216: Thermal Corner
05 Apr 2017Mac Pro news! (Really!)
Episode Description:
- Follow up:
- APFS file name encoding
- WWDC sitrep
- RIP Jason Seifer
- The Mac Pro
- The new iMac... Pro?
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
- Post-show:
- We adjudicate a bet
- T-Shirts are for sale! until 26 April
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Chapters
- Intro
- Follow-up: really
- Follow-up: seriously
- Jason Seifer
- Mac Pro!
- Sponsor: Casper (code ATP)
- Mac Pro!
- Sponsor: Indochino (code ATP)
- iMac Pro!
- Sponsor: Betterment
- Mac Pro!
- Ending theme
- Mac Pro!
- T-shirts! 🖼️
Intro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can’t innovate anymore, my ass.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. Today we’re going to talk about important things like me driving my dad’s 1970 Dodge Start yesterday. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s a good idea. What about, um, I was wondering,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John, do we have any follow-up?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and we should actually do it. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey only two items.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Only two. Oh, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mark the time stamp, kids,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only two items, and by my clock, we’re seven and a half minutes into the call.
⏹️ ▶️ John After follow-up, we can also talk about t-shirts, I suppose.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, Dad. Why don’t you kick us off, Dad? Can’t we just eat our dessert first?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco No, we… We’ll get there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll get there. No, I support… Narcoside, we should get through the follow-up. It shouldn’t be very long, hopefully. All right.
Follow-up: really
⏹️ ▶️ John The last week we talked for the second time about APFS file
⏹️ ▶️ John name encoding, and you wouldn’t think there would be more to say about it, and yet here we are. We’re going to talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about it for the third, possibly fourth time. Are you serious? Yes, because Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John posted official documentation on their website answering
⏹️ ▶️ John the question, hey, what’s the deal with file name encoding on APFS?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so to summarize, and this is a little bit weirder than I would have expected, they
⏹️ ▶️ John say APFS has case-sensitive and case-insensitive variants. We kind of assumed that would be the case, but
⏹️ ▶️ John here you go, they said it outright. The case-insensitive variant of APFS is normalization-preserving,
⏹️ ▶️ John but not normalization-sensitive, which is pretty weird. Like basically, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you send it a file name, normalized, however the hell you want it, pick your own Unicode normalization,
⏹️ ▶️ John the APFS will preserve that but it’s not normalization sensitive this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the case insensitive variant it’s not normalization sensitive in that if you try to look something up and you say hey
⏹️ ▶️ John do you have a file called cafe with little e over the accent and my reading of this is that you
⏹️ ▶️ John feed it that string in any normalization you want and it doesn’t matter what normalization it
⏹️ ▶️ John is in the file system it will find it because the file system is not normalization
⏹️ ▶️ John sensitive but it preserves what you give it really confusing so anyway we’ll have
⏹️ ▶️ John to get a case insensitive variant of this on the Mac and do some tests to see what the deal is but the case
⏹️ ▶️ John sensitive variant is both normalization preserving and normalization sensitive so that is straightforward
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a case sensitive on iOS is just exactly what we said it takes what you give it and
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s it and they do clarify here file names in APFS are encoded in UTF-8
⏹️ ▶️ John and aren’t normalized. So it wants you so it’s not as if you read a directory
⏹️ ▶️ John structure in APFS and you say I have no idea what encoding this is. Assuming everybody’s following the rules and I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ John if this is enforced at the file system level or not, they all have to be UTF-8.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the file system itself is not going to take your UTF-8 string and normalize it like
⏹️ ▶️ John HFS plus does. Like whatever you give it in UTF-8 that’s what it’s gonna stick in the file system. Both variants will do
⏹️ ▶️ John that but it’s It’s interesting that they’re saying, you know, no UTF-16, no UTF-32, no anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I suppose if you use the lowest level APIs, you could just jam whatever the heck
⏹️ ▶️ John you wanted into there, but they’re documented here, UTF-8. And they compare it with HFS+,
⏹️ ▶️ John which has all of its weird rules. And they say that in
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS 10.12.4, the APFS developer preview was updated to include the
⏹️ ▶️ John case insensitive variant. So this is the first time the case insensitive variant of APFS has been available
⏹️ ▶️ John in any version of the operating system And an iOS of course in 10.3. We got the case sensitive
⏹️ ▶️ John variant And they give some advice for avoiding bugs I bet there will be WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John sessions about this exact issue because I think it’s going to come up a lot They want you to use the high-level
⏹️ ▶️ John APIs They want you to use NSFileManager and NSURL and they want you to use the file system representation
⏹️ ▶️ John property of NSURL when creating and opening files with lower level files and APIs like the POSIX
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. So there are high level APIs to give you, you know, a
⏹️ ▶️ John character buffer or whatever to feed into the lower level APIs. So I’m glad they have some documentation
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. It’s still pretty weird. This is definitely a case where we’re gonna need to see a lot of sample code and a lot of sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of best practices and anti-patterns. And still, I believe when
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac operating system ships with a non-developer preview version as operating system,
⏹️ ▶️ John we will all get to find out which one of our applications are making assumptions that no longer hold
⏹️ ▶️ John an APFS world as they slowly break. I’m going to bet on Adobe. I don’t know about you guys.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s a pretty safe bet. Oh my goodness.
Follow-up: seriously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we should do a quick bit of follow-up and talk about the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey situation report for WWDC. We spoke last episode. Marco was 100%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dedicated to layers, which as far as I know, still has availability, so you might want to check
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that out. John and I had put our names in the hat for WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, did you win the lottery and win the opportunity to give Apple $1,600 of your money? I did. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John All right. I was very excited.
⏹️ ▶️ John I remember the interminable wait in years past for,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, when other people are getting their emails. And this time I was distracted enough that by the time I looked at my
⏹️ ▶️ John email, there it was. Success. Very happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Delightful. I also won the lottery this year, which is very exciting because I did not win the lottery last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year. So I will also be at WWDC, which I’m very, very excited about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were asked, since all three of us will be in town, we are not going to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a live in front of people ATP. We never really have.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The closest thing we came was when we were on the talk show. We don’t do that because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though some of us would enjoy doing so, absolutely zero
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the three of us want to have anything to do with planning it. And so that is why it’s not happening.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But all three of us will be in town. I’m sure we’ll We’ll talk about this more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the episode before WWDC. But if you see us, please say hi. We always enjoy it. We may not be able to talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for very long, depending on the situation, but we always enjoy it if you could say hi. Any other quick thoughts about WWDC,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kids? No. Good talk. Everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, oh, and wear your ATP shirts. It is all but guaranteed you will get a high five, hug, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some other interaction from at least me, if no one else, if I spot an ATP shirt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if I remember, I’ll have some ATP stickers printed, which I’ll probably forget. But if I remember, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have some printed. If I see an ATP shirt, you’re getting a sticker.
Jason Seifer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally, on a very, very brief but somber note, I just wanted to quickly recognize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that a member of our community, Jason Seifer, who is a fellow podcaster, a Ruby developer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and for a long time a teacher at Treehouse, passed away unexpectedly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and tragically over the weekend. And I just wanted to acknowledge that and say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I know I’m, and I’m pretty darn sure I speak for everyone, the three of us are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very sad to hear it and we were really bummed about it. Mike and I talked about it on the forthcoming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode of Analog that won’t be out until the weekend, so probably several days after this episode. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re really bummed out and we’re really sad about it, and we just wanted to take a pause to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say that. All right.
Mac Pro!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Big week? A little bit. I think it’s been, some things have happened.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this morning there appears to have been some sort of an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey embargo that had dropped about a meeting that happened sometime I guess in the last day or two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regard to the Mac Pro of all things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean who had this on the bingo card for this week, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Certainly not me. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God. This was quite a big surprise. A pleasant surprise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but certainly a sizable one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so there were a handful of people that were invited to Cupertino
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to discuss, I believe it was phrased as a roundtable, to talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the MAC. Yes, a small roundtable discussion about the MAC. So as per John Gruber, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he, Matthew Panzarino, Lance Zulanoff, Ina Frey, how did I, should I pronounce that wrong, didn’t I? You’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asking the wrong people. All right. Well, that’s right. I’m so sorry if I got that wrong. Anyway, and John Pagsowski,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe that’s pretty close to right. I should have made somebody else read those names, so I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to. Anyway, the group of them went to Cupertino
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have a roundtable discussion about the Mac and including
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not even including the Mac Pro. I would say it was primarily about the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco absolutely right.
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting how they phrase this like, come out, come out to Cupertino, we’ll have a round
⏹️ ▶️ John table discussion about the Mac. Who knows what they actually told the people about what they’re going to do, but their, their characterization of
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re just going to hang out. We’re just going to talk about the Mac a little bit, right guys. And
⏹️ ▶️ John like Margo said, no, they’re going to talk specifically about one particular Mac that’s near
⏹️ ▶️ John and dear to all of our hearts, except for Casey. And that’s entirely what the thing was about, but I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John they can’t come out and tell people, Hey, fly out to Cupertino. So we can tell you stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John about the Mac Pro. They always want to have a little bit of a surprise. Yeah, I guess they did
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about the iMac. I mean, they talked about a lot of things because you could ask them any questions you wanted, and then they could answer them however they wanted.
⏹️ ▶️ John But what the big takeaway from this and most of the headlines, with the exception of a couple that did mention the
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac, were all about the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So I’m going to do my best to summarize and then I’ll probably get interrupted.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And for the best. So let me start by reading a little from what Gruber
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had written. And he says, here’s how Schiller broke the news on the Mac Pro. It’s worth quoting him at length. So let me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now quote Gruber quoting Schiller. With regard to the Mac Pro, we are in the process of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what we call completely rethinking the Mac Pro. We’re working on it. We have a team working hard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on it right now, and we want to architect it so that we can keep it fresh with regular improvements. And we’re committed to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey making it our highest end high throughput desktop system designed for our demanding Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey customers. As a part of doing a new Mac Pro, it is by definition a modular system, we will be doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Pro display as well. John Syracuse, it is your lucky day. That’s me, not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John now you won’t see- That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That would have been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amazing. Now you won’t see any of those products this year. We’re in the process of that. We think it’s really important to create something great for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our Pro customers who want a Mac Pro modular system, and that’ll take longer than this year to do. In the interim,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we know that there are a number of customers who will continue to buy our current Mac Pros. To be clear, our current
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac Pros met the needs of some of our customers, and we know that clearly not all of our customers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey None of this is black and white. It’s a wide variety of customers. Some it’s the kind of system that they wanted, others
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was not. In the meantime, we’re going to update the configs to make it faster and better for their dollar. This is not a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new model. We’re not a new design. We’re just going to update the configs. We’re doing that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this week. We can give you the specifics on that. The CPUs, we’re moving them down the line. The GPUs, down the line.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To get more performance per dollar for customers who do need to continue to buy them in the interim
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until we get a newly architected system. So, there is a new Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro. It is not happening in 2017. There is a small spec bump
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the existing Mac Pro, but things are happening. And the fact
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Apple is addressing this at all, I think is really exciting and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really good news. I can continue to summarize, but I think at this point, we should take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a moment and start talking. So, Marco, let’s start with you. What do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have like four pages of notes here of where to begin.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, so we will get into some of the specifics, but just high-level overview,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m incredibly happy to hear this. This is awesome. Because what this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco means, you know, for a long time it has seemed, you know, the neglect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the Mac Pro has been going on for three years if you measure it from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the trash can. But actually the neglect of the Mac Pro started in 2010. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last, like, basically in 2010 was the last new cheese grater
⏹️ ▶️ Marco revision. They officially did one in 2012 but it was really the same thing with like one more processor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option at the top end. It was actually very similar to what they just did today, but actually what they did today was even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less because there are no new options. But the 2012 Mac Pro really wasn’t a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. The 2010 one was the last cheese grater update that mattered.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’ve ever seen the old logo of our show, by the way, it was a cheese grater Mac Pro with
⏹️ ▶️ John a little new label stuck on it, and sarcastically because we were waiting for the Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John the new Mac Pros to be announced at WWDC. We had been waiting for a while and they did announce new Mac pros, or maybe it was like
⏹️ ▶️ John a press release update, or not even on stage, I forget. But they were only new, you know, conceptually,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, technically, yeah, there’s one new configuration is one new CPU. That was the I think that was
⏹️ ▶️ John the very first icon this podcast ever had. It was right. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John the show was founded on dissatisfaction with the with the offerings of the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, so people who dated back to the trash can, yeah, the trash can has had problems. And we’ll talk about that. But even as far back in the cheese
⏹️ ▶️ John grater, it seemed like they took everybody off the cheese grater and said, you know, we’ve been steadily updating this cheese grater for a
⏹️ ▶️ John while. You know, every time there’s a new CPU, upgrading the GPUs every year, just like clockwork.
⏹️ ▶️ John But we’re not going to do that anymore. And maybe they all went off to make the trash can, which is really weird and complicated. Or maybe they
⏹️ ▶️ John were just, you know, pulling back a little bit and slowing down the updates. Again, it’s hard to know what goes
⏹️ ▶️ John on inside Apple. But this phenomenon of the Mac Pro no longer
⏹️ ▶️ John being updated steadily is, as Marco said, not a phenomenon that
⏹️ ▶️ John goes back to 2013. It goes all the way back to 2010, so it’s a long time. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, you know, clearly one of the reasons why there was a long delay between the 2010 one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the 2013 redesign, which was really, it was announced in mid-2013, but it wasn’t really available.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They went for sale in late December of 2013 and wasn’t actually shipped to anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until the first couple months of 2014. So it was a good three and a half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years between July 2010 when that other one came out and this new one. That was presumably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they were doing this big redesign and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also, by the way, they pre-announced the 2013 Mac Pro mostly because
⏹️ ▶️ John we felt like, or Apple felt like they had to, because we were waiting, and like, what’s the deal? What’s the deal
⏹️ ▶️ John with the Mac Pro? you did this update and it was barely an update. It was like, you know, you call that an update.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas the real new Mac Pro, and we were waiting what it then seemed like such a long time for
⏹️ ▶️ John it. They felt like they need to say at WWDC, here’s the new Mac Pro and
⏹️ ▶️ John this amazing thing. We’re like, yay, finally. And I said, oh, by the way, not really like shipping for a long time, but still
⏹️ ▶️ John they like, why didn’t they hold it until it was somewhat close to shipping? Because they
⏹️ ▶️ John felt like, you know, whatever dissatisfaction there was among that customer base, They had to reassure them by saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John all right, we’re gonna announce a thing. We’re gonna show you the pictures of it. Here it is. We’re gonna put it in a little glass tube
⏹️ ▶️ John outside of the Presidio at Moscone. And so you can look at it and see that it’s a real thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you’re not getting one for months. But we all felt better because it’s like, well, at least we know now that the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro isn’t dead. That it’s not there. The reason they weren’t upgrading the cheese grater is could have been because they
⏹️ ▶️ John were working on this. And this is a fancy new thing and it will be coming soon. And I think we all basically felt better
⏹️ ▶️ John about that, even though there was a delay. And this current announcement is like, everything that happened before,
⏹️ ▶️ John but stretch all the timelines out even farther.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, at the time, we thought they don’t care about Mac Pro users. They don’t care about the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then they released the 2013 one, and we thought, okay, great. They released a new one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this is awesome. However, it doesn’t meet a lot of people’s needs in a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of ways that we’ll get into in a minute. And so then, that was now, It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been now like about the same delay between 2010 and that one and between that one and now You know about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three and a half years or so the assumption that we’ve all been making and I I totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own this I have I have been Number one on on the list of complainers on this show at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, the assumption that we’ve all been making is that apple is being run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really just by the numbers by tim cook and that You know this this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly small product line that is, you know, something like 1% of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac sales, uh, was just not enough of a blip on the radar for Tim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cook to care about updating ever again. That is how it seemed until this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco morning, uh, to, to all of us Mac pro users. And that has manifested
⏹️ ▶️ Marco itself with a number of side effects. Um, one of which, which I think might’ve contributed to Apple finally, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, getting into gear on, on doing an update here is that when the Mac book pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was was updated last fall, the 2016 MacBook Pro with the touch bar and everything else,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was clearly not as well received as Apple thought it would be. There was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite a lot of outcry, and part of that is because of legitimate downsides of that product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Part of that’s temporary, part of it won’t be temporary. But I think a big part of the angst over the 2016
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pro was also that pros had been neglected on the desktop for so long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that not only were they kind of already mad at Apple not serving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their needs, but it sure looked like they were going to have to now wedge their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs into these other products that weren’t very good at serving them. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so if I had to guess, it was during the 2016 MacBook Pro launch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with all this kickback that Apple finally decided to go ahead with the new Mac Pro project.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Craig Federighi made some comments during these interviews that it’s been longer than six months they’ve been working on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, but that doesn’t mean it had the green light to go ahead as a product for more than six months.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it was longer than six months they’ve been working on it. This round table was a bunch of journalists, right? So the journalists
⏹️ ▶️ John are asking questions, and one of the big questions that everyone wants to know is
⏹️ ▶️ John we out here in the community who are interested in the Mac Pro have been
⏹️ ▶️ John upset about it for a long, long time. How did it come to pass that so much
⏹️ ▶️ John time elapsed between the 2013 Mac Pro and now,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there was nothing, literally no updates, no price changes, no announcement or anything. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John just now you call a round table? So everyone wanted to know the timeline. How long ago did you
⏹️ ▶️ John decide that this was the thing you were gonna do? And they did it like, well, it’s not like there’s any one decision or one meeting,
⏹️ ▶️ John and each of us went through our own journey of like deciding, what was it, Craig
⏹️ ▶️ John Fitter, he said we went through like denial and acceptance. So I can imagine there are people like, well, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the denial thing would be like, well, the new Mac Pro was weird and all, and people complain, but I bet if we
⏹️ ▶️ John just leave it out there people will come to accept it as the new way that pro hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to work on the desktop. And then eventually I have to say, you know, it looks like they’re not really accepting it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so the six month thing seemed to me more of a timeline of like, when did you come to this realization? They
⏹️ ▶️ John never actually answered, how did you go so many years with like basically your heads in the sand,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Because that’s why, I mean, just two shows ago, I was asking us all if we had consensus that basically
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not gonna be another Numac Pro, there’s just gonna be an iMac Pro, which by the way, there will be, and they talked about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, basically an iMac bent towards pro people because look, if there was gonna be a Numac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John they wouldn’t have left this one there for like four years with no updates, right? Like surely
⏹️ ▶️ John they wouldn’t do that. With no communication or whatever, And it’s like a certain point they’re communicating
⏹️ ▶️ John to you by saying, we update the iMac, you know, we don’t, dropping
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple monitors and sort of back channel communicating to some journalists somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ John that, hey, Apple’s not doing monitors anymore and offering the LG one. That’s another big sign, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the iMac, it’s the future, right? And so we were just all like, we were in
⏹️ ▶️ John the acceptance phase, or at least I was like, well, you know, no more Mac pros. And we all wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John know that because we all kind of want to like be, you know, vengeful and say, how could you have made this mistake? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John on the one hand, we’re all ecstatic that the announcement they made was not, hey, by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John we just want to let you know, we’re not making the Mac Pro anymore. Like we want to make it official. That could have been what they said at this meeting. They,
⏹️ ▶️ John this meeting could have also been, you know, we’re, we’ve just, we’re just given up on the Mac, like the most pessimistic
⏹️ ▶️ John ideas of what could it mean to go to a Mac roundtable and ominous sounding Mac roundtable, if you are accepting
⏹️ ▶️ John there was going to be know Mac Pro could have been like terrible bad news. Instead, it was good news. But the good news just
⏹️ ▶️ John immediately makes you ask the question, what? What took you so long? Like, and that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John question that you know, when when did you figure it out? Like, what was your plan before six months ago? What What were
⏹️ ▶️ John you doing? Like, what’s been another year guys, this this current Mac Pro that we never update will, will
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s gonna set the world on fire. Just wait. Yeah, right. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t, they’re not going to go into like you know their deliberation process and discuss you know if they don’t realize stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John but they did go into a couple of aspects of like why why is
⏹️ ▶️ John the current trash can why didn’t you ever update it and so Craig Federighi
⏹️ ▶️ John had said this is a quote from him I think we designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner and there
⏹️ ▶️ John he was talking about the design of the trash can which is a big cylinder and inside the cylinder is kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John three boards three vertical boards that make a triangle shape if you’re looking down on top of it. Two of them are GPUs and one of them is the CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John board. He was saying that the, this is quoting from Matt Panzerino’s article,
⏹️ ▶️ John the unique triangular design of the Mac Pro’s thermal core provided proved to be the limiting factor. It wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John built to have for one of the three sides of the triangle to get super hot. So if they if they wanted to have a really hot GPU on
⏹️ ▶️ John one side and then cooler parts it was supposed to be like equal distribution of heat from the two mid-range, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John mid-heat GPUs and the CPU on the other side. But basically I think the problem is the little cylinder with the one fan on top
⏹️ ▶️ John there was just not enough cooling capacity unless you probably crank that fan up to the point where they didn’t like it. They…
⏹️ ▶️ John the story they gave was we… they couldn’t update it. Like, they… the
⏹️ ▶️ John faster GPUs they could have put in there it couldn’t handle a thermal load. Maybe even also the CPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Federighi also emphasized that this wasn’t like someone had an idea to make a trashcan-shaped
⏹️ ▶️ John computer and then they just put all their marbles in that basket without thinking. They said… there’s another quote from Federighi…
⏹️ ▶️ John Federighi… we didn’t start with a shape and say well here’s the fastest machine we can put in that box we actually started with
⏹️ ▶️ John a target for performance and came up with what we think was a very clever design for that thermal core and thermal architecture
⏹️ ▶️ John so they they had a target of like two GPUs with lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of cores and one CPU and then they tried to figure out which again you can
⏹️ ▶️ John say this was their one of their mistakes what is the smallest quietest thing
⏹️ ▶️ John we can get that and they They emphasized that in the 2013 Mac Pro launch. Look how much smaller this
⏹️ ▶️ John trashcan Mac Pro is than the giant cheese grater. I remember when they put up the image of the two things next to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco each other that look fake. It was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is that, an airport hub next to a Mac Pro? No, that’s the new Mac Pro. It seemed impossibly
⏹️ ▶️ John small compared to the size of the cheese grater. And they did. They made it, like packaging-wise, it
⏹️ ▶️ John is super quiet and super small compared to a tower computer. And of course, they sacrificed
⏹️ ▶️ John all the internal storage and all the other stuff. that basically by making that design and all the tooling and all
⏹️ ▶️ John that fancy factory in the US that makes all this stuff and you know all the money they put into that
⏹️ ▶️ John the story they gave was that basically they couldn’t update it because none of the better stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that they could fit in there could be cooled inside that case so they had to design a new
⏹️ ▶️ John one but they didn’t they just they I don’t know what they did it just sat on their hands for several years mulling
⏹️ ▶️ John over what to do all the while continuing to sell that thing until they finally came to this realization. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, you know, again, we have to wait for people to retire and get the tell all books, but something went wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John inside apples or something. Something went wrong with the Mac pro because it is
⏹️ ▶️ John not a good look to sell the same computer for the same price for so many years. And it’s also not a good look to
⏹️ ▶️ John only realize your mistake many, many, many years later, way, way
⏹️ ▶️ John too late. So late. In fact, that You are forced to do a thing that Apple never ever does,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is call a bunch of journalists together and tell them about computer you’re going to release
⏹️ ▶️ John in the next year, like not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco this calendar year.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like a let me tell you about something that’s not released yet. We can’t even show you a picture of it and be it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to be released this year. They also, by the way, didn’t say as far as I’m able to determine that it’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be released next year. All they said is not this year and everybody’s like, Oh, that totally means next year
⏹️ ▶️ John probably does, but they’re covering their bases. And so that means, that says to me,
⏹️ ▶️ John that they decided very, very, very recently on the sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of the no, go, no-go on the Mac Pro. Because if they had come and said, guys, we just
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna tell you, there’s not going to be another Mac Pro. That would make perfect
⏹️ ▶️ John sense, because it’s like, well, we debated for a long time, while we debated, we kept selling this thing, but in the end,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re, you know, it’s down the toilet, down the toilet with the trash can. No
⏹️ ▶️ John more Mac Pros, the iMac is the future, We just want to let you know and let’s talk about it and
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s explain to you why we think pros can use this other stuff or whatever because at least that would make sense for the trajectory instead
⏹️ ▶️ John they Ham did hot for four years realize the error of their ways which is good but
⏹️ ▶️ John realized it’s so late that they have nothing to say to us except we will we
⏹️ ▶️ John will make good and I’m glad they what of course I’m glad that they’re they’re gonna do this because I love the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m glad they went into specifics instead of saying we’re going to make new pro hardware. They went into specifics
⏹️ ▶️ John by saying, this new pro hardware will be modular in their parlance. There will be a separate monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John and a separate computer. So it’s not gonna be like, oh, this is gonna be an awesome iMac you like. No, they said that is
⏹️ ▶️ John a separate thing. We are gonna do a newer iMac with fancier stuff that pros might like. But also there’s this thing, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is modular. And we’re gonna make our own displays, which so recently they seem to be moving away
⏹️ ▶️ John from. And I guess because they want me not to wake in the middle of the night and tremble
⏹️ ▶️ John in fear of having to get a non-Apple monitor, they’re gonna make an Apple monitor. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the final point they made is whatever this design is, which they didn’t go into details about, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna make sure that with this design, we can upgrade the internals
⏹️ ▶️ John on some kind of schedule other than never ever upgrading them, right? So those are the few bits
⏹️ ▶️ John of information they gave about this. I get the impression that the same brief that they gave
⏹️ ▶️ John these journalists was given to Apple’s newly formed team, not too long ago to say
⏹️ ▶️ John we need a new Mac Pro, needs to be modular, we need a new Apple monitor, and we don’t want the same thing that happened
⏹️ ▶️ John with the trash can to happen with this. We need the internals to be upgradable on a reasonable schedule. All of that is music to my
⏹️ ▶️ John ears because those are all the things I want to hear. Like the only thing they could have said more was, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re going to have multiple internal drives and multiple internal
⏹️ ▶️ John slots. They didn’t say that, and I doubt they will do that, but that’s the only other thing that I could have even asked
⏹️ ▶️ John for in my wildest dreams. I am very, very happy, but also very disappointed in Apple because
⏹️ ▶️ John they know what they did. They done goofed. Yeah, they they did not
⏹️ ▶️ John do well on this whole Mac Pro thing. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m glad that it came. Well, you know, I they messed up like they even said it themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ John They apologized. They said sorry. When does Apple ever do that? Because it’s not a coherent
⏹️ ▶️ John thing like it would be coherent if they said we slowly phase out the Mac Pro and it disappeared.
⏹️ ▶️ John And let me tell you why we’re not going to be in that business anymore. But to neglect the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John like that and then have a change of heart at the very last minute, certainly better from my perspective than not
⏹️ ▶️ John having a change of heart, that’s not good for the company. It’s not good for the image, it’s not good for the pros, it’s not good for Apple that they have
⏹️ ▶️ John to pre-announce this product, which is not a comfortable position for Apple to be in.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this was kind of an example of Apple being humble
⏹️ ▶️ John and coming hat in hand and saying, we’re sorry, we messed up this Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro thing. Let us make it up to you by doing all the good things for you. And that’s why everybody’s happy
⏹️ ▶️ John because, you know, happy and also curious about where we’re going, but happy to see that the
⏹️ ▶️ John result we all wanted is the result we’re going to get if we just wait a little bit longer.
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Mac Pro!
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, here’s the thing. On the whole, I agree with you. And even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as someone who, sitting here now, doesn’t foresee ever buying a Mac Pro, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excited about this. I really am. I joked a lot on Twitter about, oh god, this episode’s going to be terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But no, I’m actually excited to talk about it. Because this is good for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone when Apple commits to the professional market. It’s good for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me as, by some definition, a professional because I think they actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cited Xcode as one of the apps they consider to be a professional app and one of the apps they look for in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their analytics to see who’s a professional and who isn’t. Anyway, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitely unequivocally think that this was way, way,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way too late. But I don’t know, a lot of people on Twitter were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jumping straight to like, oh, Apple is just, you know, they weren’t doing anything until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yesterday and then they finally decided to do something. And I don’t know, I think it’s unfair for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us to assume how long it takes to build an entire new computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with an entirely new design from the ground up. Like I agree that they should have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey started on this a while ago. I agree that we should never have gotten to this point, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s a bit presumptuous for us to just assume they can go to some parts bin somewhere, throw a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey few things together and call it good. I think that we’re perhaps assuming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the worst where it may not be necessary. This should have absolutely happened at least a year ago, if not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two, but it It doesn’t mean that they didn’t start work on it a year ago, if not two.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What if they just didn’t feel compelled to tell us about it until now? Because a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bunch of whiners, like those guys on ATP, God, what a bunch of whiners the three of them are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What if a bunch of whiners just got to the point that they felt like they needed to address it once and for
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I, you know, we can go out where we think the decision was made to
⏹️ ▶️ John do something different, but it’s got to be pretty recent. I mean, just use the LG monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John as an example. The monitor, for most people, is a sideshow here. For me, it’s like the main show, because I can tell you
⏹️ ▶️ John that if they had said we’re gonna make a new Mac Pro, but we’re still not making Apple monitors,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would still be like, well, maybe we’ll get an iMac. That’s just me personally. But very recently,
⏹️ ▶️ John as recently as, when was it, like, October, I don’t know, whenever they came out with
⏹️ ▶️ John the new MacBook Pros with the LG display, and they talked to the press about it, and the
⏹️ ▶️ John press would ask them, so, you know, should we get an Apple monitor or whatever? Like, no, we, this
⏹️ ▶️ John LG monitor is the one we want. It’s on our store. We’re fully behind it, so on and so forth. And then through back
⏹️ ▶️ John channel communication to someone on Twitter to say, basically Apple’s out of the standalone display business. This is recent
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. If, as you suggested, Casey, that perhaps they’ve been working on this new Mac Pro for over a year,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no way they would have told everybody that Apple’s out of the standalone
⏹️ ▶️ John display business through whatever back channels they did. Maybe they still would have said buy the LG one anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John because the new Apple monitor isn’t coming out for a long time. But yeah, there are long lead times in these things,
⏹️ ▶️ John but not, it doesn’t take three years to make a monitor. Right? Like the time was when Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John would make new products every year. And yeah, they have overlapping schedules and stuff like that, which by the way is why I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the time that Apple needs to start making the next trashcan is before the previous one is released. Like that’s usually how
⏹️ ▶️ John these things overlap. Like the new iPhone is in the works at the time that the current iPhone is released.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the only way you could have yearly releases of anything, right? So it’s not as if you can release the trash can,
⏹️ ▶️ John right, in late 2013, and then after the trash can is released,
⏹️ ▶️ John start working on the next one, you’re already late at that point. Let alone release the trash can, wait a year
⏹️ ▶️ John or two, and then start working on the successor. That’s just too long. If you’re, one of the things, the commitments
⏹️ ▶️ John of the pro market, and it’s what they talked about is, you have to have a product
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can update, because the whole point of this product is the biggest, fastest
⏹️ ▶️ John computer Apple sells. And if you don’t update it,
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually your phone has faster single-threaded performance than that thing, you know what I mean, like in the most extreme case.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to update it. It’s the role of this computer. The only reason it exists is to be the biggest, fastest thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John As soon as it’s not biggest, fastest, people are like, well, why am I buying this? Why don’t I buy a 13-inch laptop that has a better
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU speed or a faster SSD or has Thunderbolt 3 and this top-end thing
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t? Like it loses its purpose without updates. So they were super duper late.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it seems to me that if they can’t even promise a 2018 release of this thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John they started sometime, you know, in the past
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey year. Oh, easily.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe in the past six months. Because it’s not like the thing we’re asking about is when did they make the
⏹️ ▶️ John call? When did they make the decision? Because they seem to make no decision for a really, really long time. And then they made a decision.
⏹️ ▶️ John And part of that decision was, given that we made this decision, look at our timelines. When will
⏹️ ▶️ John we actually be able to show a product? It will hurt us a lot to just do the normal Apple thing, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is not telling anybody until the product comes out, because by then, everyone will completely have written off Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John as a pro hardware vendor. So we need to make a decision, and then the even harder decision, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is now we have to tell people. We have to tell people that we kind of started this new project, because if we don’t, by the
⏹️ ▶️ John time we release it, they’ll all be gone. They all will have left. like, hey guys, we have a new Mac Pro. We didn’t want to tell you about it for the past year
⏹️ ▶️ John and a half that we’ve been developing it, but we totally have a new one. It’s like too late, we all left, you neglected us, right? So they had
⏹️ ▶️ John to come out and tell us that at some point in the future, defined as not this year,
⏹️ ▶️ John there will be a new Mac Pro, which was the right thing to do. But it is them coming from a position
⏹️ ▶️ John of weakness. And it makes me think that this decision was not made and that the team to make
⏹️ ▶️ John this new Mac Pro was not tasked with doing so any time
⏹️ ▶️ John longer than maybe like 12 months ago, and I would guess maybe six months ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I would say that’s, because like, you know, we know from various like tips and rumblings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here and there that like, there were occasional efforts in Apple to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco investigate new Zions and stuff, but that there was never any suggestion by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody, any rumors, any tipsters, anybody, that that was actually becoming a product for, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anywhere close to a product. I really do think that this probably became a priority six months
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s how they determined, by the way, that’s how they determined probably their thermal limits. Like they had the cylinder,
⏹️ ▶️ John and we kept hearing rumors from all sorts of weird sources, like, oh, they’re looking at this chip,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, they’re looking at that chip, or looking at this GPU. Like, maybe they tried all sorts of like, component
⏹️ ▶️ John upgrades to the trash can, and every time they tried it, it was either not a big enough win, or they couldn’t deal with the
⏹️ ▶️ John thermals, right? And it was just kind of like, well, do we want to bother going through with this? Should we make it a
⏹️ ▶️ John product? Maybe wait for next year. Maybe it’ll be better. We have these props, like Federighi’s
⏹️ ▶️ John explanation is basically like they couldn’t put better stuff in that cylinder that they, you know, they had
⏹️ ▶️ John designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner and
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that they continued to try to tinker with that every time there was a new CPU or GPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John but never actually released anything fits with that idea that it wasn’t like they were, you know, opposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to making new Mac Pros is they couldn’t make new Mac Pros without a major investment. And they come back and say, okay, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John we can’t put new stuff in the cylinder. Sorry about that. Oops. Can we make a whole totally new Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro? And then it was like, well, that seems like expensive and not a lot of people buy this. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they just kept doing that and doing that. And you know, externally, we see nothing. We just, you know, we have the same Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John as always, and just a bunch of, you know, rumors. And eventually has to come to a head, say, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John are we in this business? Or are we not in this business? And the decision that they made, which I’m very happy with is, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John we are in this business. We’re going to rededicate ourselves. Um, and we’re not gonna make the same mistake twice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, nobody puts a new Mac pro in a corner, in a thermal corner.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Reference acknowledged. So boy, it’s, I would not want to have
⏹️ ▶️ John been in these meetings, but I am so glad. I’m so glad that they, they made, I can’t even say it’s the right decision. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if it’s the right decision for Apple, but it’s the decision that I I wanted. Actually, yes, I can. I think it is the right decision for Apple. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple’s not going to be in the pro market, then what the hell’s the point of Apple? Like, are we just going to be a phone company?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s not the Apple we all believe in. And it’s clearly not the Apple that
⏹️ ▶️ John all the people who come to these meetings and profess undying love for the Mac believe in either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and I think it’s more than that. It’s that, like, if Apple decides that iOS is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only OS in their future, then that’s one thing. If the Mac as a platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to continue, they need to keep building pro hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, but is the iMac pro enough? And I think we’ll talk about that more later. But the one thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey strikes me about this, like I suspect you guys are right, and that it was very recent in the last 12
⏹️ ▶️ Casey months or so, that Apple got really serious about replacing the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it seems a little disingenuous to me for us to say, Surely they have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac OS running on arm. You know, surely they’re doing that. Why would they not? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know hardware is different, but don’t you think they would have been doing more than just piddling with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new Mac pro for all this time? Maybe there were only a handful of people on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe they weren’t taking it too seriously, but if I feel like why wouldn’t you at least have that in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the hopper just in case now to, to your point a minute ago, ago, both of you, maybe that didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey start until like two years ago or one year ago or what have you. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John feel like a year ago. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not going to be not going to be two years ago. They would be they would be done by now. If it was two years ago, especially since
⏹️ ▶️ John this like in the I know. So here’s the thing. There’s a tension with Apple between make an amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John new thing, which I think trash can qualifies. I like you haven’t seen a PC like this before. Look at this thing. Isn’t it weird
⏹️ ▶️ John and crazy and awesome? Like they want to do that. But then there’s schedule pressure. So as many people pointed
⏹️ ▶️ John out, they can make a rectangular box with nice finishes on it and shove a bunch of crap in it and be done, but they don’t want to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they’re going to take longer than it would take to just slap together some basically a PC that runs Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS, right? The question is, how much longer will it take? And if they had started two years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John even with the most obsessive, uh, you know, uh, aball craftsmanship,
⏹️ ▶️ John they could, they could have had something to show today. Right? So that makes me think again, they had to have
⏹️ ▶️ John started this in the last calendar year That’s the longest I’m going to say
⏹️ ▶️ John this goes back and probably even closer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And so I think it’s also worth kind of putting the 2013
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trashcan in context a little bit to figure out why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they still care and maybe what they can do to avoid another problem like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. So in addition to the reasons that John always likes to say about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the halo car analogy and everything else, which I agree with. So it actually sells better than I thought.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So one of the things that came out in this meeting was they said that desktops are 20% of Mac sales,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which that alone is higher than I would have guessed. You know, laptops are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people’s computers these days. So the fact that desktops still have 20% is pretty good,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think. They said that the Mac Pro is in the low single-digit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco percentage of those Mac sales. If that’s 1%, which is the lowest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that their estimate would really mean. That is about 200,000 Mac Pros a year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, that I think is like 1% of Mac sales and 200,000, I think that’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good for, cause that’s not the sales of the Mac Pro in its launch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year when it’s updated, that’s the sales of the Mac Pro now. Like this three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year old, like lame duck machine, like that’s the sales of that now. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s remarkable that it still sells that well. And that says that the market for these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably bigger than a lot of us were estimating. Because if this machine that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three years old and wasn’t even that compelling when it was new for various reasons I’ll get into in a second,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that can still sell 200,000 units a year, that’s amazing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I decided to look up a couple of stats, I did some homework. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is roughly equivalent. I translated this into terms you understand Casey, to the sales volume of the BMW X5.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s roughly what the X5 sells every year worldwide. And that’s a fairly popular model in their lineup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the fact that like, you know, that a car can and oh, and by the way, it’s also double
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the total sales volume of Tesla. So like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if if it’s selling in this kind of volume, if like a car company can justify having a a car,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an entire car model with all the customization that goes into that and support and everything else, Apple can justify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having a machine that only sells to this relatively small audience for, you know, compared to their whole product line.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, but what’s the profit off of each of these devices? You know, the profit off of an X5, one would hope would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many, many, many thousands of dollars. What’s the profit off a trash can Mac Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, no, I mean, no questions. The raw, well, actually, I wouldn’t assume that the profits are that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive on cars, Maybe on luxury cars, especially if you get the floor mats. But I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the costs of developing a new Mac Pro line, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s kind of reasonably done are probably low enough compared to developing a whole car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they’re probably okay there. But anyway, I did want to briefly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go into exactly what went wrong with 2013 Mac Pro that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we and as commentators and hopefully if anybody at Apple is listening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I assume you know they’re all smart people they’re considering these things too but I just want to say it just in case because I think there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important lessons to learn here and I really hope they have learned them. So quick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco summary when the 2013 came out it cost more than the previous model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it accommodated fewer people’s needs and so that’ll even when it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brand new that And on day one, once all the configs and pricing were up, a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of people did not like it very much and a lot of pros said, Ooh, nevermind, because it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much more limited than the previous ones. And it gave up all the drive bays, all the slots, a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the RAM expansion capabilities, GPU replaceability, GPU options, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CP dual CPU, dual socket options. Like there were so, so much stuff that was given up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it really did a lot less and it cost more. And so that’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever Apple does next, they have to learn a lesson from that. Whether they choose to follow it or not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s something to learn. Also, it also suffered from just kind of bad market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco timing relative to the rest of the industry. So almost immediately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 5K screen revolution happened. It was like nine months into the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Pro when 5K screens came out in the iMac. And the Mac Pro has no good way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to drive a 5K screen. and Apple doesn’t sell one still. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they did finally get around to launching one last fall, it doesn’t work with the 2013 Mac Pro. At least,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we keep hearing random hacks about how the stores are kind of hacking it to work, but basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t work. And so it missed the 5K revolution by a very short
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. And a lot of pros, like myself, prioritized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having that retina screen over having those additional cores and everything. Also, right after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that model came out, the next generation of processors that Apple of course didn’t use, increased single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco threaded performance noticeably. And so what happened was, within a very short time of the Mac Pro being released,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco within about a year, it was unable to drive the best screens that the highest end buyers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted, and it was defeated in a lot of single threaded performance tasks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a lot of benchmarks. It was either beaten completely, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the case of the six core, it could barely edge out in multi-threaded, but that wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all work. So it was badly timed in the market. And then- Don’t forget about
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco more revolution that happened across the product
⏹️ ▶️ John line. USB-C also came along and guess who didn’t get that? The Mac Pro, like terrible timing in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of peripheral. Like it wouldn’t have been terrible timing if it was on a yearly update schedule, it’d be like, oh, next year, the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro will get updated, it will get the new chips, it will get USB-C, it will get Thunderbolt 3, it will be able to drive
⏹️ ▶️ John a 5K display. But again, the thermal corner, Apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John they just plain couldn’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. And then also, by limiting it to a single CPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and dual GPU configuration, they were making a big bet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that this is going to be the future of pro computing. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the present of pro computing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the time, and the future took a different direction. And they were betting that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just having this one set of trade-offs, this one CPU, two workstation GPUs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was gonna solve all pro needs, or all needs of the Mac Pro customers at least. That was wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even in 2013, and it never became correct. You know, they were betting big on OpenCL,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that really didn’t pan out beyond a very small number of specialized uses. And they were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, they never really supported it very well in Mac OS either. And so I think another lesson
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to learn here is that whatever direction the Mac Pro takes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can’t rely on highly specialized OS features very much because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chances are it’s never gonna have the priority within Apple and the engineering priority
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to devote a lot of engineering time to optimizing the OS for this machine that sells to 1%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the user base. Like they’re never gonna do that. So it can’t depend on weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like edge case technologies like OpenCL has turned out to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it can handle it well, that’s one thing, but that can’t be the main focus of the machine.
⏹️ ▶️ John They did do a lot of OS changes to support the dual GPUs. Because remember, one of them was like, oh, you could address
⏹️ ▶️ John them individually and use one for compute and one for graphics. And they have that whole demo of the 3D application that Pixar
⏹️ ▶️ John was using. So they actually added OS APIs to make it so that people could write
⏹️ ▶️ John programs to take advantage of this machine. But the only way anybody, like any pro
⏹️ ▶️ John app vendor, is going to change their program to take advantage of this
⏹️ ▶️ John new fancy hardware is if doing so gives them some kind of advantage like okay well this
⏹️ ▶️ John is weird hardware and you know but Apple gives us APIs and we can address these two GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John and control them and do interesting things if we do this if we make this big investment and rejigger our
⏹️ ▶️ John application and use these new APIs what is the payoff and if the payoff is performance that still
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t match a plain old Windows PC with a big stonking single GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John in it? Well, why would we do that? Why would we spend all this time rewriting our thing to get worse performance
⏹️ ▶️ John than we can get if we just leave our application exactly the way it is, and get, you know, a
⏹️ ▶️ John GeForce 1080, whatever the top of the line thing was at the time?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why don’t you why would we bother doing that? So people didn’t rewrite their programs, even though there were API’s, and
⏹️ ▶️ John those API’s themselves didn’t get expanded and supported and everything because there was no one writing for
⏹️ ▶️ John them. So It was an ecosystem that never materialized for hardware that was never good enough to justify
⏹️ ▶️ John the investment and very quickly became embarrassingly not good enough, as you mentioned.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every other standard and peripheral and capability just passed it by,
⏹️ ▶️ John even on Apple’s own infrequently updated machines.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And then, and they also had execution flaws even with this one model. Like the GP,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, they’re talking now about how the thermals prevented them from updating it very, very well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The thermals were a problem then too. This machine, anybody who’s ever owned one of these, or especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody who’s had to manage more than one of them, like certain developer studios or visual effects places
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have had multiple 2013 Mac Pros, the GPUs die all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s doing tons of warranty replacements on those. The only reason it hasn’t become like a big known
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scandal or thing is because this is a relatively unpopular product, so not a lot of people have them. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyone who does have it knows that there’s tons of GPU overheating problems and they die all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. And on top of that, to make a GPU-focused machine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that takes this huge bet on GPUs being the future and then not updating it for three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years, like GPUs change like every nine months. Like it’s a pretty fast-moving part of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware development. So it was a huge design flaw even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then to design something that could barely cool the GPUs it had And then with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only apparently no headroom to cool future ones, but also to not update this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco machine at all for three and a half years at least, and what’s probably gonna end up being four and a half to five,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a massive just error in just how, it was an execution flaw, simple as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. I will say though, like as much as I bag on this machine, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco redesigning the tower, like the cheese grater, typical PC tower, I mean it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than typical, it was a really good one, But redesigning the tower in 2013
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a good idea. And it remains a good idea today. They should not just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put new components in the old cheese grater and ship that as the new thing. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s lots of old baggage that is no longer necessary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the PC tower. So doing a redesign is the right move. They just didn’t do the right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. Like they chose a bad redesign. They went the wrong direction. And they admitted that. Yeah, that was my
⏹️ ▶️ John before the new Mac Pro in 2013, begging for them to make a new Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John the case for a new true Mac Pro successor. Like, everything you said about the trash can, I agree with.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, it was kind of, you know, you could have predicted these mistakes at the time because it didn’t suit our
⏹️ ▶️ John needs, but like, well, maybe there’s other audiences for them. It could have worked out, but either way, whether it worked out or didn’t, they made mistakes. They
⏹️ ▶️ John were at bad timing with the 5K displays and USB-C and Thunderbolt 3. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t say, you know, we make fun of the can’t innovate anymore, my ass, the Phil Schiller thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that was mostly because they failed to update it. This was an innovative machine.
⏹️ ▶️ John They tried something new and bold and daring, and they were trying to make
⏹️ ▶️ John the best Mac that there could be. It was so different from any other Mac that there ever had been before,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there have been since. so different in so many ways that I give them full marks for
⏹️ ▶️ John doing what I asked them to do, which is try to do your best. Turns out this wasn’t a good idea, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t say they didn’t try. You can’t say like, and again, I would have, you know, been more disappointed to say, oh, here’s another cheese grater,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Like because that’s not, that’s not really trying. That’s just kind of a business as usual status quo,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is better than nothing. But I, I do give them full marks for,
⏹️ ▶️ John for introducing it, which is why even though I I didn’t buy one. I was very happy that it existed. I was pinning
⏹️ ▶️ John my hopes on, okay, they’re either gonna keep updating this and I’ll buy the one that can drive the retina display. Remember those days when I was talking about that?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco thing for this new one.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the same way, it’s like, well, they could make some kind of rectangular box and sell it and they could get that out sooner.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m willing to wait for them to try something innovative. They just need to make a different
⏹️ ▶️ John set of trade-offs with this design, building on what they’ve learned. But I totally like the idea of them
⏹️ ▶️ John because if they’re just going to make a box. I know people want them to do that. Just make me like a rectangular PC
⏹️ ▶️ John that I can run Mac OS on, which I’m sure some people would like. But I, I want more than
⏹️ ▶️ John that from Apple. I mean, even, even the cheese grater is like you said, Mark, it’s not just a tower case. It is a really
⏹️ ▶️ John cool, really good, really interesting tower case that has many innovations inside and out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, and turned out to be a good design that they kept for a long time. Just, just do that again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, is that so hard? Just be successful all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, like, and I think, you know, looking back, you know, as you said, like they, they did something, you know, as Federighi said in this interview,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he said, we want to do something bold and different with the 2013 one. And he said, it’s good for some, but it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not address the full range of Mac pro customers. And I think this is the not right here. Like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really good at being bold and different and they pride
⏹️ ▶️ Marco themselves on that. They really try to do that with much of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they do. The problem is that if you only make bold and different product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line choices, then the overall product line will suffer because you need general
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purpose products to fill the gaps and satisfy the most needs. And the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro, the purpose of this machine is to serve a bunch of those edge cases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And You can’t just make one super focused design like this, you know, one CPU, two Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPUs, no slots, nothing else. You can’t do that kind of like bold and different design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this particular product line because all of the different edge cases that the Mac Pro needs to satisfy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are all different from each other. So no single narrow design like this can satisfy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. The old Mac Pro cheese grater could be configured in completely different ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for depending on what the customer needed. and there was a huge range of what that could do. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the kind of flexibility this product line needs. Mac Pro buyers, they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need cool and bold and different. They need versatile, powerful, and
⏹️ ▶️ John And it can be innovative too, like the Yosemite case. Before Yosemite was the name of an
⏹️ ▶️ John operating system, it was a code name for a tower case designed by Apple that was like, oh, a tower, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like a vertical rectangular solid. But Apple did its thing. hey, ours has handles on all four
⏹️ ▶️ John corners, and ours has a side panel that folds down, and the motherboard was on the side panel at that point.
⏹️ ▶️ John Look how easy it is to open this thing up, and here’s the RAM, and here’s the GPU, and you can change your hard drives.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they use that design for two generations, the G3 and the G4, and well, more if you count like, mirror
⏹️ ▶️ John drive door, and the wind tunnels, and all that other stuff. And then came the cheese grater with the Power Mac G5.
⏹️ ▶️ John Still four handles, but a different design, aluminum, and look how easy it is to slide the hard drives in and out, and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a little panel that comes off the side, and look how much room we have for fans and the computer controlled fans and all this other stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like both of those designs were innovative and interesting, but like Marco was saying, they were,
⏹️ ▶️ John they could be, they were modular. They could be configured to different needs. You could choose what you wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John to put in them and make the computer that you needed. If instead they had made an
⏹️ ▶️ John innovative, like the G4 Cube is a good example. The G4 Cube is basically a trash can before it’s time. Here’s one computer
⏹️ ▶️ John with one specific set of trade-offs and you can’t change those trade-offs at all. And if it doesn’t suit your needs, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John out of luck. The G4 Cube did not do well in the market, despite being a cool,
⏹️ ▶️ John cute little computer. To address the pro market, you either need to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of different models, each of which satisfies a need, or some kind of system that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John configure to serve different people’s needs. They can configure themselves with third-party things, or they can configure on
⏹️ ▶️ John your store by picking from pop-up menus. How much storage, how many drives, how many GPUs, what kind of GPUs, how
⏹️ ▶️ John much memory, all those things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think too, like it’s important to recognize when they were designing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the trashcan in 2013, I don’t think they necessarily forgot what pros need.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they were swayed by both a bit of hubris and also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the times. Back then, the reason why Phil Schiller said, can’t innovate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anymore, my ass. And the reason that got a huge applause besides the fact that it’s hilarious hearing that from him
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that at the time, there was a huge, overwhelming press and analyst
⏹️ ▶️ Marco narrative of Apple not being able to innovate anymore, and that Samsung was doing all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the innovation. This was a huge thing in 2013, that Samsung was taking the innovation crown.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And of course, we were all trying to figure out, what do they mean by innovation exactly? But that was a massive thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everybody was saying about Apple, the press, the stock people, everyone was saying, Apple can’t innovate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anymore, Samsung’s innovating. And it turned out that all that was was big phones, because Apple didn’t have the big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phones yet. Turns out all Apple needed to do to innovate Samsung was to make the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size phones as Samsung makes. But that pretty much solved that problem for them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I feel like that narrative really got to them, and that helped sway their decision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into taking a much bigger risk with this product than they should have. I think Apple, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe this has changed now, I’m not sure it has, Apple needs to be confident enough in itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to release boring products sometimes when that’s actually what certain types of customers need.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the Mac Pro is the biggest example of that. Like, they can totally do, not only can they, they should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably do a relatively boring line of Mac Pros because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s, like, what comes along with boringness is what pros
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I, I’m struggling because I, it’s so clear to me how right you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are in retrospect, but if you’re Apple and you’re looking at what’s coming in 2013, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here again, I mean, 2013 feels like forever ago and that’s when this thing was, was released. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God, this is so bad. But anyway, uh, when you’re looking at the future in 2013 and you’re looking at like open
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CL and all these different options, it makes sense to me to bet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, Maybe not at the house. That’s probably a little aggressive but bed big on Open CL
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and and say you know what? This is probably the future and we’re gonna give you the best possible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Machine that will be as fast as it possibly can for that future. That is so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obviously coming unfortunately, the future never came but City
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is sitting where Apple presumably was sitting in 2013. I I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it does make sense to do what they did But unequivocally looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at it in hindsight, you are absolutely correct that the boring machine was the writer machine. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the cleverness is what John was talking about and having the motherboard on the door or what have you, or making it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easily upgradable or whatever the case may be. But I don’t think we could necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fault Apple for the way they were thinking in 2013, given the facts they had in front of
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I think you can fault them to saying like, if they thought OpenCL was the future, wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John they have to release a machine that the next year they could make it run OpenCL faster, and then the year after
⏹️ ▶️ John that they can make it run OpenCL
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco faster. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John even if they had kind of an idea of what the GPU compute future was gonna be like, they didn’t have,
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t seem like they had a roadmap of like, when this future arrives, we should be poised
⏹️ ▶️ John to make the fastest thing that you can run OpenCL on year after year. They weren’t even poised to do
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Even if it had materialized, they were not, like, because the, like, by the time this machine stepped, but like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get a single GPU PC that beat it, right? In the things
⏹️ ▶️ John that people cared about, right? And people didn’t have to rewrite their applications. And they seem to have no plan.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s a surprise to me because this type of chimney design where you pull in cool air from the bottom and exhaust the hot air out the
⏹️ ▶️ John top with a really big fan that goes slowly, I would think that would have more
⏹️ ▶️ John thermal capacity than it apparently has. So we’re taking what they said in a face value that like they had the, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, thermal problems with it and they couldn’t get new stuff in it. That’s pretty darn bad. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a hard time envisioning any good plan for the Mac Pro that does not include
⏹️ ▶️ John the ability to make it faster next year, and faster the year after that, and faster the year after that, in an incremental way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because again, the whole point of this product is to be the fastest thing out there. And I know what Marco’s saying with the
⏹️ ▶️ John boring updates. I wouldn’t use that word to characterize it, because as far as I’m concerned, having
⏹️ ▶️ John the best performance in the product line is not boring. Even if it’s not in a spiral-shaped
⏹️ ▶️ John underwater case, right? You know, whatever you wanna say is like, Oh, we can put it in a sphere and it rolls around
⏹️ ▶️ John your desk, like whatever. If every year it gets faster and faster, speed is not boring,
⏹️ ▶️ John capability is not boring. Like, you know, my renders or compiles took X amount of time.
⏹️ ▶️ John If I buy a new one in a year or two years, they should take X divided by some number amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of time, but something greater than one. All right, I wanna see things happen faster.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s not boring. I think what you’re getting at with the boring is like, be innovative, but don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t try to change things for the sake of changing them. And I think what they tried to do is kind of what they tried to do with a Final
⏹️ ▶️ John Cut Pro 10, which is, let’s not be constrained by what defines
⏹️ ▶️ John pro computers today, it could be that we are holding on to baggage that is not actually necessary anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John If we start basically from a clean slate and say, what do our pro users really need? What can we
⏹️ ▶️ John eliminate? What is just there? Because like oh everyone expects to have floppy drives and
⏹️ ▶️ John parallel ports and whatever like what if we drop things and just leave the essence can we get
⏹️ ▶️ John it a simplification and they dropped too many things on the wrong things right
⏹️ ▶️ John um if they had found the correct essence and dropped some things
⏹️ ▶️ John but left others like you know they could have come up with a better balance and it still could have been in a cylinder
⏹️ ▶️ John case for all we know and it still could have had no internal story like some of the Some of the bets I think were reasonable, like no 3.5
⏹️ ▶️ John inch internal bays, no optical drive obviously, like all those things that they removed from
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro as compared to the cheese grater, those were correct things to drop. It’s like you don’t have to keep
⏹️ ▶️ John having three and a quarter inch drive bays, you don’t have to have any kind of drive bays, you can, you know, we see the future as being
⏹️ ▶️ John PCI Express SSDs or, you know, Optane, whatever things from Intel.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is an example of a simplification that isn’t possible if you say super boring, which which is basically
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, pro computers got to have a bunch of PCI slots and a bunch of three one five inch bays and a bunch of five and a quarter. You’ll never
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll never make anything interesting there. It’s just that they dropped other things as well and it didn’t work
⏹️ ▶️ John out. And I think to to try to make different tradeoffs, we can
⏹️ ▶️ John start talking about what we think a new Mac Pro as vaguely sketched by
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s words in this meaning would look like.
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iMac Pro!
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted to talk a little bit about the iMac because they had some interesting things to say about that too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, to me, what was probably one of the most interesting parts of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco briefing is that it sounds like they’re not working on one Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro, that they’re working on two different Pro desktops. of them is new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like higher-end configurations of the iMac which is probably why they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem to have apparently canceled the iMac revision that’s been like mostly done and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know like the USB C KB Lake revision it seems like they’re now just gonna hold that maybe until the fall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever because what they said was that there’s gonna be new like more pro configurations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the iMac this year so I’m guessing that maybe gets announced everybody to see, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably the fall. And that probably, you know, that whatever iMacs were gonna come out this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco past, you know, winter or spring have probably been delayed to just make one big update then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which I’m not sure that’s necessarily the right move, but I see, you know, that is typical of Apple, so that’s plausible, right? But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted to kind of get an idea of if they’re going to do like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro configurations of the iMac and also do a modular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Pro, and we’ll talk about what that might mean also. What would the iMac configurations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually be like? So I was thinking like, you know, they could put Xeons in there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get higher core counts and more PCI lanes and everything, but I figured that might become like a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro only thing. So maybe the Intel Extreme Series, like we keep getting told about, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the X99 boards and the Extreme Edition processors that have like six to 10 cores,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are basically Xeons, but you know, not in official name. and so they don’t have ECC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAM support. They don’t have quite as high of cores as Xeons do, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t usually max out at quite as high of clock speeds. But that would be one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, like if they wanna keep these two different things, you know, they have the regular iMac, which the regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac already has usually the fastest, like typical desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processors that Intel sells. GPUs, they have more headroom. GPUs, they usually use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a low-power desktop GPU, because the big honking, like, you know, like the 1080
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of equivalents, like the big, like, things with like the big green plastic fans
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the overclockers, like those GPUs don’t fit in the iMac enclosure, like space or heat wise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if they make the enclosure, you know, thicker and have bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heat capacity, maybe, you know, larger, slower fans with massive heat sinks somehow,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they do that kind of thing, then they could increase the capacity enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to maybe have at least mid-range desktop class GPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that could also add more, but again, how high would that actually be able to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before it questions the need for the Mac Pro Tower, right? So I’m guessing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would probably be obviously limited to just one GPU, but maybe again, limited to the PC mid-range,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the kind of PC GPUs that you can usually get for like 200 bucks, like that kind of class.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. Um, and so, and maybe it might have a higher Ram ceiling, you know, cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now the iMac is 32. Um, maybe the iMac pro in finger quotes goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to 64 and the macro goes to one 28, you know, stuff, stuff like that. Um, the iMac pro probably wouldn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the Thunderbolt bandwidth and like, you know, the, the Mac pro has like three Thunderbolt buses.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, you know, you know, the new one probably have a different arrangement, but suffice to say that they would max out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco however many PCI express lanes and however much Thunderbolt bandwidth they could get,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac Pro would have the most and the iMac Pro would probably have closer to a consumer level of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe the iMac Pro would retain older ports for longer, maybe like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they drop Ethernet, say, or the SD card or whatever. I think Ethernet’s a better example. If they drop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ethernet off the iMac in the consumer line, maybe they keep it in the iMac Pro line. Or if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they drop upgradable RAM out of the consumer line, are ways they can do the iMac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that doesn’t interfere with the Mac Pro. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only am I very surprised that they’re doing two, but I’m very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco excited to see what the iMac Pro is because that might end up being the computer that’s right for me. Because I actually don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need a lot of what the Mac Pro offers. I really just need the massive CPU power.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That being said, as I stare at my 5K iMac with the horrible image retention,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m starting to wonder maybe I would still go that way
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway. The big question with the iMac Pro for me is,
⏹️ ▶️ John was this product planned before or after they decided they’re doing the new Mac Pro? Because that
⏹️ ▶️ John really dictates the design. Because if I think about it in the new world where they’re saying, hey, we’re gonna have a new modular Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, oh, well then this iMac with stuff for Pro people is just gonna be like
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit faster internal SSD, uh you know thunderbolt 3
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit faster gpu a little bit faster cpu all the same classes just like
⏹️ ▶️ John better components all around a new high end what we used to call a plain old speed bump
⏹️ ▶️ John right but if this new iMac was planned and you know
⏹️ ▶️ John because this new iMac is coming this year right so this is not like a distant thing it’s coming this year um if this new iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John had been planned at a time when apple was like we’re not doing the Mac Pro anymore
⏹️ ▶️ John and this was going to be be their replacement to satisfy everybody, then I start thinking, well, maybe they
⏹️ ▶️ John could put a Xeon in it. You know, maybe they could put a actual slightly higher end GPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the things that you said, like use the X99 series and use a desktop class GPU. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the only reason I think we would get that. And that machine, I think, makes less sense for Apple to invest
⏹️ ▶️ John in, in a situation where they really are making a new Mac Pro, because who in the world would
⏹️ ▶️ John buy that when they have the option to buy a new modular Mac Pro. Like if you need that stuff, if you feel like you need tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of cores and you need a faster GPU and stuff, like why wouldn’t you go with the modular one? It’s so much
⏹️ ▶️ John better, you know, because then if your monitor does have image retention, you can just, you know, ship the monitor back or get a different monitor instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of chucking the whole machine. Like all in one is not pro friendly in terms of how to configure
⏹️ ▶️ John a system to your specific needs, right? Um, so really this machine,
⏹️ ▶️ John depending on when it was, when it was created and what Apple’s plan for it was.
⏹️ ▶️ John It could end up being this weird one-off where somehow by some miracle we get an iMac with
⏹️ ▶️ John a Xeon in it but then that goes away as soon as the new Mac Pro comes because like what the hell’s the point of an iMac with a Xeon in it when you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got the Mac Pro. But for the most part I’m thinking that this new iMac will basically
⏹️ ▶️ John be like the current top of the line 5K iMac but every component of it just be a little bit better
⏹️ ▶️ John and also have Thunderbolt 3. And I think they could sell that as saying this This is a
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac that has more appeal to pro users than the previous one, but to me it would
⏹️ ▶️ John just be a speed bump in the old style where we just took it for granted that every year
⏹️ ▶️ John the computers that Apple sells, at the very least, would have all their components upgraded to be slightly better, and
⏹️ ▶️ John every couple of years they would get a new generation. Kind of like cars, although they don’t tend to get horsepower bumps,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you know there’s a generation of car, and they improve it year after year after year, and then there’s a new generation.
⏹️ ▶️ John That used to happen with Macs too. year, they would get a little bit faster. We used to be disappointed in speed bumps. Remember that
⏹️ ▶️ John it was like, oh, they just did a speed bump. But right now we would kill for speed bumps. Please just make every
⏹️ ▶️ John make every component a little bit faster. Make you know the the just just make everything a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit better. And that will hold us over until next year. And so they just don’t update stuff at all anymore. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, my for the iMac, I’m interested in what it will be as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the promise of a real new Mac Pro is probably going to keep me
⏹️ ▶️ John away from an iMac no matter what. A real new Mac Pro with an Apple monitor. The only way I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John end up with that iMac is if my computer dies, I will get an iMac and then I will get the new Mac Pro after that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if my little 2008 Mac Pro can hold out, as I’ve said and joked about in many past shows, if we can go
⏹️ ▶️ John for the full decade, 2008 to 2018, 10-year
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco service life
⏹️ ▶️ John of a computer, if I can make it, I will. I will, and if not, I’ll get an iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think you guys are right that an iMac Pro would just be more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of whatever the top of the line 5K iMac is. It would potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have more ports. I think, Marco, your example of Ethernet is a phenomenal one because I think Apple’s itching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get rid of that for the most part, but a pro user is the kind of person that would want to move humongous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bits of data around.
⏹️ ▶️ John Didn’t they already get rid of it? I don’t think my 5K iMac has any more ports. Well the iMacs still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco have it. I think the
⏹️ ▶️ John who cares about the Mini? I gotta go look. I don’t think mine does. Continue talking, I’ll be back in a second.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I have the most modern 5K iMac, I believe, and it absolutely has an Ethernet port.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has it. You don’t have to check. Yeah. I think it would have more ports, like Marco said, potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more RAM. The other thing I wanted to bring up though is, and I don’t know anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this, so maybe this is completely bananas, but what about like VR? So I know that VR
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is super intensive and it requires just tremendous GPU power, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it feasible to have a 5K iMac Pro that maybe does VR? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey VR is kind of that in-between, right? Where you need tremendous hardware, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you don’t necessarily need to go all the way to a Mac Pro for that sort of thing, do you? So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe that’s the target is you could use an Oculus with an iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5K or something. I understand that at last I heard Oculus isn’t supporting Mac OS, but just for the sake of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey conversation. That’s because Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t make any hardware that’s fast enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Right. Exactly. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, I don’t think you can fit a VR capable with current VR standards, VR capable
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU inside the iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right. Unless,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, unless this iMac we’re talking about was the one that was designed and
⏹️ ▶️ John planned and executed for an age without the Mac Pro. Because there’s plenty of room back there to add
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff to the back of that monitor. They could put much more capable cooling. They have a lot of areas, especially between the 5K one.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a lot of area behind that monitor to put stuff. You can spread it out far away from each other. You can get lots of air flowing over things
⏹️ ▶️ John and you have tons of options. But the only way such a thing would exist is
⏹️ ▶️ John if it was something that was supposed to be in a lineup that doesn’t include the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in which case I think it would be a one-off.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you think Apple’s official message is, if you ever wanted to do VR,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have an answer for you and it’s a $5,000 Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe, I mean, it depends. Like, I think VR is, you know, right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even in the PC world, VR requires like the highest end hardware, because it’s really new and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s incredibly taxing on GPUs. But, you know, everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that comes out that’s like a new type of thing you can do with GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco requires the best GPUs. And if you look at like, you know, gaming and, you know, which is what VR is obviously involved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with, typically what happens is, you know, in a few years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more pedestrian GPUs will be able to handle VR in the same way that today, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can run a 3D game on a MacBook Pro. But you maybe just can’t turn all the settings up. So you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have like all the super high resolution, super high detail levels, things like that. So VR is gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same way. Like right now it requires these massive things, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in two years, you know, cause you know, and Apple’s patient, you know, it’s like they’re not gonna design a whole new product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line with this iMac Pro that would be only able to do VR with this massive thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the back of it, but then in two years that wouldn’t be necessary anymore. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically I think that by the time the new Mac Pro comes out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we see the kind of stuff, whatever the new Mac Pro balance with the Pro iMac and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular iMac is, I think by the time that all gets settled out, VR will run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine on mid-range hardware. And so that question will be kind of moot. Now, if you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really good VR setup, you’re probably gonna want a high-end gaming PC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the equivalent hardware on a Mac Pro. But that’s a different story.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re still early in VR because there is so much headroom just in resolution. Like, it’s so grainy.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, not going back to Doom where the pixels are the size of boulders, but you need
⏹️ ▶️ John a high-end rig just to get the current best VR
⏹️ ▶️ John goggle setups to show you something that looks incredibly grainy from the perspective of
⏹️ ▶️ John what you would expect from like a modern 2D regular PC game. So there
⏹️ ▶️ John is a huge amount of capacity for new GPU power that will purely be absorbed by making
⏹️ ▶️ John things less ridiculously dotty. And it doesn’t mean like you can be able to do VR as it exists
⏹️ ▶️ John today on a mid-range system, so at least it will be possible, right? So you’re right about that, that like suddenly it’s possible on
⏹️ ▶️ John a mid-range systems, but the appetite for high-end will not go away for a long time, just because
⏹️ ▶️ John at the very least, you’re doing twice the work for VR because you have to have two different images different eyes and it just
⏹️ ▶️ John goes up from there in terms of sensor fusion and response times for getting things to your eyeballs as
⏹️ ▶️ John fast as possible in a very very demanding environment where every millisecond
⏹️ ▶️ John counts. So that’s why I feel like you always need a high-end rig to rig to wring the best out of this either high-end rig
⏹️ ▶️ John or something like PSVR where it is a purpose-built system that is not a general purpose computer but that is designed specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John to do VR and it has strict constraints on latency and frame rates and all that stuff.
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Mac Pro!
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco So let’s talk about the whole idea of what is this modular design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they mentioned. They were very clear on a number of times during this briefing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the new Mac Pro that’s coming out sometime after this year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to have a quote, modular design. What does that mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the things that people online have been thinking about and asking about and suggesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even predicting for the future for years now is a kind of set of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stacked components that would look kind of like Mac minis that you’d like stack up and like one would be your CPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco module and one would be your GPU module and stuff like that right? Here’s a storage one you kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco build your own like assembled stack of parts each one of which is its own independent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco box that you could buy and upgrade and customize as needed. The more I thought about this kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, the more I think that this is not only not what Apple probably has in mind,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that it actually might be terrible and impractical in reality.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t believe you were entertaining it enough to discuss it as a show topic, because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ John People have been talking about this for a year because it sounds like a cool sci-fi thing, kind of in the modern
⏹️ ▶️ John incarnation of this that people may be more familiar with, is like the Project Ara, whatever it was, those phones,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, we’re going to make a cell phone by having a bunch of modules that we snap together and you can pick your camera you
⏹️ ▶️ John pick your CPU and your GPU and how much storage and how much battery and you’ll just be able to build your phone from
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of these little modular capsules that snap together to build a phone it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John no it’s an interesting idea but the tech for that simply does not exist
⏹️ ▶️ John and so with the advent of thunderbolt 3 everyone says well the tech for that does exist everything you just described
⏹️ ▶️ John i can get a bunch of mac mini type things and they snap together with the cool Thunderbolt 3 thing and I have my GPU and my CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John and my storage and it just snaps together. But it’s like what is that buying you versus
⏹️ ▶️ John just having a regular computer that you can pull things in and out of? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John what do you get by putting them in separate little modules? What does Apple get? What do you get? Like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it has always been a pipe dream and as the technology comes closer and it goes from pipe dream to potential reality,
⏹️ ▶️ John then you have to say if we could feasibly do it What do I get out of it? And other
⏹️ ▶️ John than it being really cool and future-y, I think we don’t get enough out of it with today’s technology
⏹️ ▶️ John for it to be worthwhile for Apple to even consider this approach.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and if you even think about what it would actually be, if you think through, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what would these things actually require? How would this be sold? How would it be supported?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So one of the number one, obviously, is how do they connect to each other?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what kind of interface do they talk to each other that is actually fast enough to do this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you’re talking if you’re putting like you know a disc on there Thunderbolt’s fast enough but if you’re putting a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPU or a CPU or you know things that we need lots and lots of bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you’re gonna need you know either you’re gonna have to deal with the the limitations of Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because Thunderbolt is PCI Express over a cable but it is not nearly as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much bandwidth as the as the internal slots for like a GPU and desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have and furthermore the standards for you know PCI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Express itself and the Thunderbolt standards those change every few years so you’d have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the set of like pods I guess that’s the word I’ll use you’ll have like the set of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like component pods where like there all be different speeds if you mix and match over the years and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re not going to mix match over the years there’s no point in doing this Not to mention, like, every one of those pods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would need its own power and cooling. And so, like, maybe you could have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some interface where the big honking one on the bottom has a giant power supply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and powers all the other ones. You still need to put fans in all of them. So that’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more noise, more size. They’re all going to have their own metal casing and whatever hardware is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco involved with the interconnection between them and keeping them securely mounted so your GPU doesn’t pop out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the socket in the middle of using it if you nudge the desk or your cat walks over or whatever. Like, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so challenging to build a system like that that works at all and it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end up these these pod things would end up being so cumbersome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and expensive and loud and it would and then not to mention like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco imagine the support nightmare of like you know you think it’s bad now when we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to know like well if you have a 13 inch MacBook Pro, the two Thunderbolt ports on the right side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are a little bit less bandwidth than the two Thunderbolt ports on the left side. You think that’s bad? Imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a system where like, well, you can, you can stack like three GPU modules, but only if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have this one high powered CPU module and only from this year forward. And not if you have a disc module between any of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the two GPU modules, like it would be crazy to support and it would be crazy as a user to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out what would work with what else and whether you could do things. And it would just be a nightmare. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there would be weird limits of like, how many of something you could have, what order they’d have to be stacked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in, what the certain like main module would have to be to support the other ones. It’s, it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a mess. So that entire idea of stacking these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco external boxes that you could just combine to whatever you want, I don’t think that’s ever going to happen. It just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in practice, it just doesn’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I completely agree with you. And I think that that that reading of modular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is grossly overcomplicating what Apple’s probably talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, they just mean a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey separate monitor. That’s all I mean.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s it. Just separate monitor. And I think what they mean, you know, it turns out if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you can describe the configurability of a PC tower that we’ve had for decades,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that is modular. Like, I think what they mean.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to say. Yeah, I think it just means like user replaceable RAM, maybe user replaceable CPU, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey user replaceable graphics card. It’s basically a cheese grater Mac Pro, but presumably done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a much more modern fashion, but with the same amount of upgradability.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I would say it doesn’t even necessarily need to be user replaceable on all these parts. I think what Apple means
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by modular is they can configure the same general
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case in different ways to suit different types of needs at purchase. So the old Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro tower could be configured with the one or two CPUs, you know, three or six RAM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slots, any number up to five, I think of PCI Express cards, two of which have GPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or three of which could have GPU bandwidth, I think, four disks, two opticals, like there were all these different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco configurations. And this one product that Apple, you know, this one case with this one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power supply with this one set of supporting components could be configured by Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a modular fashion to solve a bunch of people’s needs differently in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one product. That’s what the PC tower gave Apple. That’s what the Mac Pro had until 2013. And so when they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say modular, I’m pretty sure that’s the kind of thing they’re describing, as opposed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the 2013, which is with this model, you get one CPU and two mid range GPUs, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Like there was it was one configuration you could make with that one. So that is what I would expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the word modular. So I wouldn’t get your hopes up, anybody out there about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the stack components idea, or even as, as you were saying, even like user replaceable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, like, you know, I’m sure like the Ram probably will be storage, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processors, probably not. I mean, it’s like CPU upgrades haven’t really been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a practical thing for quite some time. Uh, because basically like sockets that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the CPU is plugged into and like the the motherboard, chipsets and everything, those change so frequently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can’t really upgrade to a processor that is newer than the one you have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can move laterally, like within the same family. Like if you bought the low-end one in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco family, and then two years later you can find the high-end one for sale somewhere, you could put that in, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gain usually isn’t that big. The difference between the low and the high-end within a single family, like in a single year, isn’t that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big, it’s like 5% most of the time. You could get more cores with the Mac Pro, But again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like, it’s a, it’s not as big of a gain as just buying a new one would get you. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing a CPU upgrade on a modern computer, especially a Mac pro with these giant Xeons in it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco involves so much like messing with delicate and very important thermal management
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, giant heat sinks, moving the fans around, dealing with these little fragile sockets and the thousand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pins in the bottom of them. Like it would be such a crazy ordeal to put most people through.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would not expect anybody today to consider the CPU in an average person’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer to be user replaceable So I definitely would not expect that to ever happen again with Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s you know, it wouldn’t surprise me if the CPU was soldered to the board probably not for component management reasons But wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t want to poopoo the the external stuff too much because you’re just like oh nothing’s ever gonna be external
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s probably the right choice for the Mac Pro, but Thunderbolt 3
⏹️ ▶️ John does let you have things that were previously inside the case, outside the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so it is conceivable, but ill-advisable, that Apple could say, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve solved the GPU upgrading problem by putting it in a separate box. And we already talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John that Thunderbolt 3 does not have enough bandwidth to fully satisfy the very, very,
⏹️ ▶️ John very top-end cards in a specific application where they need all the PCI Express
⏹️ ▶️ John lanes that they could have internally because the external does not have as many lanes as internal and maybe you could gang cables
⏹️ ▶️ John together or something like that but um they could do that but as you said another
⏹️ ▶️ John external power supply cooling like it’s awkward the the role of that is to make a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John have a decent GPU if Apple was ever going to do something like that they would do it for
⏹️ ▶️ John a laptop because you can’t put it inside the case wouldn’t it be cool if you could put your laptop down and then
⏹️ ▶️ John connect it with Thunderbolt 3 to a GPU that is not the highest of the high end, but is
⏹️ ▶️ John so much faster than the GPU that’s inside your case, that it’s a win. So
⏹️ ▶️ John my hope, my first hope with the modular thing, which I interpreted this is the same as Casey, which is basically I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ John saying it has a separate monitor. I’m not even talking about the internals. I’m just saying there’s a box that doesn’t have a monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s a monitor connected to it. That’s my interpretation of modular.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey modular. That’s no different than the current Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. But it’s not the iMac. That’s what I’m to say like we’re gonna make a new Mac Pro and that’s their way of saying and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna be an iMac Pro like that’s how I read yeah their statement in the broadest level
⏹️ ▶️ John right so what what I hope my first hope is that they do not have an external GPU connected
⏹️ ▶️ John with Thunderbolt on the new Mac Pro because again the whole point of this computer is to be the
⏹️ ▶️ John absolute fastest thing that money can buy and if you connect a GPU with a Thunderbolt 3
⏹️ ▶️ John cable you are already down behind all the people who have internal stuff forget about having having a CPU connected
⏹️ ▶️ John separately from this and that, and yet just plain old taking the GPU outside the box is
⏹️ ▶️ John a bad idea from packaging, and it’s a bad idea from performance perspective.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, I think to me, as we think through what the new Mac Pro should be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what it’s likely to be, the question of whether the GPU is internal or external,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, decides a lot of it for us. And I’m with you, John. I think once you think it through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and think through the realities, No question that Thunderbolt is great, and you can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco external GPUs over Thunderbolt now. And they actually, if you look up, like I know barefeets.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did a bunch of tests a few months back, and it turned out that external GPUs for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of applications that didn’t involve tons of transfer to and from main memory,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they actually did pretty well in the external boxes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they can be just as fast. If you’re not constrained by bandwidth, they’re exactly as fast as if they were
⏹️ ▶️ John internal. But again, the whole point of this computer is to be the absolute fastest at everything. And say
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re doing some workload that does take advantage of all those lanes. Now you’re down some number of PCI Express
⏹️ ▶️ John lanes. Now you’re down bandwidth. Why take that hit? For what advantage? It’s like, oh, well, if it’s external, we can upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ John it easily. Well, guess what? If it’s internal, you can upgrade it easily through this amazing technology we call cards. Like, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, we’ll get to that. Not that Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna get into the upgrade business, but like you both said, Apple can upgrade it. Maybe they’ll never let you
⏹️ ▶️ John upgrade it, but next year, they can swap out one of the GPUs and put in a new one and say, here’s the speed
⏹️ ▶️ John bump to Mac Pro, we’re now with new GPU options because we built them with enough cooling capacity.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what we’re talking about here. Not even like, oh, you’ll be able to take your GPU out and put in a new one yourself,
⏹️ ▶️ John which you probably will be able to do by taking PC GPUs and flashing them and all that other stuff. But in terms of Apple supported
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, internal versus external does not give Apple any more flexibility
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of modularity.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I also like I like kind of like product wise, I cannot see Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shipping a portion of a computer that does not contain a GPU. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it would contain the internal one and they would do switching.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, oh god!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a computer these days needs a GPU to do anything right like you’re not going to use a computer without a GPU. Sorry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Linux people or you know embedded routers, but you know for that I’m not talking about that. And so they’re not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to sell you like the base Mac Pro box that doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a GPU. They’re going to put one in there. Like that’s not the way Apple would do things without that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re going to have a GPU that comes with the computer, it might as well be internal like that. They would make no sense to put the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco external. So I think once you have kind of realized like, okay, there’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be an internal GPU and they’ve already talked about modularity and they’ve talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upgrades easily in the future, you know, them updates, I should say updates easily in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re basically going towards a PC tower, right? So what other parts of a PC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tower are still needed today? You know, we mentioned earlier they needed, there’s lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things like, you know, optical drive bays that you don’t really need anymore. Right? Um, upgradable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAM is an easy one. That’s going to be in there, but we already have that. You don’t need to make a tower to have, you know, you have that in the iMac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you had it in laptops until very recently. Uh, So we already have upgradable RAM. You know, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can just have a little tiny door somewhere and have that be it. So you don’t need a tower for that. You don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco optical bays. You John, you said earlier that you don’t need three and a half inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bays. I think you’re probably right, but I’m not a hundred percent confident in that because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s the thing. When I first, when I was first trying to think about this, I was thinking, you know, you don’t really need three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a half inch drive bays anymore because you can, today you can get a four terabyte SSD,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? And it’s not, But it isn’t even that ridiculously expensive. And the two terabyte ones, which is about as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much space as most people need on their desktops most of the time, two terabyte SSDs are actually inexpensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. They’re actually like only a few hundred dollars. And by the time this thing comes out in 2018
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or beyond, that’ll be even cheaper. And so at first I was like, well, you don’t really need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three and a half inch base because if SSDs can be that cheap, they can put a couple of like the stick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind. And I’m not even saying like, you know, if you’re building a computer to have a bunch of SSDs in it, you might use 2.5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inch drive bays, which is like the little ones that SSDs and laptop hard drives use.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s storage skeuomorphism right there. 2.5 inch SSDs, come on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, like you don’t even need that anymore because not only are the SSDs a lot smaller, but also like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the interface standards, like the SATA
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the PCI Express, you’re not going through SATA, that’s not a spinning disk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly, so like you’re gonna have some kind of directly connected PCI Express SSDs. And whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re on little slots, like those little M2 stick things or whatever they are, they’re probably gonna be on slots,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? At least for Apple to service them, replace them when they die. So, and it would be nice to have more than one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those. It’d be great to have two SSD slots maybe, so you can configure it at purchase time probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with more storage, that’d be awesome. But I wouldn’t expect more than that for SSDs. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can kind of make an argument that, you know, if they would just put like one or two three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a half inch bays in there. You know a 10 terabyte hard disk is just 400
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s just too slow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is really slow to be your boot drive, right? But like, but pro users,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many pro users need to work with very large files that they, almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of them use these, you know, incredibly expensive, complicated, loud,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giant external RAID boxes and stuff. if you would put two three and a half inch bays
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inside this machine, that could accommodate lots of that in a really nice way. Now I’m not saying necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that this is definitely what Apple should do. And I’m almost certainly not saying that this is what they will do. I bet they, there’s no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s, I really don’t think there’s any chance that they would do this, but a three and a half inch bay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inside something that’s big enough to have a GPU on a slot is nothing. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three and a half inch bays aren’t that big. Right? And so, you know, It wouldn’t take a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Apple to fit this into whatever shape this is going to take. That being said, though, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think they will. I don’t think it’s very realistic.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would go the reverse of what you said. I would say that I don’t think they should
⏹️ ▶️ John do it, but I can actually envision them doing it because they really are having this
⏹️ ▶️ John self-reflective moment about the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John and atoning for mistakes. I think they would actually entertain the idea, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John inconceivable from the perspective of the trash can that they would entertain this idea, but I think they should not do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like my, my vision of what if I had to advise them both what they should make and what I want, which
⏹️ ▶️ John coincidentally are very close to the same thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think all they need to do to atone is all the things they already said they’re going to do, which is make it so that you can change the parts year over
⏹️ ▶️ John year to make them faster, which necessitates a certain amount of cooling and power structure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Honestly for the past since the power Mac g5 the probe
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple desktop line Has you know Johnny I’ve even said in
⏹️ ▶️ John his little intro video for the power Mac g5 has been basically Making a box
⏹️ ▶️ John to extract heat from components like that It was modeled after a heat exchanger like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why the cheese grater looks the way it does He actually talked about heat exchangers like you know up and up in a room or whatever take
⏹️ ▶️ John air one temperature in and and extract heat from it, and you know, like that’s what these boxes
⏹️ ▶️ John are all about. The cheese grater is about that, the trash can is about that, it’s a chimney, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So make a box, or it doesn’t have to be a box, make a case that can support the thermal
⏹️ ▶️ John load of all the parts that you could possibly put in it. That means you have to support two really hot CPUs,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe also two really hot GPUs, or some combination thereof, so you can upgrade them year over year.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to have excess capacity. And one great thing about the cheese grater is it has excess cooling capacity.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it was made for chips on such an old process that were so incredibly hot.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I mean, they made a water-cooled one at one point, you know, there was room for that in there. There’s so much, you know, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can cool almost anything in this box. It is huge, it has direct airflow from back to front. It, you know, works
⏹️ ▶️ John great. You have plenty of room for different arrangement of fans. Not that I’m saying they’re gonna make something that big, but so make a box with adequate
⏹️ ▶️ John cooling and, you know, upgradable. And the next thing I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that we need to do is get, You were getting at is like what things can we remove? Obviously you need to have tons of ports all
⏹️ ▶️ John Thunderbolt 3 and all that other stuff You know high-speed Ethernet put 10 gig Ethernet on put two separate
⏹️ ▶️ John Ethernet buses like do everything you can use all those PCI Express Lanes on the back of the thing and then for storage
⏹️ ▶️ John I Think it would be the right thing to do to have more than one Internal storage thingy
⏹️ ▶️ John more than one internal SSD because they are so small To be able to support not a 3.5
⏹️ ▶️ John inch drive for a bulk storage which again And I think they might consider, especially if they have a lot of room in the case, because for all the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John you said. But I think they should not do it. Instead, they should let me have three or four internal SSDs, which they
⏹️ ▶️ John will charge an arm and a leg for. But that, I think, gives all the advantage you’re looking for, which is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, what if I don’t want to have a giant RAID array? I just want to have adequate internal storage.
⏹️ ▶️ John And SSDs, you know, you can only get them so big. But if I could have four
⏹️ ▶️ John 2GB internal SSDs that are super fast because they’re internal, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that’s what you want out of it. I think there’s plenty of room for one to two GPUs,
⏹️ ▶️ John one to two CPUs, and one to three or four very fast PCI
⏹️ ▶️ John Express SSD things. And that to me looks like, in whatever shape they put it, a modern
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro. Especially if you’re saying those SSDs eventually will be replaced with Optane, you know, 3D Crosspoint
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever thing Intel’s coming up with it’s even faster still is that how you say that I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John x-point I don’t know you know anyway like that’s the point of this machine very very fast
⏹️ ▶️ John storage And yeah external storage is great for bulk storage and everything But it’ll never be as fast as internal storage
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t want to just have oh my boot drive is internal and everything else that I work with is outside
⏹️ ▶️ John Mistakes of the past don’t make it so darn small that you only have room for one tiny little SSD because the things are
⏹️ ▶️ John like the size of a thumb drive practically inside there. They’re so small you have plenty of room to put four of those
⏹️ ▶️ John inside there. No five and a quarter bays, no three and a quarter bays, no 2.5 inch bays,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you have room for that. If they made that machine with that combination of things that would be upgradable
⏹️ ▶️ John by Apple and upgradable by industrious hackers and having more than one internal
⏹️ ▶️ John storage thingy, all of which are super duper fast and that third parties could sell
⏹️ ▶️ John into, I think that would cover all their needs and all the sins of the past while
⏹️ ▶️ John not looking backwards and while foregoing the 3.5 inch tray even though like you’re saying like
⏹️ ▶️ John this this could keep people from having to go for the big array even longer because I just I just think
⏹️ ▶️ John any spinning thing inside this case is a non-starter and is not forward-looking so
⏹️ ▶️ John I would not save space for it and I would use the space that I get from that to put that other stuff in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a reasonable argument the only thing I will say though is that all of these super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome PCI Express SSD systems need a good amount of PCI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Express lanes to make them fast and one of the issues with the current Mac Pro is that there actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aren’t enough PCI Express lanes to really add anything more to it than what it has now and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have the slots inside you know if you have like you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four you know M2 or whatever they are SSD slots, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to have allocated the PCI Express lanes to assume that those are going to be in use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then maybe you don’t have enough to also have two high-powered GPUs and the ethernet port and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what makes it a configurable system. You could say, hey, if you want to have four really fast internal SSDs, you got to
⏹️ ▶️ John give up something. You can’t have two GPUs. And in other words, be able to configure the machine. Or Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John just let Apple configure it. Not you, like it’s a built order where you get to pick and choose everything. but Apple can make different configurations.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s the one for people who need a single modest CPU, one
⏹️ ▶️ John really fast GPU, and tons of fast storage. And here’s the people who need two of the fastest GPUs,
⏹️ ▶️ John but storage is less of a concern, and a moderate CPU. Like, you’re right, that the lanes have limit, but again, the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John point of this machine is they will choose the chips and chipsets from Intel. They give the maximum
⏹️ ▶️ John number of PCI Express lanes that money can buy, and then it’s up to Apple to allocate those
⏹️ ▶️ John in arrangements that serve all the different needs. That’s fair. I’m just saying one of those needs may be the one
⏹️ ▶️ John that says, hey, I want to have more than one internal storage thing. Because if you don’t, then it’s going to be like a SAN
⏹️ ▶️ John over 10 gig ethernet. Like, you can’t, data’s got to get into the system somehow anyway. Like, you’re just going to go through a bridge
⏹️ ▶️ John chip and get into the whole, you know, like, it all ends up in the same place. It all needs to get
⏹️ ▶️ John into the computer somehow. So it’s not as if by not having internal storage, you suddenly get more bandwidth for
⏹️ ▶️ John storage. You don’t. It just, you know, it sips through a smaller hose outside the computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then I’m curious to know your thoughts about whether we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think they would actually use like standard PC slot GPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sized things or whether the GPUs would take, it would be like a custom smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple slot because to me that there’s, there’s clear advantages to both. I mean, you know, number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, like if it’s, if it’s a PC like standard one, like the old Mac Pro use, like the, you know, the PC,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the GPUs in the, in the cheese grater were really just PC GPUs, like with Apple firmware and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco custom Apple driver support, but they, you know, they weren’t that different. If you go that way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then it’s easier for Apple to keep updated. And I really do think, you know, they said, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, a number of the Apple executives in that meeting seem to say this over and over again, which is they want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new Mac Pro to be something they can keep updated frequently. And so if the GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not something crazy custom, that’s, you know, just for Apple, but if they’re just regular slot GPUs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then that could probably help them achieve that goal a lot. On the other side of it though,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they do the slot GPUs, then assuming that they’re at all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco user replaceable, then they’re not going to be integrated with the system’s cooling thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re going to have to have 16 different fans in there because the GPU’s going to have its own fan. By the way, GPU fans
⏹️ ▶️ Marco die constantly. with dust and die all the time. And then the rest of the system is gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have all these different heat sinks all over the place like the old one did. If they do something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco custom, it would be harder to keep updated. It would be more work, they’d be more likely to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco neglect it like the current one. But also like the current one, they could integrate the GPU’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cooling needs into some kind of larger combined cooling system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that would therefore probably be a nicer product because it would be quieter and it would be,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, easier and more reliable to cool if they gave it enough capacity, unlike the current one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I can kind of see both sides of this. If you make it the custom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple thing, you have, I think, more flexibility to design a really cool new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product, which as we mentioned, we’re not actually sure that that’s what they should do. But if you do it the PC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, the more you think about what’s gonna be in this new Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the more it seems to me that it’s basically just gonna be the bottom half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the cheese grater. Like, and maybe, you know, they can tweak certain things a little bit within that design,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if it has to accommodate regular PC graphics card slots, and especially, presumably,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would accommodate more than one, and even if it maxed out at two, unlike the old one, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could put four low-powered ones in, but even if it maxed out at two big honkin’ GPUs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just to design something that could accommodate that, even if they didn’t even offer dual CPU options, which I hope they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do, but I wouldn’t bet on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That, it very quickly becomes a PC tower. You know, and whether it’s just like really short
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and doesn’t have any drive base or not is a question, but it doesn’t really matter. If it has to accommodate those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco standard GPU sizes and more than one of them, it’s gonna basically look like a small PC tower,
⏹️ ▶️ John So the question is whether, what is the
⏹️ ▶️ John barrier to them updating the GPU? It’s like if they went with a custom thing, it would be harder for them to upgrade the GPU.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not entirely sure that’s the case because Updating
⏹️ ▶️ John the GPU like they can get the chip and Like the the chip set and the reference board
⏹️ ▶️ John that goes with it The packaging and what you’re talking about is like PC is like they have all this cooling and
⏹️ ▶️ John then there’s this other fan That’s facing a totally different direction like 90 degrees to the whole rest of the airflow
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s cooling the cart because they’re sold modular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually has its own slot on the back because it has the you know the double width slot cover thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to blow the air out the back and fill with dust.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is its own little cooling universe because it’s modular, right? But I
⏹️ ▶️ John think Apple can actually use the work of the PC industry.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, we have a new chip, a new chip set, a new reference design, a new card, a new the whole nine yards,
⏹️ ▶️ John but not take their cooling solutions. It would still be in some kind of slot, but that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple would have their own cooling solutions. Because again, I don’t think Apple cares that you can upgrade it after the fact, they’re not going to sell new cards
⏹️ ▶️ John for it. If you want to do some weird third party thing and hack a thing in like Apple’s not supporting you. It’s not a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’ve done in years and years. So I have to think that no matter what, even
⏹️ ▶️ John if they make a rectangle, that they’re going to do their own cooling solution, because I think I think they’re off the train
⏹️ ▶️ John of doing like a card with its own like you said, terrible to tell her what we used to
⏹️ ▶️ John call them video coolers, or what they had a weird name that people used to call
⏹️ ▶️ John them for the those horrible fans that would be attached to your GPU. They’re would always be the first thing to die in your system. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John those days are gone for Apple. Even if they use an actual card, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, a full length or half length card, like in a slot that looks like
⏹️ ▶️ John a plain old, I think they will still do custom cooling. Because I think to design a good case with thermal
⏹️ ▶️ John capacity, Apple’s recent designs, and even on the Mac Pros to some degree,
⏹️ ▶️ John like they’re all working towards, Let’s design the airflow as one,
⏹️ ▶️ John like one system for maximum capacity. And taking this other little island of cooling and chucking it
⏹️ ▶️ John in the middle, I’ve got my own fan, I’ll put my intake here. Like, first of all, they pull their intake from inside the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then they do exhaust to the outside through their back little slot thing, right? But like, that is so, so
⏹️ ▶️ John not how to efficiently design, you know, a system like an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John style system for cooling. Which is why the, you know, the Trashcan Mac Pro wasn’t like that. and
⏹️ ▶️ John why in from the G5 until today, it has always been so incongruous to open up these machines and
⏹️ ▶️ John see the carefully planned air flows and channels and then see the cooler, the video cooler, sitting on its
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, doing its thing off in the side of the world. So it really depends, I think, on, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John does Apple think that doing that, doing custom cooling, or even a custom form factor for the card, is
⏹️ ▶️ John that too onerous that will actually stop them from updating the GPU? Like, oh, we would love to upgrade the GPU, but we can’t just
⏹️ ▶️ John take a new thing and slap it in there. Or will they say, well, you know, we just need to have
⏹️ ▶️ John cooling, enough cooling capacity and a way to design a cooling solution. And we will take your board and
⏹️ ▶️ John your chip and plug it into a standard slot and then slapped onto it, alien
⏹️ ▶️ John face hugger style, will be our
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco cooling solution
⏹️ ▶️ John that integrates with the whole rest of our cooling flow inside the case. So if I had, if I had to bet, I would
⏹️ ▶️ John say they are going to go with custom cooling, even if the cards themselves are standard. Now on
⏹️ ▶️ John the trash can, the cards themselves are not standard. They’re not in standard slots. They’re, you know, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John on the outside of a weird triangle thing, which is no arrangement than any PC motherboard thing. Like, that is custom
⏹️ ▶️ John head-to-toe, and that didn’t work out. So I don’t think they need to go that extreme. I totally think they can have cards, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m thinking the best bet is to go with custom cooling, which means you will not be able to yank that thing out,
⏹️ ▶️ John go buy an NVIDIA card off the shelf, and shove it in without doing some,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, pretty fancy hardware hacking to get their giant cooler in there. there because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John just have trouble envisioning a box that would accommodate that that isn’t literally the size of the cheese grater,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe with some parts of it lopped off the top and bottom because those cards are huge. The coolest to come with the huge, they’re noisy.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just it’s just gross. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically, we we’ve basically redesigned the Mac Pro for Apple in two hours.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that was so easy. What’s taking them so long?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. Yeah. So and I think you know, to to to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco close out, I think for now what I think they’re going to do with this, or what I think they should do with this. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you work through what this machine should be, I think it’s a lot more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the Cheese Grater than like the Trash Can. And even though the Cheese Grater was definitely outdated,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and should have significant editing done to it, and significant changes done to it, I think what we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ended up with is, to make a good Mac Pro, you need to go more towards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that style. Whether it’s just the bottom half of it, flopped off or whether it’s more designed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is not going to be a sexy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high PR product for Johnny Ive to feel really good about. It’s not, because it’s gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some form of PC tower. It’s gonna be utilitarian more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than it’s going to be a fashion object. But this, if Apple has to do that, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the one Mac in the entire Mac lineup that must
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sacrifice appearance for functionality if that choice is necessary to make.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If they come to a point where they have to decide whether to make this thing cooler
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and prettier or whether to make it more utilitarian, every other Mac, you could make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a case, maybe they should go the other direction, not the Mac Pro. It has to always go to functionality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first because it has to satisfy the widest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco range Pro needs possible that are not satisfied by the iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The iMac already has the high-end, nicely designed computer covered. The iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that. It is great at that. The Mac Pro must be utilitarian,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if it comes at the expense of the coolest, tiniest, you know, smallest, thinnest thing they could make.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The more tower-like that it gets, the more the design that they choose for it resembles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a tower, the more it offers above the iMac, and the easier and cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is for Apple to keep it updated.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just don’t agree with the way you’re characterizing that, because I think the G3, G4, and
⏹️ ▶️ John Power Mac G5 cases were awesome looking. They were fantastic. They
⏹️ ▶️ John were the best looking things Apple had made. I don’t think they sacrificed
⏹️ ▶️ John the beauty and design of those cases at all. And they also delivered amazing utility,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So I get what you’re saying, like, I think the way to phrase it would be more like what Federighi said, where
⏹️ ▶️ John we came up with what we wanted, which was like two GPUs and a CPU, and then they
⏹️ ▶️ John pulled in, like, they basically said, how small and quiet and elegant
⏹️ ▶️ John a case can we get this exact amount of power? Like they pulled in the edges as far as they could go, like they shrink wrapped
⏹️ ▶️ John it down. That’s the wrong approach, right? Instead of saying, here’s what we want to build.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now let’s put it in a beautiful case that has like 10 times that cooling capacity,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So that we have so much headroom that no matter what comes down the line, we have places to put all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think there is tremendous freedom to make, it should be the sexiest looking computer
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes because it can be fantastically weird like no other computer. You just have to make sure you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t like you said, make those trade offs where you’re like, oh, I have a great idea. Let’s make it shaped like a
⏹️ ▶️ John corkscrew. And we can fit the pieces in the corkscrew and they could go in a little so it’s like, No, wait a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, you may think corkscrews are cool, or maybe we could fit these parts exactly in a corkscrew,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that corkscrew has no headroom. That corkscrew is the wrong choice for this, you know? So
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t, or whatever, making it super duper flat. Like, here’s a Mac Pro that’s like, it’s like an iMac with no monitor. It’s so incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John flat and thin, right? It just lays, I don’t know, underneath your feet, and you put your feet on it, it keeps them warm. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff like that is where you’re, where I get what you’re saying. Like, don’t make that trade-off, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John I disagree that this shouldn’t be sexy. I think it should be the sexiest computer that Apple makes and I think there
⏹️ ▶️ John You have the flexibility to make it sexy because it doesn’t have to have a monitor in it. It can be
⏹️ ▶️ John insanely expensive and You have don’t have the size limits of portability So
⏹️ ▶️ John by all means make this thing awesome looking and make it look like I don’t know make it make it you can make a look At the
⏹️ ▶️ John Death Star as long as the sphere is big enough to support a tremendous amount of cooling, like go nuts. It can be
⏹️ ▶️ John black and shiny and chrome and whatever you want to do to it. I picture in my head something
⏹️ ▶️ John that, even just a rectangular solid with the right surface finishes, right, would
⏹️ ▶️ John be really cool. Like a couple of well-placed white LEDs, you know? Not saying it has to
⏹️ ▶️ John have ground effects on it and have water bubbling through it or whatever, although they did that with the G5.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or was it the G5 that the water cooled? Well, I forget. Anyway, I want this to be
⏹️ ▶️ John exciting and sexy, just, you know, and again, I point to
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole Yosemite, El Capitan line of cases that have
⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of weird surface finishes within the same basic but also very weird and cool shape,
⏹️ ▶️ John hiding the fact that guess what, inside it was a gigantic rectangle with reasonably good cooling, and the G5,
⏹️ ▶️ John the same thing. I think it looks pretty cool. by now we’re bored with it because it’s ancient, right? But it
⏹️ ▶️ John did its job and it did it with style and pizzazz and
⏹️ ▶️ John elegance and it was and is cool, but it was also a workhorse.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I want it all. I want sexiness and utilitarian-ness and I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s possible. I think Apple’s proved it’s possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I agree. I mean, you know, the other funny thing is like by going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the big utilitarian silver rectangle that weighed 50
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pounds and sat on the floor to the little black cylinder, it had to come off the floor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It had to sit on your desk.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s a question. Do you want this on the desk or the floor? The new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one? Right. And honestly, I really greatly prefer it on the floor because it allows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like neater, cleaner cable routing. If there’s any noise produced by it, it’s further from your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ear and your podcasting microphone. And it just, to me, it gets everything out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way and it is the only thing is though to be in the floor it does have to be huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and fairly heavy to be stable there like there was nothing saying that you weren’t allowed to put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the trash can on the floor it was just unwise.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just kick it over all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah exactly like you just shouldn’t put it on the floor and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John only thing is like I. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John up on the desk
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the interesting thing like socially speaking I had my G3 and G4s on my desk because
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought they deserved to be up there because they they were beautiful. But the G5 I also had on my desk,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it was just too damn big. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco how big is your
⏹️ ▶️ John desk? It was on the desk, it was like, it was gonna fall on me and crush me to death, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco so I had it on my desk for a long time,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I said, you know what? This is inappropriate. And it went to the floor, and my G5 and my
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro have been on the floor ever since. So I’m not opposed to putting something that other people would put on the
⏹️ ▶️ John floor that could be put on the floor on the desk, just because I think it’s really cool, and looking at it makes me happy.
⏹️ ▶️ John But at a certain point, it becomes ridiculous. So I’m thinking this one should be and will
⏹️ ▶️ John be small enough that you could put it on the desk, but I think a goal should be, also it works
⏹️ ▶️ John underneath the desk. So that gives the people the choice of where they wanna put it, which means like you said, it can’t be so
⏹️ ▶️ John small that it like, it tips over from a stiff thunderbolt cable in the back or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. But I’m just guessing just by the way things are, like the direction technology is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going, you know, if you actually do take that choose greater case and subtract all the stuff you don’t really need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anymore, I think it actually might be too small to go on the floor. I
⏹️ ▶️ John put lead weights in the bottom like high-end audio equipment. There you go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Casey, what do you want them to make? Anything. Or you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to make nothing, right? So we’d stop talking about it? No. Or do we talk about it more when they make nothing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You talk, A, you talk about it more when they make nothing, and B, I want them to make something. I said that at the opening of the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want them to make something. I just I wanted to be here because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want to do 50 some weeks of us pontificating about what it will be. Could be more
⏹️ ▶️ John than that. They only said not this year. That leaves the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole rest of time. The future. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On an infinite time scale
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco kids, they will release a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new Mac Pro. There we go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, so, you know, overall, if I could summarize how I feel about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this one more time to kind when I close out my thinking on it so far, which of course
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure we will follow up next week with all the stuff we forgot about. But I’m incredibly happy to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see this because it really does show, for the first time in a long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, that Apple is really taking pros needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very seriously. And they might have done that for a lot of time in the middle here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but we weren’t seeing a lot of signs of that from the outside. It was always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco questionable from the outside whether they really cared about addressing pro needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whether pro needs were kind of like this nuisance they had to deal with, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they were kind of reluctantly supporting very minimally until the pros just all went away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And none of us wanted that as pros or as fans of Apple trying to be the best that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can be. None of us wanted that. And for a while, it really did seem like that’s what we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had. And whether that was true or not, this shows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us that they are taking a serious effort now and really putting themselves out there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, publicly, to show that that’s not the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And whether that was the case two years ago and they had to change their heart in the last six months, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, right now, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that they are getting back on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the right track. and maybe this new iMac will get halfway there, and that’s only a few months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away. And then maybe the new Mac Pro is only a year away. A year’s not that long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s going to feel like an eternity, but it isn’t that long. Paul
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Krahulik Especially for some of us. Edith Winkler
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ha ha ha, yes. And so I’m very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of just feel relieved today. like, you know, reading all this stuff, seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the things that the Apple executive said, I feel relieved that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they clearly care as much about this as I do right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Possibly even more so, which I kind of hope because it’s their job to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s really a very nice feeling, and I feel very good about that right now. And actions do speak
⏹️ ▶️ Marco louder than words. You know, Gruber ended his speech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, actions do speak louder than words. And these aren’t necessarily actions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the sense that we don’t have any new shipping products today. But the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fact that they put themselves out there so publicly, talking about future products, which Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost never does, they really did commit to doing this. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, they could decide in a few months, Oh, you know what? Nevermind. We’re not going to do that. But that would be really bad PR.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, that’s unlikely, right? The fact that they made such
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a deal out of this and gave so much info about why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can’t update or won’t update the 2013 Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of why it’s been so long, although that’s, you know, okay, that wasn’t, they weren’t doing everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they could have done in the meantime, but that’s behind us now. now, you know, they’re doing it now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? That’s what matters. So we now know that they care.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re being honest with us about what has gone wrong, about how long it might take,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that they’re actually planning on apparently one and a half to two pro desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lines, depending on what the iMac pro ends up being. That to me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is awesome. And I’m just incredibly happy and relieved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a user of this platform and as a fan of this company and its products and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like so much of my life is in the Apple universe and most of it is in the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco universe specifically to know that Apple is that committed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it. It really means a lot and it’s something that we’ve been lacking for some time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in at least being shown to the public and so I’m very happy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s my hope for this new Mac Pro because as we’ve discussed in many shows in the past,
⏹️ ▶️ John despite this recommitment, people are understandably wary because even when they come out with the new Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, people are going to say, well, that’s great and all, but you did this once in 2013.
⏹️ ▶️ John Fool me once, right? Why would I buy this machine? Uh, you know if I have no faith that
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going to update it but if everybody takes that attitude
⏹️ ▶️ John when the new Mac Pro comes out Apple’s gonna be like well maybe we misjudge this because we come
⏹️ ▶️ John up with this new Mac Pro and people aren’t excited about it and a lot of people are buying it despite the fact that there’s got to
⏹️ ▶️ John be pent-up demand so I think it’s important for when the new Mac Pro comes
⏹️ ▶️ John out for it to be successful in the market and my hope for the way that it could accomplish
⏹️ ▶️ John that is the old-fashioned way. Because again, you can’t you can’t prove that you’re gonna, we promise
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll update this next year and the year after the year after. You can say that all you want, but people people aren’t gonna trust you at this point, right? You
⏹️ ▶️ John have you have a trust issue. The way you can get people to buy this thing and get them to be excited about it is the way
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple used to get people to buy and be excited about almost all of its computers, but certainly its top-end ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John Show me that this new thing you’re gonna sell for thousands of dollars is the fastest money can buy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Show me that it can do things that not only no Mac could do, but like, that for a brief
⏹️ ▶️ John moment, probably really, really brief, it is like the fastest thing in the world at a bunch of tasks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Show me that it runs Final Cut Pro faster than any other computer has ever run it. Show me that it runs 3D stuff faster,
⏹️ ▶️ John like whatever you pick, VR, like I don’t care what it is specifically, but you have to show me
⏹️ ▶️ John to get me excited about this computer that is not just finally a Mac that that I can use to do my job
⏹️ ▶️ John get me excited enough that I forget about the fact that you introduced a fancy new computer and didn’t update it for
⏹️ ▶️ John four years right make me just say I just got to have that because it’s so darn cool or fast
⏹️ ▶️ John or has some capability even if I’m never gonna do that they used to do that with their laptops are crying out loud they’d like buy this laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the world’s fastest laptop or it has the best screen or you know it’s got to be the best or look at
⏹️ ▶️ John the throughput on the the storage whatever it is that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John That is a thing, you know, it’s not appropriate for you to do on the iMac or the MacBook.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even on the phone, they show those little graphs to show how much faster it is and stuff like that. But like, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the Mac Pro. Get us excited about it. Do not release it and say, Yay,
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t you excited that we are now remotely competitive? No, I want you to crush everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s going to cost thousands of dollars. I know it’s the next week, it’s not going to be the best thing. And I know the benchmarks will
⏹️ ▶️ John be contrived and probably isn’t really the fastest and you can still build a PC for less and yada yada yada, but you just,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re gonna go through all this trouble and make this product and you wanna convince enough of us to buy it despite
⏹️ ▶️ John our better instincts about the fact that it won’t be supported going forward, make it awesome in at least
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of ways so that we come out of the presentation drooling. They say, I don’t even think I need this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, but I want it because it’s awesome. That is the feeling that I want. I think we even had that
⏹️ ▶️ John feeling for the trashcan because it’s like, who knows what this thing can do? two workstation GPUs?
⏹️ ▶️ John What does that even mean? What the hell is the D500? That’s not a part number that I write. I mean, we learned it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John as cool as you thought it was or anything, but yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John my hope for this product. And I think that would be a good strategy to get people off their butts and into the Apple store as
⏹️ ▶️ John plunking down their thousands of dollars for this stuff. And after that, all you gotta do is execute. Next year, update it. Next year, update
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Next year, update it. And everything will work out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this I feel like is the first step in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is going to have to be a multi-year series of actions by Apple to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regain that trust and to show all of us, pro buyers and just Mac fans in general,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to show us that they are committed to this after all. And it’s gonna take not only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the release of this product, but then also an update or two to show like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, we really are gonna keep this updated this time. Thanks a lot to our sponsors this week, Casper,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Betterment, and Indochino. And we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental John didn’t do any research, Marco and
⏹️ ▶️ John let him Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at ATP.FM And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to Accidental, accidental, check the podcast
Mac Pro!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, did I win the bet? Or rather, I guess I didn’t win it yet. Did I lose the bet?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think… I think you put a lot of qualifiers on like, if these exact models are on sale come January
⏹️ ▶️ John and technically these exact models won’t be on sale, even though they just shifted configurations and prices, that’s not the exact models
⏹️ ▶️ John with the exact specs. So I think we have to go back to the tape and see exactly how you phrased
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Yeah, because I think I said like, is the 2013 Mac Pro still for sale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the end of here and that is almost certainly going to be yes, but then I think I might have said unmodified and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is the question. Do you think on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco January 1st 2018 the 2013 Mac Pro will still be for sale?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco absolutely not. I vote yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would if I had to pick I would vote no, but it’s not as big of a it’s not as sure of a thing as
⏹️ ▶️ John I would. I would hope it would be as I think about it. I’m like… You want to bet five bucks?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not betting you any money. I’m guessing January 1st, 2018, it’s still for sale.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll take your five dollar bet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, all right. It’s a deal. If I said unmodified,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s arguable whether it has been modified or not. Because here’s the deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they did today was it used to they used to have you know for six
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four and six core you know skews and then you could custom build them up to eight and twelve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they eliminated and also the d300 500 and 700 GPUs what they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done is they’ve eliminated the four core and the d300 so they got rid of the lowest end parts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they they basically moved everything down a notch so now the low-end skew gets the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco six core and the D500 and the high-end SKU gets the eight core and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco D700. Now these are all parts that were available from since 2013 these are all the same parts and like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing else has changed except for the options that come pre-configured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the two SKUs in the store. So does that count as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether the computer has been still available at the end of this year, unmodified or not?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I think there’s some ambiguity here, and I think the one clear resolution
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to this problem is when you or someone else—I’m assuming you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because this is your MO—buy a Mac Pro in a week or two,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what does the Mac Pro say? Is it Mac Pro, early 2017? Then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a new computer. But if it still says Mac Pro comma prehistoric, I mean 2013,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then it is the same computer. Commas parentheses,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? Yeah, right. Sorry. Comma,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John parentheses.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know what I’m saying?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is probably right. Like, I think I would consider that I would consider that the authoritative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco source as well. And I can almost certainly guarantee that it’s not going to get a new model identifier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I cannot see that happening.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, I’m sorry. So you’re saying it would still read 2013? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I’m guessing that whatever they have changed, it does not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get a new model ID, and it does not get a new name in Apple’s support system, like Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco late 2013. Like I’m guessing that’s what you’re saying, right? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they’ve ever changed the support-facing English language
⏹️ ▶️ John name without also changing the internal identifier. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John so if they, you know, whatever the model is, you know, Mac Pro 6,1 or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the hell the trashcan is, I can’t imagine them changing
⏹️ ▶️ John the external name to say Mac Pro 2016 without also changing the internal one. But
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no way they’re changing the internal one because the hardware is literally the same. Exactly. So I think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to change it, the internal or external name, because they come in a pair.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So then you win, right? Because if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I would win,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s still for sale on January 1st.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that, that part I’m pretty confident in. So unless they, and we didn’t talk about this in the main part of the show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, but there is the slim chance that they are deeply under promising with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the hope slash intention of over delivering. So you never know what will happen. But if, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we take Apple at their word, then you will not see a new, new Mac pro until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least 2018, which means if it still reads Mac Pro comma, peren
⏹️ ▶️ Casey late 2013 or whatever it was, then I owe you $5. Okay. Comma. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think now that they’ve announced pre-announced the upcoming one, I think they are free
⏹️ ▶️ John now to stop selling the trash can as soon as they think not enough people are buying it anymore
⏹️ ▶️ John because presumably sales will tail off even more now. I know there’s always people who just need to replace it because they’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they just need more of them, period. Right. But come January, they could say,
⏹️ ▶️ John all right, well, we’ve drained all our existing inventory and sales have slowed to a trickle, and we know,
⏹️ ▶️ John although we’re not going to tell you yet, that the new one is coming in X months, and so we’re discontinuing the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro. And they’re discontinuing it, no one’s going to be upset, because they’re like, you already told us the replacement’s coming. Like it’s, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s, it’s, they’re free, what I’m saying is they are now free to stop selling the trash can anytime
⏹️ ▶️ John they think it is a reasonable thing to do. And so we have to wait until January before any money
⏹️ ▶️ John changes hands because it is not inconceivable they could just plain stop selling it because we all know a new one’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, I’m definitely not going to declare victory or loss until January 1st. But it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my calendar. We will see.
T-shirts!
⏹️ ▶️ John Do we want to mention t-shirts?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, we launched t-shirts. That’s the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. Go to our site atp.fm slash shirt or just go to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shirts item in the nav bar on our site and we’ll put a link in the show notes as well and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably have some kind of promotional artwork and link at a chapter marker at this point in the podcast as well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because we are really good at self-promotion. That’s how we do things. So we had a couple of minor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glitches. If you saw it when we first launched it, there were a couple of issues with certain sizes being sold out, which we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t even know was a thing on Teespring, but apparently it is. So we fixed that now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you, John, for fixing that very quickly before the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John show. At least we think we
⏹️ ▶️ John sure I fixed that. If you don’t see a size option listed,
⏹️ ▶️ John just send us an email and we’ll do something. We’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to get you the shirts in the sizes that you want. The website is fighting us on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, and the shirt design, it’s an interesting story. So it was actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about a week ago that I had the initial concept and then John did a lot of work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it and came up with something way better. But the initial concept that led to this shirt was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically Mac Pros. And it was like, it was like the first Mac Pro, the trash can,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then like a dotted box with a question mark in it. Like, what comes next? Where’s the new Mac Pro? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of evolved over a week of design and into what we have now, which is more of a celebration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the Pro Mac desktops over time. Right from the very first one, all painstakingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco illustrated by the artist on the show, John Syracusa.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John There’s no art
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco God’s sakes, take the credit. It was art. Yeah, seriously.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I take more credit for the design concept because in the channel it was like, hey, Mac Pro, Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John question mark. And I thought the question mark was a little bit too snarky like hey where’s the new Mac Pro? Like I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want the shirt to be accusatory because people want to wear it
⏹️ ▶️ John and feel good about it, not like here’s this angry protest shirt that I’m wearing. And one of
⏹️ ▶️ John the in-between designs was like, well what about this? What about the evolution of the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro? Like doing the whole evolution from monkey to homo sapien, you know, you’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ John that thing they always show in like textbooks of like it starts off all hunched and gets upright and at the end there’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John the human being holding the spear or whatever, you know, that that was the idea. Trying to pull that off with
⏹️ ▶️ John computers because they’re not tall and slender like humans are doesn’t really work that well.
⏹️ ▶️ John We tried a whole bunch of different iterations on it. We couldn’t quite get it. We’d already eliminated the question mark.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are a couple of times I still think had some legs in them, but someone who’s a better designer than I am could maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John make it work. But then, you know, we abandoned that and said, well, look, let’s just make it. No question,
⏹️ ▶️ John Mark, let’s just make it about pro max. and me being the old person that I am,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have the long view of Pro Macs. It’s not cheese grater trash can question mark. There
⏹️ ▶️ John have been many, we didn’t include them all, but there have been many, many Pro Mac designs. In the beginning,
⏹️ ▶️ John every Mac was the top of the line Mac because first there was only one, and when there was two, the new one
⏹️ ▶️ John was faster than the old one, and when there was three, the third one was faster than the first and the second, and like
⏹️ ▶️ John so early in the PC industry and especially in the history of the Mac, Every Mac was better than all
⏹️ ▶️ John the previous ones in like every possible way Like one of them came out with color and it was like the other ones are black and white is
⏹️ ▶️ John one color it wins Right. So what we put on the shirt is the classic Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John and there are many of these obviously the first one was the fastest But then the SE was faster and then you know Or the plus was faster
⏹️ ▶️ John and then the SE and SE 30 and so on and so forth And then then the color max the Mac to 2x to FX
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I skipped a whole bunch of weird-looking towers don’t look good in profile because it’s only so much room in the shirt
⏹️ ▶️ John skipped to the G3 and G4 design, which I think is fantastic. And then the G5
⏹️ ▶️ John cheese grater, which lasted a really long time. And then finally the trash can. So we have a nice progression
⏹️ ▶️ John of Pro Macs. And not pictured is every other Mac that was not a Pro Mac. All the laptops aren’t there,
⏹️ ▶️ John because F them. All of the boring towers
⏹️ ▶️ John that were like mid-range, the LC is not there, the, you know, What
⏹️ ▶️ John other weird? Like the tooth is not there. The Emac is not on the list. None of the Imacs are shown
⏹️ ▶️ John in this silhouette. This show, this shirt and so many episodes
⏹️ ▶️ John of the show are all about pro desktop Macs with their like the least popular,
⏹️ ▶️ John most uninteresting to most people Macs in the lineup. And yet we spend, to much to
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey’s regret, so much time in this show talking about it. It is the logo of our show as
⏹️ ▶️ John discussed was originally the cheese grater with the Snarky New badge on it. And then the later logo
⏹️ ▶️ John of our show that you may be looking at right now, assuming you’re not driving a Tesla and seeing some crazy artwork that is unrelated,
⏹️ ▶️ John is a depiction of the front of the current trashcan Mac Pro. So this show
⏹️ ▶️ John is all about the Mac Pro and the shirt is all about the Mac Pro. So buy one, they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be on sale for the next, well, 21 days from the time we’re recording this and by the time you hear
⏹️ ▶️ John it, less than 20 days. And thus far, we have never
⏹️ ▶️ John repeated the design. So don’t think, well, I don’t want to buy the shirt now. I’ll buy it next year.
⏹️ ▶️ John You probably won’t. If you want a shirt, buy it now. Oh, yeah, and shipping. Last year,
⏹️ ▶️ John we had a lot of complaints about it was super expensive to ship these outside the US. We’ve gone with a
⏹️ ▶️ John different vendor this time that has fulfillment from the EU. So hopefully, the shipping will be cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ John for people who are not inside the US. And we have many, many, many choices of colors.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not even obvious sometimes from the store pages how many choices, if you wanna see what kind of color choices you have, almost all
⏹️ ▶️ John the shirts have only one color choice, except for the shirt with white ink that has like seven
⏹️ ▶️ John color choices. And a couple of the other ones have like two choices where you can get a black or a white shirt. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you look at the shirts and they all look boring to you or you just see two blue ones, you’re like, well, I don’t want black or gray or blue, I’m not gonna get a shirt.
⏹️ ▶️ John Click through to the ones that have white ink on them and they will have, how many choices do we have? One, two,
⏹️ ▶️ John three, four, five, six, I have up to seven color choices of the shirts. And
⏹️ ▶️ John unfortunately, the color choices are not the same in the US and Europe, and they’re not the same on men’s and women’s because they’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John not. We did. We tried to make them as consistent as possible, but we are limited by the offerings
⏹️ ▶️ John through the T-shirt vendor. So take some time, click through the things, try to find the best shirt for you. We
⏹️ ▶️ John apologize for inconsistencies. We apologize for regional and gender inconsistencies. So we
⏹️ ▶️ John did the best we could. Indeed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and special thanks to John for doing the vast majority of the work this year.