46: A Compromised Machine

03 Jan 2014

Reviewing Apple’s 2013 releases, yet more Mac Pro discussion, and the iMac as an alternative.

Episode Description:

• Mac Pro follow-up: socketed CPUs and potential upgrades, and the benefits of only using stock Apple parts.
• Scoring Apple's performance on John's 2013 to-do list.
• Concerns about Apple's recent Mac apps, including iWork '13 and Messages/iMessage.
• AnandTech's Mac Pro review.
• The Mac Pro's 4K/Retina monitor situation.
• The iMac vs. the Mac Pro, and the hardware needs of developers.
• Why do John and Marco care so much about Retina?
• What the next big computer-hardware shift may be.
• After-show: our future as old men, saturating USB 3, and the often-neglected Mac Mini.

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Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Transcript start

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Why don’t you just build a game PC? Your video card is slow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey There’s some quick follow-up about Guess what the Mac Pro?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well come on. We did like a whole episode on it. We can’t there’s not gonna be zero follow-up. I know no that’s fine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco After we recorded last episode Somebody took it apart. I think it was first OWC

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and and then everyone else jumped on the reporting of it but basically they discovered that the Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco CPU is socketed and and it’s the regular standard Intel CPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with the heat spreader on top so you can easily take it out and replace it. And so everyone told

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me, hey, you can buy the CPUs you wanted. So, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, more usefully to everyone else, hey, you can upgrade your Mac Pro CPU in the future.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Now, in all my history of building my own computers back when I was a PC

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco guy, and then ever since then owning Macs, I have never

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco once upgraded a CPU. And the main reason why is because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco usually the CPU is not the only problem in a computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco once it starts getting old and slow. And secondarily to that, which is more limiting, usually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can’t really upgrade the CPU very far. Usually by the time there are CPUs that are substantially

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco faster than what you have, they either need a new socket or need a different chip set on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco motherboard, or they need to use a faster bus, or something more than what your board can do, something like that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco usually within the socket that you have on your board and within what your board will support CPU-wise,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco usually it’s not really worth any upgrades that are available within that little

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco narrow range. So upgrading a CPU in this case is not going to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that common of a thing. It also was pretty hard to get to. requires

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pretty substantial disassembly of the whole thing, including fiddling with some very, very small,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco precise ribbon cables and stuff that connect all the big boards together. So it’s not something, it’s not like replacing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco RAM, you know, it’s not like, you know, you pop the slot and that’s it. So I don’t really think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s really going to be a thing that anybody does. What makes it a little bit different in this case

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is there is a pretty vast difference in core counts that are available for this socket.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So if you start with the four core and then in two years you buy the eight core,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’ll be a big difference in parallel performance. But even then, single thread performance, you’re probably not really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going anywhere. So it’s probably not gonna be worth it for almost anybody to actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Let’s not forget the psychological trauma of opening up your beautiful trash can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and carefully prying it apart, especially the things that you’re pulling heat from.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I know you don’t have to take off the integrated heat spreader and everything, but anything involving like you have to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sure when you put it back together that all the correct contact is made between all the right parts to keep things cool

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because bad things can happen if it’s not. And it’s the type of thing you get good at if you do it a lot. But most

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of us don’t, you know, don’t do this for a living, don’t build computers for a living, don’t upgrade computer for the living. So how many computers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do you even own throughout your life? Even if you upgrade the CPU and every single one of them, it’s not a skill that I count among

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the things that I’m confident I can do. I’m, you know, I’ve replaced heat sinks on graphics cards and stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I’ve done it a handful of times in my life. And I certainly don’t want to crack open this five, seven, $10,000

⏹️ ▶️ ^John trash can cylinder, yank out the CPU and put in another one. Maybe when the thing is like five years

⏹️ ▶️ ^John old, and I feel like it’s depreciated, but it’s not as bad as opening a laptop, but that’s kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John part of the Apple experience is you don’t have to do that stuff. You just buy it. It comes out of the box. It’s pretty. Everything’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in it. It works and you use it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Also, there is a lot of value in keeping your computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with the stock Apple parts. Anyone who’s been around Apple long enough

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has heard stories about how people, say, send in their laptops for a service from Apple and they get rejected

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because it has third-party RAM in it. Or Apple takes the third-party RAM out and doesn’t return it. Something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like that. Having third-party RAM is always a little bit questionable whenever you need Apple service.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a non-standard or upgraded CPU in there, they probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wouldn’t notice. But if they did notice, that would make it pretty hard to get service, even if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something broke that they should cover and otherwise would cover. That might cause problems for you. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco also, what if things go a little bit wrong? What if your computer starts being a little bit unstable?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Is it because you didn’t apply the right amount or pattern of thermal paste on the CPU, or you didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco remount the heatsink properly? You never know. You have all these things that can become your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco problem, and for what gain? And if the gain is maybe you saved

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a couple hundred dollars on a $5,000 computer, or by putting in some third-party thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or the gain is maybe you extend the life by a little bit longer, I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco In most cases, it’s not worth it. Especially now, in the RAM

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco example, Apple’s RAM pricing in the last few years has actually gotten pretty competitive. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the cheapest, but the price difference between Apple and anybody else of actual good quality like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco OWC or Crucial, the price difference between those is not that big for most configurations

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for RAM. So it actually is pretty plausible for the few remaining Macs that even have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco RAM slots, it’s pretty plausible to just pay Apple’s price and be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco set for a while with that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Okay, any other follow-up before we move on to some other things?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean before we talk about the Mac Pro even more.

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Is this the show?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Some people tune in for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Okay, are we really going straight to Mac Pro talk we’re not gonna do anything else I guess that probably makes sense.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What else is there? Well, I threw something in there because of reviewing Apple’s 2013, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I did a blog post about it, and because this is the first show of the new year, so, you know, why not talk

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about last year, how Apple did last year?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I am all for that, John. Thank you for providing at least a small reprieve.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} A

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco brief oasis of non-macro talk. All

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right, so John, tell me about how Apple did did in 2013.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, did either one of you remember my Apple 2013 to-do list post

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from early in 2013? Nope.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I did, because I’m a huge fanboy. There you go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John When I was thinking of ways to look at Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I didn’t want to do a wish list. Those ones where here are the things that I really want, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the things that are wrong with their current products. There’s lots of different angles that tech sites take at the,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uh, you know, what should Apple do? What should they do next? What should they do this year or whatever? And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the angle I took at the beginning of last year was let me make a to-do list. Like if I was to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John give Tim Cook this list and say, here’s what you got to do this year. And you’re not going to put crazy stuff on it by like, make me a hoverboard

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or, you know, stuff like that. Cause that’s not actionable. Right. And I’m not trying to predict what will Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do like a rumor site. Here’s what we think Apple will do in the next year. Cause that’s a totally different exercise. I was trying to make a list of things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I think are feasible, reasonable, not crazy, they’re going to be pretty boring,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but that Apple should do. It’s a to-do list for them. They should just go down and during the year make sure you do all this stuff. Check,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John check, check, check, check. And I totally planned, you know, by the end of the year to go back and see how they did. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so that’s what I did. I just looked at the items. There were 10 items, and I went through each one of them. And it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John surprising that they did pretty well, because again, these are not predictions, rumors, or wish lists.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s very straightforward stuff. So I guess we’ll just go through them because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re pretty quick. Ship OS X 10.9 and iOS 7, duh, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, keep doing that stuff that you’re doing. They did that stuff. That

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was really going out on a limb there, John.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, it’s got to be on the to-do list because think of it this way. Like going out on a limb, iOS 7,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re pretty sure that’s going to happen. But 10.9, you know, well, they could get thrown off or iOS 7 could turn out to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be more of a problem than they expected and they could delay 10.9. So it’s conceivable they could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have missed one of those, or they could have done them really badly, like if one of them was a disaster, right? I also gave these items

⏹️ ▶️ ^John letter grades. So if one of those things was a disaster, it’s like, yeah, you did that. You shipped those two OSs, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of them was terrible. But they weren’t, so that’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and I have a bone to pick. I think you’re suffering a little bit from grade inflation here. I think some of these grades are too high.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And lots of people think they’re too low. And so, I should have thought harder before doing the grades, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s kind of like ratings on game reviews. If you just review a game, People leave you comments

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, you know, that they disagree, agree with some of the part, but as soon as you attach a number or a letter grade or a number of stars,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people are like, this is totally not a 9.753. It’s a 9.755 easily. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’ll just argue forever about it, like the same way you argue about grades. This is not an A-minus. It’s definitely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an A or whatever. And I’m kind of regretting putting those grades in there because now that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all people can see, even you. We’ll get to your disagreements

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as we get to each and every item, but do you think the A-minus is unwarranted for 10.9 and iOS 7?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, I think that’s actually, I would have even given that an A.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I put the minus in there just because, I mean, I’ve linked to your thing about the button shapes and all the options they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John adding, and that’s a sign, as you wrote in your post, as we talked about on the show, once you start having to add options and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff, that’s a sign that maybe you didn’t nail it quite the first time. And a lot of the times,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no series of options will fix the fundamental flaw in the philosophy of your design.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You might have to go back. Options are kind of a quick fix, but you kind of push

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one thing in over here, and something else pops out over there. And then you push the other thing in, and you don’t end up with a nicely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shaped product in the end. You end up with lots of lumps. And so iOS 7’s UI

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has a couple of those minor warts. That’s why I throw in the minus. Next item was diversify

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the iPhone product line. That’s a vague item. I didn’t want to be particularly specific.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I said, yeah, just got to do something. It’s got to be more than one iPhone, more than one new iPhone, not just last year’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John model and the new one. You have to diversify. And I’ve been talking about that for years and years. They did it with 5C. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gave it a B plus only because the 5C is like, it’s a little bit disappointing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in that it’s not more different. My whole thing was that if you make a purpose-built

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cheaper phone, you can do it better than simply offering last year’s model.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And they kind of did that, I guess, by going with plastic and stuff and maybe putting a little bit bigger battery, but otherwise it’s basically just an iPhone 5

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in there. And I feel like there’s some untapped potential in a purpose-built second tier iPhone. So maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their next run at it, they’ll do a little bit better, but we’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Are we getting the impression that the 5C isn’t actually selling that well?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t even know if Apple’s gonna break that down. We’ll have to wait for their earnings calls, but it seems like since the iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a high-end product, that I mean, well, like the lines, all the people lining

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up the early adopters, obviously, they’re going to want the fancy phone. And it seems like the people in line

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when they had people going through and surveying them were there for the five s not the five C. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everyone has said, Okay, well, that’s fine for the people who’d line up in the first week or whatever. What about over the long term, people who just wander

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into the store and want to replace their iPhone or want to try an iPhone for the first time, maybe they’re all buying five C’s. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even know if Apple will give us that breakdown. I don’t this. This to do item is not predicated on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the particular success of that mob merely that it has to exist. I’m sure Apple will tweak

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the pricing, the power, and the mix. I think they can diversify further. In fact, I haven’t made a 2014 to-do list for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them, but it’s hard for us to know, and I’m not even sure Apple’s going to tell us, so I think we just have to wait

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Can I create a 2014 to-do list for you that includes one item of creating

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the 2014 list for Apple?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You can create it, but you have to wait a year to rate me on how well I did, Well, I accomplished that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can be patient.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Wait, can you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I? Already gave up. I Already bought the Mac Pro for God’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sake. Yeah, seriously So for the next item was I keep the iPad on track, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a boring one But it’s something you have to do and it’s on the to-do list You can’t because if that’s not on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the to-do list you go through the year I did everything I need to do this year right guys and Tim Cook says we said no you forgot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to put out iPad updates. So the iPad Air is pretty great, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPad Mini, when Retina, I gave it an A- because the iPad 2 is still there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s kind of creaky that they’re still selling it for that price even though there are customers for it. Again I think a purpose-built model for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that market would be better. And the iPad Air really really needs more RAM.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like that’s the one thing keeping me from, not the one thing keeping me from buying the iPad Air, but one of the many things keeping me from buying the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Air is it’s kind of a shame they didn’t bump the RAM up over the iPad 4 and I think even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the iPad 3 all just have a gigabyte and with the power that’s in the a7 and everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that it deserves more RAM so a minus there. Introduce more better Retina

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Macs, kind of, the ones I was kind of talking about were the portables where they did finally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put the you know the Iris Pro graphics in the MacBook Pro to give the integrated GPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^John enough power to handle the screen and more things can on the integrated GPU, they don’t have to go to the discrete,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and actually the discrete is only on the high-end model, but it’s still there, so that’s all good. But the Air and the iMac, no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Retina at all, and the worst part, as we’ll probably talk about later, the Mac Pro’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Retina abilities are, at this point, extremely limited, and that’s disappointing. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we already talked about giving up on Retina, giving up on the Retina Dream for last year, and maybe next year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. Um, this, this turned out to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a particularly controversial one to make messages work correctly. Uh, and, and I,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s, I wrote messages, uh, but then I referenced I message. I was mostly talking about the application messages that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the Mac. I think it’s probably called messages on the phone too, but I message is what people think of it when they use it on iOS.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Anyway, uh, what I would say is like, it’s an instant message service.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John type text and it appears in someone else’s screen, you have little conversations with little bubbles. It’s basically the replacement for I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John chat. And it was pretty crappy in beta, and it was pretty crappy when it came out for real. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I said, you got to fix this. This is an instant message client. It’s got to work. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as I said in the report card here, is it is it fixed now? It’s hard

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for me to tell because I don’t have a representative survey of every single person who’s using messages in the entire

⏹️ ▶️ ^John world. But in my own personal experience and in the experience of the people who send me emails, tweet at me and people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who I know there are still routinely really embarrassing, dumb problems with messages

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like messages being in the wrong order or clicking on a conversation and messages

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the right hand pane showing you a different conversation and those types of fundamental errors are what’s the big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John deal? It’s a small little bug, right? You can’t, you just can’t trust an instant message program that does that. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s, it’s, it’s kind of a degree of difficulty type of situation where, okay, so in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some crazy obscure situation with 20 different devices, maybe it does this weird thing, fine. But this is like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just from one person to another, one Mac to another, having a simple conversation where you type something and it appears and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they type something and it appears and it can’t even handle that correctly. And that’s why I gave them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a D, because their task was make messages work correctly and I think they still haven’t done it. I still routinely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John see reports from people, I routinely experience myself, really basic bugs with messages.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s not that they’re the end of the world, it’s not deleting all my data, it’s not, you know, hosing my hard drive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or causing kernel panics, but it’s failing to be a competent instant message client.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If that happens to you once a month, once a year, is that okay? What if you, if you, you clicked on a conversation and start

⏹️ ▶️ ^John typing and don’t realize until, you know, a minute or two later that you’re actually typing in a totally different conversation,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you said something you didn’t want to say in that window, or things being in the wrong order and not being able to make sensible

⏹️ ▶️ ^John conversations or messages like inserting themselves up into your history or losing your entire scroll back.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Those that’s unacceptable. It’s acceptable in a beta. It’s maybe acceptable in a 1.0, but at this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John point, the basics should be sorted out. And I’ve used like every, I am client. You can,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, high profile on Yahoo, instant messenger, aim, ICQ, Google

⏹️ ▶️ ^John talk, uh, you know, custom Jabber servers, you name it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ve used them and I’m not dinging Apple for not getting the really hard stuff, right. I’m dinging them for not getting the basics,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right. And some people say, oh, it works fine for me. I send messages all the time. It works perfectly. Well, that’s great. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s still enough people for whom it doesn’t work correctly that I gave them a D

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the task of make messages work correctly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So I disagree there. Well, I shouldn’t say I disagree. I just don’t see any of those issues. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if I saw those issues, I would rate it the same way. But I actually I am going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to ruin things for myself by saying this out loud. But I almost never have problems with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey iMessage and I almost never have problems with the Messages app. I don’t ask a lot of iMessage. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ask a lot of my IM client on the Mac. But I very rarely,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in fact, I can’t even remember the last time I’ve had an issue with either. And so I’m stunned

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that not only are you saying, well, I shouldn’t say stunned, but I’m surprised, that not only are you saying that you’re experiencing all these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey issues, but you’ve clearly collected a lot of feedback from regular people saying,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey other people saying that they’re also experiencing the issues.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, that’s what I was getting on Twitter was one. One person was objecting. This is never happens to them, and it’s an unfair grade

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever. And then a few other of my random followers saw that. And one guy said, like, I just took a survey

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of ten iPhone users in this room, and all ten have seen problems like these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John recently. And you know, there’s other people who I follow who are just having, you know, a months long,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John years long battle with messages and constantly post a screenshot. So the screw ups or whatever, and people send me email. It doesn’t happen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to everybody. It’s not widespread. It’s not an epidemic. It’s not. It’s a big enough deal. Like Casey,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you said it’s never happened to you. Say it happened once, just once, where you clicked the conversation,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John started typing and didn’t realize it was the wrong conversation. After that, you’re going to look at messages a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John differently and say it happened maybe, maybe, maybe not just once, maybe like once two years ago

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then once three, six months later and then once a couple months after that, eventually you start to say, look, this is this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this program, it’s not terrible. It works fine most of the time, but I have to constantly be watching it. And other programs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you don’t have to constantly be watching. Even Skype for crying out loud, you type a message and it appears. It doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John misdeliver, it doesn’t deliver it twice. It doesn’t send it to the wrong person. The messages

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are sorted correctly in the scroll back. All those things that we just take for granted. I mean, for crying out loud, if Skype is doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it correctly and Apple can’t, it’s not because this is a big deal, but this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was a to-do item, which was, you know, Apple, bring your instant message client, help, bring it up

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the reliability standard established by iChat, even. using AOL servers right

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they haven’t even they haven’t even got up to you know there were fewer problems with iChat so I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John give that one a D

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey well and then most interesting thing to me about this is that to me these are the kinds of problems that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple doesn’t from the outside seem to care about at all you know they’ll care about an antenna gate which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey actually wasn’t a problem but they’ll care about something that everyone’s screaming and yelling about but when it’s an intermittent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey intermittent thing it seems like it never ever ever gets fixed or if it does, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just a happy accident riding along with some other bug fix that was unrelated. Yeah, I feel like these are the sorts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of things that they ignore constantly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, it’s so hard to debug this though because people people file radars on it. It’s like this one time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I launched messages and it did this crazy thing. And here’s a screenshot of the crazy thing. How can they debug that? They have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no idea like it’s you know, it’s a client’s a server issue. There’s data involved that all of which is gone by that point.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s so I understand, you know, be difficult for them to debug. It’s not like, well, there’s some obvious fix they’re not doing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it’s their job that just makes something that works. Like many people have made instant message clients that work,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, again, I secure aim, uh, using the native clients, using adium

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for them, Jabber, Google talk, Google talk has a web component. Google talk is, I have fewer problems

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with net does like a thing in the web browser. Plus I’m using adding them at the same time. Like they have to figure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out what’s going on here and fix it. And I didn’t give this one an F cause I think they did make messages work better. just didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make it work better enough. Like I should no longer be experiencing the type like just someone asked me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what did this happen to you? And as a matter of fact, just happened yesterday. My parents were here and I was trying to demonstrate

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something with messages and sending a message from one computer to another to show. I wanted to show how like you when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you don’t have messages launched, you can still get the notifications and stuff. And I was just demonstrating messages from one Mac to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John another. And I couldn’t get a message to go from one Mac to another, both of them using messages, both signed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in with two different Apple IDs and two different computers. And I would send messages and they wouldn’t appear. And I would send messages

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they wouldn’t appear. And I quit and relaunched the programs into this to that. And all of a sudden they started working. But the messages that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sent that didn’t appear never appeared. Maybe they’ll appear next month out of order or somewhere. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know. But that’s that’s that’s inexcusable. Coming to the end here. Make iCloud

⏹️ ▶️ ^John better. I actually gave this one a C because I think they have made iCloud better. I wrote about it in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mavericks where the Qlikog Core Data team got a chance to group to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, maybe it’s too late for them to win back the hearts and minds of people, but they are at least trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to fix the problems that they had. But in general, I don’t think iCloud still has a good reputation, mostly because,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, what they provide to the kind of control they provide to you is like go into a preference pane and check a checkbox

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or, you know, something simple like that. And when it doesn’t work, you just kind of have to stare at it until it does,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, oh, just wait, maybe it’ll appear, you know, just launch iPhoto and let it sit there. Maybe stuff in photo stream will appear eventually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If it doesn’t, I don’t know what to do. Like, there’s no visibility. So if you’re not going to provide any visibility

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or any, you know, sort of way to debug, which is fine. All four are not letting people see all the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gears and touch all that stuff, but you just got to make it work all the time. And iCloud still doesn’t. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco still also disagree that the iCloud, I mean, and the word iCloud applies

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to lots of different things. Talking specifically about the files and documents

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and data storage within apps and syncing all that, I still disagree that that’s even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a well-designed system. I think conceptually, the whole idea of each app being its

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco own silo and having this iCloud container in it that’s pretty much opaque to everything else,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or completely opaque to everything else. On iOS, it almost

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco makes sense. On the Mac, it’s really confusing and really clunky.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would even say on the Mac it’s it’s badly designed conceptually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I still don’t see this really taking off or going anywhere in the future

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, they haven’t really made another run at that. I think they’re still in the deep think stage Well, there are two stages

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one is make the existing stuff work correctly and reliably which is a totally separate issue

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the second is let’s think about how we can deal with the whole silo thing and I don’t think they’re going to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m hoping eventually they’ll come back and say we’ve thought about this and here’s our solution to that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it will be kind of a big picture solution not just like some kind of weird band-aid or hack that enhances

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the silo system so there’s like this little straw being drawn between silos where you can send

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things, I don’t know. So I hope they’re considering that but that wasn’t what I was getting out of the to-do item

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was mostly just saying, mostly going for reliability and speed and stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John next year’s list of something like that. We’ll see. Uh, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Yeah. If there is a list,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uh, next one was a resurrect. I life and I work. And they did that, but they kind of did it at pet

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cemetery style. Well, I don’t know if either one of you read that book or saw the movie, but anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uh, I life and I work are back, but they’re not really the applications. We

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thought they would be like, they’re new, they’re different, but sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they have fewer features and it’s not kind of like wow this makes the old versions like crap it’s more like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John boy I hope I can still get my work done with these new versions because they removed a lot of features and they changed the file format

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and all this other stuff so it’s not really not really what I was looking for but they did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John resurrect it right they’re back although not the not the names

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but the individual apps and hey they’re free why not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah I don’t I don’t know. I actually use the iWork apps. I don’t use Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Office. I don’t even have it installed. I use the iWork apps for work. And granted, my kind of work does

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not require frequent use of them. At least numbers I do use frequently, actually, for accounting stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and the occasional graph. But I have not found anything in the new versions

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I think is better than the old versions. And I want to like these so much and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I just can’t. I’m having a really hard time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco having any faith in Apple to do right by their application software anymore. You know, their OS is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doing great, both OSs are doing great. Their hardware is doing great, as I’ve said in the past.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Their application software is really suffering. And they, you know, I looked at the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apps by Apple page on the Mac App Store to see, oh, let me get a list of all their,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all their major application software and it’s not a very long list it’s basically iLife, iWork,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Final Cut, Logic, Aperture, and a couple of like little administrative things. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really not a lot there and it seems like every major update

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’ve done recently has been either mediocre or downright destructive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to their applications and I really question what’s going on there, like why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is it that they don’t have enough time to do this right? Are they in too much of a crunch every year and they want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to hit this release cycle? Is it a problem of one of the leaders of one of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the groups in the company? Is it a problem of priorities? Is it a problem of design? What

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is causing them to… Now I’m scared. Any Apple app I use,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iLife, iWork, Pro, I am actually scared to see what Apple does to it next. It’s reached that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco point. And that’s really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bad. I think they’re in the same corner as Microsoft found itself in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John barrier to entry, the price of being part of this market, is now higher and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John different in ways they’re not prepared for. And what I mean by that is like when Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kept revising Office, or Windows for that matter, and the internet aged on, their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reaction was, I guess this means we have to add internet crap to Microsoft Word or something, I think,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John guys? Is that what we have to do? And the next thing is like, all right, well, I think it means

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we have to make a web version version of Office or something. I don’t know. And I think of this, and I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of Google back there, kind of smiling and gloating. Like, we have one version of Google

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Docs or a spreadsheet or whatever. And it’s not a fancy version. It’s not amazing. But we just have one. And we can put all our

⏹️ ▶️ ^John resources behind that. But now Apple has to make the iOS version and the OS X

⏹️ ▶️ ^John version and the stupid web version. So they have to make three versions of their programs. And this release seemed to be about synchronizing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them feature-wise and file format-compatible. It was embarrassing when you had, like, oh, the web version can use the you can edit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the file, you can just view the files or edit them ones you made on your Mac. But when you put them on iOS, some features don’t work. And it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that was embarrassing when they had three versions, and they weren’t in sync. And some of them, you could create some things that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John couldn’t be viewed and others and vice versa. And so this release is more about we have to synchronize but look what they’re doing. They’re synchronizing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John three, what’s basically three entirely different applications, God knows how much code they share, if anything, between

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iOS and the Mac, maybe some there, but like the web version, who knows. And that’s what they’ve got. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’ve got to be feeling like, but we must be doing something wrong here, because I know native software is great and everything,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but Google just has to make one version of these and we have to make three and that feels wrong and we’re spread too thin

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and we have trouble hiring and this is not a big priority. And so and we need to hit our deadlines and talk about the yearly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John deadline like I work the latest version was oh nine right and I life it was like 11. Yeah, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco life was like a mix of like 10 and 11. I looked everything up and I made that post and it’s like it’s really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it basically the iPad came out and then all development on Mac applications stopped

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because all the teams seriously because all the teams were like then oh my god rush to create

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iPad version and then Oh iPhone version and and you know it’s very clear that Apple is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco using very small teams and we know that from talking to people there we know that they use very small teams on stuff like this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it’s clear that this is like they were distracted by having to make iOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco versions and then having to update the iOS versions and And now all of a sudden now they’re back to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They’re back to the Mac having to make something because it’s been almost four years without having made anything really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they have to make some Kind of update, but it’s not like they’ve been working for four years on the Mac version straight They’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco working on the Mac version for maybe a year And so and on top of all this stuff having to like cram

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all this in it’s just it’s really it’s very clear that They’re not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco handling their size. Well at all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s got some I know we’re not talking about software methodologies right now But this gets me back to one thing about software

⏹️ ▶️ ^John development as I’ve always believed and I find it frustrating It’s not the case is that I?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Do I’m a big proponent of leaving developers on a product?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So if you have a team that builds some application When

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the application is done and it ships Don’t take those people off and assign them to a new product

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and repeat that process process. It doesn’t mean you can’t. It doesn’t mean that people can’t work in different products or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But in general, there must always be a team working on X. What is like that’s the cost of having a product.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The cost of having a product is the team that builds it. Then you got to have a team that they’re that supports that product and makes the next version.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that team’s only job should be to make that product as awesome as can. Now, maybe that product becomes irrelevant. And then you got to move them. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that product has to change in a certain way. But you can’t just shift them like, Oh, hey, we did that. Now, everybody like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it seems like from the outside that that Apple has like these A players and like wherever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the fire is, wherever the most important thing is, the A players get swooped off to there. It’s exciting. It’s fun. Like, hey, now we’re doing iOS,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it’s a secret project. So pull off all the best Coco guys and bring them over to iOS. Right. And hey, now we’re doing the amazing holographic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John watch levitating hoverboard. Everybody pull them over to that secret project. Right. Like that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s not a good way to support your products. You have to you have to leave a team in place like, well, but if we do that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everything have these teams in place. They’re like stuck there. Those development resources are basically dead to us. They’re not dead. They’re there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John making a new version and a new version to make them better and better. And we all see the point where that kind of stopped.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPhoto got better and better up to about two versions ago, and then it just got worse and worse.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Same deal with many other products that we’re talking about, where we could tell when there was teams actively working on them, and each

⏹️ ▶️ ^John new version was a big thing. For example, iOS has teams actively working on it, and each new version is like, wow, look at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what they’ve done, right? Or the compiler team. they didn’t take those guys off.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The compiler team was, hey, we did this, we’re done. No, they just, every year, they have new stuff. That team, it’s probably a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John small team, and that’s fine or whatever. I’m not saying you need like Microsoft sized teams with hundreds of people, but every

⏹️ ▶️ ^John year there is a compiler team. It’s probably good that you can’t take the compiler guys and make them do the next version of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John numbers for iOS or something, because they’re just compiler guys, and what else are they gonna do? Might work better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, well, but every year, they make the programming language, the Objective-C runtime,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the compilers, they make that better every year. And the Xcode team, I’m assuming, just does Xcode year after year, and that gets

⏹️ ▶️ ^John revised. But you’re right. It seems like the guys who were doing iLife, it’s like, oh, no. But now we’ve got to make all these for iOS.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And maybe it’s not the same guys or whatever. Oh, now we have to make these things. And so who’s left on the iPhoto team?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, your job is to use a couple of the new controls to make it look more like iOS, and keep

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it running on the new version of the operating system, and take away keywords under photos because you want to drive John Syracuse crazy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do you think that there’s like one guy at Apple somewhere whose job it is to just drive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you crazy. I want to find the person who took keywords out from underneath photos and find the person who’s keeping them away

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because maybe you Steve Jobs took them away fine now he’s gone we can put them back.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I will give you one word that will solve your problem light room.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s too late for me. It’s not it’s never too late. Look I used iPhoto for years.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I then used aperture for years light room trust me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is night and day I mean this is ultimately what what I’m doing here is I’m replacing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple software

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with Adobe software look what you’re doing to

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} yourself I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’s an improvement

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be fair Lightroom is I would say possibly Adobe’s best product it’s a really good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco product it’s nothing like their other ones it’s really good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all right so that’s I made that I might It’s my own fault for not being clear

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the to-do item. Resurrect iLife and iWork, and what I meant was, like, they hadn’t been updated in so long, and now they’ve been updated.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And like I said in the post, I got to be careful what I wish for. They did resurrect them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Eh, oh well. Yeah, I think B- was optimistic on that grade.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I mean, like, I just said resurrect. They did resurrect them, right? I didn’t say resurrect them and make them. I should have been more specific.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So they get a B-. Because I am glad that they, like, at least, what if there was no new version of iWork? Or what if it was just that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John web thing that no one cares about? Like, that would be a lower grade. So the next item was to reassure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac Pro lovers. I give that one an A because you’ve got, you know, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dramatic intro video, WWDC. Remember that thing with all the deep bass in that room

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the cool video? And like, you know, that’s it’s reassuring. Apple is totally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the Mac Pro business again. But, you know, the whole nine yards and the factory in the US and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yep. Definitely an A there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m going to choose to just be quiet here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Better get used to it. I’m kidding.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m totally kidding. I’m totally kidding.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And my final item was do something about TV, which was conceivable last year. That

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could have been something about TV. And what I meant by that, if you look back at the original item, I have specific

⏹️ ▶️ ^John examples of what I was talking about. It’s like do something, something different than what you’ve been doing instead of just having a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple TV box, you know, make it make a TV set by Netflix, make an app store on the TV, something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that we all recognize as a big move in the television world, because Apple has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John been hinting that they want to, they’re interested in television, they want to do something there, they see lots of potential, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I thought it was time for them to actually do something, but they didn’t. We don’t know why,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe we’ll find it next year. That’s the only one I gave an F, because they totally didn’t do that. But that was kind of a stretch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway, and it was kind of vague. That was the closest thing to a wishlist item. But overall,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’d say I’d give this a pretty good rating. It was a pretty good year for them. They did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pretty much most of the things they were supposed to do to varying degrees of success, but I would give them checkmarks. I’m like, yep,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we did this, did this, did this. They did all the things they had to do. No big stumbles, just a few minor ones

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here and there that mostly only nerds care about. So good year for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco them. Now do you want to give any hints on if you made the 2014

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco list, what that might include?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it’s I think it might be harder for me because last year, like I was trying to look for a way in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to this other than saying like speculating about what they might do or doing a wish list

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and to do seemed appropriate at the time because it seemed like they had a lot of work cut out for them. You know, that was kind of at the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John beginning of the, you know, Tim Cook’s run. It’s like, well, what do you got to do? What do you got to do if you want to Apple? You got a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of product lines and you have to sort of hit all of them. And you know, a couple of them are in various states of crisis.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Other ones hadn’t been updated a while. So you got to X, Y and Z. into next year, I don’t know if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a to-do list is the right format. Maybe now it’s time to start thinking of a different angle

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on this. So I’m not sure what I’m going to do for that, if anything, but I want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to think about it some more because if I was going to make a to-do list, I think it would be kind of boring,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I think I would have to start to go into the speculation type stuff of new product categories and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John TV mumbo jumbo. So I don’t know if this is the right format for next year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, the funny thing is you can copy and paste this list with very few changes and and just say, all right, do this again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, well, there’s the things they have to do every year. But for example, I would gladly not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put OS X 10.10 on there. Say, look, I don’t think you need 10.10 next year. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could do 10.9s and march your way up through the single digits there and do 10.10 in 18 months. The world

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would not end if that gives you enough time to do a new file system on all four. You know what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean? Oh, god. Of course. Bingo. And iOS 7, you can imagine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an iOS 8 that is a lot like iOS 7, with a few new frameworks and features and some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John minor UI tweaks. And like they’re going to call it, that’s what I was it is going to be like. They’re going to call that I was eight, but it’s not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, I think that’s fine. And all the rest of the stuff about diversifying the iPhone, if they go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John another year with just two phones, I think that’s fine. You don’t have to do that. You’re keeping the iPad on track.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think there’s room for an iPad pro in there, but maybe not next year. Like you’re right. It’s a lot of the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff. They have certain product lines that they have, but I tried to be specific about what I was expecting, like, you know, what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are they going to do with the Mac line? You got to bring more retina out. That’s going to be repeated next year too. And messages

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in iCloud. I don’t even know what to say about those things anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We are also sponsored this week by a new sponsor. It is the Omni Group. And you probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know the Omni Group software. They’ve been around forever. They make really good stuff. They make productivity

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco apps, including the new Omni Graffle 6. Omni Graffle is a great way for beginners

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or professionals to work on diagrams, layout pages for print or create website and app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mock-ups it’s for students designers engineers whomever they actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wrote whomever in this copy I assume that either it’s correct or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they listen to the show and like Casey or both whomever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just go have a look Omni Graffle 6 is the easiest way to get your information and ideas into a beautiful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco document to share go to Omni group calm

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Omni New Graffle 6 is now available on both the Mac App Store and their own store. You can buy either

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way. It has a bunch of cool features. You can mask images right on the canvas so you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t need to crop them before you place them down. They have new fill and stroke styles that specifically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco created for quick and dirty mockups. So for instance, if you’re a designer and you want to bring

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in a quick mockup to a client, you want to show it off but you don’t want it to look like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco too done yet and set expectations accordingly or you want to make it look rough so that you protect your original

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco assets that you’ve made for the final version in case they don’t you know they want to like go copy it with somebody cheaper or something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Very nice and easy to create quick mock-ups and quick and dirty styles it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fantastic but beyond that you can do all sorts of professional final looking things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you go to just go to OmniGroup.com you got to check this out. What this app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can do is it’s hard to explain in like a one-minute ad spot all the features of OmniGraffle.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s just fantastic and to give you some idea of how good the Omni Group is, they charge

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco real prices on iOS and they sell. That’s how good they are. I’m not like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is not actually a joke or anything like they they charge real sustainable software

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco prices. They’ve been around forever. They have ridiculously good quality, ridiculously good support.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They have a very very long history of this and it shows. Their apps are professionally made.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I mean, heck, I had Omni Graffle. Omni Graffle came with my first Mac, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they had some deal with Apple around 2004, I guess when I bought the Mac where it came with like a basic version

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of it. And this stuff’s just so good. It’s been around forever. Great history, great company, go

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to Omni group.com and check out these very professional apps, especially the new Omni Graffle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco six. Thanks a lot to Omni Graffle and Omni group for sponsoring.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I remember the days when I got to make all my graphics my OS 10 reviews and Omni Graffle and now they have sort

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of a chart format at ours and they want you to do certain use other software for the charting. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the gravel, I still have it and I still use it is amazing. I use it a lot if you’re a programmer and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you want to make like those programmery kind of diagrams, it can do that for you too. I use it as a poor man’s Adobe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Illustrator, even though it’s not really made to be Adobe Illustrator. But here’s the thing about Omni Graffle and a lot of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Omni applications, they look kind of like keynote like where it doesn’t doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of features

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But believe me, there are a ton of features. I Liken it to the days when I used to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use I think it was AutoCAD way back in the day with a command line I don’t know if you ever use AutoCAD where you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sort of type in commands to do sort of It’s not obvious like you’d look at the tools that were on the screen didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seem like you could do a lot But if you knew what type of the little prompt you could do amazing things, right? Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you just look at Omni graph Well, it just looks like a palette of tools and a bunch of stuff or whatever, but there are so many keyboard commands

⏹️ ▶️ ^John keyboard shortcuts magnets, weird tools where you can copy and paste subsets of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John styles from one place to another and duplicate items aligned and rotate them and reconnect things to magnets.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It is like if you’ve ever seen someone who’s really good using OmniGraffle, it is amazingly impressive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I feel like I’m like barely scratch the surface of what this program can do and I keep I keep buying the upgrades

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like to stay in that upgrade price wagon even though I almost never use it. I use it like maybe once or twice

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a year. I just love the program. I just love having it on my computer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I mean their stuff is really it there. These are pro apps You know everything you just described about having like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the this like deep potential for learning new shortcuts learn new features that’s what that’s how pro apps

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are and These are really truly pro apps and they’re really great. So thanks a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lot to the Omni group

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for sponsoring all right, so We should probably get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey To an antex Mac Pro review.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, if you insist that you would like to talk about this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I would love I would like nothing more than to talk about the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Did you did you read it Casey?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I did

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} wasn’t good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The review was very good. I know you’re I know you’re saying that half seriously half joking The review was very good and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all his reviews are really good you know as a quick aside it made me think I feel like he’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a much better and Perhaps more Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey friendly version of Tom from Tom’s hardware. Do you did you guys read that back in the day?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yep, I remember it’s still there, isn’t it? Yeah, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey still there. Yeah. Does anyone ever read it anymore?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean it looks radically different now, but yeah, I’ll occasionally land there from Google searches about processors and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah, it’s still around

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Hmm. Well, anyway, so yeah an Antec and I’m probably pronouncing it wrong and I’m sorry, but an Antec

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey seems like a modern You know a 2010s era Tom’s hardware and their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey view was very good and I’ve come to really enjoy their hardware reviews They’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not quite to Syracusian level, but they’re very, very good. And the Mac Pro review

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is good, it’s just about something that I’m not terribly interested in. But with that said, I know that you guys

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and many of the listeners are anxious to talk about this, so let me have it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So first, John, I’m curious. When you read it, what did it make

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you think about a potential Mac Pro purchase for yourself?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It probably made me, pushed me more towards not getting one. Although,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it pushed me more towards not getting one for a lot of reasons, but at the same time it made me think that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the big reason is still how much it costs. Because that’s what it always comes down to. Because I would love to have a Mac Pro. Who wouldn’t want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right? Well, I can think of one of us.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe occasionally you wouldn’t want one. But like if someone gave it to you for free or for some really cheap price or whatever, you’d take it, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because it’s awesome. It’s an amazing thing. But since it costs so much, I constantly have to be weighing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it against my other options for similar or less money. And learning more about this machine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John made me push me more towards I got I have to find some alternative, both

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in looking at the performance figures, both CPU and GPU, mostly GPU. And also

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just thinking about like, if it does this look

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like is this a compromise machine? And I think it is a compromise machine. Like the one thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s really pushing me towards getting is like, well, you had the first power Mac G five. Uh, and like, don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you want the first one? Like the, the first cheese grater, the first trash can, like it’s in my Mac collecting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John type things, pushing towards that. But on the other side, I’m looking at what’s inside this thing. And there are lots of weird compromises

⏹️ ▶️ ^John inside there. I mean, he talked about them in review and you know, the ones that we’ve always known about the, the server CPUs being

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off cadence, but just the way the thing is built internally and the, and the decisions they had to make, It makes me think,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m going to spend all this money and I’m going to accept these compromises and performance and stuff that doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really matter, but that just seems awkward to me. Not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John having USB 3 in the chipset, which I didn’t realize until I had read the review, is that going to be the end of the world? No, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a compromise. And in this case, it actually is a compromise for real world consequences, which we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John talk about in a bit, I think, but it’s pushing me away, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Let’s assume that it’s a year from now and we have, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to make it safe, let’s say it’s two years from now and we have available a 27-inch Retina

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iMac with the screen resolution we want or a Mac Pro with an external Retina

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco monitor with the same resolution. So we can get Retina on both so that’s now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no longer a factor. At that point, I would have a hard time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not choosing the iMac. And I think for you, it would be no question

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you should get the iMac for what you actually want.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it would be an easier time two years from now for me to not get the iMac because I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all about the GPU, Marco. And the only reason I’m looking at this thing is because I need to have a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fast GPU. And in fact, I’m saying, well, for this amount of money, this GPU better be the fastest possible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s not. That’s one of the things pushing me away, right? So the iMac is never going to have the fastest possible

⏹️ ▶️ ^John GPU. The Mac Pro is always going to have more GPU power. I’m just hoping, again, because the GPUs are one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John revision back from AMD’s current chips, right? So even there, it’s a compromise, where they selected them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John before the new revision of the, you know, what do you call it, the GCN cores, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever they are, came out. So they have an old revision there. It’s, I don’t know. I mean, and again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s just because it costs so much money. If it was two grand, I’d get one in a heartbeat, right? Like, who wouldn’t?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right. And that’s the thing. I think for your purposes, for your expressed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco interest in Windows gaming, I mean first of all you can look at this and you can say, oh great,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well it has the dual card, whatever it’s called for ATI. Crossfire X. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So according to the Nantec review, the Mac Pro is configured to do that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for Windows, but OS X does not support that. And that’s not really that big of a problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco OS X really doesn’t care much about game use, and that’s mostly used for games as far as I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know I don’t think pro apps really really support that very much so I could be wrong I don’t know, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the point is I still think that for your purposes You would be much better served

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco buying a new iMac every two years than buying a Mac Pro every four or five

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I’ve I’m still the other thing that I’m still thinking about is Enhancing my ancient

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac Pro in various ways that is able to be enhanced and pricing those out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I don’t know that that kind of feels like putting a brand new transmission into a 10 year old car

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is But like that’s I wait to see should I get a new car should I continue to soup up this one? But anyway, let’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John talk about some of the compromises here one of them that I was surprised about that Seems like I am was surprised about as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well was that there’s ECC RAM on the video cards But that the ECC

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is disabled when you run under OS 10

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I read there was actually some interesting comments on the article I don’t know anything about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pro GPU stuff, but the comments basically indicated one guy seemed to know quite a lot and he was saying how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ECC unlike when it’s when it’s supported in the main memory chips ECC on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on workstation video cards is actually just a software implementation of it. Basically. It’s not it’s not like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a hardware difference and It basically just uses the RAM a little bit like a raid 5

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco array, which is like there’s like a parity Area and then a regular area so you lose some of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco space in the memory and in exchange for getting this benefit and so it’s it’s all done in software

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and You know it apparently is not universally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco praised because The loss of the RAM is is a factor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think that would should but still be an issue because like again with the ECC RAM and another reason I like the Mac Pro says

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they come with ECC RAM It’s like well who cares about that well as the amount of RAM that you get that you have installed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John increases It becomes a factor. It’s kind of like you know bit rot Maybe it’s not that big a deal when you have a 2 megabyte

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hard disk But once you have a 3 terabyte hard disk that same percentage of bit rot assuming It’s the same and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not you know worse. It’s it’s it’s an issue so With with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know when you have 512 megabytes 1 gig of eRAM who cares so when you have 12 gigs of eRAM You’re like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well for the same reason I would like to have ECC in my main RAM and wouldn’t I like to also have it on my VRAM? But if it’s a software only

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing and there’s other compromises, I can understand why Apple disabled it. So that’s a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bit disappointing. I think the most disappointing thing is that the four USB 3 ports

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are all connected up to a single PCI Express 2.0 lane. So you have 500 megabytes a second for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all four of those ports combined, which is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco great. Right, the PCI Express layout, I thought was one of the most interesting parts about this. Because I had heard a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco while ago, like back when they announced the thing, somebody told me that they had heard from somebody and somebody and somebody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that the reason why there was only one SSD in there,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because the SSD mounts to the back of one of the graphics cards. And so the obvious question is, well, can’t they just put

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a second slot on the other graphics card and give you two SSDs inside, which would give you a lot more capacity potential.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And the reason that I was told back then was that they’re out of PCI Express lanes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that’s why there’s only one SSD, that they’re using all the PCI Express lanes possible by that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco CPU and chipset for other purposes and looking at this diagram that looks correct

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah but this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the the SSD has four lanes and so it’s two gigabytes per second and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it seems like that the current SSDs are using are maybe pushing about a gigabyte a second maybe two gigs is gives

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it head room for faster flash going forward right but the main reason the USB

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing is a problem is a lot of the notions before this review were like well

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you get a Mac Pro I know Thunderbolt hardware is really expensive. But remember, it’s got USB three and USB three is a great way to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get cheap storage. So just hang all your storage off your USB ports. You’re not going to do that you get one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fast SSD, you’ve saturated all your entire USB three bus, right? Because it’s just one and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re out of lanes. Where are they going to pull lanes from? If they pulled like one lane from the internal SSD and brought it down

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to 1.5 and then gave you like and what what’s taking up most of those lanes these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John honking video cards each have 16 lanes I think I don’t have the diagram in front of me. So yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And why, you know, it’s interesting also how they’re sort of multiplexing the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John PCI Express, where they have like, well, it’s PCI Express 3.0 to the CPU, but it’s 2.0 to the devices. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s a multiplexer so that even though it looks like you don’t have enough bandwidth to support it, because you’re multiplexing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John down more than one connection into a fewer number, the fewer number of connection is 3.0. So that’s how you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John able to do it. Lots of weird stuff going on. And again, because USB 3 is not in the chip set for the server chips because they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a generation behind. There’s lots of weird stuff going on inside that box, or that cylinder.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, and I think the reason why, the PCI Express diagram tells you everything you need to know. It tells you that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this machine is made for OpenCL. That’s what this is. It’s made for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco extremely high bandwidth between the CPU and the two GPUs, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everything else is, oh, and I should point, and Thunderbolt. They’re pretty generous with the Thunderbolt bandwidth.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and everything else is secondary. So they’re telling you USB 3

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a legacy concern, basically. It’s like all of the USB 3 ports

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco together share the same amount of bandwidth as the Wi-Fi chip. Yeah, that’s what I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gonna, like the Wi, I mean, but the thing is they have to do that for, you know, if you wanna, they have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gig ethernet, and so those have, you know, one lane each, because they have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dual interfaces, that makes sense. And they have the Wi-Fi, because Wi-Fi is getting up to gig ethernet standards in ideal conditions,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these days minus overhead I suppose and you know they threw a whole bunch of the SSD assuming like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John storage is always gonna matter and someday maybe we may have an SSD that can saturate 2 gigs a second

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then whatever the hell we have left hang four USB ports off of it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well and I think it’s I think it’s a safe assumption that most people’s USB devices

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all taken together don’t really push 500 megabytes a second most of the time usually you’re talking about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about external platter hard drives and various other much slower devices, things like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco keyboards, mice, card readers, stuff like that. But the fast bandwidth use things over USB are usually just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco platter hard drives, which you’re not gonna get anywhere near that speed. So I wouldn’t be that concerned about that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You have a USB 3.0 RAID, or like, and I would imagine the things that it could attach to USB, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the quick throw away things, but a little bus-powered SSD, that’s conceivable. You could saturate that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with a high-quality bus-powered SSD. But you know they want you to use Thunderbolt for that though the thing about the Thunderbolt

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Market is even in the pro market. I’m yeah, I guess they have those Pegasus raid things and stuff But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I I would be more expecting to see them like I don’t know what the hell are people buying Thunderbolt

⏹️ ▶️ ^John storage It doesn’t seem like it’s a burgeoning market with Thunderbolt peripherals even in the pro space

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well, but until today You Thunderbolt was not even available on the Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So like all all of the all of Thunderbolt’s best potential customers all these people with high-end computing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco needs that used Macs were all using computers that didn’t even have Thunderbolt ports. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think even though you’ve had Thunderbolt ports on every other Mac for a while, I don’t think we can really judge

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thunderbolt’s maturity or widespreadness yet because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it just came to the Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah and even on the Thunderbolt front that’s the part that’s doing the multiplexing where they’ve got these Thunderbolt 2 things connected

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to what seems like an inadequate number of pipes back to the CPU but actually it is adequate because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the CPU talks to that bridge through PCI Express 3.0 and then the Thunderbolt 2 is a reach on 2.0

⏹️ ▶️ ^John buses and they have this multiplexer chip in the middle. It’s it’s a pretty… when I looked at all this stuff and figured… saw

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the extra crap they had to add in there, like it’s not just a stock Intel server motherboard cleverly arranged,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but they had to add these extra multiplexers for the Thunderbolt crap and the USB chip and all that other stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s a pretty amazing packaging job inside that cylinder because there’s a lot of a lot of extra

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff in there. It’s not like… it’s not like the GameCube motherboard where everything is so neat and tidy and you’ve got your, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John CPU, GPU and RAM and it just is this beautiful little square, there’s stuff all over the place and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John connected with ribbon cables and circle-shaped boards and it’s a very, it is very G4

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Cube like people have made that comparison before but now having seen the guts and everything and how it’s put together, that’s pretty apt.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, you know, I will say that the thing that fascinated me the most about… Who

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the hell

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are you? Who the hell is KT? Exactly. I just woke up. The thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that fascinated me the most about the NNTEC review was the talk about the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey multiplexers and all the stuff they had to do to get all these PCI Express lanes squared away.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It was really fascinating. And even if you’re like me and don’t really care that much about the Mac Pro, I would encourage

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you to read at least that part of the review. It is really, really, really interesting.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And you could tell by this layout, what they are emphasizing here is high

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco speed, modern and future throughput. You know, you have Thunderbolt being connected directly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to the CPU. So, you know, as an end pointed out in the review, that’s pretty amazing that you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like this external cable interface, six ports in the back that basically plug directly into the CPU.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s pretty awesome. And so you have that crazy interface, plus you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco these workstation class GPUs being able to run OpenCL stuff over these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco incredibly fast buses because one of the big challenges with general-purpose computing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on GPUs is just getting the data back and forth in a way that doesn’t make the whole thing take

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more time. Like if you can just do something quickly in the CPU that’s going to be faster than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco shifting over the graphics card doing something there and shifting it back. So in order to make graphics

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco card computing better and more useful in practice you have to keep making those transfer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pipes bigger and faster and clearly this machine is made specifically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and and primarily for that which is something that none of us are gonna use probably you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the three of us none of us are really gonna use that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it makes perfect sense in light of the demo they gave at WWEC for the Mac Pro was the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lunchtime session I don’t know if either one of you went to

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah but it’s available in video but anyway I believe we sat with you well there’s a lot of amount of nerds there well

⏹️ ▶️ ^John many many nerds look alike so So check your nerds to make sure they’re yours. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah, so it was someone demonstrating, doing painting on a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 3D model. Someone from Pixar doing some stuff from Monsters University. I think you can download it from the Apple’s developer site, I think. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not sure. But anyway, what they were showing there, and they had to take pains to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John point out, was, oh, it just looks like you’re drawing on a 3D model. Big deal. But they’re drawing with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John humongous textures, using all 12 gigs of VRAM, things are just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not possible on a regular computer just because of the sheer volume of data.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We’re not just doing like, oh, this just needs to be good enough quality to display in a video

⏹️ ▶️ ^John game or something. This is artwork that’s going to be rendered at high res,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 4K or whatever for movie purposes. And the assets that go into it alone are just gigantic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so it’s amazing that it can do it at all. But that’s not what most people are doing. Most people are not dealing with with a huge

⏹️ ▶️ ^John volume of data. But that’s what this machine is designed to do. Be a small little cylinder thing that amazes, kind of like the old

⏹️ ▶️ ^John SGI, like the octane machines or whatever. Be this little tiny thing that can do these amazing things with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a huge volume of data that other machines can’t do. So for that purposes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and for, you know, if you work at Pixar, it seems like this is a great machine for that purpose, compared to what you would have had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to buy before to do the same thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, after I read it, I was a little sour on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the idea of keeping my order and not canceling it. I thought about canceling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my order because it looks, from all accounts,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it looks like this is a machine with power that I’m paying for that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m probably not going to use. And I keep thinking, you know, what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if, one of the things I frequently do is convert videos

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that we’re gonna watch somewhere, or rip Blu-ray so we can watch them on the Apple TV without their stupid menus and all,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, stuff like that. And, or like, I’ll have like a giant folder of images

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that we shot that I want to convert and I’ll run ImageMagick from the command line in parallel.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, you know, maxing out all the cores to do that. And I think like, you, hey, what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if ImageMagick, what if their OpenCL support improves and it starts becoming like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco five or 10 times faster on this computer? I would love that. What if Logic starts using

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco OpenCL for something? That would save me tons of time editing this show. What if Lightroom

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco improves its OpenCL support and imports don’t take as long, conversions to DNG don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco take as long? All this stuff that I do fairly frequently that is highly parallelized,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m not gonna see savings every day that are gonna be noticeable, but I’m gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco see maybe once or twice a week Potentially big savings by having lots of parallel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco CPU power, but the GPU side Is still a big question mark and I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mostly still like half done or not done by most big software packages and I wonder

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is that gonna change in the lifetime of this machine or You know maybe maybe we’ll be looking at buying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a Mac Pro with tons of GPU power in Three to five years when tons of stuff takes advantage of that Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that would be a better idea than buying one now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well you need to buy one now just to replace your current Mac Pro because what you’re think of it this way like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You should think of it as what you’re doing is you’re getting a smaller Quieter version of what you already have that also happens

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be faster like that is another thing that pushing me towards Finding a way to buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this thing is It will it be better than my current Mac yes And it won’t just be better in ways

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like performance wise and spec wise and number wise it’ll be better in you know the touchy-feely really ways of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John being nicer to look at taking up less room making less noise using less power producing less heat

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe yeah it’s gonna be producing less heat like it’s it all those advantages

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are there maybe you didn’t need to get the d700 you could go to a with a less GPU but you’re just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know and plus you have to buy the expensive things that we can’t afford it’s your job you should not cancel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your order I guess

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco somebody has to be yeah serious I mean one thing I’ve thought about is like is because I ordered the 8

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco core with the d 7700 because the 8 core is is really great and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco One thing I thought about was what if I just downgrade to the stock 6 core config

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco plus the big plus the terabyte basically but Once you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco once you add the terabyte and the RAM that I want I want the 32 gigs of RAM Once you add those

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s not you know, it’s all price relativism. Yeah, it’s like it’s like a $1,500 difference Which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a lot of money, but it’s like well if I’m gonna spend spend $4,500, might as well spend $6,000.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I want this computer to last. And if you look, one of the great things about the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco AnandTech article is that it shows you how much value

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Mac Pros hold over time because the ceiling of performance really does

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not move very quickly. And the rest of the Mac lineup is actually hitting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a similar wall, which she talks about, which is the thing about how single threaded CPU gains

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have really hit a wall and are really slowing down dramatically across the industry

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in desktop. In mobile they still have a while to go, but in the desktop we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have like maxed out single threaded potential and the only

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ways we can realistically make gains are by shrinking the process down and making

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a few little, you know, instruction efficiency gains here and there but it’s the games

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are coming very slowly in single-threaded performance so what Intel did and what everyone else is doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is let’s just throw more cores in the die we can make the process small enough that we can make that work

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so you threw a whole bunch more cores in the die so now we have these now you now you can get a quad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco core laptop that’s crazy like imagine that imagine telling somebody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that ten years ago that would have sounded nuts but that’s normal now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can get a four core laptop that’s That’s crazy. And so on the desktop,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re basically doing, you’re basically just maxing out power. Like how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco much heat can you dissipate in this enclosure? That’s basically it. And so you have these 130 watt

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco chips, and that’s your limit there. So you’re limited basically just by,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well, you’ve maxed out single-threaded performance, you’ve put as many cores on there as you can while still staying under

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the power envelope, And you just gotta basically wait for minor improvements

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to efficiency in instruction level stuff and process shrinks to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be able to cram more on there or make it run faster. And so the era of having these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco giant jumps is gone. So the CPU I have in mine was released in 2010.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And the new one I get for nearly $7,000,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco CPU-wise is only gonna be about 50% faster. Well, 100% faster,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco roughly, in multithreaded, but single-threaded only about 50% faster. And that’s, like, I kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of expected more for a 2010 CPU going to a 2013 CPU. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think what you would feel more is the storage speed. I don’t know what speed your SSD is or whatever, but these SSDs do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seem reasonably fast, and that would probably give you a more day-to-day experience. And Apple, to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John its credit, as Adam points out, is trying to walk the walk with its software, heavily optimizing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Final Cut, which is the application they keep showing in their own advertising for like, hey, buy a Mac Pro get Final Cut,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, with the 4k video support, they’re trying to use all that GPU with Final

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Cut. They’re using the CPU and the GPU is not just a GPU is not is they’re trying to use all the hardware that they’ve built.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So if there’s, if you’re not talking about Maya or something, if there’s a piece of software that Apple makes, that’s trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be tailored for the Mac Pro, it seems like Final Cut is the flagship there, but other software less so.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But even in the case of other software, like, well, at least you won’t have any, you know, it’s got

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fast memory, it’s got a lot of it, your you won’t be processes won’t be waiting on a core. If you buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of the models with lots of cores and hyper threading and everything, it should still it should still feel significantly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John snappier and in a smaller package, it like makes less noise and everything like that. And the GPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not bad in terms of like, what it just like normal, you know, what do you want to use GP for? What do I want to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use just gaming or boring stuff like that it’s it’s fine it does pretty well like it’s up there with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the big boy GPUs it’s not the top of the stack of the big boy GPUs but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s okay but for the price of a Mac Pro you could buy like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seven high-end PCs with the same video card in them and that’s kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s kind of depressing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Which is what I keep telling you to do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco want to I don’t want a PC and… Well you don’t need seven you can just buy one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well see the thing is the like looking at in terms of of GPU performance of gaming. It’s great that it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has a crossfire in Windows and stuff like that. But I’m comparing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it to upgrading my thing, or I’m not comparing it to an iMac, because the D700 still stomps all over the iMac.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So the iMac is, I keep looking at an iMac,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pricing it out, and it ends up being like, we did it before, like three grand, and not really great for my purposes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I keep just looking at, can I hold out another year? Can I put stuff on my Mac Pro to hold out another year?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What am I expecting out of the year? The new CPUs might not even be out, but maybe they’ll be able to rev the GPUs, because then they’ll have, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like the GPU rev, fine, just swap in the new GPU. It shouldn’t be that big a deal. Maybe lower the price

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a little bit, because CPUs aren’t updated, and you’re kind of offering the same machine, so maybe you can bring the price down.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m waiting for. I haven’t decided yet. But half of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me looks at these GPU benchmarks and goes, if your current Mac was on there, it wouldn’t show up in the diagram. It would be like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a one pixel wide line, or it did not finish. Why do I care that, OK, so it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as fast as the very fastest GPU you can buy in any computer ever right

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now. But it’s in the ballpark, right? And then the other half of me is like, why not just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get, as many people have suggested, a high-end GPU and jam it into my current Mac Pro?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know. So what you should care about, or we should all care about, ignoring this gaming stuff, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what is the Retina situation like on the Mac Pro? And we already discussed how it can’t drive the big quad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 27 inch display that doesn’t exist because of What you called display port limitations and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right and we don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even know that it can’t do that There isn’t a display out there of that resolution to test with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right and maybe you could with dual length or whatever But the question was alright, so say you buy one of these 4k

⏹️ ▶️ ^John displays that Apple offers you from sharp or whatever Can you run it in retina mode

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the answer seems to be wait? Before

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t have to use the stupid impersonal at gmail.com or at yahoo.com. You can make your own domain

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you control forever. They also have Google Apps for Business and all sorts of great features.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Beyond all that though, they have amazing customer support. They have excellent online help and documentation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so you can help yourself, but then if you need any more help than that, you can call them. They have a phone number

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you just call during the week, 8am to 8pm Eastern, and a human

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco being picks up the phone. Get this, this is shocking for anybody who’s called anything recently. You call this number,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a human being picks up the phone after no holding, no waiting, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the person who picks up can help you. They don’t have to transfer you to anybody else, they don’t have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make you wait a million years to go through different departments and push different buttons, no. You call the number, a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco person picks up immediately and helps you. I know it sounds ridiculous, but anybody who’s trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to get any service from anybody else knows that’s pretty amazing this day and age So go to hover.com

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco slash ATP for high quality No hassle domain name registration and use a new promo

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco code tech by chance for 10% off. Thanks a lot to hover

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So retina, yeah, not so much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Moving on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is a part that has me a little bit worried So what Anand found

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was that the monitor that comes with it, yeah it works fine, but it’s, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the same reason that I didn’t order one, and I think John you probably wouldn’t either, that 4k

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at 32 inches is too many pixels for its size to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be useful at 1x, but not really enough to be useful at 2x.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s basically useful for 4K video editors to see an output of their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 4K video, but as a general purpose display this clearly is not a great solution.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And what’s interesting, so Dell recently released, there’s a few other companies that do this, but I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the most popular ones for a while are going to be these ones from Dell, it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the UP24Q something, they have the worst product names. It’s Dell’s 24-inch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 4K display, and it’s only like $1,200. So we’ve talked about it before, I’m not going to get too into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it, but that apparently, he got one of those from Dell for the review and he plugged it into the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Mac Pro, and it was just garbled and didn’t work right. And so it appears

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as though, you know, there’s all these standards that we talked about to like multiplex two signals

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco into either one cable or into two cables that go into one monitor and have the OS see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it as two different monitors and then merge it in software so it behaves properly to overcome various

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco limitations and stuff like that to be able to get these super high resolutions on one monitor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it sounds like Apple kind of made special support for the sharp one to work

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that they’re selling and didn’t make any support for this Dell one and that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s worrying because that means… well, it’s worrying in that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is now going to be a question. You can’t just buy any 4K monitor and plug it in and expect it to work right. So that’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco problem right there. This also rules out these particular monitors, which if you wanted

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dual 24s or a single 24 instead of a big 27 or 30,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you could have Retina today if this monitor worked. But it doesn’t, so you can’t,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and there’s no saying whether it will in the future.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Did he say that even on the Sharp one you couldn’t put it into high DPI mode though at 2x?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think he said he hacked it, but it would only do like 1 to 1 high DPI mode. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it would like, like exact, so it was 1920 by 1080. So it wouldn’t,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or whatever it is, so it wouldn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I thought what he said that it wouldn’t even do that one. It wouldn’t do that mode.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, it did that, but everything was too big, of course. And the problem was he couldn’t get any

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the scaling modes to work, the ones where it renders it higher and then scales it to the native pixels

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the way the MacBook Pro does. He couldn’t get any of those working. So yeah, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco basically for retina use, the current sharp 32 inches is not what really anybody’s looking for.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And the Dell, which is what a lot of people are looking for, doesn’t work. And it might never work.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It might work next week. Who knows? We don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, there could be driver issues Sort that out, so I don’t think it’s it’s hopeless on this front But like what it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John using to support these 4k displays through a single cable is the multi stream support

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Which was it seems like it was originally designed so you could daisy chain monitors together So you’d have a Thunderbolt display go into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one monitor and then out of that monitor into a second monitor So you’d have to send two monitors where the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John signal down this one Thunderbolt display. How would you do it? Just multi stream thing so they make a single monitor that consumes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John two streams and displays them in the right place And that’s why you might need some kind of driver support to correctly talk

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the monitor using multiple streams I know I’m sending within the multi-stream protocol But both of these images are for you, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here’s how you should arrange them and display them Synchronize them all that stuff so it’s again

⏹️ ▶️ ^John talking about a compromise machine It are the standards out there ready now for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for even just existing 4k displays let alone a quad 27 size thing and the answer is no they’re not like displayport 1.2

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t handle those those types of resolutions and even at plain old 4k It’s kind of a hack on top of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John multi-stream support to get this resolution to a monitor and it’s monitor dependent so again, it looks like a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Compromised machine not sort of we waited until we could do it all cleanly and elegantly and here it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They didn’t and they did it. However, they whatever they did what they had to do But all these areas we see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re just that close just so close to getting Everything the way it’s supposed to be but we’re not quite there yet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco exactly and So, you know, the big question is Will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple release the display we want anytime soon, first of all?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And if they do, will it even be compatible with this Mac Pro? And we don’t really know that yet. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still think you should buy one though. Maybe two, send me one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, I mean, and I did keep my order because, you know, looking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at this, assuming that nothing comes out that’s going to make something really incompatible,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, you can look at his CPU charts to see the progress of Mac Pros over the years, how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco slow it really is. The side effect of that, you know, one thing is, you should

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco almost never buy two Mac Pros in a row. Like, you should almost always skip generations. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the upside is that you buy one and it lasts a long time, and when you’re ready to sell it, it’s still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco worth something. Which is true of all Macs, usually, but in particular, the Mac Pros really hold their value very well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so I want to buy this computer that’s going to last me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at least two years of being top of the line and probably four or five

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco years of usability of still being a high performance computer relative to new software for at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco least four or five years if I still choose to use it for that long. Which I might not. Maybe I’d sell it before then,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but because it’s a joke, I sell everything. Ha ha ha.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If I choose to use it for a long time, I can. You know you like John you’re using your 2008 Mac Pro, and it’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, this this it’s gonna Guess it’s like it’s gonna go even longer Yeah Like but I would say if you’re buying if you’re buying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some machine buy it for what it can do for you today like don’t Buy it with the expectation that you’re gonna be doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a 5000 by something screen But maybe you never will but if you want a small quiet powerful

⏹️ ▶️ ^John computer That’s faster than your existing Mac Pro that drives your existing Monitors and non retina resolution

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and that you could use for years and years and not feel like you have a slow machine this is it. But if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re buying it with the expectation then in a short time I’ll be able to connect up this amazing new display and do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all these maybe you won’t maybe you will but like don’t don’t buy it for that purpose like this 2008 Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pro I don’t know what I was thinking in terms of you know what it would do but what it’s doing now is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the same thing it was doing on day one it’s running the same monitor it’s running similar software with similar features

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it doesn’t do anything amazing and it just keeps doing what it always did very well and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is amazingly problem-free and is very expandable and all the other good things going for it so maybe it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will just be under my desk here for another year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco On this topic we got a good question from a person who gave their name as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Agains and he or she said can you talk about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco why you guys would never use an iMac for work development etc I think it has many advantages to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pros in MacBooks. So this fits right in here with like you know why we buy Mac Pros and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco why we like Mac Pros and why John refuses to buy an iMac even though it actually serves his needs way better and be way cheaper over time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Not that I’m bitter but you know I think if you have never used

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a Mac Pro you’re fine. Keep not using them. It’s like using a giant monitor. Once you use one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re ruined and you will keep wanting to buy those big expensive things but you know an iMac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or a laptop they’re fine if I had to use those things I would use those things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Mac Pro is just better in a few in a few pretty key ways for what I do and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know people always say like oh do do I need X or Y for development

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most development especially if you’re doing web development you’re just typing into a text editor either

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s very few like IDEs that are really gonna stress the computer for any modern hardware.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you’re doing web development you can do it on pretty much anything. You can do it on an 11-inch MacBook Air if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco want to. You can do it on anything, it doesn’t matter. Screen space is always nice to have,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but performance-wise it doesn’t really matter what you’re using for web development. For iOS development,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can do it on everything else. Again, you need a lot of screen space, especially for iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco development. And for iOS stuff, Xcode is a bit of a hog.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So there’s a lot of smart things that it’ll do. I don’t know if this applies to the other big IDEs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the market like Eclipse or all the Windows crap. I don’t know if it applies to that stuff. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco IDEs can be very heavy and slow. Also just the compilation process

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is not quick if you have a major project or if you’re using big libraries in it. So you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can start hitting performance bottlenecks when doing iOS development, But even then, if you’re doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it on a modern MacBook Pro or a Mac, you’re fine. You’re not going to see massive gains

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in most cases for most projects by going to a Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think you can do iOS or Mac development very easily if you just get a Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mini with an SSD and stuff it full of RAM. Is it going to be the fastest? No, it’s not going to be the fastest.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You’re going to wait a little bit longer. But if you don’t have another Mac to compare it to, you don’t know how long that compile would take on a Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s fine. lots of RAM, big screen, and you can get away with the Mac Mini. I know plenty

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of iOS developers who made amazing, great apps, and their first Mac was a Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mini, and that’s what they did all their development on. Once you get a faster Mac, then you realize, okay, I can’t go back to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John developing on that Mac Mini, but you can get it done. That’s the amazing thing about development these days is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bottom of the bottom of the line Mac can, physically speaking, do development, whereas it used to be like you needed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to have the super high, you need You need a Lisa to develop for the Mac because you need more RAM. So it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, when they say, can you do development on iMac? Of course you can. Of course you can do development on iMac. In fact,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John most people probably should do development on iMac because you don’t need a Mac Pro for that. You definitely don’t need

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a Mac Pro to compile stuff. The compiler is not using your GPU. Not yet anyway. Not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey yet. Also consider that in the new versions of Xcode, what is the,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I forget what they call But they basically have this system by which you can compile

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey regularly on a completely different computer, which I believe was basically—they never came out and said it, but it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was basically designed for a Mac Mini. Do you guys know what I’m thinking of?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, the continuous integration thing. It’s the Jenkins—it’s not a Jenkins—

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s not just—you’re talking about distributed builds, which they used to have.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yes, distributed builds. I’m sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know if they still do. Yeah, but there’s ways to farm out. That’s one of the reasons

⏹️ ▶️ ^John why a lot of Mac development shops can get away with giving their developers less powerful computers, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you have a bunch of spare hardware and you can set it up as this continuous integration farm and have it doing your builds

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and everything. Basically, to answer this guy’s question,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iMacs can do everything. They can do everything you would want to do, and in many cases, they can do it extremely well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The only few things that you would suffer for having an iMac core is, if you’re a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gamer, you will suffer because the GPU is not. If you care about super-duper fast,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John best 3D games in full resin, blah, blah, you’re not going to get that out of an iMac. I’ll buy a PC

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at that point. Yeah, well, or a game console or whatever. And if you’re doing something that requires

⏹️ ▶️ ^John those big, massive GPUs for non-gaming purposes, like you’re doing Maya or Final Cut with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 4K video or any other application that takes advantage of all that GPU power,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s when you need a Mac Pro. But the iMac CPUs are faster in single thread than the Mac Pros for the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John most part, if you buy the super high-end one. So the iMacs really are amazing machines.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And just because I don’t want to get one because I don’t want to have a wimpy GPU, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the edgiest of edge cases. The iMac is a great desktop machine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for anybody. And it’s getting better all the time now. Once it goes completely SSD,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Fusion Drive seems to be great, although I did see some reports on the web about it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John having trouble with audio recording, which gave me some pause. But anyway, in a couple of years, The spinning discs will be gone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from the iMac. It’ll probably be even thinner. It’ll just be amazing, fantasy, future computer type

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing. Everyone, that’s the machine that everyone should look at. When you go into the Apple store, don’t look at the Mac Pros.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They’re way too expensive. Look at the iMacs if you’re on a desktop machine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That said, though, there’s a few, so I wrote on some post this week, couple days

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ago, I forget which one, that in our household, we’ve had an iMac, we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco had multiple laptops, and we’ve had a few Mac Pros over the years. and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco i’ve regretted buying almost all of them uh… except the mac pros the mac i’ve never heard of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a macro purchase and at one of the reasons is how these things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco age and what happens at the end of their life and how soon that the end of their useful life

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco comes uh… the laptops and the i’m ax are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and the mac many but wed i wanted to have one of those i sold it after a year to den benjamin uh… because i i i

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco i had a public this closet computer do accessory tasks and turns out that sucks uh…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it’s really a pain in the butt so i i didn’t want to do it anymore but uh…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when it’s very clear when using these computers uh… that these are consumer grade parts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and that they are you know if they’re made to be used by one household

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for a few years and then they’re basically worthless and they’re made to be you know discarded

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco donated or recycled and so certain things don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco age very well. I’ve had with iMacs, our iMac had a couple of screen issues especially by the time it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like three years old. It had some various screen issues that it was out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of warranty. Like right after it went out of warranty, part of the screen had like a deadline and stuff like that. There

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was like weird stuff. And there was like this big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco giant pile of hard drives hanging out the back of it because we couldn’t get to the internal one easily

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco enough to upgrade it and needed more performance out of the disk I O and the RAM

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was maxed out and we wanted more RAM and we couldn’t do it and and and whenever it would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get under load it with the fan would spin up and you’d hear it so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and most of that applies to laptops as well and so some of those needs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are removed or minimized now disk I O is a great example disk

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I O used to suck now it’s great because SSDs are everywhere. And so,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, there’s less of a difference. SSDs close the gap tremendously between the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of performance you can get out of a big desktop and what you can get everywhere else, especially in laptops. Close

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the gap tremendously. So that’s great. But all of the limitations are still there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If a screen goes bad in an iMac or a MacBook Pro, you’re screwed. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco better hope it’s under warranty, because you’re screwed. If If you want to change

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the screen size or upgrade it two years in, you’re screwed. You can’t do it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you had to buy a computer today and you want a Retina monitor,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well, tough luck. You better buy a Retina MacBook Pro, but even then, the current Retina

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco MacBook Pro probably won’t be able to drive the panel that we’re talking about over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thunderbolt 2, unless it was made for it and they never mentioned it. But there’s special stuff on the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Pro to enable this, and I don’t think the Retina Macbook Pro has that, at least not at 60Hz. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you want to buy a computer today that will last you very happily for the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco next 2-4 years, the Mac Pro is it. The iMac might,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but you’re taking a lot of risk there and at the end you can sell a 3-4 year old Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for over $1000 easily. And the three-year-old

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iMac, maybe a few hundred. You’re not talking a whole lot there. And the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iMac might have more problems that you can’t get to. And again, some of that is minimized now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from the reduction of hard drives and stuff like that. But there’s still a lot of those cases where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over time, you might come to regret having chosen the iMac if you have high-end

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco needs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I almost think that the high-end iMacs are kind of a sucker’s bet because they cost

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so much money. Like, you can push an iMac up towards $4,000. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can go right past $4,000. If you configure the iMac with the same hardware

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as the cheapest Mac Pro, or as close as you can get to the same hardware, it’s not that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco different in price. I think I said it on my site somewhere. I think it’s like $500 difference at that point.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, well, of course, you get the free monitor, but…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But the Mac Pro gives you dual GPUs. And so it’s the higher-end

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thunderbolt, more Thunderbolt ports, the dual network ports, if you’ll ever use that. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot more advantages to the Mac Pro that partially offset that screen thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if you have those kind of needs, and if you find yourself like I was, if you find yourself in the iMac configurator cranking everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up, then it’s probably time to look at another machine. I think the sweet spot of the iMac is kind of in the middle range, where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what you’re getting is you’re getting a computer that you’re on iLife apps on and browse the web,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re getting a really nice looking big screen, you’re getting like a sealed little thing that just looks like a monitor with like a wireless

⏹️ ▶️ ^John keyboard and mouse attached. And that’s all it’s ever going to be. You’re going to use it like that to the day it dies. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where I think regular people can easily get four or five years out of an iMac, because they’re never going to attach anything else

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to it. Maybe they’ll, they’re never going to have anything connected to any of the ports, except maybe some USB dongles is just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going to be this sleek sealed silver panel with a nice screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on it, they look at it and they do their computer stuff. And it’s got more than enough storage in there to last them forever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You get a fusion drive of three terabytes. They’re never going to fill that. It’s reasonably priced. It seems nice and snappy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the three apps they use all the time. They’re never going to upgrade it. They’re never going to care about the GPU. They’re never going to attach anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to it. That’s your good deal. Once you start cranking that stuff up and you’ve got a four gram machine, they’re like, it’s obvious that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you want more. You’re like, oh, but I got to have more better. And it’s not that’s not a more better machine because you will start

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to get the itch a couple of years down the line of wanting to do more. and well I’ve already maxed out the RAM I can’t have anymore well

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now I can’t have Retina and everyone else has it. The people who just have their iMac sitting on their desk as their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John little home computer, don’t care about those things and for them it’s a great machine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or if you just, you know, you don’t have the kind of money to upgrade, if you’re just gonna do development on an iMac, I think you could get five years

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out of an iMac, a mid-range one, you’d be perfectly happy with it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I mean, again, it depends on what you’re doing and like I know myself well enough to know that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if I bought an iMac instead of a Mac Pro, First of all, as soon as there’s a Retina monitor,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would feel like an idiot. So, you know, for me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the value option would be to just wait until there’s a Retina iMac and buy that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But I’m not sure we’re getting that this year. I don’t know. I mean, if you look at where the technology is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where the pricing is for these panels and GPU driving them and stuff like that, I wouldn’t necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco say a Retina iMac in 2014 is a sure thing. I don’t think so either. I mean, probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 2015’s IMAC. I bet we’ll have it then. But 2014, I don’t know. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would give it maybe a 50% chance of happening. Can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I ask a really stupid question? Why is retina so important?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And before you answer, what I mean by that is… Hi. I have… What? Nothing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh. Oh. Took me a second to realize what you were doing. Anyway, sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Moving on. So the reason I ask is because the obvious trump card answer is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you just want more real estate for developing Retina apps.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But – What? That’s not it at all. It’s because it looks good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey See, and that – maybe it’s just because I have terrible eyes. But at a distance in which I sit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from say take my high res anti-glare pre-Retina MacBook Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I can tell the difference between a Retina MacBook Pro and a not Retina MacBook Pro, but it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not night and day different. And I don’t find it to be as egregious and as frustrating

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as you do. And it doesn’t make you wrong, and it doesn’t make me right. It’s just, to me, it seems like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey an odd thing that you’re so obsessed over. I don’t know, maybe that’s a statement rather than a question.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s that good. So I work a lot with text, which looks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco awesome on retina, and I work a lot with images. When you see a photo,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, it’s so funny. So I take my laptop and we go on trips of course, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ll take a little camera and I’ll import the photos while I’m still on the trip

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco into Lightroom to see how they turn out and maybe play with them and maybe post one. And I see these photos

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on my retina screen on the laptop and I’m like, wow, these photos are amazing. I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco believe how good this is. Look at how great this looks. And then I get home and I import them to my desktop and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they just look so drab and disappointing. And part of it’s because my monitor is drab and disappointing, but part

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of it’s also that massive resolution difference. And oh man, it makes such a difference. Browsing the web.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like I was redesigning my site this week and just giving it like a new font and a few minor updates and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just looking at text that closely for a while. Text looks like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco such crap on non-retina once you’ve seen it on retina. It’s just one of those things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It really is a very big difference when you’re doing certain things. And a lot, you know, just like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you look at the iPads, you know, we talked before about how a lot of people don’t see the difference

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with the Retina iPads versus the old ones, or they don’t care, or they can like, they can vaguely be like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I guess the text is sharper or something, but like, they don’t really care. For a lot of people, that’s going to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco true forever, and they won’t care. I’m one of the people that cares, shockingly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And you know, I’m sure, I’m sure John is similarly observant and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco picky. And so, you know, we – like I care and if you don’t care,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s great. You’re going to save a bunch of money over the next few years by not caring. Or

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} by switching to Geico.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, it’s not that I don’t care. I think maybe it’s just that because I’ve never used a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey retina computer for any duration of time more than like 10 minutes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey maybe it’s just ignorance and maybe I just don’t realize what I’m missing. And again, I can absolutely recognize

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that it is better. It’s not that I don’t recognize it. It’s just,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know, to me, it didn’t make a big difference. And I think that’s because I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sitting with this display between four and 12 inches from my face,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like I do with my iPad or my iPhone. But I mean, if I, whenever I get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey another computer, it will surely be some sort of Retina MacBook Pro and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ask me again after a month with that. And maybe I’ll tell you that me asking that question was the dumbest thing I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ever done. But sitting here now not knowing any better, I just don’t see why it’s that big a deal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, here’s how I think about it. If you’re into technology, like I am, and I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we all are, technology kind of advances and fits and starts. And there’s these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John little discontinuities. And if you’re a technology nerd, you never want to be caught on the other side of the discontinuity. You want to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be using like, whatever the new thing is on the other side of the next little leap,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you want to be there living in the future, right? So monitor resolution sizes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one example where monitors were, you know, got color. And that was a big discontinuity,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, oh, you have a monochrome display, you wanted to color, if you knew color displays existed, you clearly knew that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a every display was going to be colored pretty soon. Right. And so that’s like, it’s going to happen. Color monitors

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are coming. It’s not like this forever, there will be black, you know, and be that you wanted to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of those. And you want you want to be living in the future. Now, if someone’s out there has got a color monitor for a year enjoying color monitor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John type games and you’re still on black and white, you feel bad. You want to see that new thing. And then the monitors got

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bigger and the pixels got smaller and they just kind of incrementally getting bigger and bigger and smaller and flatter and bigger. Flatness

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is another thing. Flat panels are out. Do you want to have that gigantic 21 inch CRT on your desk

⏹️ ▶️ ^John taking up all that room? If flat ones exist, that was another discontinuity. You want to be on the other side of that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you wanted to get there as soon as possible. When can I change my life from a person who has gigantic CRTs person

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who has no gigantic CRTs. You know that everyone’s going to be like that. You know CRTs are going away. You want to be on the other side

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of it. Well, retina is the next one of those things. So the monitor, the flat panel monitors get bigger and better and bigger and better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then all of a sudden there’s this discontinuity. 4x the number of pixels. It’s not just like a little bit bigger. That’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a total change, like a qualitative change. And you know, they’re all, everything’s going to be retina. You just know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it like it’s going to happen. Right. And you’re like, well, let me, I want to be living in the future with everybody else. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want to wait. I don’t want to be the last person to get a color TV. I don’t want to be the last person to get a flat panel TV.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I want to be among the first. I want to live in the future and with this amazing new thing. And you have to balance that with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John layout. Maybe the first flat panels TVs are bad, or the first high-definition televisions are still CRTs, or whatever your problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is there. But that’s the thing that’s driving me. And I, you know, I want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to, that’s another reason I get a Mac Pro. I want to see what is it like to be on the cutting edge of technology, to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the fastest, best, you know, most amazing thing. But tempering that with like, when is the right time to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John buy? When do I want the compromise machine? Do they want it? We don’t want to wait until they have it all sorted out. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s that’s the balance I’m going for. And me Yeah, like my eyesight is good enough to see the difference in retina.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would never go back to a non retina iOS device because that would be crazy. And I think Casey would agree with that. Now you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hold a non retina phone up to your face anymore and be like, No, you can’t forget it. And even an iPad, I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not use a mini when it was in retina. I don’t like the mini anyway. But yeah, and with the monitors, am I suffering

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by not having a Retina One? No, but if I know that other people are out there, it pains me, even the people with laptops,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to get to look at a Retina screen all day, and I don’t. Like, that’s the way everything is going, and I want to be there with them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so that’s, I think that’s the big driving factor. And it has to do with not whether you can tell the difference between Retina,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not whether you find it more comfortable, or you can appreciate Retina, or whatever. I think it mostly has to do with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John being interested in technology and wanting to sort of like live in the future with your jetpack, you know, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if other people are doing it and you’re not, you feel like you’re missing out because having futuristic things is cool and exciting, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it for two people who like technology, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And that that genuinely does make sense. I guess I’m trying, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey struggling to find a way to properly explain, but to me, it makes sense

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to want Retina, Marco’s dying urgency

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to get it now, now, now, that I don’t share that. But again, it doesn’t mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m right, doesn’t mean he’s wrong. I just don’t see what the urgent need is to have it yesterday. Other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey than that, it’s new and shiny.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, there’s a hierarchy of things that you need in your life. And Marco’s at the point in the hierarchy where Retina

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is actually really near the top of the stack.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, I also you know I because I have the retina MacBook Pro for travel every time I travel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and then come back I’m like oh, I go back to my old monitor. It’s terrible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, you’re living It’s like if you know if you had a bunch of flat panel displays

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But also one giant CRT monitor and every time you come back to the CRT. You just want to be like oh this thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John again

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean granted. This is not like a you know. This is not a severe problem in life relatively speaking But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but you know John’s right like you know we we’ve come we’ve come past all of these like major changes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know in in computing and and I think I think SSDs and high DPI are kind of happening at the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco same time with SSD SSDs being a couple years ahead and And I’ve crossed the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco SSD point I’ve I’ve chopped down my storage needs on my desktop so that I can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have all SSD storage I don’t need to use fusion drive Which is good because I tried fusion drive And it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was it was inconsistent and which is a problem and that’s probably why it’s a problem for audio recording is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s inconsistent and so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know High DPI is just you’re right. It’s the next big thing and after that like I I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not seeing any obvious Next big thing that’s gonna change computer hardware for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a while I mean, I’m not saying there’s never gonna be one that would be short-sighted But but there isn’t an obvious

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one coming up shortly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John memory unification you think well Yeah, sure that’s the that’s the next obvious move

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean It’s not going to be anytime soon But like if you look at the way a modern computer is made and you squint your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John eyes a little bit like this is ridiculous Let’s squish those diagrams together. Hey there you go and everything’s better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I Mean the way the way we’re doing it now so so to be clear You’re talking about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Similar to how the Xbox one was designed the first Xbox one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} nothing nothing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about it will be so much of the first Xbox

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The the CPU and GPU both shared one Giant fast bank of VRAM and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so there was no separate video RAM and main RAM It was just one big bank of fast RAM that everything had high-speed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco access to is that what you’re talking about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Game consoles have been like that and the PlayStation is the same way It’s all one shared, but I’m talking more about like memory unification

⏹️ ▶️ ^John across you know, disk, quote unquote disk, and RAM storage.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So maybe you’re right, maybe it’ll come first as like the stuff that the PlayStation and all the other game consoles do, like having

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a single pool of memory between the CPU and GPU, because that’s kind of silly. You’re gonna put 32

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gigs of RAM in your Mac Pro and then 12 gigs are hanging off the GPU and there are important technical reasons for it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now, but it would be nice if you had virtualized video memory and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John once video memory is virtualized, well then why do you have two separate pools of virtualized memory? be nice if you can combine them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then God knows what the process size will be and we could have you know we already have integrated GPUs and they keep getting bigger

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so eventually end up with a situation where you have your compute and your big pool of RAM and then the next one is you have your compute

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your big pool of RAM and your storage all unified into a single memory space

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and that you can make especially especially if process sizes continue to shrink you can make some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very interesting computing devices where where everything is is addressable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as a 64-bit address somewhere in some big virtualized pool of RAM. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s your disk, and that’s your VRAM, and that’s your main memory, and that’s your everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would never have assumed that that would be a thing that would happen just because of the economies.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s like saying that eventually everything is going to be L2 cache, or everything’s going to be a register

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco taken to the extreme. It’s like, no, that’s never really going to happen because of various economies.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, it’ll happen. We will live to see what I just described, I think, of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. I mean, half of it we already see in video game consoles. So that’s not fantasy. It’s like, go buy a PlayStation 4.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John GDDR5, quote unquote, VRAM is the entire RAM for the system. Like, it’s one big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing, right? The hardest one is bridging the disk RAM barrier with the storage thing. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if we all live long enough, that will inevitably happen too. Because certainly, we all agree that spinning disks are gone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John goodbye, right? And so now we just have a series of chips with addressable memory using different technologies,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s fine. You’re always going to have a hierarchy. There’s always going to be registers L1, L2, L3, flash, DRAM.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, whatever the technologies are in the hierarchy, that will all be there. But I’m talking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John distant future stuff. Like, as we’re on our deathbeds, the unified single chip everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John addressable as RAM machine will probably be out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And we’ll be complaining that it doesn’t support some new retina

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} display. No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’ll be complaining because you You can’t make a text size big enough for us to see.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And with that, thanks a lot to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, OmniGroup, and Hover. And we will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco see you next week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And you can find the show notes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and T. Marco Harmon, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey accidental. Accidental. They didn’t mean to.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Accidental. Accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Tech broadcasts so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John long. Why do they have to make everything so small? Can’t see a thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on these things. That’s all we’ll care about is the accessibility features from our

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey old. Oh, God. Hey, you kid about the accessibility zoom, but when I don’t have my contact

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey lenses in, that’s the only way I can see a computer from any reasonable distance. And I’m not trying to be funny

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just got to wait until you get a little bit older because as you get older You your vision starts to get worse in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the other direction and suddenly you can start to see close up a little bit better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well the way I’m heading I’m looking at corneal transplants in my future. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Anything any time I can buy until I can just get some dead guys eyeballs is is a is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a positive improvement

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Get the ones with lasers I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get right on that Got to think about the think about the options that the person selected

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like going to the BMW dealer hmm the cold weather package Up display.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m getting that definitely like it’s part of the premium package of those you’re gonna have to get a spoiler on your butt

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco guys are gonna make great old men I I really hope I still know you and talk to you regularly when when we’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all like Ancient because it’s gonna be hilarious and by that time nobody else will care

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to listen, but it’ll be funny

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, I genuinely, I’m not trying to be funny, not trying to be snarky, I genuinely cannot wait until

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m old, because then I can, then I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} have an excuse.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s such an old man

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} thing to say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’s great. Well, I can have an excuse for going to bed early, I have an excuse for eating early, I can be the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey curmudgeon bastard that I really want to be and get away with it instead of just getting yelled at for ruining the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fun about the Mac Pro. Oh, it’s going to be fantastic, I can’t wait.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So what you’re saying is you look forward to getting old so it justifies all of your existing behavior.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Basically, yes Also, I plan on buying a 1960s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey era Buick and just driving into people that don’t use their signals Because 1960s era

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Buicks are invincible. I mean what what could possibly harm a 1960s Buick?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey They weigh 85 tons,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but they crumble up like a house of cards. They’re death traps. There’s gonna be some like 1,500 pound smart car that’s gonna crush your being there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Don’t ruin my moment, John. Yeah, you know what actual

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey car crashes are like.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I know. All right, do we want to do titles?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, Wayne Dixon, Pet Cemetery Style. What did Wayne Dixon do wrong? Wayne Dixon,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John look at your title suggestion.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Cemetery?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, Kyle Cronin’s got it. It’s got to be an S.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I clearly don’t know what you’re talking

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} about. Stephen King,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John forget it guys, just forget

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. Oh, because was the movie title itself a custom spelling?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yes, yes. I guess neither one of you has read that book or seen that movie.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Nope. Alright, here’s a quick primer. If Lex Friedman hasn’t seen the movie, I probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco haven’t either.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But this is also a book, I thought maybe you might have read Stephen King, he’s a well-known author you may have heard of.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John He’s written some books people might have read. I have heard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of him. I can tell you that. Mark you don’t but you don’t read novels. Do you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know I I don’t read anything anymore. I barely have time to read instapaper

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, that should be that’ll be our next podcast. It’s just it’s like a big cultural

⏹️ ▶️ ^John intervention for Primarily, but I feel like there’s probably big gaps in Casey’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John life.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, there are there absolutely are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well look I spent my entire youth digging around with computers. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} like I didn’t you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, that’s Clearly you took some breaks. I took fewer breaks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think is what it comes down to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t like any of these titles

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Compromised machine did anyone suggest that that’s pretty good. We could do that. Yeah, I can do that either comp

⏹️ ▶️ ^John compromised or Compromised I say I’m gonna get compromised right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} was gonna I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would say with the D

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I would say without but I’ve just been overruled so that’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What are the reasons for without I’m willing to hear

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just because It’s as though it’s its name rather than its state of being.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s a machine that produces compromises. It’s a compromise machine. You turn it on, it pumps out compromises one after the other.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Compromised is what we’re getting at, I think. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} like the machine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John itself is compromised in some way. I don’t know. Either one is fine. But that covers the MacPro-yness

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of this thing. One of us probably said it at some point, other than we have to anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m kind of surprised that you picked the compromises that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco did to complain about. Like, the USB 3.0.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, the reason that’s relevant to me is because I’m trying to save money. And one way to save money is, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actually, a lot of my enclosures do have USB 3.0, even though I’m probably using the FireWire 800 interface at this point,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because none of my Macs have USB, or my Mac Pro doesn’t anyway, right? So one way to save money is, hey, you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reuse all that storage. You don’t have to buy a $300 Thunderbolt box. You don’t have to buy these $50 Thunderbolt cables. just put your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff, hook it up to a USB, and it’s like, eh, they kinda screwed that part up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, but you’re not really gonna be hitting those limits, though.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have SSD with a USB 3 interface, and it’s only gonna use like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, I don’t know what it’s gonna, 100 megs a second, 200 megs a second from, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, but like, then I start. How big is that SSD?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like 100 gigs? What are we talking about? 256. How long do you think you’re gonna be using that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for in reality? I don’t know, it was really expensive. I use things for a long time. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when I got my first SSD, it was one of the 160 gig Intel X25E’s, or M’s.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that was a few hundred dollars when I got it. I think it was like three or four hundred bucks when I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco got it for a laptop, and it’s sitting in a drawer now, because it’s 160 gigs and that’s useless.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can make a Fusion Drive out of it. Well, if Fusion Drive was really good, and if I had a computer that had-

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Everyone else says the Fusion Drive is really good. I don’t know why even NN says it. He got an iMac with Fusion Drive and he was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John amazed at how well it performed over time. I mean, maybe it’s different when you get the officially supported one, as opposed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to making one yourself, I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Compared to a hard drive, it’s radically better. Compared

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to a real SSD, it is noticeably worse. Not doing everything,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but you will notice the difference. If you have the option

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to go all SSD, do it. Like a lot of people are complaining that when I do the iMac price comparisons

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to the Mac Pro, I spec out the terabyte SSD in both. Because that’s what I would buy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and that’s what I would recommend people buying. And people are like, oh, well you have Fusion Drive on the iMac. No, it’s not the same. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have i5s as possible CPUs on the iMac too, but I’m not picking those because they aren’t comparable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, when I’m saying comparable, I mean comparable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I haven’t used one either, so I can’t say it, but like I have, you know, my main drive has SSD

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at work, and it’s a big difference. That’s the thing that’s hurting me the most, that for this for me to last another year on this Mac I really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just need to get an SSD for it but I have the size problem I have a 1.5 gigs of stuff here and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could probably pare that down to a terabyte but that’s a lot of money to dump in. Why don’t you buy my old one? I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lost what I’m thinking of doing so if you’re a new Mac pro you want to get rid of that thing I’ll probably take it off

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your hands if you give me a good price on it and then I can squeeze myself into that in the last and then for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the GPU I’m thinking I just won’t upgrade it I’ll just keep it I’ll just not play

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not play PC games for a year But I’ll be getting my PlayStation 4 this year and hopefully I’ll be playing most of my gaming

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the console or playing like old Games that still actually run okay

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You could buy this whole Mac Pro for me It has the ATI video card and it’s like the high-end one that get will high-end for 20

⏹️ ▶️ ^John minutes like a fit was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it? 58 70 or something I Don’t even know I’ll try to look it up, but yeah, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it was the high one that was available

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like it’s like a quarter of the speed of the Mac Pro ones or something like that that 5870 yeah yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no we’ll see like it’s much easier for you to ship me just the the PCI Express card than to pay for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shipping for the whole Mac Pro but you know that will make a bigger difference of course yeah when you when you get your yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s that’s maybe the only thing that will make a big difference because maybe I wouldn’t even notice the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the video card stuff depending on the games I’m playing so I’m I will think about my options there but I think of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I’ll the Mac Pro is still on the table if I can get some amazing hardware discount on, which I’m still working on, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah. I mean, I think… we’ve talked enough about it for now. What do you think, Casey?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} It’s not gonna go on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Hand on heart, I was just debating with myself if I should just hang up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Just to be funny. Like, I’m not actually angry, but just to be funny, I was genuinely thinking about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hanging up and just going to bed and seeing what you two did by listening to the show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, you can’t. Michael Lopp already did that on Unprofessional last week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Ah, yeah, that’s true. I forgot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can’t do it for a while. It’ll look like you’re copying LOP.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s true. Yeah, you’re right. Oh well. All

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} right, anything else?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, be glad, Casey. This will probably be more or less the end of the Mac Pro stuff until Marco gets his in February.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s, no way. This is a hell that I am doomed to live in for at least another three episodes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I bet we’re going to have enough to fill up half of next episode and then that’ll pretty much be it because, and fortunately

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for you, Casey, the Mac Pro hardly ever changes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John transition smoothly into complaining about the lack of updates.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} yeah, exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And the monitor situation, whenever that moves at all. Oh, God.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or doesn’t. Yeah, what we just need to avoid, and what I was trying to avoid in failing here, is we need to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stop talking about what we’re going to buy for ourselves, because that’s boring.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Even though that’s what I’m obsessed about currently, and what you’re obsessing about, and stuff, or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more talking about you know I think talking about the review and the state of the machine itself

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the compromises in it that’s good hemming and hawing about what I should get instead just makes people angry

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John why don’t you just build a game PC your video card is slow well

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but but it is helpful like so much of the feedback email that we get is stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like this I met question that we got which is like should I buy this can I buy this what should I buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff like that and and I think by you know it’s one thing to Hem and Haw over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know minor differences like oh do I need to get the d500 the d700 that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know that’s less important but big picture things talking about do I get a Mac Pro every every

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco four years or an iMac every two you know that’s that I think is more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco useful to more people.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I love that one go but you keep telling me I should buy an iMac every two years a that would be super expensive and B I would never

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have a good machine for gaming during that whole time. I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} always have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, like, just every few years I have a continuing mediocre to crappy game for, uh, machine for gaming. Whereas,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, at least for a brief moment I want to be able to play high-end games at full res and then slowly let the machine age

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out. And then for a brief moment be at the top of the heap and then… It’s exactly what you do with cars. I’m never at the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John top of the heap. But I gotta, yeah, for a brief moment I have a brand new Accord.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco exciting. Yeah, I guess my, my iMac idea of doing it, like, you know, doing an iMac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every, every two or two and a half years instead of a Mac Pro every four or five. That

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco depends on the iMac being like half the price of the Mac Pro, but it actually is much closer in price

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than that. It’s like, yeah, when you spec it out, it’s actually not that much cheaper. It is cheaper,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but not half as cheap.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Is she and the other people in the chat room saying, you already have a crappy game? I know! What do you think I’m thinking of replacing it for?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John People have to remind me that the 8800 GT is slow. I know I have an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John old machine. Do you realize this is from 2008, this computer? Of course it’s ancient, of course I know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that. It’s not, but it doesn’t mean you just immediately need to buy whatever’s out there to get rid of it. I want to buy the right new thing to jump to. I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just, anything I buy will be faster. Mac minis probably have faster GPUs than this thing. Like, I understand

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that, right? I’m just looking for the right machine to buy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco By the way, what the hell’s up with the Mac mini? It hasn’t been updated in like 10 years.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You think Mac Pro people are long suffering, the Mac mini people’s like, why not upgrade it? It’s not an advanced technology,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just shove the last CPU in. It’s like such a simple machine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Do you think, does the Mac Mini, you think, still sell well, at least

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as well as it ever did? Or do you think it’s on its way down? I’m looking, like thinking, if you’re in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco market for a lower priced Mac, or if you want like, you know, a second one for some purpose,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, the Mac Mini will always serve the role of like something cheap to connect to a TV or be in a closet. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for actual like desktop, you know, use of it, I have to imagine the laptop lineup

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has to be than Mac Mini’s launch at this point.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because laptops are… Oh, of course. The Mac Mini is an obscure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John niche machine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And the laptops keep getting cheaper. So you have laptops which are way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more useful and a way better value than Mac Minis for almost all circumstances.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Mac Minis are not that cheap. Again, it’s like everything else. Once

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you give it reasonable options, it’s not that you’re paying 900 bucks or 1,000 bucks for it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so, you know, it’s not that much cheaper than the laptops.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The Mini, Apple needs to keep the Mini around so that when we’re 80 years old, that will be the form factor of the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pro. Right. It’ll have some sort of like, you know, matter, antimatter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John black hole technology to remove the heat.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Do you think the Mac Mini, I was saying, do you think the Mac Mini is going to get a redesign to look like maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like the bottom third of the Mac Pro?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They should make it look like the stupid new Wi-Fi base station. The Mac Mini’s gotten taller.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Happy to see me or is that a new Mac Mini in your pocket?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I keep forgetting that the Mac Mini got squished. Like I forget where I saw the current

⏹️ ▶️ ^John model Mac Mini recently, but I’m always struck by how big and wide they are. Yeah, they look a lot like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John old Apple TV. Yeah, but there’s like this massive like I was kind of used to like, you know, the original mini

⏹️ ▶️ ^John form factor was so cute and now it’s like thinner but wider and I don’t know if I like that better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John especially now that they don’t need an optical display why is it so wide and flat squish that back together again I’ll take another

⏹️ ▶️ ^John half an inch of height

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t see the Mac mini being a very good deal for any actual like desktop use as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a computer as opposed to closet or embedded or TV or whatever like so you know servers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s nice for it’s what’s the least amount of money I can buy to get into a computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and maybe let me reuse some other crap I might have from my previous computer. So the minis, and closet

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use, and rack mounts, and all those other type of weird things. But it is worth keeping

⏹️ ▶️ ^John around, just because the profit margins have got to be pretty darn good, because there is cheap stuff in there. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they sell it for so much money. And it hasn’t been going down. I feel like the margins in that product

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have been going up. They’re like, fine, you want us to keep you doing this mini 50% profit margins? Deal with it. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco also, because there are so many people who want to get into Macs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as cheaply as they can. The resale market for Mac Minis is huge. You can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sell a Mac Mini for almost what you paid for it, even if it’s a few years old. You can sell it for a really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good price. Because, you know, to get a new one right now, you look, the cheapest one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is $600, but it kind of sucks. The one that’s actually good-ish starts at $800, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s only 4GB of RAM, it’s like, well, you want more than that. You add 8 gigs of RAM and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you want a Fusion Drive say to make it perform better, 8 gigs of RAM and 1TB Fusion Drive, $1100 already.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So you know like it’s really…

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s so easy to get you into a low end iMac at that point. Exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Come on over,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have you seen this big shiny color screen? That mini has no screen. And the only screen we sell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is $1000. Or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get into a MacBook Air at that point, or a 13 inch Pro. Do they still sell the 24 inch?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No they don’t sell that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anymore. They delete the 24, now it’s only 21 and 27, which is a comical difference. Oh, that’s right, the crazy 21 thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, no, no, not the iMac. They sell a monitor. They sell a 24-inch monitor. Nope,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not that either. Only the 27.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} The

⏹️ ▶️ ^John slippery slope that lands you into the popular models, the laptop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, and these price points are very carefully designed and considered so that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can upsell yourself through the line. So it’s like you start out with like, oh, I want to get the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cheapest Mac possible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Only certain people can upsell themselves to a Mac Pro though.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} There’s a limit.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, yeah, obviously that’s ridiculous.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} There’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John canyon that you have to shoot yourself over with a rocket sled to get from the iMac.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But you’re right, though. It’s designed to get a lot of laptops and iMacs sold, basically.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I think it does that very well. Because really, Apple doesn’t want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everybody buying the Mini, not just because of lower profit margins. But because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s not really the full Mac experience. They can’t control very well

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what kind of monitor you use with that, whether you plug in a crappy keyboard or mouse from a PC or whether you use theirs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff like that. If you get a laptop, an Apple laptop, everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is included for you. You have the keyboard, you have the trackpad that supports all the gestures properly, you have the nice big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco screen that Apple controls and knows about and can tweak. You have everything integrated

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco into this one nice package. A Mac Mini is sloppy and messy and uncontrolled. So it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco give as good, as integrated of an experience. So if you’re having somebody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco trying the Mac for the first time, Apple should want to give them the best experience

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they can so they keep buying Macs in the future. And to do that, you have to have a laptop, basically.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yep, I agree But they keep selling it anyway sort of kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I Have it yeah, how many like how many new CPU generations is the mini skipped?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it’s kept a couple of them though.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I would say probably at least three or four It went it went a long time the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco current one I think I think right before the current one it went like three generations something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like that it it has had pretty sporadic updates that have been noticeably slowing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco down over time. The

⏹️ ▶️ ^John current CPU is a core 2 duo for your $1,100 Mac mini.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Don’t complain! At least you can use your own monitor.