like yeah you're doing a whole bunch of like private api crap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like not in a way that would blow up in their face um and second of all with like the mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app store thing like where you're gonna have this app require the mac app store purchase that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like apple cares if you try to bring purchases out of their in-app purchase system right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you're trying to bring purchases into it you're trying to you're you're doing a hack for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to make more money so i don't think they're going to care about that either here's
⏹️ ▶️ John here's where i think they'll get tripped up and for the first release of this i'm going to avoid this but for subsequent
⏹️ ▶️ John releases i will not avoid it and here's what it is when you submit the app review and you have like you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to have like urls in your app for like your support url and your privacy policy and crap like that and also
⏹️ ▶️ John like the help button like in the help menu of all my apps there's a help item and if you select that help item it launches
⏹️ ▶️ John you to a page on my website
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then they go poke around to see if you're trying to suck purchases out
⏹️ ▶️ John yes and on my website you can click on the logo at the top and get the most recent blog
⏹️ ▶️ John post. And the most recent blog post is like hey look at this unsandbox app you can download they're gonna be like eh sorry you can't
⏹️ ▶️ John link to another app to download like you basically that is an app store rule you cannot in your app say hey
⏹️ ▶️ John download this other app from my website you can't do that at least not in the U S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if you don't have your own purchase system outside of their system
⏹️ ▶️ John no i know but like i what i'm going to do is i'm going to for the first release of this i am not
⏹️ ▶️ John i'm going to make sure there's no links on my like the question is how many links do you follow because remember the horror stories of like
⏹️ ▶️ John i linked to my website from my about screen on my app and 20 clicks from that you can get to this post that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco mentions this thing and
⏹️ ▶️ John apple's like sorry we found our way to this thing that mentioned another app rejected like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that's my fear so one thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one thing that i've done um even though i don't think i am at risk for any problems with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with my with the website but like for unforgettable, the privacy policy and terms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of service pages which have to exist for all subscription apps um those when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open those in the app there is no header or footer or navigation to go to other pages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it only is those pages um could you do something like that
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah i probably i probably will when i put them up like but the problem is the help page i want there to be a header on the help page like it's
⏹️ ▶️ John part of my website like we'll see how it goes like if i have to and also it's like as you know with the app review
⏹️ ▶️ John it depends on what reviewer you get is this the reviewer that clicks three three follows three links deep from your
⏹️ ▶️ John help page or four or you know
⏹️ ▶️ John there's no consistency so i'm going to do what i can apple don't listen to this podcast as marco
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco says see i'm
⏹️ ▶️ John bringing money into your system i don't i don't know what they think of it but this is my current strategy if it doesn't work out i'll think of something else
⏹️ ▶️ John i mean the good thing is this is never going to be a mass market app anyway so who cares it's just mostly a curiosity and a fun
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to do on the show but i'm having fun making it so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no this this is very clever i did not see this like like a wholesale
⏹️ ▶️ Casey replacement of switch glass being where this conversation was going Cause all we knew was john's new vibe coded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app uh i'm surprised this is where it ended up but i mean i think it makes sense and and i
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think if it's working for you that that's all that matters
⏹️ ▶️ John it's a regression for me it's a like i said it's a regression for me trying to make useful apps going back to my i'm back
⏹️ ▶️ John on my bs as they say i'm back to making apps that nobody wants that are weird they're
⏹️ ▶️ John just bigger than they used to be and also mostly not coded by me but that's just the
⏹️ ▶️ John place where we are the place where i am right now so maybe someday i will return to making apps that other people might
⏹️ ▶️ John want to buy but uh yeah in the meantime i'm doing this one you haven't asked me about the app's name yet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay what's the name john
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just assumed you were subsuming switch glass
⏹️ ▶️ John no no no switch glass will continue on um as as you know again it's it's it's a six-year-old
⏹️ ▶️ John paid upfront one-time app that if you paid for six years ago it will keep i'm gonna keep it running right
⏹️ ▶️ John um but i will probably never modernize the code so at some point if like if this version of swiftywi
⏹️ ▶️ John no longer compiles i maybe i'll have the llms modernize it or something but anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John i i named this app when i thought no one else was ever going to see it been
⏹️ ▶️ John there yeah yeah you know how it is um
⏹️ ▶️ John also on that front i made the icon myself and it's not good oh been there
⏹️ ▶️ John too right we've all been there and here's the thing with this i'm probably not going to change
⏹️ ▶️ John the name because like who cares like whatever it's not it's not it's
⏹️ ▶️ John not as bad what was your past month uh fluck up it's not fluck up bad but it's not good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all right calm down
⏹️ ▶️ John the icon on the other hand it's not good but
⏹️ ▶️ John my plan is if i release this in the mac app store and apple does not kill it
⏹️ ▶️ John uh once it makes enough money for me to pay someone to make an icon that's like the the first x amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of money from this app is going to pay for its own icon so it will not be in the black
⏹️ ▶️ John until it has paid for its own icon yeah that's that's where i'm at and i honestly
⏹️ ▶️ John making the icon was fun but it just like it's not again it's not in my skill
⏹️ ▶️ John set and i and i used ai help like so the icon well i didn't,
⏹️ ▶️ John I, first problem is i have no good ideas for the icon so that's not a good place to start if you have no ideas like
⏹️ ▶️ John if i have an idea i can fumble through and like make something but i had no good ideas so i went with bad ideas
⏹️ ▶️ John because you got to do something right and then i was like can you ai generate an icon no you
⏹️ ▶️ John can't they just look terrible so i i did what i've done it a few times like
⏹️ ▶️ John i did this for the beta icon for hyperspace i bought stock photos from i stockphoto.com
⏹️ ▶️ John you can did you know you can buy stock photos you can you pay for them and they're yours free and clear and you can use them in
⏹️ ▶️ John your app icon and so i bought stock photos uh and then i ai generated one
⏹️ ▶️ John element and then i photoshopped it with a bunch of crap that i did in photoshop and affinity designer plus
⏹️ ▶️ John my stock photos can you see how this isn't making for a not good icon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so that's how i ended up
⏹️ ▶️ John i will show you the icon first and see if this helps you get the name i will try to show you a small version of the icon
⏹️ ▶️ John so because it looks worse the bigger it gets
The icon
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, Here you go. So, this uh, the, the, the inspiration is
⏹️ ▶️ John icon, which I will put in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no. So, the the, the menu bar icon, cause like switch glass has a menu icon, this one has a menu
⏹️ ▶️ John bar icon. The menu bar icon is essentially like the SF It's the SF symbol for like
⏹️ ▶️ John a computer screen with dock at the bottom of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, Like a lower third.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it's like a computer screen. I forget what the SF symbol is called, but it's like computer screen with docker. I don't even know, but that's
⏹️ ▶️ John that's what it's supposed to be. Supposed to be a like a round rec with a line at the bottom. And I'm like, that's
⏹️ ▶️ John my app. It makes docks. I'm not going to use docs. I'm using palettes for a reason. Like, I don't want a confusion.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Looks like inset filled bottom third square
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah uh But I'm like, but yeah, but like, obviously that's so fine. That's the monochrome uh menu
⏹️ ▶️ John bar icon. But what is the actual app icon? And so here, uh this is what I've got
⏹️ ▶️ John for the app icon. And it makes sense with the name. Kind of, sort of. I tried a lot of iterations in this. Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have any guesses of the name of this thing? Keeping in mind that it makes a bunch of little rectangular
⏹️ ▶️ John long skinny things around the edges of your screen. And given that you're looking at the icon, which one of you can feel free
⏹️ ▶️ John to describe the icon. I won't.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it's like a it's a wave crashing onto a beach, like like that, like the foaminess of the end of a wave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With air power sitting on the beach.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, with a big black sunglasses case sitting or like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big, like a polished oval stone. So I'm guessing you probably didn't call it Docker,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though that would be a great name for it. That would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John be. Oh I think that's taken.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, maybe. It's like a, and like the icon, it's like a, you know, like a polished
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stone from a beach.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is there any long, skinny rectangular things related to beaches that you can think of, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ John Docks. Yeah. That's right. But I'm not using that one. So what's
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey The answer is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right there in front of us, and I'm cheating because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John if you would.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, I know, Casey, don't tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obvious once you hear it, though.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I grew up i grew up going to a
⏹️ ▶️ John beach, uh uh Long Beach on Long Island on the North Shore that has a jetty. I played
⏹️ ▶️ John on that jetty all the time. For those who don't know, a jetty is like a uh long, skinny pile of stones
⏹️ ▶️ John or other things that goes out into the water and directs where the erosion should go so that one people on one side of it are mad
⏹️ ▶️ John and people on the other side are happy. Yep. That's what that's what a jetty does. And it's a long, skinny
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And it make you know, what's a bunch of long, skinny things? That's what I'm, I can't use dock.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can't use anything having to do with dock. Calling the app Jetty. And the uh the unsandboxed
⏹️ ▶️ John version is called Jetty Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is honestly, I don't see anything wrong with this name. I mean, I haven't done like, you know, a trademark search or anything, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like at first glance, I don't think this is a bad name at all. I agree.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was kind of surprised it wasn't taken. It's Who even knows what a Jetty is? And the reason this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is black is because I tried a bunch of non-black rocks, but the problem is at small sizes, they just become mud. And this,
⏹️ ▶️ John this at least is when you shrink this down to tiny sizes, it looks like the icon in the menu bar. So you can be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is the icon in the menu bar? Oh, it's this app. I can see it. That's why it has the thick black outline around
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Like the, And it's jet black, like I guess. Like whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, this is a bad idea for an icon. It's a bad idea for an icon not well executed. Like, I'm not happy
⏹️ ▶️ John with this icon, but honestly, I don't have a better idea. But when I get enough money, if I get enough money from this app,
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm going to give it to someone to come up with either a better idea or a better version of this icon
⏹️ ▶️ John if we can't come up with a better idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is there a reason you didn't like orient it to be more like a Jetty?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because this is what the menu bar icon is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John oh yeah i guess for the whole reason. Right, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John the menu bar Like I picked the menu bar icon first and I got used to it. I'm like, and I couldn't think
⏹️ ▶️ John of any other ideas for the things. I know what you're saying. like But the thing is, the the UI in this
⏹️ ▶️ John app doesn't ever stick out from the screen. They're always flat against the edge. And I know
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that's not what a
⏹️ ▶️ John Jetty does, but like again, it's not. I can't i can't i can't uh defend it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like it is what it is. No, this icon this icon is straight trash, but the name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And it doesn't even matter. Like, you know, like if people who don't live near these things don't know what Jettis are, who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cares? There's lots of names that like, people don't know the origin of the name. They just associated it with the app, and it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, how many people know what a Google is? Even if, even if you spell it the other way,
⏹️ ▶️ John although I will say that Jetty with no colon suffix was in fact taken on the App Store because everything
⏹️ ▶️ John is and that I ever try.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, well, I mean, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I think this is fun. Yeah. What is your suggestion for my colon suffix?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What did you say? Little turdy pellets everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John going with little turdy pellets.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See what you, what you actually want to do, like if you want people to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find and download this, what you actually want is figure out what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keywords you want that, that people would be most searching for for apps like this and figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out some subtitle that would that would include those keywords. Like that's, That's the actual answer to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. But since you are really good at, at not making money with your apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you're a purist.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can only go where my heart leads. me it leads me to non-profitable places.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, for your subtitle, I don't know. I can imagine you being very pained
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the idea of even having to make one.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I accept that it's the way it is. I had to do it with hyperspace too. Like, it is what it is. Like, I'll do it. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John as long as it's not on my icon in the app, in the applications folder, I'm fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don't have a clue what I would
⏹️ ▶️ John write. Oh, here's what I've got. And I'm, as usual, not happy with it, but it will
⏹️ ▶️ John actually probably help with SEO cuz I've got Jetty colon custom docs because people are going to search
⏹️ ▶️ John for doc. Yeah. Again, I'm not going to call things doc because in my UI,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have things like material doc, which means make it look like the dock, right? Or preset
⏹️ ▶️ John doc, which means make a thing that looks like the dock. So I do not use doc for the name of my things. I always use palette,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is, I think, what Dragthing might have called them. I don't know. I'm using Palette is what I'm going with. But you can't put palette
⏹️ ▶️ John on the headline. So Jetty colon custom docs is terrible and looks gross and kills my eyes, but it will
⏹️ ▶️ John come up in people's searches, maybe. Will Apple let you use the word doc? We'll find out. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, they did let me test flight it. And let me tell you, they were rejecting me like crazy in test flights. I'm like, it's a test flight.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco reject me in App Review.
⏹️ ▶️ John Fine. But, like, I'm just trying things out here. And they're like, nope, we can't even let this test flight thing up. You're not getting that entitlement. Forget
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Wow. So they let they let it up with the subtitle. We'll see how it goes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, good luck. I think that is a perfectly good subtitle for this app. But I would be, honestly, I'd be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprised if Apple let you use it. Are you going to capitalize doc?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it's title case. Capital J, capital C, capital D, Jetty colon custom docs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Other apps in there say Doc stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't know if that's on the Mac App store. We'll find out. If I have to change the subtitle, fine, but I can't. I would have just used plain Jetty, obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I could have gotten it, but someone else has got it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is exciting. I think this is fun. I think you should I think you should stick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with it and see where it goes. And, you know, listeners, this is not an official perk of being a member.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if the test flight never ever shows up in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John membership. It's going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show up. Well, all right. Just make it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I'm just trying to leave you an out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Trying to leave you an out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nope. I've got the test flight built up. I've made the group. It's all ready to go. I just haven't pushed it to the website
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, all right. Like I said, the app is filled with bugs, but you know, the consequences of those bugs is the animations
⏹️ ▶️ John are glitchy in your custom docs. It's not a big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Real-time follow-up, there are actually lots of apps in the Mac App Store that include the word doc, including
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that seem to be doing somewhat similar tasks, like adding extra docs, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ John there's lots of apps that do this. And it's like, why don't you just use one of those apps? Obviously, I need the app that works exactly specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, of course. Well, yeah, I mean, look, I just made a reminders app. There's lots of reminders apps, including reminders.
⏹️ ▶️ John Exactly. But that's the that's the whole thing about vibe coding. Like, I never would have bothered doing this whole rigmarole for
⏹️ ▶️ John just this one little thing, but vibe coding makes it makes it possible to do this with the amount of effort
⏹️ ▶️ John that, with an amount of effort that makes sense for the amount of money this is not going to make. You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because like the amount of effort I put into Switch Glass was tremendous, hand rolling all that, learning, learning on the fly,
⏹️ ▶️ John like my very first Swift UI thing. Huge amount of work into that, but that was like a learning opportunity, blah, blah, and i didn't
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn't make it back on the app, like but it was, but it was a good learning opportunity. But now when it came time to do like, oh, revise
⏹️ ▶️ John Switch Glass to like, you know, generalize it to do this thing, I implemented it and I realized this is not, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a waste of my time. This is not a good use of my time, which is good because like I didn't do that I did hyperspace instead. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John but anyway, fine this is one of the beauties of vibe coding that even for developers, it opens up the potential
⏹️ ▶️ John to do things that would have been a waste of your time otherwise. And this definitely qualifies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. I mean, like, like just literally in the last, you know, two weeks, I, I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only, you know, do I make my regular software, but I've, I've vibe coded two different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps just for myself. Like one of them was, uh, I have an app that decrypts Audible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco books. And there's been like, you know, command line utilities to do this. I want to listen to my audio, my audible books in Overcast. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course. Like I want to use upload them to my uploads and use my audio engine with my effects and my speed to listen to audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco books. So I buy my Audible and I use my crappy vibe coded app that I'm never going to release because I don't want the hassle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um you know But it just took two seconds, you know, for for this app to come together. It's great. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don't have to remember all the command line incantations for how to use the different tools and where do they drop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the little tertiary configuration files and how do I keep all the logins straight and everything. Nope. I just had a vibe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coded Mac GUI app that stores stuff in keychain and it's great. And I didn't have to look at any of the code ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that's great. And then my second one is an app that, you know how in the App
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Store, people want, you basically want to have screenshots that aren't really screenshots.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They like show the app kind of in a device frame and they have a bunch of text crap to brag about stuff about the app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I, years ago, like I tried this with Overcast. I even i think we didn't even did an under the radar episode about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it um where I did see like, yeah, they those do actually convert like a little bit better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It wasn't a huge difference. I think at the time it was something like seven to ten percent better conversion rate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um But it's, you know, that matters. And I just hated having to like make them. And I hate having to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the different size screenshots to optimize for different devices. And some of that's easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, but not all of it. So I, in like one giant 15-line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prompt, I had Claude make me my own stupid little admin app to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make those screenshots. It's basically a GUI editor for me to add text and symbols
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and crap onto screenshots and have them put into a device frame and then to be able to export
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them in this nicely, you know, nicely sized and named list of ping files that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can drag into App Store Connect. And it took, that whole thing took a total of, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think, three prompts and maybe a half hour. And now I have this app that, again, like, I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to release it. It's not, it doesn't make any sense for me to release it, but like it's vibe coding is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco helpful for like making little things to scratch your own personal itches.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, stuff that used to like either only like you could only do it if you had a lot of free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time and a lot of you know, skill in that area or if you could find another market for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now you can just make your own stuff. Like in the same way like people can make their own spreadsheets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, to solve their own problems for all these years. Now you can make your own little apps to solve your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own problems. Like for internal tools, for admin tools, it's very, very valuable.
⏹️ ▶️ John That screenshot frame thing, one of the reasons it probably did such a good job is there are so many of those apps out there and some of
⏹️ ▶️ John them are probably open source. So it has an idea of how to do it. Like that was my hope with the, it didn't work out
⏹️ ▶️ John as well as I hoped it would. That was my hope with feeding it Switch Glass as the initial prompt, which is like, look
⏹️ ▶️ John at the source code to this app. Here's the repo. You have all the source code. Just do that. It didn't work
⏹️ ▶️ John as well in my experience as when these things are trained on open source repos of like a thing that makes
⏹️ ▶️ John a device frame screenshots with text for your phone. Like there's so many of those apps out there. And I got
⏹️ ▶️ John some of them have to be open source. It makes me think that like training, if, you know, cause obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John switch glass source code is not public. It's not an open source app. Okay, But, but if these models had trained on
⏹️ ▶️ John the Switch Glass source, I feel like they would have performed better than me saying, here's the entire Switchglass
⏹️ ▶️ John source code in your context window. Because my experience with doing that is it was like it wasn't even looking at the source
⏹️ ▶️ John code or it was like looking at just certain portions of it. And I had to direct its attention. Look at this file. Look at this function. Look
⏹️ ▶️ John at this thing. It was a little bit frustrating and counterproductive, but it was a good learning experience in how
⏹️ ▶️ John to use these things. But yeah, for the device frame thing, so many apps are out there that do that. And I think the reason everybody makes
⏹️ ▶️ John them, predating Vibe coding, people were making these little apps for themselves, people who did have enough free time to do it,
⏹️ ▶️ John because everyone wants to do it in their own way. And again, some of those must be open source and some of them must be in
⏹️ ▶️ John the training data. So when you ask for one, it's like, I totally know how to make that. I've seen this app before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, I did actually specify a lot of the behavior. Like I specified the data model. I specified
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the UI and a lot of that stuff. But and I don't know. I don't think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the coding agents now are like replicating entire apps from their training
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data. I think it's more piecemeal and more involved than that. But you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, I think it's, it's a pretty well-known problem set. Like you can just, if you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, If they look in their training data or do web searches for just what these kinds of apps need to be, what are the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app store connect requirements, stuff like that, Like that's, that's all easy to find.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's good stuff, Sean. I am excited to see the test flight and and kick
⏹️ ▶️ John once and never look at it again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Probably. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know what? I'm excited to see it nevertheless.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, congratulations. Like I, as I, as I have, you know, recently gone through this process of launching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an app, like, launching any app is a significant achievement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it's a significant amount of work. It's way like just you know my stupid audible decryptor and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screenshot annotator, like that took no time. If I wanted to release either of those,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that's a that's a totally different ball game
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, even if you're not writing the code for the app, just the the hassle. I mean, you could get the LMs to do that too, but i'm
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm not going to do that. But like, yeah, there's so much like overhead. That's why like you need some you really need some motivation
⏹️ ▶️ John to get something over the hump of like, am I going to actually release this to people? Because it's just such a hassle. And There's so much stuff to deal with,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially if you're dealing with App Store and App Review and the website and support and bug tracking. And
⏹️ ▶️ John It's just so much that like keeping stuff private, like my little trimmer app or these other, you know, I have a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John other little like command line things that I made for myself that like give me info about files that I use as
⏹️ ▶️ John like debugging tools while developing hyperspace that have all these vibe coded tools that like spelunk in the
⏹️ ▶️ John file system. Like that stuff is great. But once you release anything to the public,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's like, well, now you've taken on this giant mound of crap into your life. So it better be worth it
⏹️ ▶️ John for what you want to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. And that's, that's, that's partly why too, like, you know, I see I see a bunch of, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, people around our circles. Like I'll see somebody who we followed in years for Mastodon and they'll be like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launching apps for the first time. And these are people who maybe they were power users, maybe they weren't necessarily programmers or they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weren't this kind of programmer before. I don't have any problem with people doing this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you know, obviously people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco differently about using AI to code stuff. And and I, because I have mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that some of the code I write is AI code, I'm, I'm now getting regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one-star reviews on both of my apps because it's, quote, AI slop, even though,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it's like, I spent three hours today writing writing code and unforgettable myself,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I've written most of. And it's like, and people, you know, people will accuse whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I'm sure I'll get those reviews on this app too. But, you know, it's like,
⏹️ ▶️ John want handwritten ones, I've got three other apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And the thing is, like, I really don't have any problem with people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 100% vibe coding an app and releasing it as long as it works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as long as like, you know, if there's a bug, they'll be responsive to it. You don't have to be handwriting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the code to have an app out there that works and that you are responsive to making sure it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco continues to work. So I think like, to me, again, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know this is controversial, but I guess I've already lost all these people or angered them. This is a very enabling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technology. Lots of people can now make apps who couldn't make apps before. And lots of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who could make apps before, like us, can now make more apps, better apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and apps that just wouldn't have been worth the time to make before. So again, not a perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technology without its downsides, but overall, a massively enabling technology.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I'm able to take joy in the fact that it can do stuff like this, that like these, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an app like this that you just made, that like that couldn't really exist or that wouldn't have existed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before, now this exists. That's a cool thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, the problem is that, you know, people hate the technology, but like we're talking about this one very narrow corner of the technology
⏹️ ▶️ John where it excels. And the technologies are not only used for programming. And that's part of the big problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's like, okay, that's great for you and your little programming world, but like people use AI
⏹️ ▶️ John for other things and it's extremely problematic in many of those things. And that's even before you get down to like, okay, but what
⏹️ ▶️ John about any, you know, so that whole wad of crap is there, but like we have such a narrow focus in the show because we're programmers
⏹️ ▶️ John and we're always talking about programming. And I think sometimes people hear, you guys love AI. It's like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, it's, we're, we're using one very specific thing, which is a
⏹️ ▶️ John popular thing that people use and people are getting, you know, utility out of it. But boy, people are like the majority
⏹️ ▶️ John of people who are using Chat GPT are not making apps. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John Let's put it that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And and you're right. Like there are a lot of, I think, more problematic uses for it that that i think uh you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we're not we're not advocating for everything all of those things, but in this case, uh you know using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for software development. it's
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, which is why like I'm excited about being able to run like local like open weight models in the future
⏹️ ▶️ John on your Mac without paying some giant company, without you know running in data centers. and like all that you know like I can
⏹️ ▶️ John see that future being attainable, but we're not there yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And and like that's what i was looking earlier. That's why I was saying about like with you know trying to figure out how to use my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco excess Mac mini capacity. I was looking at like, okay, well, what if I want if I want to do like, you know, summarization and stuff like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with local models running on Mac minis that I own? It's like that's, that's pretty low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco impact, really, like for the world. Like it's not, that's not that bad. But
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple was touting that, by the way, with the new Mac Studios. They're like, look, in this giant stack of Mac Studios that are connected,
⏹️ ▶️ John it takes so little power. Like, I think Snell was saying, they said, look, it's just plugged into one outlet. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, okay, great. But like, people usually plug computers into one outlet. But for AI,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's like, look, this is so energy efficient. You can, you know, run this incredibly big model
⏹️ ▶️ John plugged into a single household outlet. It's like, I guess this is the bar now. You can have this computer
⏹️ ▶️ John in your house. Right. You don't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even need three-phase industrial power.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, instead of whatever you have in your like a 240 volt or whatever dual power strip thing in your data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And again, and I do want to, just while we're on this topic briefly, I do want to reiterate,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone saw that big list of features that Apple did on these OS releases, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know Apple's using Claude, right? Like everyone knows that out there. I i think i think you need to know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Like that huge, massive list of things that they're adding in this OS release, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that's not a coincidence. Like they're they're definitely using, we know that they're using Claude widely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have been for a few years. And that's why they're able to get this much stuff done. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you're taking a super hard line against using anything AI-generated, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have some bad news for you to use macOS, iOS, probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Windows, and yes, also Linux. I think you're going to have a hard time avoiding