195: The Show Must Go On

10 Nov 2016

Touch Bar iPads, all-in-one Mac Pros, ARM Macs, and Mac clones.

Episode Description:

• Follow up:
  • Iris Pro and Skylake
  • Touch Bar and touch sensitivity
• TouchBar app with iPad viewer
  • Control Strip
• Marco's Mac Pro post
  • Empathy for the Machine
  • External monitors in Cupertino
    • Dell 5K display
  • DisplayPort and Thunderbolt capabilities
  • MacBook Pro as the Naked Robotic Core
• Apple discounts USB-C peripherals and dongles
  • LG UltraFine 5K Display
  • Thunderbolt 3 and Macs
• ARM on Macs?
  • MacBook Escape vs. iPhone 7 benchmarks
  • ATP #35: Sea-Level Executives
• Mac clones?
  • Apple's Lenovo
  • John's halo car
• Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
• Post-show:
  • The Grand Tour
  • Black Mirror and San Junipero

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

Chapters

1. Introduction
2. Follow-up: eDRAM GPUs
3. Follow-up: Escape Zone width
4. iPad Touch Bar simulator
5. Mac Pro all-in-one?
6. What monitors do Apple employees use?
7. DisplayPort resolution limits
8. MacBook Pro as naked robotic core
9. Sponsor: Eero (code ATP)
10. Apple’s dongle sale
11. Sponsor: Hover (code DONGLESALE)
12. ARM Macs
13. Sponsor: Betterment
14. Mac clones
15. Ending theme
16. Post-show

Introduction

⏹️ ▶️ ^John My kids were refusing to eat the purple potatoes, so I made them do blind taste tests and they couldn’t tell the difference. So I’m like, ha, eat

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your stupid potatoes. It’s not burned. It’s purple. Just eat it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So as chief summarizer in chief, that job is usually quite delightful,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but on rare, rare occasions, it is anything but delightful. And,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and we are recording the night of November 9th, 2016. Last night,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey our country made a very peculiar choice that none of the three

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of us agree with. And we were debating what to do about the presidential election

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and how we should handle it and what we should say about it, what we should talk about. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the conclusion the three of us came to is we wanted to acknowledge that it is a thing and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it happened and we’re upset. But otherwise, carry

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on. It’s going to do me some good to forget about this for a little while. I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s going to do you guys some good to forget about this for a while. And genuinely,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey no snark intended, it’s our hope that it’ll do you, the listener, some good to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not think about that for a little while. I’m upset. I’m frustrated. I’m angry. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really, I’m going to get over these MacBook Pros soon. I ruined my own joke. Look at that. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} how upset and angry I am.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Wow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} We’re off?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, we’re going to totally fix that in post. But anyway, but no, seriously though, no,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all kidding aside, we’re all frustrated, we’re all upset, and I’ll give you guys a chance to weigh in if you have anything to add. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s going to be business as usual around here and we’re going to try our best to just move along.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and I do want to clarify, like, you know, we’re not, I’m not for a second going to forget that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this just happened. And I’m not going to pretend that it didn’t happen. I’m not going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco forget what this means, what this signifies to so many Americans. This

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is not going to be forgotten at all. But we have a tech show to do, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we’re going to do the tech show. And hopefully that can help us and our listeners

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco temporarily get a reprieve from what has happened.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, the show must go on, as they say. We’ve talked about this before. We will touch on social topics

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as they intersect with tech, and this potentially intersects with everything, but I think this falls more into the category

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of what we mentioned on a past show that if something really big happens, it would be weird if we didn’t acknowledge it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But by the same token, especially with how all three of us are feeling today and how a lot of our last listeners are feeling today,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the overwhelming consensus is we just want to do a regular show as a brief respite

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from what we’ve all been dealing with today and will be dealing with going forward. So there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah.

Follow-up: eDRAM GPUs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So let’s start with some follow-up Isako writes in to say Apple did not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ship an e DRAM slash Iris Pro Skylake on the 15-inch MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It is HD 530 is that we’re talking about video cards. Is that right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, that was in my reference to What I was talking about on a past show where I said That

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple kind of is puts itself in a difficult position by demanding the highest and fanciest

⏹️ ▶️ ^John version of all the chips Especially with the biggest GPU embedded in them and we better if they went with a wimpier chips and just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use the discrete But that’s what they actually did on the 15-inch. I mean, it’s not wimpy It’s the hd3 530 is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of the better ones, but it’s not the one with the embedded DRAM and the Irish Pro things So and no, I’m not saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Irish Pro, which is what everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} here I’m trying to say Iris Pro, but it’s difficult

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Just gon’ put that right here.

Follow-up: Escape Zone width

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Touch bar apparently registers past the screen area particularly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on the left-hand side Where the escape key well, I guess it’s not a key anymore the escape button

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey would be Can we talk about how we know this or should we not talk about how we know this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There was a French website that posted something that someone a listener translated for me

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but the just that is when we were discussing like It’s a shame that they didn’t have the touch bar go all the way to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the left because you can reach the upper left-hand corner and feel for it and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but that part is not screen we knew that for a fact from the from day one that part is not a screen you can’t draw

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the escape button up against the left end of the bar the question was all right so there’s no image there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but is it touch sensitive and the answer is it’s about half to touch sensitive like so if you just take the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blank space where you can’t show any pixels on the left side of the touch bar and divide it in half

⏹️ ▶️ ^John vertically the left half of it does nothing you hit it doesn’t do anything it’s not touch sensitive it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pressure sensitive it doesn’t light up or anything the right half of the blank region doesn’t light up but does register your touch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in some way and because it’s about the width of your finger you can pretty much take your finger

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and jam it on the left side of the touch bar and it will activate the escape key in fact it will activate the escape key even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if no part of your finger is actually touching any of the pixels that make up the escape key or the picture of the escape

⏹️ ▶️ ^John key or whatever so it’s kind of a weird compromise like they almost got it to go edge to edge but not quite

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I guess Maybe when I fix it does it tear down maybe they’ll figure out why like how do the touch sensors

⏹️ ▶️ ^John extend that far? How far does the screen go and so on and so forth.

iPad Touch Bar simulator

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Have either of you done with the simulated Touch Bar on an iPad yet?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} No. Have you seen that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app that does that? Yeah, but it’s the wrong size, isn’t it? So it doesn’t seem like it would be much of a test of anything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s interesting. I ran that way yesterday for a while while I was working, and it’s actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of interesting. I guess I’ll put the link in the show notes. I forget the URL offhand, but Stephen Trout and Smith has been tweeting it a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here and there and different things. And basically, you have to have Xcode. You have to install the special build

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of 10.12.1 that isn’t the real 10.12.1, but it’s a new 10.12.1 with a different build number. You have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to download separately from Apple’s website. It’s kind of a mess to get it working. And then you have to get it running on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an iPad, which means you have to have a signing provisioning profile and everything. But if you can get past all of that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which is a lot, it is interesting to see. And so I placed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my 9.7-inch iPad Pro right on top of my keyboard, kind of in the right spot where it should be.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it’s interesting, like, you know, so as you mentioned, it is significantly smaller

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than the real Touch Bar. Like, I’ve been able to estimate from pictures that the real Touch Bar is 11

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco inches long or 10 inches long or something like that. And the iPad 9.7, the side of the screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is like 7 point something inches long. So it’s substantially smaller. And you can tell, like, the Touch Targets do feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a little bit small when you run the simulator. But it is really cool to see, like, as you move throughout the OS,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just to see what the Touch Bar actually does and how it responds to different things that are available.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know as as I mentioned at the end of last show, this really is showing that Apple’s putting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot of effort into the Mac and the Mac is not just some totally dead platform to them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because they have a lot of stuff built for the Touch Bar already. Like it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so much so many of the built-in apps already support the Touch Bar with some pretty useful stuff like there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s There’s like one, there’s like an iTunes widget that’s kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco always showing whenever iTunes is doing anything. It looks like a little equalizer, and you can tap that, and it converts the whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bar into basically an iTunes scrubber with a couple of play, pause buttons. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can just leave that open the whole time you’re working. So if you like to scrub through songs or to see your progress through

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a song, which is important when you listen to such incredibly lengthy songs as I do, it’s actually kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} nice to see.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And you can play with all this stuff, like on this iPad thing. actually works pretty well. I would say if you are curious

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about the Touch Bar and if you have the patience and skill required to use Xcode

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to open some open source thing and provision it to actually run on an iPad, it’s kind of cool to see.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But again, I’m not sure I would recommend it for full-time use unless you have a 12.9 inch iPad Pro because that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco actually would be big enough, I think. I think that would be about the right size. But on an 9.7,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s pretty tiny, but it’s cool to see. And it works surprisingly well. It’s but the animations

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are fluid. It’s surprisingly good for this like two day old hack, basically.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s pretty amazing to have this running on an iPad. And I will say though, having run this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on this little thing above my keyboard on my desktop, I think John’s concerns last episode

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about the ergonomics of like looking up and down so far between a desktop screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and the front of your keyboard, and that distance being way further than how you adjust your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco eyes on a laptop. That is a real problem. And it’s a problem enough that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s… I’m not entirely sure the touch bar on desktop is ever going to make a lot of sense.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Just because that really is odd. And kind of uncomfortable. I will say

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco though, that now that I’ve seen how well this works, it is kind of an interesting idea

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that… What if Apple made an external touch bar? That was just it by itself,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that didn’t include a keyboard necessarily. keyboard necessarily. Maybe you can get a keyboard that had one with it, but maybe they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco also sell an external one. I mean, this is wishful thinking. I don’t think they actually would do that. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco once you use an iPad like this, you see, oh, this actually does work. It is kind of useful.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And there could be something here if it was done well. Where would you put the external touch bar?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Above your keyboard, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John same place I put mine. But isn’t that the same problem with the whole desktop thing of the focal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John distance change everything like what have you solved by having just a random external touch bar

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well you have quick access to you know it’s it’s kind of like having media keys on your keyboard but you know on steroids but you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have to look at them I have to look at most of my media keys most of the time too because I never remember what’s what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well they don’t you probably just have to glance maybe to because you know you’re going for somewhere on the middle like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but you’re not it’s different in reading and just like you know glancing to see where it is but well

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but they’re always in the same spot like you know like when if you use something if you use a frequent item a lot it’s always gonna be right there I I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah, as long as the app is front most like that’s the that’s the tricky bit How did you find that in terms of the context switching because if you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a particular Especially for media keys and stuff like I’m used to hitting play pause on my keyboard to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Put you know to pause iTunes at work, but doesn’t matter what happened man I’m in my text editor I can hit play pause

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it stops the music, you know Someone comes over to my desk or something, but I’m never actually in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iTunes. Well, I wasn’t using any third-party apps I was only using Apple ones that that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have support for this But things like having like when I mentioned the expanded iTunes view with the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco scrubber that stays up even if iTunes is not front most which is kind of cool like that like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s just like it’s one of the modes you you know like there’s like all these buttons on the side that you can like the control strip part you mean that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco always there yeah the thing on the right you can like toggle on certain modes that persist until you change them and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s just one of those modes like one of them is like the old function keys one of them is the iTunes thing you know guys never

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John real control strip did you know Nope. I did and it was awesome. Congratulations.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It was it was pluggable too. You could buy third party things that would add new tiles to the control script and you could, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John configure it how you wanted. Yeah, it was really nice. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s come back, but now it’s on my keyboard and it comes from the other side by default. Actually, you can’t move the control strip, can you? You can’t make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it come from the left, right? It’s always on the right side.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m sure there’ll be a P list entry for you, John. Don’t worry. No, well, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t even pin the dock to the edge anymore. Are you kidding?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} This is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey why you never mess with those sorts of things kids. This is why you embrace the defaults Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John um fast for the big scrubber That’s one of my frustrations with uh quicktime player and one of the many reasons why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I still have quicktime player 7 installed and hope it never breaks, uh is Frequently

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if I mean I should probably just use a real audio editor like vision or something and sometimes I do But sometimes you just want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to open up an audio file and scrub to a particular time stamp And it’s a really long file because it’s like a podcast or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something And you just can’t do it in like when the the audio window

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is small So I open it in QuickTime 7 and I stretch the audio window to really wide

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and yell I have a scrubber that’s the entire width of my screen to give me the resolution I suppose I could do that with the other QuickTime

⏹️ ▶️ ^John player too But the point is I’m I’m making a window bigger on a non visual medium And the only reason I’m making the window bigger

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is because I want more precision in the scrubber This brings us back to our old discussion about ideas of zooming and scrubbers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and stuff But anyway, if you have a screen that is the width of a QWERTY keyboard, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a pretty good scrubber length And you probably get decent resolution there Not as big as you get maybe on like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a giant 5k display where you make it the entire width of the thing But you know, I mean at a certain point you need to just open an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John audio editor and zoom in on the waveform I understand that but it’s one of those hacks that you do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So in summary Marco touch bar Tentatively optimistic. I mean you sound

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey pretty pleased with it in principle.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I I mean, again, I didn’t get to try a real one yet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco time will tell on this again. It seems pretty cool. I think if I were

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco buying, again, I think what I said last

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} episode or the one before. If you were buying again a new laptop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, if I were buying a laptop, a Mac laptop today, and I intended to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use it as my primary computer, I would get the Touch Bar because I think it will probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco end up being really great. seem to have them now, so we should hear fairly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco soon from people who have actual hands-on experience for more than 10 minutes. We

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco should hear from them how these are in practice, and then hopefully sometime soon people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco will actually start being able to own these things. I mean, I don’t think any of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco initial orders have shipped yet, because they all had that 2-3 week ship date estimate at first. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t think anybody actually has one yet except a couple of reviewers, but I do look forward to hearing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what they say having used the real one not some iPad approximation of it but the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco approximation was pretty good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s awesome I’m really looking forward to trying this one day eventually, maybe.

Mac Pro all-in-one?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, tell me about the next Mac Pro. Is it going to be an all-in-one?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is a topic that has come up on lots of past shows and has been gaining

⏹️ ▶️ ^John steam as people hear us moan about the Mac Pro and Marco wrote a big piece about the advantages of Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and all that. And it’s seeming to me, you know, probably many months out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from any potential movement on this front, that if Apple is not going to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John another Mac Pro in the style that we expect it to be as in a computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that doesn’t have a monitor like if they’re you know they’re not going to make another trash can if they’re reimagining the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mac pro as something other than a trash can the most likely reimagining is what everyone keeps referring to as an iMac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pro which is the big 5k screen with a bunch of computer crap stuck to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John back of it and the only difference would be that the computer crap stuck to the back of it is more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pro-ish and so then it’s a question Like, can you fit a Xeon in there? Can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you actually put a decent graphic card in there? There’s a lot of room behind a 5K display.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Obviously, they want it to be super skinny and they’re kind of like, their own self-imposed constraints, especially on the back

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the display, because you don’t even see that when you’re looking at it in the front. It doesn’t need to be portable, except for that guy who brings his iMac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to Panera Bread to play World of Warcraft.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Naturally.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. So, you know, realistically, you could totally do that. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if Apple did it, I assume they would make their life more difficult, by still trying to make it thin and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John using all their skills honed by working on these super slim

⏹️ ▶️ ^John MacBook Pros and on their iDevices to continue to make it skinny

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and use clever heat routing and venting and special fans

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and whatever to make it so it doesn’t melt. And so these days, as I dwell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about the Mac Pro in bits and pieces, I start thinking about a Mac Pro that looks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like an iMac and thinking, they could fit some pretty good stuff in there. Maybe they won’t even go with Xeon. Maybe they’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just try to use better desktop chips and have a higher RAM ceiling and a bigger GPU. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it really literally is named iMac Pro. Or maybe it’s just called Mac Pro and the new Mac Pro is an all-in-one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know, like, I guess this is the bargaining stage here. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} like, all right. I was just about to say that. Get out of my head, oh my gosh.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Make me a matte black Mac Pro shaped thing with a decent GPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and a Xeon and ECC RAM with the high limit, I’d buy it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I mean, I would love that myself. I would absolutely love that. And you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the thing is, again, I mean, this totally is bargaining, but at this point, I’ll take what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we can get. If they can make something that is Mac Pro-like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that happens to be an all-in-one, that will cut out certain use cases. That will make certain

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people who would have bought a tower Mac Pro not buy it and that will possibly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hurt its sales. But if that’s what Apple has to do to make it palatable to Tim Cook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and Johnny Ive, then I guess we’ll, you know, I would take that over no Mac Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know. So I don’t know, but I think the question of what you could put into that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco depends entirely on the cooling setup. You know, if you look at the way the tube Mac Pro is set

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up, which by the way, like and I didn’t mention this too much in the post, but the the tube Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has a serious problem that the GPUs die frequently.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And this is this has never really been much in the public eye because not a lot of people own these machines, relatively speaking,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but there’s a massive like GPU death flaw in the tube Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I brought this up about about your article and you didn’t add it to your article, did you?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, here’s the thing, okay, a lot of people have first asked me the question of like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco why do I presume the Mac Pro is dead? And I’ll tell you right now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we have heard tips from so many different sources and they all conflict with each other.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Every single tip we’ve heard is different from a different one we’ve heard. Some of them are in direct contradiction.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve heard that the Mac Pro is already dead. I’ve heard that the Mac Pro is on hold. I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco heard that the Mac Pro is not dead but going to take a different form. the Mac Pro is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very much alive and that the Mac Pro is coming between last month and next summer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think all of those I think all of those things the reason I’m a big on the iMac Pro rumors because I think it fits all of them because the people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John saying it’s dead what they really mean is the trash can is dead check people say it’s coming but in a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John new form that’s that’s the iMac Pro form factor the dates nobody knows those so forget about it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well what I haven’t heard is anything like is it sky like E or not because that’s really I think that is really about the death of the Mac Pro if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s if it’s not the Xeons if it’s just a desktop chips with a better CPU then it literally is just a better iMac which you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hey we’ll take what we can get but but anyway getting getting back to cooling like one of the things you listed on your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John article of why we should have a Mac Pro is so it doesn’t you know howl like a laptop when you push it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hard and the iMac doesn’t howl like a laptop it kind of moans like an iMac like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not it’s not as quiet as a Mac Pro and I have to say that’s that’s not a I keep using

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like luxurious or elegant or whatever but like there if If you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hardware empathy, empathy for the machine, which I think I’ve talked about on past podcasts,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you try to do something that stresses your computer and it is just, the fans are just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going, you hear it whirring, there’s a certain baseline level of anxiety that I feel about that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, it’s kind of an annoying sound, first of all. And second of all, you’re like, is this, is everything okay?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Am I, you know, is it good to do this? What if your laptop sounded like that, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John eight hours a day while you worked? Like, it can’t be good for the thing to be, and it is an annoying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sound, it feels better to get a big honking machine that you can stress

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to its limits, and it, you know, and it doesn’t make a big racket. And so the iMac does not fulfill

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that criteria. And the reason I brought up to Marco about his article is like, that is an advantage

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the Mac Pro, the idealized Mac Pro, or of course the 2008 Mac Pro that I’m sitting next

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to, which is humongous and weighs 50 pounds. But the trashcan Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fulfills the quietness ideal, but not so much the not-melting ideal, which is an important part

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the power and elegance formula for the Mac Pro is you can be quiet and have good cooling, but that also

⏹️ ▶️ ^John means the parts that are inside of you can’t die from excessive heat. And so the current trashcan won’t current.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The 2013 trashcan has had a history of perhaps not doing so well on removing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the heat, but it’s pretty quiet. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah, but anyway, I wrote this article with the presumption that the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Pro is either dead or quote on hold, whatever that means. And the point

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of this article is not to keep people’s hopes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up that it’s not dead yet. The point of this article is to help convince the people at Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that if this thing is truly either dead or postponed or on hold or whatever, to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco try to convince them that I don’t think that’s the right move and basically please don’t do that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it has gotten a large response, very large response and so I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve hit on something here and when you see the article in that way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s why at the beginning I assume that it’s gone and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I didn’t bring up like you know here’s why the current trash can overheats GPUs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because you know that that is a real problem, but that didn’t really need to be in there. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco did mention, here’s why the current trash can sales might not be very good, and why you shouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use that. I think the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John overheating is one of them. I think highlighting, you know, it’s not that we, you know, you did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bring this up, it’s not that nobody liked the Mac Pro, it’s that you changed it so much, and the ways that you changed it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were maybe not palatable to all the people who buy Mac Pros. And it’s not as if, you know, well, the Mac Pro’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for you. It’s like, well, it’s gotta be for somebody, and apparently the trash can Mac Pro was not for enough people. So and one of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the things is reliability. You know, I guess one of the things you expect is quietness, able to handle high

⏹️ ▶️ ^John load and reliable. That’s why you got the ECC RAM. That’s why you have the, you know, workstation class components, whatever the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hell you want to call them. And you know, that is not super-duper overclocked. That is supposed to be a reliable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John piece of hardware. And the Trashcan never quite fulfilled that. So it’s yet another reason to add to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the pile of why the Trashcan might not have been successful. that is not, oh, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s no market for a Pro Mac anymore because I think there still is. It’s small, it’s as small as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s ever been, but you have to actually serve that market if you want to sell into it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Exactly. But anyway, so in summary, my article was basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a letter to Apple, presuming that they’ve killed the Mac Pro, trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to shoot down reasons that they might be using internally why they shouldn’t make this computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anymore. And it just so happen to be also wrapped up in some other things that pros might like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and everything else because that’s how I feel and my love for Mac OS and not wanting to leave Mac OS. Because like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what am I gonna do? Go use Windows? No. Windows is horrible. Sorry all the people who responded to me saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that that’s a stupid thing to say. No.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Oh it’s true. See? It’s true.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Casey is an official Windows-er.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well I was and then I wasn’t. More recently than me. Yeah oh yeah because I installed Windows 10

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just two weeks ago or something like that. What What happened? Are you okay? Don’t even get me started.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ve installed Windows 10 and I was genuinely, hand on heart, I’m not trying to be funny, I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey kind of looking forward to it in a way because everyone, anytime I’d ever seen anyone talk about Windows 10,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’d always heard, oh, you know, it’s really good now. It’s good. It’s good. You know, it’s not bad at all. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I installed it and it is just as bad as everything has always been. And I think we talked about this already on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey last show, so I won’t belabor it anymore, but it’s terrible. believe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey otherwise. It’s terrible. So anyway, moving on.

What monitors do Apple employees use?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So one of you put this in the show notes, and this is a genuinely great question

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What external monitors are Apple employees using with laptops?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well for now, they’re probably using Thunderbolt displays but this this a question or Idea

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was brought up in many different forms at a surprising number of Supposedly, you know presumably completely independent

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people came up with this one scenario Hey Apple’s got the new spaceship campus with the cool-looking office It’s shaped like a ring

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and all this, you know know, open seating or whatever. And they were trying to say, like, what would it be like to walk

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into this spaceship campus and see the Apple engineers diligently working

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as if you would actually be able to see where they work, because you probably can’t. Badge entry. But anyway, this is these are people writing and like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and presumably those people would have laptops because they Apple doesn’t make desktops anymore. And who would use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an iMac and whatever, whatever. But you know, people with laptops, as we mentioned,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even Apple laptops, when they’re sitting at a desk might like to have a bigger screen to do stuff on, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because it’s one of the advantages of sitting down or standing at a standing desk or whatever. You can have a much bigger screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or multiple screens or whatever. And for all these people asking this question, they couldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John envision a scenario where Apple’s headquarters was filled with people using

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple laptops connected to non Apple monitors. Is it because non Apple monitors are ugly?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Is it because they wouldn’t match? Is it because it wouldn’t fit their ideal of these architect sketches of this beautiful,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pristine Apple Place where everything is all aptly and perfect and the tables are made from one giant continuous piece of wood

⏹️ ▶️ ^John painstakingly manufactured in Germany or whatever That’s probably part of it, but the practical consideration

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is you know it was brought up before Apple’s monitors for a while have been made to connect

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to laptops if they don’t make any monitors Which seems like they’re not anymore, and if the Mac Pro either

⏹️ ▶️ ^John disappears it becomes an all-in-one What are all the laptops are going to connect to I guess

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the other? connected question to this is the question of target display

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mode for iMacs which used to be a thing and then wasn’t but now with the advent of Thunderbolt

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 3 which we’ll talk about in a little bit in theory you can buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an iMac and just use it as a monitor when you sit down and connect your laptop to it which would be like the world’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John most expensive monitor not really actually because the Apple 30 inches probably still more money but it would be a very expensive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John monitor, a total waste of the internals. But technically, it is possible and that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would be an out to let Apple’s campus photos continue to be completely happily

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from top to bottom. Realistically speaking, as for the campus pictures, you’re not going to see an except for a reception

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and those are going to be iMacs and they’re going to be all in one and they’re going to have a big Apple logo on them and it’ll be fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think I speak for all of us and saying we have some friends at Apple And one of my friends at Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I know for a fact is rolling the Dell 5K display as I believe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a child to his 5K iMac at the office. I… The LG or the… No, the Dell.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, the double cable one? Correct. Maybe this is his

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey home machine, so I might be lying unintentionally, but I am almost positive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that this is his work machine. It’s a 5K iMac connected to this, double-cabled

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to this Dell 5k display and so in the future I would expect it would be the LG 5k display.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you’re never going to see that because he can’t take you to see his office anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right exactly. I have I have no idea what an Apple developer office even looks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco picture of one of anybody’s ever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You should go look at what they look like in the 90s. They were awesome people. It is a giant the giant 840 AVs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with the CRT monitor with two big speakers on the bottom and because they would you know they would hoard the fanciest

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac hardware. I think it was it was more of a big deal back when Max were just so much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more expensive than I know. Again, if you look at the original purchase price of the Mac to FX and converted to 2016

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dollars, you will be very surprised. So but if you worked at Apple, you got access that stuff. So I remember

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a lot of like, cubicle farm pictures from the 90s. I had offices, not cubicles. But anyway, very sort

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of, you know, if you are listening to this, and you are a 90s era

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple employee and have photos of your cool setups in your office to send them a couple of them. Send us a couple of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them because I love seeing those. Um, and I’m sure they’re not quite what they look like today. I have not actually seen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the inside of an actual human working person’s office at Apple in recent years, so I don’t know what they’re like, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I do know that Apple right now has many different buildings that vary widely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in how nice they are, how modern they are, when they were built, what the accommodations

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are like, and the spaceship will be yet another iteration. I think of the spaceship. They a bunch of mockups

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can see pictures of what they expect the work areas to be like and the offices to be like but there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is no like what does an Apple office look like because Apple’s campus is so much bigger than the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John giant one infinite loop building it’s so many other buildings scattered all over the place and they are very different from each other.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Fair enough.

DisplayPort resolution limits

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So tell us speaking of displays and cabling tell

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey us about DisplayPort

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Someone wrote in with a bunch of facts about DisplayPort and we’ve talked about all these bits and pieces before we talked about how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we didn’t think there was going to be an external 5k display for a long time because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You couldn’t run it over DisplayPort at the current standard We were on display part 1.2 and you didn’t have it can only do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up to 4k And we’re like maybe when DisplayPort 1.3 comes but that’s not gonna be out for a long

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time So what are they gonna do? We found out the answer to that was that they’re gonna do this you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what they do with the LG display it’s one cable it’s not two cables and they just stream multiple display part 1.2

⏹️ ▶️ ^John streams over it but this information we got sent as a summary brought home

⏹️ ▶️ ^John another reality which is even when display part 1.3 comes it still is not your savior not that we need to save

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your network because we have a solution but it is not your savior for connecting your 5k display because display part 1.3

⏹️ ▶️ ^John only does 5k at 60 frames per second at 8 bits per component

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whereas display part 1.2 goes up to 4k at 60 frames per second at 10 bits per component

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which is important if you’re doing fancy photo and video work and don’t want to see like color banding and all of the crap

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and also the Alpine Ridge Thunderbolt chipset can’t receive that display part 1.3

⏹️ ▶️ ^John input anyway so it’s kind of a moot point. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we are going to be in the world of two DisplayPort 1.2 streams being

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tunneled over firewire for a while because that’s the only way you can get 5k at 60 frames

⏹️ ▶️ ^John per second at 10 bits per component. So maybe DisplayPort 1.4

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will do it in a single stream? I don’t know. And as for Thunderbolt, the Thunderbolt Angulus, Thunderbolt 1

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could send two DisplayPort 1.1 streams. Thunderbolt 3 can send

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to display part 1.2 streams obviously we know it can do that because it does it with the LG display and when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Thunderbolt 3 does that it still leaves 10 gigabits per second of bandwidth left over for other stuff so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John magic that makes the laptops being connected to LG display work and that is like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you were to take that back in time and show that to someone like 15 years ago you say you’re gonna output how much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John video over this skinny little thing you know we had we were just connecting like the ADC

⏹️ ▶️ ^John connector DVI are these big honkin multi pin parallel things with big thick cables at resolutions

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that are you know a tiny fraction of the current one and now we’re able to do this you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s still kind of a hack taking those two display part one by two streams and streaming them over this one cable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because the the standards don’t have enough to fill the whole screen and then putting them back together with the display controller and everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that is a that’s very impressive and we mentioned multi streaming sometimes Abbreviated MST

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that actually refers to the part of the display point 1.2 spec that lets you tunnel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to display port 1.1 streams over it and I keep saying display 1.2 1.1 and 1.3

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But the abbreviation that’s used frequently is HBR which helpfully stands for high bitrate

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and display part 1.1 is HBR Display point 1.2 is HBR 2 and display

⏹️ ▶️ ^John port 1.3 is HBR 3 I don’t know if that adds any clarification, but that’s how it’s referred to in this email and some of the literature

⏹️ ▶️ ^John clears my Anyway, it’s a good thing we didn’t have to wait for DisplayPort 1.3,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s really cool what Apple did to get the external 5K display working just in time for them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to not introduce a new Mac Pro. And finally, somewhat

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tangentially related to this, we got an anonymous as yet unconfirmed tip that no, the LG display does

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not have a GPU in it. Which makes sense in light of the DisplayPort stuff, because why would it need a GPU if they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can output two DisplayPort 1.2 streams over the single cable? yell at you, you could display it, you could just receive them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and make one image out of them and Bob’s your uncle as they say.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Okay.

MacBook Pro as naked robotic core

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then as a final note, and this is clearly for John,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey tell me about the MacBook Pro as the naked robotic core, if you please.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is another topic that many listeners have brought up. The naked robotic core, for brief review, is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John idea for the iDevices, specifically the iPhone, that Apple wants to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the smallest, skinniest thing possible, even if it doesn’t function as a complete phone, and then allow people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to augment it either with cases or battery cases or colors or whatever, that they don’t sell you the entire phone,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they they tell you the naked robotic core and then you dress it up to be the phone that you really wanted to be because if Apple made

⏹️ ▶️ ^John those choices and put a rubberized rugged case on the thing for you or made it thicker and bigger and ruggedized,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the people who wanted a skinny little silver thing couldn’t have it. And the people who wanted a different color could have and so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on and so forth. So they’re like, here you go, here’s the naked robotic core, add to it whatever you want. That’s a strategy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has been discussed a long time as a you know, trying to get into Apple’s head about why they make their phones

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thinner and slippery and all that stuff. Um, and so a couple of people brought that up for the MacBook pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the MacBook pro and a robotic core. And my initial instinct was to say it was no, you because you don’t put a case

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on your thing. Although a battery case for a MacBook pro would be awesome, but you don’t like they do have external batteries for it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it’s not, it’s not like you put a flowery case on it. So when you accidentally drop it, it doesn’t get dinged.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like it’s not, it’s a different size class of item than a phone. Doesn’t seem like they’re selling you the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John skinniest thing possible and allowing you to bulk it up by adding stuff to it. Although I suppose you could do that and I’m sure someone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out there makes a case for the MacBook Pro. But I thought about it a little bit more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John One aspect of it does seem kind of make it robotic, Corey, and it gets into the idea of the Thunderbolt 3

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ports that, again, as discussed last show, I’m in favor of going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a bunch of uniform, very small, multipurpose ports that can do everything. They’re cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John multipurpose they can do a lot of things but one of the aspects of Thunderbolt

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ports there that makes them so multipurpose is there like an externalization

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of PCI or PCI Express that necessitates the externalization of certain

⏹️ ▶️ ^John components for example like this one little tiny plug I can plug in here and I can do video out to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John DVI to VGA to mini DisplayPort to Thunderbolt display HDMI

⏹️ ▶️ ^John look at all these different options I have I don’t have to put 17 different video ports on the side of my Mac I can just have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this one little skinny port but the price for doing that is that you have externalized

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the circuitry required to make HDMI output work to make a DVI output work because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as we discussed and seen in the past lots of these adapters have chips in them and those chips aren’t just like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John optional and will go away you know once once the world gets fixed like it’s because the thing that’s coming

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out of that that port that lets you do that is not video if only my projector could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John understand it It is an externalization of the PCI bus so there needs to be some chips to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John deal with that And not effort that’s not true for all things like USB you could connect right to it So when we all convert to USB C

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on all our devices everywhere, we won’t have that problem, but certain devices still Have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some part that could have been inside the computer if there was a big honking port Move to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the outside of the computer now those components are small and often they fit in a little adapter that you wouldn’t even see and in theory

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they could also be moving into the devices eventually, but for a while I think one of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the prices of this beautiful uniform future, not just the fact that we have dongles, but that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple is pushing some logic, some active logic outside

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of their computer case. It used to be in the inside and now they’re giving you the naked

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even less robotic core because some of the roboticness has been moved outside the case. So I’ve been I’ve been thinking about that and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thinking is Is there a future where you plop down your super skinny Mac laptop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the only thing you ever plod into it is super skinny, beautiful, slender cables,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John none of which have a big white dongle brick that contains an impossibly small

⏹️ ▶️ ^John active chip to do some sort of translation?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And one thing that I think is a necessary

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco regression of this move, though, of the move to externalizing all of these different little things and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and and you know pouring all of the complexity and capability

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of adapting to different ports and protocols and adding different things you know onto external devices.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco One of the downsides of this is that the ones that you put in the computer you could control the quality

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of and oftentimes they came for free with the Intel chipset or whatever else or you know and you could make pretty good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things like USB controllers and HDMI outputs and everything else. In the current

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way of doing things of externalizing to all these dongles and adapters and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you are basically forcing people to buy something from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco someone who knows who and who knows who’s making the thing on the inside to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get the capability that used to get with like nice reliable built-in stuff and some of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or many of the things that you are adding on to are these like you know cheap no-name

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco brands from Amazon or eBay or whatever and like I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s it’s gonna be a similar problem as like finding a good USB hub which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very difficult they good USB hubs do exist but you it’s they’re so hard to find

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reliably that they basically don’t exist and so like USB devices

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in practice once you need more of them than what your computer has ports for they just become less reliable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because your hub is probably less reliable and it’s It’s very hard to find when it isn’t or very hard to diagnose that problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And once you require fairly pricey Apple dongles, and we will get to this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but fairly pricey Apple dongles to do basic things everyone needs, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, or not everyone, basic things a lot of people need, like USB-A adapters or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco HDMI or things like that, because the first party ones are so expensive,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco many people in reality are going to go buy third party ones from Amazon or whatever, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re going to be less reliable, they’re going to be less controllable, they’re going to be less predictable, in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco many cases, not all, but many cases. And I feel like that’s kind of a step backwards in a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of ways. We used to have these nice, reliable internal ports for all these things, and while it’s great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to have the versatility of these kind of everything ports now, and while it’s great to save the thickness of them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you want a thinner laptop, it is definitely a step backwards to have to rely on some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like 50 cent chip inside of a God knows who made it cable for something that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you find pretty important to getting your work done.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well okay that’s certainly possible but I don’t know if the sky is really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey falling yet chicken little I mean we

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} don’t know what the quality of these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey things is going to be and I think that in general like USB hub is a good counter-argument

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that I don’t have a good answer for but in general.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well the USB is built in though. That’s the, that’s the, the USB will be inside the thing. It’s when you externalize

⏹️ ▶️ ^John PCI express and say, this adapter works by pretending it’s like a device on the PCI bus

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it has a chip for translating the video, you know, pulling the video off. And what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was that one that had like, well, the iPad 100, like an H264 encoder thing in there, or a tiny little iOS device.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} And like that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of stuff goes on. That’s where you’re moving stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John outside. USB should be just a matter of everyone, please update your connectors to not be big old things like I see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I see a light at the end of the tunnel for the USB angle but I see less light for things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like display adapters or even something as people mention like ethernet which is very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John common and standard and you expect to just work but if there has to be a chip in your ethernet

⏹️ ▶️ ^John adapter then it’s like Marco said you are kind of at the mercy of uh

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the the quality of the adapter the bright side is if it breaks unlike the little chip break on your motherboard you just buy a new adapter. So there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up and downsides.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. And I don’t think that we should go and assume that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey quality is going to be subpar right out of the gate. And certainly there will be one or two of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey any kind of device, one or two Ethernet adapters, one or two SD card readers, et cetera, that will be crappy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But I think it’s a bit premature to just assume that anything outside of the case is going to be crap.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And even if there’s a glut of things that are crappy, I mean, that’s in principle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey why Amazon has reviews and why you can ask your friends, hey, does this one work for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you? And hopefully Apple would only carry things that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they feel are of a decent quality, even if it doesn’t have the Apple logo on it. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey certainly possible that this stuff will all be crap, but I think it’s way too soon to get worked up about.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, Apple will make stuff anyway. Like, so if you just want the Apple quality ones, Apple will make them and sell them to you for for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way too much money. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but there’s an interesting side effect to that, too. if you noticed that they’ve outsourced a lot of the current ones to Belkin

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like they’ve outsourced the the Ethernet to Belkin I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} one learning

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dual yeah the dual lightning that horrible splitter that lets you charge and listen to your lightning headphones

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s the worst thing ever you pay like 40 bucks for this thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this giant thing that has two lightning ports out one lightning port in so that you plug it into your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iPhone you have this giant dongle and And then you also have to have the headphone dongle to plug that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco into the second lightning port. Why couldn’t they just have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it be lightning out and headphone out? Why did… ugh.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s another angle on this though. I would mind the chips and the adapters and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John externalization of all this active logic less if it was smaller. That

⏹️ ▶️ ^John adapter in particular is comically large for the function. I understand you have to have active logic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Ideally, it would be like the little, you know, the, what do you call it, lighting, the headphone adapter, where it’s like, I didn’t even know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there was a chip in there. It’s so darn small. Like, that’s how they should all be. When it’s a giant white brick,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then it is, you know, that’s, it makes me feel bad about externalizing it. And I assume that stuff will go down

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over time and they’ll shrink and they’ll get better and so on and so forth. So there is some light at the end of the tunnel there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I still do think about the pushing of the chips outside of the laptop case, especially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Especially since on a 15-inch laptop, that’s a pretty big case. So at some point,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if we can’t get the world to get on board with putting these chips in their devices, and we still have to have an adapter

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with a dongle, it would be nice to maybe move one or two of the most often used

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ones to the side of that thing. Or if you’re not going to do that, put like three more of those ports on the side,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because there’s so much room on the 15-inch MacBook Pro. Things are looking kind of lonely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there with just those two tiny little openings.

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Since the last show, Apple has made a very curious move. They have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cut the prices on USB-C peripherals. And we’ll put a link in the show notes to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a post on iMore from a friend of the show, Renee Ritchie, that breaks down kind of the price changes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that have happened. And so as a couple of examples, the USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to traditional USB-C went from $19 to $9. The USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to lightning cable went from $25 to $19, et cetera, et cetera. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what’s particularly interesting about this is that the LG displays,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the 4K and 5K displays are also getting discounted. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey don’t recall how much the 5K was before, Was it like $1,300? I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} think it was $1,300, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And now it’s $974. Still not available for order quite yet, but it’s going to be $974 until the end of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey year, and that’s how long all of these discounts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey will be going on. That’s a really interesting move.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I feel like there’s a pessimistic and an optimistic take on this. The optimistic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey take is Apple’s listening and they’re responding, and they’re trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to make all of our grumbling go, well maybe not go away, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey make it easier on us for those of us who are professionals or think we’re professionals

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and need a whole bunch of dongles. And so on the plus side, Apple’s listening

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and they’re trying to react. That’s one way of looking at it. And I’m assuming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that you guys will have alternative ways of looking at it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, it’s, I think it’s damage control to some degree. I think it’s pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} clear

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that Apple released these new MacBook Pros, I think the reaction

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to the new MacBook Pros has been less positive than Apple expected. I think that’s pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco safe to say. And you can read between some lines on that, and I think Phil even came just about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to saying that in some interview somewhere. Basically, the reaction has been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not as positive as they wanted. And so they’re trying to do damage control. And that’s why they begin all their statements basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by saying how well this MacBook Pro is selling. That’s great, and there’s all these qualifiers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like it’s the best selling Pro laptop that we’ve ever had on our website.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And, you know, so all these qualifiers and everything, but obviously it’s selling well. It’s not gonna be a flop or anything, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they are getting a lot of criticism for it. So this is obvious damage control. And I think, you know, I think Gruber’s tip, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Gruber’s note about it, I think on Twitter somewhere, was that, you know, he thinks maybe they don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco want it to appear like a money grab. like the reason they moved to USB-C, they don’t want it to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco appear like it was purely for profit reasons to sell a bunch of adapters and stuff. And I believe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that. I think, you know, I’m sure Apple is not sorry that they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gonna make a lot more money from adapters and stuff than before. I think that’s a happy side effect. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t think that was the primary reason why they did it. I think the primary reason they did it was to make the laptop thinner, lighter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and simpler, save on component costs internal to the laptop, make it easier to engineer by having fewer ports the outside,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco easier to service, fewer things that will die or break or have things stuck in them or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco otherwise need warranty service, and then finally of course because they believe in the future of whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I believe those are all reasons why they made only USB-C plus a couple of headphone jacks,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco why they made those things all the standard ports and nothing else. However, you could very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco easily look at this and you could say, well you know, they did this just to make money on adapters. So I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that was probably one of the things they were trying to combat with this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think they were also just trying to apologize, maybe,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to power users in a very small and relatively inexpensive way that doesn’t admit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco any fault about anything. It’s a PR feel-good move,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco similar to the free bumper case for the iPhone 4 with Antenna Gate. It’s a PR, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make you feel better and make it look like we’re not just being greedy for adapter prices. That being said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco these dongles and stuff are still very expensive. Like, they’re still Apple prices. They’re still more expensive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than they need to be. And I think it’s weird that the price cuts are temporary. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the fact that it only runs till the end of the year, like, if they really wanted it to not look

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like it was about dongle profits, they should have made the price cuts permanent. Because these price cuts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are not, they don’t appear to be unsustainable. Knowing roughly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what margins tend to be at retail things like this, and knowing that most of these probably have very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco few parts in them and are probably very inexpensive and are probably very profitable to begin with, it wouldn’t surprise me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if most of these had at least a 50% margin and probably a larger one. And they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cut the prices by 25 to 50%, basically. So I would be very,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very surprised if any of these things were actually losing money at the current prices.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sustainable by Apple standards because they need 40% margin on everything. I agree that the margins are probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way over 40% for accessories and they’ve cut them down to what I think is below 40%. Although

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think they should maybe revisit that because if they can’t make them, like if they’re getting 50%

⏹️ ▶️ ^John margins on these things, they’re spending perhaps too much money making them. Not that I’m saying they should

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make them crappier, but…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than 50% that was being that was a conservative estimate. I’m guessing the margins are more like 80%. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there a lot on this kind of stuff. Usually, they they do make like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all their stuff. They make their even their little adapters very carefully, not so much in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John terms of reliability as a million people who will send us pictures of their totally destroyed things. But in terms of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tolerances and industrial design, they’re, they’re precision engineered products. There’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a lot of plastic mold lines on them. All the edges are straight

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and crisp. They look like little pieces of art, which also makes them bad adapters in many cases.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I’m just saying like it’s it costs money to do that. And they come in a little. And the reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I know this is I bought a bunch of them. I get back to the temporary pricing in a second. They come in little rectangular

⏹️ ▶️ ^John boxes that are beautiful origami folded. And you know, they’re just they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re not just like a little plastic bag that you get like with Amazon basics and the frustration of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} repackaging of just this cable thrown in there. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you know, and like I said, in terms of how they perform as actual adapters, I don’t think they’re actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John better than the other ones, but I do see that where some of the money is spent on them. So I think they would,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in general, they would be better off make finding a way to manufacture their adapters

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for less money, giving up some of the beauty and elegance and at the same time making them more reliable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John adapters and the reason I bought a bunch of them is what you’re getting at the temporary pricing. It’s you know, if you want a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pessimistic take, this is what I thought when I saw it. Oh, it’s nice. They’re doing something to you know, be nice to all those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people who who are like posting horror stories that I bought a new MacBook Pro and also $300 worth of adapter so I could use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the damn thing, right? That’s a bad look for Apple. So like now you won’t have to spend $150 worth

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of adapters, but only until the end of the year. So what happens at the end of the year? By the end of the year, has everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John updated all their offices to have connectors that don’t require these dongles? No, they just go back to the old pricing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the old pricing, which was really, really expensive, especially for some of the simpler adapters. The reason I bought

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I bought those, the USB C to plain old USB-A because that’s gonna I don’t even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have a computer with ports that require that I mean I got my Apple TV I suppose I could plug it into but it would do nothing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but someday I will have a computer that does that and they were half off basically it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like $19 to $9 so I bought two of them because I’m gonna use them and $9 is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a price I will pay for that little adapter will I pay $20 for that adapter hell no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I will not pay to I’ll go to monoprice and find or whatever that you know, or, you know, Amazon basics was mentioned, I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John find a cheaper one because it’s not worth that much money. $20 for USB C to USB a adapter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No. So I bought them because they were temporary. Maybe their system is working

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make adding some urgency or whatever. But it would be much nicer if they didn’t see this as a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John PR thing that needs to be addressed in the short term, but rather as a long term issue,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because I think they’re going to be selling dongles for a long time. And that’s going to be factored into the price of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John buying laptops, especially the next laptop that people buy after this one, because they’ll know, oh, when you buy an Apple laptop,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John also reserve 100 and X dollars for dongles, maybe more. And if the prices just go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right back up, it’s, it’s not a good, it’s not a good situation. I mean, I know they kind of get away

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with in the iOS devices where it’s like, oh, you can buy the iOS device because you want the one with lots of memory, we’re just gonna add a couple hundred bucks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you want AppleCare and then you want the front case and the back case in your iPad it like it adds up really fast but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for some reason and maybe this is illogical the adapters seem like you know relatively

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more expensive and maybe it’s because I don’t see the little chips in there and don’t understand how expensive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is to get them all integrated into that but this is a problem of Apple’s own making and when I see third-party ones

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that can come in for less especially for the simpler adapters it makes me think that Apple is choosing the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wrong trade-offs when it comes to making its own adapters they’re too expensive, too precious,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and not sturdy enough.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s funny you say that you went and pick some of these up because on my to do list

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this week, which I haven’t had time for, is I wanted to go to the Apple Store

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and pick up a handful of these adapters because I have the exact same thought I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey probably won’t have a MacBook Pro, or a Mac that uses USBC for at least a year or two.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But But that time will come. So So why not just pick up a few of these? And I intend

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to do that very thing sometime soon.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The reason I’m laughing is that I did that very thing. All three of us did this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So none of the three of us have one of the new MacBook Pros or have ordered one or likely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are planning to buy one. Well, you briefly ordered

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} one. I did.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} You briefly ordered one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I ordered it with two adapters, a USB C to A and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a C to Lightning. both shipped and arrived before I can’t even cancel the laptop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So and I’m like well I could return them but well I’m gonna use them anyway and then the price drop was announced and they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco credited me the difference I’m like okay that’s even better and so I went I bought I now have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco two C to A adapters the light the C to lightning gigabit Ethernet the sandisk

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco card reader and the Thunderbolt 2 adapter because I have I have an external sound device that I that we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco record ATP at WBC with that is Thunderbolt and I paid all the exact same

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco calculations as you guys. It’s like, well, I’m going to need these eventually, and they’re probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not going to get cheaper over time. Like this is probably I’m going to need these soon,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably within the next two years. I will. I will need these adapters and think like things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like the seat, a lightning cable. That’s just the new lightning cable. I need tons of lightning

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cables. They’re all over the place. Like I like to pick up one of these at whatever it is. Nineteen dollars

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of twenty five. I get that was a small price drop on that one but like well I’m gonna need these so I might as well get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one or two.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You should make like a paper craft MacBook Pro and plug all your dongles into it. You’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have like a pretend computer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Yeah but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco again I do admit though I agree John that it is very strange these price drops are only

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco temporary on the dongles because again like they’re still not making them like monoprice level pricing or anything like they’re still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re still expensive compared to the no-name ones and that’s fine they are they are better. They dropped

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco them down

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the same price as good quality third party peripherals. Like that’s all they did. It’s not like it’s a super

⏹️ ▶️ ^John duper bargain. It’s just like, oh, this is the price I would expect to see if I found whatever the best third party one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is out there, a similar price to this. And like they botched the PR on this too because they did the right

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing and credited everybody. But the way we found that out was like, oh, they’re dropping

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the prices, but what about the people who already ordered them? And then we had to wait for people to start getting credit. That’s got to be part of your message.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We’ve lowered all the prices. And by the way, if you bought one in the past X days, we’re going to credit you.” Which they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John obviously did. Like, they did the right thing. Like, when you’re going to do the right thing, Apple, tell us about it, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s good PR. Like, don’t leave people wondering, like, oh, now I feel bad that I bought them. Hey, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what happened to the poor suckers who bought them or whatever? And you know, we found out a couple hours or a day later that Apple did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the right thing, but why, like, that was another drop of all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, but I, regardless, this is a good move.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I wish they would make the price cuts permanent. might still do that. They said until the end of the year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They could change their minds, or they could cut the prices later, after some period of time again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The funny thing about the end of the year thing is that I was honestly tempted to order the LG

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco display too, the big 5K display. Well, that is only going to be available

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for ordering at this $300 discount for a couple of weeks maybe, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can’t even order one yet. The website currently says it’ll become available in December, and the price drop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is till the end of the year. So you’re gonna have like a few weeks in December when you can actually order this thing at a discount.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Who knows when it would actually ship and arrive. And I’m thinking like, well, will there ever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be a time, like if they make a new Mac Pro next year, I’m gonna want one of those displays if it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco still a standalone Mac Pro. But I’m not confident enough that it will be a standalone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Mac Pro that will exist, that will be out next year, to actually order of these things like six months ahead of time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You just hook that up to your paper graph MacBook Pro and you’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} have a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John complete

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} setup of, except for the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John computer part. You’ll have the dongles, you’ll have the screen, it’ll be beautiful.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} You can use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your iPad as the pretend touch bar. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} right. It’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have the whole computer except the screen, the keyboard, and the trackpad, and the CPU, and the GPU.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it’s gonna be a rough journey. Once we get to the other side, you know, we’re in these like heavy transitional

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco eras. You know, first we went Retina and SSD, right? and we still have not finished

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco those transitions. We’re close, but we still have not completed those two

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco large transitions completely. You can still go out and buy not even just one, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco many Mac models that either don’t have Retina, don’t have SSDs by default, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even both, which is embarrassing. But those transitions

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are almost done. Once you’re past it, once you have a Retina computer with all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco SSD storage, not Fusion Drive, all SSD storage. It is a thing of beauty. It is amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s such a good computer from that point forward. And USB-C is going to be the same thing for ports. It’s like we have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this kind of cumbersome, annoying transition that’s going to break a lot of things like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco old monitors that you won’t be able to use anymore. It’s putting up this big barrier, changing all the ports,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco requiring this dongle sale and everything else. But Once we get to that promised land

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of all USB-C ports and all or mostly USB-C peripherals,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s going to be really nice. The benefits of the new MacBook Pro, like being able to charge it on both sides,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s cool. That’s a useful thing. It’s going to be a really nice world when we get there, but the transition

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is going to be uncomfortable, just like all these other ones have been.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, you’ll still have our new thing in our future world will be confusion about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the USB-C lightning cable which end is which because they are they’re different sizes and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can tell if you look at them but if you’re not paying attention and you just pick the skinny little cable up with the two skinny little ends

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we don’t have the problem of like usba where you keep flipping it over three times to get it in right because they’re both bi-directional

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but you might find yourself sticking the lightning plug into the side of your macbook pro maybe just once or twice

⏹️ ▶️ ^John before you realize what’s going on.

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ARM Macs

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We had talked, I think, briefly last week, and then we ended

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey up shelving it so we could discuss this week, about the thought of ARM

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey processors on the Mac. And I think I might have brought this up because I was saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that, you know, if you look at a lot of the angst

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’s been floating around the community with regard to the MacBook Pro and the Mac Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there is a way that you can blame a lot of these troubles on Intel. Not to say that Apple’s blameless

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey by any stretch of the imagination, but you can paint a picture in which Intel holds

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a lot of the blame. And it’s in Apple’s, it’s Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey modus operandi to control everything you can. And so it controls the chips on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the iOS lines. Why wouldn’t it make sense for them to try to control the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey chip on the MacBook Pro or really just the Mac lines? And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so that makes you think, well, why wouldn’t they use an ARM chip like they have in the iOS lines

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and throw that on? It’s presumably going to be very low power.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And the modern iOS devices are nearly as fast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as modern Macs, and so it seems on paper

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to make sense. Why wouldn’t they give it a shot? I mean, the transition would stink,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but we’ve already done this once with the transition from PowerPC to Intel and fat binaries

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and blah, blah, blah. Twice. Why not try again? Twice, right. So why not try again?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We need like an old Mac sound effect. Whatever John schools us on, like something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that came across the Mac before 2004.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Power PC transition was awesome. Graphing calculator was a miracle.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} We could use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a startup chime, since it’s not a thing anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There you go. So we discussed this ARM and the Mac thing so many times, and we’re probably going to say all the same things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here. But the reason I think it was worth bringing up again, the reason we delayed it to this show, is because things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John change surprisingly quickly in the world of ARM CPUs. And just to briefly summarize

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the things that we’ve said in the past, x86 is important for Windows compatibility. How important is that still?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it is a thing. Why would Apple spend money

⏹️ ▶️ ^John producing ARM chips for the Mac? Because the Mac doesn’t sell enough volume to be worth creating your own chips

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whereas the iOS chips do and that leads to okay well all you got to do is wait until

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can do the investment to design your own fancy ARM chip that you use in your iOS devices

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and basically use that same chip or the same architecture maybe with more cores and more fancy stuff but basically like the work

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you did for your iOS devices transfers directly to the Mac and then you solve the investment problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because you’re like oh I’m doing this work anyway for the next iPhone it doesn’t cost that much more to make a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bigger more parallel version of it and throw it in to a Mac type thing it solves the problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of relying on Intel like Casey was getting to because it’s been a bad run lately with delays and everything like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that Apple’s the master of its own destiny and you just have the x86

⏹️ ▶️ ^John compatibility stuff to deal with and the reason I think it’s worth revisiting again is because just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one year since last time we probably discussed it, the chip that’s in the latest iPhones

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, I think, faster than some Macs, and it’s clocked lower in most

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cases, and like, I think we’re kind of at that, not quite at the point, but getting close to the point

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where the work they do for the iPhone CPU is directly transferable to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Mac in terms of, you know, what kind of performance could you get out of it, you know, with, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, making a bigger version, locking it higher, maybe putting in a couple more cores. I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re there for the low-end Macs, and if they don’t even make any high-end Macs anymore, maybe it doesn’t matter. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as this equation keeps changing, and as we depressingly look at the Geekbench scores for the latest phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and compare them to whatever Mac we’re sitting in front of and go, what is going on here? The world

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is upside down. The balance of all those factors that I discussed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at Apple have to be changing. It really depends on the weight you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John give to them to decide, is this the go or no go moment? And again, we all just assume that Apple has,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, has either been working on or understand the challenges of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John converting Mac OS to arm if it hasn’t done so already. But like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and especially with the integration of the arm chip for the touch ID, the viability and desirability

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of an arm based Mac to both Apple and consumers only increases over time. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I feel like this has to come to a head eventually, unless Intel gets back in gear

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and is another two process levels ahead of everybody else. And I guess the wild card is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 3D XPoint stuff, which I don’t know if it’s like proprietary in any way or tied to Intel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in any specific way. But there are many ways that Intel could ensure that it keeps

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple’s business. But especially with this recent delay and the new MacBooks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and looking at the scores for the new iPhones. In my mind, anyway, things are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shifting much more towards the possibility of ARM Macs in the future than I would have thought of even just a year

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ago.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I completely agree with you. And it’s worth noting, as I have in the past, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to switch to ARM would incur some pretty significant costs for a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey developers, which admittedly are a very, very, very small part of the market. But doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey virtualization on an Intel box for Windows, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really now only running on Intel again, that’s easier than trying to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey some sort of cross-compilation from ARM to x86. I’m sorry, from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey x86 to ARM. So if old me, the me that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was still writing code in Windows, which actually happened earlier today, but we’ll leave that aside,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the old me that was doing it professionally 40 plus hours a week, I would probably have to go go

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey back to a PC because presumably it would be just awful to have to cross-compile

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or really—what’s the term I’m looking for? It’s not cross-compile.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Emulate?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, really, emulate is what I’m looking for. To emulate x86 on top of ARM. I mean, maybe it would be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey quick, but I would assume that it would not. And as we’ve spoken about in the past, I remember

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey even as a not-Mac person, I remember hearing about the PC on a daughter board that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey some people plugged into their Macs so they could run Windows on them. And so there are definitely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey costs to this. There’s costs in software, pain, you know, you would have to have some sort of emulation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey layer for x86 or the, what was the, what was the thing they did for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey PowerPC on top of Intel? What was the name of that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Rosetta.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Rosetta. Thank you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ve got just a solution for you, Casey. It’s a dongle and inside it is a Raspberry

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Pi. I mean, you just mentioned it basically a PCI

⏹️ ▶️ ^John card. It was, I think it was a

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Nubis card. Yeah, yeah, you’re right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you could fairly easily put a reasonably powerful x86 computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John inside a dongle connected to a Thunderbolt 3 port and the only people who’d have to have that dongle are the people who need to do that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and if there’s I mean it’s not just that it’s like also people who want to you know use people who want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to run software on there if you just want to run like I ran into this at work recently which is depressing Docker

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does not run on my Mac at work because it’s too old because it

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} doesn’t have a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hypervisor stuff or whatever but anyway Docker is not going to run if you’re Docker for deploying on an x86

⏹️ ▶️ ^John based servers is not going to run on ARM Mac. And so I would need to get the dongle too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, fair enough. I didn’t think of it that way. Also, doing a quick search, it looks like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey first time that we spoke about this that I could quickly find was episode 35,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey almost exactly three years ago on October 18 of 2013, where we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey discussed, where is it, how Touch ID could be used in Macs, and whether ARM

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey MacBooks would be worth the transition costs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So does that make this follow up?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} We crossed over into topics,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John believe it or not, when we talked about the peripheral price cuts, everyone in the chat room wants to tell us all that Thunderbolt is an Intel thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like all things are solvable with money, though. I truly believe this. Like it’s like we talked about last week. Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could make X86 chips and get off the Intel bandwagon. And you know, there’s there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lots of possibilities here and that involving money changing hands and licensing deals and so on and so forth.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And another thing that factors into this, I forgot to mention in the little summary is that for a long

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time, Intel has had this massive advantage. They were on the new process size

⏹️ ▶️ ^John before everybody else, sometimes like a year or more before everybody else. So everything they made

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had just like a built in advantage of being lower power and smaller, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and like they, they were first at whatever the process sizes. And lately,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t I’ve been seeing lots of stories and collecting them in the show notes, then eventually deleting them or aging them off. Lots

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of stuff about like, well, Intel is not going to be first to 10 nanometers or Intel already is in first 10 nanometers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, no, those are just promises. Intel will still be first and Intel is the only one who’s going to be able to proceed beyond that because they’ve done

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the deep R and D and like for back in that show 36 or whatever. One

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the topics we probably talked about is like, does does Intel just want to be a fab for everybody else because they have the best process?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Wouldn’t it be great if Apple could have Intel fab all of its, you know, a series chips on their fancy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John new process and you know Intel is making some of the chips and phones but not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the big one not the a series chip they’re just making what like a radio chip that is not as good as the the Qualcomm

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one yet

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} but anyway that’s the one I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that doesn’t work

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well I don’t know if that’s why you’re you’re having to drop calls but be the way like it used to be that Intel was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unquestionably the best place to fab your stuff it’s because Intel was like we’re not going to just fab your stuff we want to sell you chips

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that we make because we make way more money off those we’re not going to just going to be a stupid fab That’s not what we are. We’re not just a fab. We’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Intel we make chips And it I’m not gonna say that Intel is losing its lead

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in fab tech but it seems less clear-cut to me as a fairly casual observer of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John silicon chip industry that Intel’s lead on process

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is no longer as big as it used to be and I forget what are the A10 being made at is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it are they 14 nanometer? I forget what size they are but I keep reading stories about you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know Taiwan semiconductor will be at 10 nanometer before Intel is and

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} all stuff like that in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nanometer is at 16 Yeah, maybe they still have a lead But it just doesn’t seem as big to me as it used to be and also

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Intel seems to be more open now to fabbing things for other people There was some other story on the show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John notes about that a while back. So Add that to get another set of variables that are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John slowly shifting More towards being in favor of our max

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think any of this stuff is a tipping point yet but when we revisit this topic in a year, it may be a slam dunk.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I mean, at this point, I would say that the processor itself is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably no longer the reason why they’re not doing it. It’s everything around the processor. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s all the memory controllers and the Thunderbolt, if they want, they have to move

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco away from Thunderbolt in all likelihood. Which, by the way, yeah, I mean, Apple did just make a pretty big bet on Thunderbolt

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with the USB-C transition. Like, that’s a big bet, but Apple changes their mind when they need to like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they they can totally say you know what thunderbolt was great last year this year we can’t do it anymore too bad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco buy new dongles

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well they don’t have to change their mind like i said this like these are all solvable problems with money like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John i’m sure intel could come to some agreement with apple involving exchanges

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of money that would allow someone somewhere to build an arm chip with thunder like i don’t think there’s anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John specifically x86 specific about it even though it’s like byte autocraft like these are solvable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John problems technically and monetarily it could be another barrier and that’s another variable like on the against side

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and maybe it’s a big barrier because Intel is like, no, we’re never going to license it and, you know, tough luck. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we don’t know, we don’t know the constants that apply to all these different factors, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t, I don’t say it rules it out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I wouldn’t say that Intel is incredibly flexible on things like that. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the other thing too is like, it would be possible, although I don’t think it would last

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very long, I think it would be a transitional thing, but it would be possible to only make

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some models with ARM chips, like only the MacBook One, or only the MacBook One and Escape. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so you keep the Pro models on Intel so they could just say, you know what, if you need to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco virtualize Windows or whatever, you could use the Pro model. And if you need Thunderbolt, use the Pro model. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you are willing to get the smallest, lightest thing that doesn’t have all the Pro features,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then you can have these two models that are ARM-based. Maybe the Mac Mini becomes ARM-based as well. Who

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco knows? They have lots of options there if they wanted to go that route. I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if they will. I don’t know if it makes sense for them to put so much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco effort into this transition if they’re not really hurting badly from Intel. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think there have been times over the last couple of years where they have been really hurting badly because of Intel.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If they care about the Mac Pro more, it would be even more pressing there because the Mac Pro has been historically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even more limited by Intel, even before Apple started skipping generations. You’re right, money does solve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot of things, they can make a deal, but Intel really is pretty inflexible on certain things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco these days, and it doesn’t seem like Apple is a large enough or profitable enough Intel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco customer for Apple to be able to dictate terms to them anymore, if they ever were.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple’s big bargaining chip, though, is that they could say, hey, Intel, I know you don’t want to be a fab. But if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were going to fab something, the A-series chip that’s in our iOS devices, it’s pretty good volume

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Fair point. Also, to go back a half step, Marco, you had said, you know, you could make just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the, you know, MacBook One have the new ARM chip just for the sake of discussion.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I agree with you, but wouldn’t we run into the same sort of problem with this USPC transition where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if the MacBook One is running ARM but nothing else is, what is incentivizing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the software developers to rebuild their apps for the ARM platform and make fat

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey binaries and blah, blah, blah if only one presumably low-volume

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Mac is on ARM and everything else is still on Intel?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ______ ______ The Mac App Store rules, if only Mac developers actually sold things through the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} App Store anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, I’m sure they would do that. That would be their thing. they would mandate it in the Mac App Store. And honestly, developers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would do it if it’s as easily as just changing some settings and filling some stuff around like at this point,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John most conscientious Mac developers should not have architecture specific code. And like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they still have WC sessions say how to tell if you’re doing something that relies on you know, word size or byte order,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and especially with Swift and stuff with this stuff being abstracted away and not having to worry about C ints and shorts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and whatever the hell those are, right, you know, and different architectures and all that crap. I think it wouldn’t be that bad and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John developers to do it because if you want to sell to those people, you’ll do it, right? Like, maybe the people making pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John apps wouldn’t because they don’t want to sell to the MacBook Escape people, but it is surmountable and I think there are incentives

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for people to get on board.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco As time goes on, it becomes less and less difficult to make relatively

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco portable code. Like, you know, we have moved up so many layers of abstraction and so much of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco our code, we do so little custom assembly or by order assumptions or, you know, binary

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco operations at that level at all anymore. It’s less and less work now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think developers are going to do more work to support the touch bar than they would need to do to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an ARM version of almost any app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Except for game developers, they’d be screwed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What gets delivered to the App Store? I haven’t looked at this in a while, but doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Swift compile to its own intermediate language, then gets compiled to an LLVM intermediate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey language? Is that what gets pushed to the App Store, and then that’s what Bitcode is all

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} about?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mixing bitcode up with the SIL stuff, which is a whole different

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} thing. I think you’re right. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John forget what the bitcode policy is. Do you remember, Marco?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Bitcode is required on the watch, I believe. I think it’s optional

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for iPhones still. And I don’t know if the Mac App Store, may

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it rest in peace, even supports it. I don’t know. Anyway, but bitcode,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a number of people have looked at it and basically determined that bitcode is probably not a very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good way to just automatically generate a whole ARM thing because bitcode, I think,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is too low level. It’s beneath the compiled level and so basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco assumptions about byte order and stuff would not translate automatically. Gotcha.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Okay. But you see where I’m driving at, though. I wasn’t sure if this could solve that problem for you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m pretty sure bitcode is not the answer to an automatic ARM build of everything in the store. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} what was it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Is it mostly I forgot? I used to know this about bitcode, but not writing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these interviews for a long time lets you forget all these things. I don’t remember the details, but like Apple’s motivation for doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was so they have more flexibility with like fiddling with instructions from one generation to the next of like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the S1 chip or the S2 and so on and so forth that because you’re not delivering machine code that they just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John run as is, they have some flexibility if they change an instruction or move instruction or replace it with another one that’s slightly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John different that they can do the final final machine code generation business. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John developers were all antsy about it. And who knows how long it will be a thing. But on the watch, that’s the one I was thinking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the watch, like it is a thing. It has been from day one, right? Everything for the watch is delivered as bitcode, which gives

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple more flexibility with hardware design than they would have if everyone was shipping just binaries that are run as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I thought that the the pitched reason for bitcode was that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this way, as a user, you would only download the version of the binary

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’s built for your platform rather than having to get to kind of building on what you were saying rather

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey rather than having to get the A six version, a seven version, a version or what have you, you would just have the version

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the app built against the processor that you have. Yeah, and thus it would be a smaller download.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Unknown Speaker That’s true, too. Although, like, with, with binary, you know, in most

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cases, as most of Marcos apps prove exists, and like to include graphics because he uses paint code for everything. The size

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of your application is not determined by the size of your code these days. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} your icons

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are bigger

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a lot of your code, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I will say that a lot of apps involve a large quantity of advertising

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and tracking SDKs, and those can actually add a non-trivial amount of binary

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco size. I mean, and a lot of their sizes assets as well. But yeah, a lot of those can get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pretty sizable and make the binary pretty ridiculous.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, the Swift standard library, which I think still has to ship with the applications because they haven’t worked out the ABI compatibility

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yet, is another big thing that’s in there. But for applications of appreciable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John size, when you’re thinking of things like a one gigabyte game, that’s not code. That’s all assets.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We are sponsored tonight by Betterment, investing made better.

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Mac clones

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s Betterment.com slash ATP. Betterment, investing made better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey There’s been a couple of calls for a terrifying strategy from the past

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to come back. John, should there be Mac clones again?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This was mentioned last show as a measure of exactly how deep

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the dissatisfaction in some quarters was about the new MacBook Pros.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They’re saying look if you’re not gonna make the pro Mac that I want to make How about letting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John other people bake Mac hardware that way Apple you don’t have to worry about it anymore Someone else will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John address my needs and everyone will be happy. Isn’t that great Mac cloning? It was done. We did it once before

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we can do it again Just license the Mac operating system And I will gladly buy from some other company

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that actually cares about my needs and will make me the big honking computer that I want And we’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ ^John down this road before in the past for most of Apple’s history with the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people have been clamoring for them to clone it because that was IBM’s half accidental strategy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John IBM and Intel and Windows like that whole big mess the way it ended up through no particular

⏹️ ▶️ ^John grand plan of anybody except perhaps Microsoft was that you could buy a PC

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from companies other than IBM they were IBM compatible and they all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would suit your needs they could all run MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows eventually and all that other stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and so the hardware vendors would compete with each other and have their own little race to the bottom until they all went out of business except

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for Dell and Lenovo and anyway blah blah blah. Everyone was saying during the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go-go late 80s early 90s, hey Apple, IBM, Microsoft, whoever are eating

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your lunch because they let anybody make hardware and they have competition and capitalism and yay, 80s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} should license your operating system.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And Apple said, no, we’re not gonna license our operating system. And every time Apple did something that someone didn’t like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was, I see if you just license your operating system, you’d be doing much better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John In the end, eventually, I think Apple, now making so much more money than the other PC makers, has come

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out the other side and saying, I guess our strategy was pretty good. But in the middle there, a couple of Apple CEOs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were convinced that this is a good idea. I think Spindler started it maybe I forget I’m blaming the wrong

⏹️ ▶️ ^John CEO for Starting Mac cloning. They said when Apple was getting increasingly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John desperate I still didn’t have a new operating system and Windows 95 98 and so on and so forth were taking over the world and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I hadn’t Yet bought next one of the panic plans. They made was alright people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John keep saying license the Mac operating system Let’s do that and they did that with predictable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John results because Apple was not licensing for a position of power It allowed a bunch of third parties to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac clones very often based on Mac or Apple derived reference hardware design. So these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John clone companies sometimes didn’t even have to do the hard work to build their own hardware. They could just sort of make hardware that was like Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but a little bit better and do a little bit of work. In addition to that, it didn’t help Apple make more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John money. The license fees did not make up for the loss in hardware sales. When Steve Jobs came back was,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah, I think when Steve Jobs came back, he canned it. I mean, it might have been McCann before then,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John should have been McCann before then. And the brief Mac clone experiment

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ended. And for most people looking backwards on it, they’re gonna be like, oh, Mac clone, that was such a big mistake. It didn’t actually help

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple, actually hurt Apple. And it was kind of cruel to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do Mac clones and then a year or two later say, oh, just kidding, no more Mac clones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so all those companies sprung up around making Mac clones, had a brief moment in the sun

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then had to disappear because their entire business was gone. Motorola even made them for crying out loud. Motorola made Mac clones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so I would imagine for you people who didn’t live through it, you silly millennials, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just seems like a cautionary tale. But to me who lived through it, I do have some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fond memories and I think most Mac users who lived through the clone era do have some fond memories of it for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just the reasons we just talked about like with the MacBook Pro and dissatisfaction.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There was a time when if If Apple didn’t make a Mac that was like you wanted to buy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like it didn’t have the right balance of features and price and so on and so forth, there was a chance there would be another company

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that would. And these companies, the Mac clone makers are no dummies, they tried

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to fill markets, market niches that Apple didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want to. And so they would clock their CPUs a little bit higher. They would make boring

⏹️ ▶️ ^John looking tower boxes that were nevertheless much more expendable than Apple’s designs. They would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sell computers for less money than Apple. They would do all sorts of things that Apple wasn’t going to do, or just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John giving you different combinations of size and hard drive space and video capabilities.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It was actually a fairly exciting time to be a Mac user. And I know a lot of people actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bought those clones. And were they as nice as Apple’s computers? No. And the companies

⏹️ ▶️ ^John weren’t around very long because Apple stopped cloning. But for a brief moment there, we were in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that world where if you were an enthusiast who like to run the Mac operating

⏹️ ▶️ ^John system you had more choices and it was it was kind of fun. Now this doesn’t mean we should

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do it again now it’s a silly over reaction to a new product that some people were mildly dissatisfied

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with but like I guess maybe just my main point

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in this is to say that Mac clones weren’t actually all bad and if Apple ever loses total

⏹️ ▶️ ^John interest in either the Mac entirely or the high end of the Mac market, some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of limited licensing plan could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John work like just like the LG monitor is currently the only one you can buy that works for the MacBook Pro and I assume there will be other ones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But imagine if like one company was blessed as the company that makes the pro Mac hardware and it was blessed by Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it was the only there was it was no it’s not like you had 50 more choices, but merely you You had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John two choices where before you would have zero, or before you would just have one. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a thing I think pro users would find reasonably acceptable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and Apple might find advantageous. Why don’t we make some money off this market and let someone else do the heavy lifting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John without increasing our support burden too much. Obviously this is totally outside

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the realm philosophically speaking of I think anything that Apple would ever consider, but from a consumer perspective,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it seems viable to me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t see the Apple of today doing it, but everything you just said does make sense.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, who’s that? Craig Hockenberry had an article about it. Apple should pull Lenovo and you know, this exact thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Just have have one company do its hardware stuff. If Apple’s not interested anymore, I think mostly it’s just an overreaction.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You’re not going to make the hardware. I want lunch. Let somebody else do it like totally in our reaction, but they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of like the arm on the Mac. Like there’s something to it. And it’s not the time to do it now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but we’ll check back in five years and see how things have changed so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for reference I have configured a Mac Pro like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco workstation at Dell.com I’m so sorry if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you try to configure anything complicated at Dell.com recently

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Wow my goodness so I have a few errors in my configuration that need to be fixed according

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to this this popover dialogue now one of those is the PCIe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco solid-state drive boot drive requires the hard drive to be the PCIe boot drive please update as needed of course it can’t update

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for me Wow the PCIe solid-state drive is not compatible with the dual video card please update the internal hardware configuration

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco requires a

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} PCIe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco boot drive and a PCIe solid-state drive boot drive please update as needed please be sure to update the selection for boot drive hard drive and also the selection

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of boot option from the PCIe solid-state drives that being

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} said

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if I could somehow make this configuration work I have configured

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what I think would be a a modern version of the high-end Mac Pro, the 12-core Mac Pro. Now, the current

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 12-core Mac Pro, which is three years old and slow, 64 gig, one terabyte

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco PCI Express SSD. Base video card, which is the D500-ish. That is $8,800 for this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, wow. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John D500, by the way, I think is now less powerful than the GPU in the iPad Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} or maybe it’s close.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, so the similar Dell with a brand new Broadwell e Xeon

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco oh crap. I’m sorry. I had the eight core selected. Let me change Switch the Mac Pro to eight

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco core all right Mac Pro is seventy three hundred dollars in the eight core config seventy three hundred for the Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 5400 for the for the Dell with the brand new parts that are faster So it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there is a substantial price gain here for for you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you wanted to do PC hardware that was similar and in many

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ways better. But don’t let Dell do it. I would like Lenovo or even HP or anybody

⏹️ ▶️ ^John else. It would be better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, the only reason I went to Dell on this was that I checked earlier in the week and HP does not seem to offer the Broadwell

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco EZONs yet. They’re all the V3s and Broadwell’s V4. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. But yeah, for the purpose

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of building Hackintoshes or workstations or anything else, man, if Apple licensed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the OS to clone makers, even if they charged like $300 for it, like some, you know, large price for the OS,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it would still be pretty price competitive to go with a clone maker. But that’s probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the reason they’re not gonna do it. Now that being said, you can look at what they’re doing. As you know, as I mentioned earlier,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is very noticeable that they are outsourcing some of their dongles to Belkin, that they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are outsourcing their new monitor to LG. I think it’s very clear that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple is trying to get themselves out of businesses. Like they’re exiting businesses.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They’re exiting the display business. They’re outsourcing that. They’re exiting some of these dongles, outsourcing that. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Belkin Ethernet adapter box, it looks like an Apple product. It looks like an Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco product box. It looks like the product itself. Like, this is clearly like, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is trying to get themselves out of these non-core,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe unprofitable businesses. It wouldn’t surprise me if they actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco did do some kind of weird partnership with IBM or something, to, or you know, HP or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whatever, to offer something like this. I mean, it seems crazy to tell Mac people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that Apple would ever do some kind of clone program again, but if you look at what they’re actually doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco today, that isn’t totally out of the question. Now, I still think it’s incredibly unlikely.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I do. I would not count on it, because I would assume that if Apple wanted

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a computer like this to exist, they would just make it themselves. But there is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now precedent in what they’re doing in their lineup to effectively outsource

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco less interesting parts of their business to other companies to make it their problem whenever something needs service

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or to manage the margins or whatever else.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s the most interesting part of their business to some people, though, like the high end hardware is kind of like getting back to the halo

⏹️ ▶️ ^John car thing, like they should be making that in house as a even as a motivational tool for their for their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John internal tech theme and for their customers. But I think it would have to be it couldn’t just be like a licensing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John arrangement, because it’s not just that Apple wants to make like 300 bucks in each one they sell. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a support burden to every new model that’s out there, they have to support with the OS and everything. So I think it would have to be more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of a partial ownership profit sharing type thing, which would probably mean that these machines

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would not be like the Mac clones, they wouldn’t be less expensive for the same hardware, they would be just as expensive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as if Apple made it. The only difference would be, like you said that that Apple outsources some portion

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of it. And with stuff like the Belkin connector, and like I said, the early Mac pros, you wonder how much of that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is Belkin’s work and how much of it is apples a lot of the original Mac Mac clones were

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple reference designs modified and a lot of companies do that give you like a reference board and then you can tweak it and add your thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but like for for the Belkin on the LG display, how much involvement that Apple have in the creation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of those peripherals? Was it purely here you go company, you’re now allowed to make this here are the specs figure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it out or did apple cooperate with them very closely surely for the software integration for the lg screen they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had to do something was there any cooperation at the hardware level like you don’t really know what goes on in these relationships

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but as i said before like monetary deals could be worked out and i would hope the apples today

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bargaining from a position of strength and not from a position of michael spindler would make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the arrangement so that it is very profitable to apple and that the company that they’re partnering with to just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feel itself lucky to even be allowed to work with Apple because Apple is so awesome and that Apple would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John come out ahead on it financially while removing whatever burdens they feel are put on them. I think by the way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the high end it’s totally wrong move because Apple should totally be doing the high end in-house because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know we’ve discussed this I think we mostly discussed it in Slack but all I’m just doing is reiterating my halo car thing in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seven different ways to get people to understand how this works and having them complain to me. Even Casey was like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t buy my car because there’s a high-end car from the same maker I don’t know I don’t have the discussion again but we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} what I sound like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah and slack

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} that’s you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know you had that voice plug-in put on

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Wow yeah yeah that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey unfortunate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Wow all right I think that’s it for this week thanks a lot to our three sponsors

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this week betterment and we will see you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^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 at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 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 Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey accidental, they didn’t mean to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Accidental, accidental, tech broadcast so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John long.

Post-show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Sorry for the people waiting for server studio and switch. I think we have exact actually exhausted all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the follow-up and tangential topics related to the MacBook Pro announcement now and I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gonna take all the blame for this because People keep sending us feedback about it because it’s so it’s not just us that’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well I got to get off this MacBook Pro issue They peep the listeners are still talking to us about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, but I think we’re through it all so next week for sure Unless something big happens Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ ^John server studio Nintendo switch When are they gonna get to the fireworks factory?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s a Simpsons thing, isn’t it? You got it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey job. The only reason I got it is because you’ve used that on us like seven times. Way more

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} than seven. Way more. All

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right, so what else is going on other than the obvious that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} we’d really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey rather not discuss?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I will say, you know, thank you, audience and you guys. This has been nice to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, get my mind off of that stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I agree. Uh, grand tours coming back, not, not this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey coming Saturday or Friday, but a week from this coming

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Friday, coming back. Has it already? Yeah, sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, no, no, no, no, no. I, that was a poor choice of words. It’s a, it’s starting when I say coming back because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think of it as top gear again, but, uh, but anyway, that’s, that’s a week from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Friday. So that’s super exciting.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. You need to remind me of that or I was going to miss it. Is that, is it Amazon

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} only, right? Correct.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s Amazon. I don’t know what time of day it’s happening, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it is the 18th of November. They’re streaming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one episode per week for six weeks, and I believe there’s going to be two seasons per calendar

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey year. So presumably we’ll have a spring and a fall season, since we’re getting kind of a fall season

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey now. I’m really looking forward to it. Should be good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Speaking of TV, although I don’t want to get onto depressing politics topics, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of the analogies the and the jokes and the snarks that has been made in involving this election has been

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the show Black Mirror, which is a

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} show in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John UK. I don’t want to say it’s a BBC show because then you get yelled at because it’s not there’s other places to me. Anyway, whatever. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a show made in England and it’s like, uh, you guys remember amazing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stories. Maybe you’re too young for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that. No, we’re too young, but I’ve seen, I’ve seen some of Black Mirror episodes and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think given what just happened, it’s going to be a long time before I’m in the mood to watch any more of them. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so like amazing stories is like the Twilight Zone is the older reference like every week there’s a new

⏹️ ▶️ ^John episode and it’s a usually sci-fi related premise and there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no carryover characters. There’s no, you know, through line stories just like here’s a little side. It’s like sci-fi short

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stories for TV and Twilight Zone had a particular bent to it and so did amazing stories, which is a Spielberg esque thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Black Mirror is bent is sci-fi ash independent stories that are usually really depressing like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Black Mirror like it’s right in the title right and so like Marco said maybe you’re not in the mood to watch them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right now and Black Mirror me personally I find it a little bit silly and overblown

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because I’ve seen all these same ideas and stories before and they take them to the nth degree and it just gets a little bit ridiculous but sometimes there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fun ones whatever I’m not as a big a fan as other people are but on the specific topic this current season of Black

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mirror season three that it’ll come out all at once not like the the Grand Tour but they’re not you they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make them ahead of time and it’s a scripted show more scripted than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway whatever um there is one episode of this season of black

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mirror this third season of black mirror which is like all the previous seasons just a grim terrible slog

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of overblown sci-fi but there’s one episode that i think actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John i watched it and i felt good after watching it i’m not gonna say it’s happy and you can judge for yourself

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whether it is like you know the feel-good story of the century but i think it would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be safe for people to watch even if you’re feeling bad and that episode is sandra napero which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John i was my favorite episode of black mirror ever which probably means that i just don’t like black mirror because it’s the least

⏹️ ▶️ ^John black mirror of any black mirror episode but i would encourage you if you’re looking for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a sci-fi short story on tv and don’t want to be super depressed Black Mirror season three

⏹️ ▶️ ^John San Junipero, which is episode Wait seven seconds for the chat room to look it up for me episode

⏹️ ▶️ ^John number Four episode number four casey beat them to it because he’s listening to be in real time cheating

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} And there’s the chat room

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and so what was the summary of this episode?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} No You’re not supposed to know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anything about black mirror episodes. You just start watching

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey them So nothing you don’t want to tell us anything. No, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} can’t know they’ve ruined it. No, no spoilers for black mirror

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey My goodness, I did my my mistake. So I forget who it was. Shoot. It was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one of the New York City based developers And I’m drawing a blank which one it was might have been Brian

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I race had guilted me into watching

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey One of the episodes black mirror and the one that I watched this was a couple years ago now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was About the British Prime Minister being black

⏹️ ▶️ ^John episode one. That’s the first first

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} episode.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, that’s I had no desire to go back

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a tone that sets a tone for the show. That is the appropriate tone for the show

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} basically I see that except for engine apparel.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m not saying it’s a bad show. I’m just saying yeah I watched that and I was like, this is not for me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} No, thank

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you watch all season 3 at Marco or

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} no

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve I don’t think I’m even all the way through season 2. I think we watched all of season 1 at least

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s a good thing Like you can skip to any episode at any time because there

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} is no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John through line

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just pick one out But I get some of the season 3 episodes are just so grim like it just it’s it’s almost

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a parody of itself at this point but Sandra D’Apparo thumbs up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it’s like it’s the kind of show like it’s so it’s such a downer and it’s so dark

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you if you have anything bad or stressful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going on in your life it’s not a good show to watch and so I’ve had not a ton

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of opportunities where I really wanted to watch shows like that recently and that’s not going to change

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the next few weeks that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for sure. i said try this episode it is not oh yeah i think you will watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it and not curse my name after you watch it i think it will make

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} you feel better a high bar okay that’s right you will feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it will improve your mood right

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco okay i will give i will

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} maybe give it a part of the reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^John part of the reason it improves your mood is like the context is like wait this is a black mirror episode it should be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John terrible and grim and it’s not i feel awesome about it it’s like you expect the worst and then you get this thing that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is like it like it like redeems the rest of Black Mirror briefly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Who would have thought that this episode would end with a recommendation of an uplifting Black Mirror episode?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I was as surprised as anyone. I got to the end. I even went to the internet to say, maybe it’s not actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uplifting, and I’m reading it wrong. And so you go on the internet, people like, No, actually, it’s super dark. Here’s the ending.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But the creators of the show were like, No, it’s actually uplifting. Just accept it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah Yeah, I mean I I wouldn’t be opposed to watching an uplifting one but The after

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey having watched the very first episode like I said I decided it was not for me not to say it’s not for you or anyone else.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It just it wasn’t for me. I Have enough to be depressed about one depressed and poor choice of words.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have enough to be sad about I don’t need to be sad while I’m watching television as well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, that’s why if and I for our current like Casual series

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we just restarted the office tonight. It’s just like this. We just need something That’s not like even Parks and Rec is too

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco political. Oh god. You can’t even do that yet Just need something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco light that is just not gonna add to anything bad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You should watch some Miyazaki movies, which you’ve probably never seen any of that’s true. I’ve seen anything. That’s correct.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yep

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} If

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you should be showing out of Totoro by this point this I feel like you’re neglecting your your duties as a parent.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah Totoro is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Just you’ll find it. Just find it and show it to Adam and the whole family can watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it together and you’ll be happy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I downloaded Millennium, whatever whatever when it was When it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} a movie but close It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all the same,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} John. It’s all the same. Can we just start calling them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Syracuse movies? Yeah, that’s fine. That works for me. So I downloaded that Syracuse movie, the Millennium whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Millennial whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Actress?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Millennium actress, which is probably Millennial actress. I don’t even know. Millennium Falcon? That’s the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} one. She was not a millennial. She was not a falcon from 82. Oh, my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bad. Is that the one with the wings that are like in the X shape? Is that right? Yes, the Y-wing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The sick thing is we’re going to get so many emails from people thinking that we’re serious when we’re deliberately trolling John. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey point is I downloaded that forever ago when you and Merlin talked about it and I still haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey watched it yet, so I need to get on that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You mean you watched it legally on YouTube when it was legally available on YouTube?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John exactly. With commercials. with commercials.