217: Apology Mac Pro
12 Apr 2017Clips, Workflow, GPUs, a big Escape, and more Mac Pro!
Episode Description:
- Follow up:
- Mac Pro transcript posted
- Workflow on ice
- APFS and free space
- T-Shirt Update
- Clips
- Mac Pro
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
- Post-show:
- Marco convinces himself Casey owes him $5
- Managing Mac Pro expectations
- Apple speed bumps
- MacRumors Buyer's Guide
Sponsored by:
- Squarespace: Build it beautiful. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
- Audible: With Audible, you’ll find what you’re looking for. Get a free 30-day trial.
- Fracture: Photos printed in vivid color directly on glass.
Chapters
- Intro
- Mac Pro briefing transcript
- No Workflow updates planned
- Sponsor: Fracture
- APFS gave me more space
- T-shirts 🖼️
- Apple Clips app
- More Mac Pro!
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- 15” MacBook Escape?
- Touch Macs: “No.”
- Apple surprised by reactions
- Sponsor: Audible
- Pro users
- More iMac Pro!
- NVIDIA Mac support
- Imagination GPUs
- Ending theme
- Post-show 🖼️
Intro
⏹️ ▶️ John We need more investigative journalism. No one actually, I mean, with the exception of, I guess,
⏹️ ▶️ John 9to5Mac and Bloomberg, because they got, what’s his name? Like, who’s out there digging
⏹️ ▶️ John through dumpsters to find out what the new Mac Pro is gonna be? Let’s get some old-fashioned journalism
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think first Apple needs to figure out what the new Mac Pro is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John supposed to be. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, you know, if you dig through dumpsters and find out, like, you know, too bad they don’t use paper anymore, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John find out they’re just now having meetings about what they might do about this. Like, you can get timelines on it, But anyway, as time
⏹️ ▶️ John passes, and we wait for WWC to appear, things could leak. Let’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s find stuff out. Let’s get some engineers drunk. Let’s find out some answers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, because that always works. All that gets you is a pre-release iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s the only thing that works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I mean, I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spoil it for you right now, John. You’re not gonna know until, like, it launches.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The two things that you’re gonna complain about and convince yourself not to buy it about. You’re not gonna know the price, and you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna know the GPU choice.
⏹️ ▶️ John The GPU choice could leak like if they’re using Nvidia I feel like that could leak right and if they are using Nvidia They’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be they’re gonna be using Pascal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It might leak that they’re using Nvidia, but it wouldn’t it wouldn’t leak like which one they’re using you know
⏹️ ▶️ John It would leak that they’re using Pascal architecture would just be a question of like which part But like even that would be enough
⏹️ ▶️ John like so to you know to be exciting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s been so long since we talked a lot has happened in the news this week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of April 8th or 9th or whatever, right? You know, today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we talk, has obviously got to be April 12th, 2017. Of course it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But rather than talk about the exciting news that has happened this week, we thought we’d talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more about what has happened, say, early last week, maybe before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. Yeah, we thought we’d just do a recap because why wouldn’t we? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so So here we are. And so that that amazing news about Nintendo that happened,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, just a couple of days ago on the 10th or the 11th, we’re gonna save that for next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The good news is we’ve covered everything that we could possibly cover about the Mac Pro. So we don’t have to talk about it until it comes out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 2019. So let’s talk about some other things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do we really have no follow up trademark on about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the Mac Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that Casey get through his little song and dance. Don’t worry. Don’t you worry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, I can’t even take this seriously because I know that I’ll be murdered if I don’t bring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up Mac Pro stuff, so here we go, kids. TechCrunch,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the things I do for you two, I hope you appreciate me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m so sorry, Casey. I’m just so sorry for you during this time. I know this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very difficult time to be on our podcast during Mac Pro Week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Mac Pro Week? Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Week? Are you sh**ing me? It’s Mac Pro year!
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I like when they call this the year of Mac Pro, and we’re just gonna keep calling it the year of Mac Pro until they
⏹️ ▶️ John release one. Right, which might be a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other year. Right.
Mac Pro briefing transcript
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, all right, let’s do a little follow up about the Mac Pro and then hopefully we can move
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. TechCrunch, Matt Panzarino and team at TechCrunch have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey posted the full transcript of their meeting. I guess he recorded it by some mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and had Hammer, one of his people, go ahead and transcribe it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all. So we will put that in the show notes. I have yet to have a chance to even look at it. There are definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey parts as much as I snark that I think are interesting that I’d like to read a little more about, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t had the chance yet. So you can check that out in the show notes. Is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really the only Mac pro follow up? Oh, because one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John of you made it a topic. I see. The topic is
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, we’ll get to it. Um, on the transcript, um, I read the whole transcript and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey of course, surprise,
⏹️ ▶️ John surprise, surprise. The, uh, you know, the people that had their reporting on it did a good job reporting on it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey there’s not any
⏹️ ▶️ John important information in the transcript that you’re missing. You can read it just to get a flavor of what they said and stuff like that but
⏹️ ▶️ John this it was well covered you know it’s not as if they left out major sections that were important
⏹️ ▶️ John the only the fun thing about the transcript is you can see since it’s a fairly faithful transcript I would imagine because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got all people’s false starts and weird sentence structures and stuff that’s just what happens when people
⏹️ ▶️ John speak you can see occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ John people getting their reigning in their instincts one One particular instance is Craig Fagary talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about, you know, the old Mac Pro and the architecture with the tube and the heating and,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, how it was difficult to put different components in and everything. And so he talks
⏹️ ▶️ John about all of that. And then he said how they really put a lot of energy behind
⏹️ ▶️ John that design. And the next bit is in retrospect, that was dot dot dot.
⏹️ ▶️ John And he’s about to say in retrospect, that was that was a mistake. That was
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a bad idea. That was not
⏹️ ▶️ John the right thing to do. But he doesn’t say that because he is disciplined. He gets into the sentence, but then he is abort,
⏹️ ▶️ John abort. In retrospect, that was nuisance. While that system is going to be fantastic for a huge number
⏹️ ▶️ John of customers, we want to do more. There you go. And Phil smiles next to us. Good job, Craig. You almost you almost
⏹️ ▶️ John landed in it there. But anyway, they’re very disciplined with their message.
⏹️ ▶️ John Craig still manages to be funny and witty within the bounds of being disciplined for PR.
⏹️ ▶️ John Phyllis is Phyllis Fell. He’s the guy we know and love. So if you have
⏹️ ▶️ John seen a lot of presentations with the people who are at this meeting, then
⏹️ ▶️ John you will definitely get the flavor of them just reading the transcript. And I don’t know much about John Ternus. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen
⏹️ ▶️ John him on stage, but he’s the other guy.
No Workflow updates planned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. All right, moving on. Just like that, we’re done with Mac Pro, right kids? Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Okay. So, workflow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, somebody that listens to our show had a conversation with the support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey team at Workflow, and they received the following email, which was then forwarded on to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us. The person at Workflow said, you know, blah, blah, blah, fix
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for your problem, blah, blah, blah. But just so you know, we have no further
⏹️ ▶️ Casey planned updates for Workflow. That being said, we are continuing to support Workflow’s current
⏹️ ▶️ Casey functionality and have no plans to end support, so let me know if you run across any bugs or crashes. Cue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the sad trombone here, Marco. Womp womp.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, to be honest, when Workflow was acquired and we did mention,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, they might just let it die or kill it outright and have the staff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work on other stuff built into iOS, that was kind of the long-term idea that that was most likely to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will admit I did not foresee them, because of the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was bought and because of the messaging around the time that it was bought and what they told the users,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did not foresee them totally stopping all updates to the app right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or at least, I think the way this reads, they might do bug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fix updates, but that’s it. No new features are coming to Workflow. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is unfortunate, But I guess not a huge surprise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, because like that’s that’s what happens with, you know, this was clearly an acqua hire, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the sense that Apple wanted the staff more than the product and whether that was to make the staff work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on something boring like, you know, mail.app, probably not. It was probably to have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco staff work on workflow like functionality, you know, automation technologies for iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, you know, that’s, that’s my guess. But the fact is, if you’re a workflow user,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this doesn’t make it any easier to take that basically workflow is effectively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dead in the sense that no one will really be working on it anymore unless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they want to fix some bugs for some reason. But that’s about it. So that is pretty unfortunate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for workflow users. And I hope that in the end this will prove worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many acqui-hires, what happens is the product gets shut down, the team goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to work on something similar within the bigger acquiring company, and sometimes that sees
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the light of day and sometimes it doesn’t. Or sometimes what eventually comes out of that from the bigger company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not nearly as good as the acquired app was. It’s kind of a crapshoot. You don’t really know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I hope that this will lead to better stuff in iOS that will replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the need for workflow for the people who use it today. But honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not the most likely outcome. The most likely outcome is iOS stuff moves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forward a little bit. We get some part of this in a future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of iOS. Then maybe the original staff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who created it goes to work on other things with an Apple, or maybe after a few years they get unhappy and leave do something else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That kind of thing is more likely to happen than iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gaining complete functionality like Workflow or even something close to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll tell you, I place much higher odds on Workflow being
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple-branded application for some period of time. Like that it would be brought into the fold,
⏹️ ▶️ John Workflow by Apple as a downloadable thing on the app store, possibly bundled with
⏹️ ▶️ John the future OS update while you know, while they worked on the next integration of you know, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John and just this is pretty quick. Like you said, the the press releases and then
⏹️ ▶️ John very shortly after. Yeah, we’re not doing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I mean, what’s it been like 10 days like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has not been very long. Yeah, sad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times. I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know what to make of all this. just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to be interesting watching Mike have to become a real true honest to goodness programmer and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writing Python east as well. God, he’s gonna be he’s gonna have no other choice. So Mike, welcome
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, no, because workflow will keep working. Like I think they will keep it working. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, well, yeah, what are were there major features that people wanted to add to workflow like you can you can add workflows
⏹️ ▶️ John people can continue to do that and share and distribute those isn’t the workflow well, app is just the engine. So I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like it should last people until something new comes.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s a good outcome. But if you were really excited about the engine gaining features, then you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, so, you know, in the past, I remember when extensions came out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think even sometime last year for some reason, I’ve discussed on this show how I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the future of URL scheme usage on iOS is probably limited.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because now Apple has things like universal links, which replace a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the need for URL schemes for average uses. X-Callback URL and things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that are used only by a narrow amount of power users
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for legitimate purposes, and there’s lots of abuses that they’re used for. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has slowly clamped down on that over time to the degree that they can with various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS changes like having to declare your URL schemes that you that you query for in your info.plist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco file and stuff like that but it’s it’s no real secret that Apple is not a huge fan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of URL schemes being used for purposes like this that I would guess Apple probably wants to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rid of them and you know make them actually impossible for various privacy and security reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is completely reasonable so it would not surprise me at all if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know say I you know maybe Maybe not iOS 11, but maybe iOS 12? Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end support for calling other apps via open URL and can open URL.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At that point, there are still other features of workflow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as it exists today. It could do other things, but that would lop off such a big portion of what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it could do that I think that would effectively kill the app. Hopefully by the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time Apple does something like that, if they’re going to do something like that. Hopefully they would have some kind of replacement in mind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like maybe whatever the workflow staff is working on at Apple now. I hope that’s how it would go,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the thing is with big companies and with acquisitions, you don’t know that it’s actually going to go that way. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be everyone’s intention and plan now, but at big companies things change.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In six months, something else might be a bigger priority. They might be reassigned to work on that and this project
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just doesn’t continue or anything like that. This is kind of just a side effect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the economies going on here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Early on in Instapaper’s days, I had a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco early discussions about acquihires, some of the big tech companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanting to buy Instapaper for some relatively insignificant amount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in order to get me to come work for them. these conversations always stopped pretty early
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, because at that time, Instapaper was making very good money. Because it was selling for like 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bucks, and then later five bucks in the app store, and it was selling pretty well. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever I would, whenever we get to the money part of the early conversations, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would very quickly end the conversations. Because it was like, well, for me to stop making this money from this app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re going to have to pay at least X for it. And that was more than they were willing to pay to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just get some engineer to come work for them. And the problem is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the app economy has gotten worse and as the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big handful of tech companies have gotten bigger and have had more money and have even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tighter competition for engineering talent, the economics of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have shifted so much so that it is very hard for most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app developers to turn down decent aqua hire deal today because most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps are not making that much money anymore and these companies can now afford
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to pay a lot for good engineering talent and they would rather and there’s so much competition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that they would rather do that then you know let these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps continue I guess and so and again like as the developers of these apps you can’t really fault them because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if someone comes around offering them like you know ten times what they’re making now per
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year in an upfront sum to buy their app and then oh you’re you’ll also have a nice stable job with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us instead of having to rely on the ups and downs of your app selling in the App Store. I don’t blame developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all for taking those offers. They you know in many ways like well you can’t really say no to some of these offers because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re so good and the only way this is ever going to change is if the economics of app development
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change such that it is more worthwhile for people to keep their apps apps and not sell them and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not take jobs somewhere else than to do that. But I don’t see that happening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the near future, right? If anything, I see things going the other direction.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just assume the workflow developers have gone to work on the Mac Pro. It’s a safe bet, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, because apparently the Mac Pro is only started a week ago and they went there 10 days ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re getting to that. We’ll get to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, my word, you guys. I didn’t even start my holiday party yet. This is gonna be a long show for me. Probably
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APFS gave me more space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you to Fracture for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me John about a possible explanation for increased free space with APFS on 10.3 if you please.
⏹️ ▶️ John Continuing the streak of APFS follow up and what are we on like five shows in a row now? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. We’re keeping the streak alive. Some show in the past we
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about people upgrading to iOS 10.3 and saying, hey, I have more free space available
⏹️ ▶️ John on my iOS device now. And that could have been clearing caches, or just rebooting,
⏹️ ▶️ John or other things related to the upgrade and not related to the file system itself. I heard one theory that I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John was worth pondering. And it has to do with APFS space sharing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I doubt you guys remember what that is, because I think your eyes glaze over when I talk about APFS, but. Yep,
⏹️ ▶️ John I do. Hey! It’s basically copy on write, right? No, no, that’s one of the features, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing they refer to as space sharing is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, is this a thing where you can have like two different partitions that both kind of share some space. And so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like whoever fills it first gets to keep
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Exactly. So if you got a one gig disk, and you could put two partitions on it, you can put two one gig
⏹️ ▶️ John partitions on it. You’re like, how can you put two one gig partitions on a one gig disk? Can’t you put two partitions that are
⏹️ ▶️ John like 500 and 500 and 250 or 750? How can you have two one gig partitions? That makes no
⏹️ ▶️ John sense. That’s exactly how space sharing works that I forget what the terms are, they call it a container or or something and within
⏹️ ▶️ John the container, you can have separate volumes and they share that space. And like Marco said, whoever fills
⏹️ ▶️ John it first wins, right? And that produces weird results for saying
⏹️ ▶️ John how much free space you have. Anyway, so this theory goes that iOS has,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if this is true, maybe Marco does, although I’ve heard it before, that
⏹️ ▶️ John two places where it puts stuff. One is sort of the OS partition and one is the user space partition
⏹️ ▶️ John and they are separate from each other. Does that sound familiar, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I’ve never looked that low level at the OS. That’s a question for Steve Trout and Smith, not me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Anyway, the idea is that, yeah, there’s that arrangement that has been there for a while. But with APFS
⏹️ ▶️ John and space sharing, it changes the way free space is reported, and that the increase
⏹️ ▶️ John in free space you’re seeing is related to that. Now, I tried to think through this and say, well, all right, how does that work exactly?
⏹️ ▶️ John What would that do? And what, you know, I have in the notes here, experiments required, unfortunately, because we just recorded
⏹️ ▶️ John two days ago. I have not done these experiments, but changing the way space is
⏹️ ▶️ John both shared and reported with the file system could possibly account for
⏹️ ▶️ John discrepancies in what is reported in the OS. You would think that Apple would work this out, but
⏹️ ▶️ John in that example I just gave, what is the right thing to do? If you have two one gig partitions on a one
⏹️ ▶️ John gig disk and you ask one of them how much free space, it’s going to say, I have one gig available. And he
⏹️ ▶️ John asked the other one, it’s going to say, I have one gig available. And that’s kind of the truth because there’s nothing in the disk. they both technically
⏹️ ▶️ John do have one gig available. But if they were to both start filling really fast, you’re not gonna fit one gig into
⏹️ ▶️ John each one of those things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So now you have like smart ass file systems now. Like, well, technically I have one gig available. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John lie to you. Right, you could put one gig in B as long as you put nothing in any of the other partitions
⏹️ ▶️ John that are sharing the same space. Yeah. Anyway, I really, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish I had more information to provide, but I just wanted to bring up space sharing to remind people that space sharing in APFS is a thing and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s weird. And this is one of those things where it’s difficult from a user interface perspective to determine what is the
⏹️ ▶️ John right thing to do. It’s not like, oh, you just need to update your operating system to report, to understand APFS and report
⏹️ ▶️ John the right thing. People’s mental model of how space works on disks does not match how APFS file,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, space sharing works. So I don’t know what they’re gonna do on Mac OS. iOS, you don’t, this
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t manifest in any way that you can see, except perhaps in this free space thing. But further news
⏹️ ▶️ John as events warrant, maybe next week I will have some experiments. and next week is actually two weeks from now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh goodness. All right, fair enough.
T-shirts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, can we talk about t-shirts? Because we’ve had a little bit of ajito
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with our t-shirt rollout this year. So you guys have been generous enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to spend most of your time doing this. I have been completely swamped in all aspects
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of life this week. So take me through the pain and suffering that you’ve gone through to bring t-shirts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to our lovely listeners.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to go through the pain and suffering, but I do want to say that, as usual, every time we do a t-shirt launch, there’s something
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s weird or wrong and odd about it. and we work it out. This time it was mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John about size availability, where as far as we’re able to determine, we had no visibility
⏹️ ▶️ John into what sizes will be available until after we launch it. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John when we launch it, you can go to the size pop-up menu, like I’ve picked the shirt that I want, now I need
⏹️ ▶️ John to pick my size. And you will see all the sizes listed, all the sizes that we could see before launch. We can see this shirt is available from
⏹️ ▶️ John extra small to 3XL, right? And then we launch it and you go to the shirt and you
⏹️ ▶️ John see that pop up menu with those sizes in it, but only two of them would be selectable. And like usually extra small
⏹️ ▶️ John and some other weird size, like none of the common sizes would be available to you. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. We want the shirts to be available in all sizes. So what we had to do for a lot of the shirts is
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of delete or end the campaigns, which by the way, some people bought shirts in those campaigns. And my understanding
⏹️ ▶️ John is they will get delivered. It’s just kind of weird that you were the one of the two or three lucky people who got that shirt before we
⏹️ ▶️ John frantically deleted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And your shirt might be titled, ATP shirt delete me in the emails that you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John about it. Yeah, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John get an email and it says delete me, that’s us trying to keep track of which ones are the old bad ones
⏹️ ▶️ John and which ones are the new good ones. Anyway, and we replaced them with identical looking shirts,
⏹️ ▶️ John but with shirts from a different vendor who had stock in all sizes. And we’ve been working on that,
⏹️ ▶️ John working with Teespring to get more sizes available and recreating them and so on and so forth. All this is to say
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you tried to buy a shirt, because you heard the show last week or whenever, and you went there
⏹️ ▶️ John and you couldn’t find the shirt in the size you wanted, or the shirt wasn’t available in any sizes, which
⏹️ ▶️ John was true of some cases, like the purple one that I really love was literally available in zero sizes. Like no one could
⏹️ ▶️ John order it because you could not select any sizes at all. It would let you hit buy now, and then it said, please pick your size, and they
⏹️ ▶️ John were all disabled. So that’s fixed, you can get your purple shirts now. We added
⏹️ ▶️ John a few shirts to be larger sizes because some of the other shirts only went up to 2XL, and now we have 3XL, and I
⏹️ ▶️ John think up to 5XL on the European one. So and also finally
⏹️ ▶️ John Teespring has told us that as stock comes in for different sizes and different
⏹️ ▶️ John colors those sizes will become available so Technically if you just
⏹️ ▶️ John want to you know wait and check back next week or something even if the size isn’t available right now Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it will become available. Um, so we apologize for this. It’s difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll try to do better next year as always every year we have to have something last year It was really expensive shipping outside the
⏹️ ▶️ John US this year. We do not have super-duper expensive shipping outside the US, which is good But we have some size
⏹️ ▶️ John issues So thank you to everybody who’s bought shirts and good luck out there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you know last year we had to apologize for the expensive international shipping and this year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re having to apologize for some of these operational issues And we we are sorry that we have to deal with this and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to deal with this the reality is that printing and shipping shirts all over the world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is is complicated. And every vendor who does it has different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trade-offs. We’ve now tried two of the major vendors, and each one has strengths and weaknesses.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we’ve chosen a different set of trade-offs this year, really. But we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have not yet found a perfect solution. And we hope in the future that one materializes or that we can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tweak things a little bit better. But in the meantime, we’re sorry. Please buy our shirts now. Thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Alright, one more thing we are thinking about, this has not yet happened, but the thing that may
⏹️ ▶️ John happen is that you may get your shirts earlier than you would expect. We had set all these things to be like a time limited campaign
⏹️ ▶️ John that we’re going to end about 20 days from now. We’re still going to end it, that’s still going to happen, so buy your shirts because we’re going to end this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, right? But during the time that it is running, there is some potential, not a sure thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John that your shirts could ship like shortly after you order them instead of having everybody wait until the end
⏹️ ▶️ John of the 20 days and then all the shirts go out at once. The reason we’re thinking about that is it gives you
⏹️ ▶️ John more time to hopefully get your shirt in time for WWDC if you’re coming or so you don’t have to wait so long or if
⏹️ ▶️ John there are issues with it, you know, anyway, that’s why we’re thinking about that and that may be a thing. suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ John arrives and you didn’t expect it for 20 days don’t be surprised.
Apple Clips app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, Apple’s Clips app came out today, and I think we should spend a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of time talking about that because it’s my turn to talk about something that I want to talk about.
⏹️ ▶️ John Didn’t I put that in there way, way down below all this cool new Mac Pro stuff?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, guess what, buddy? It just got escalated. And actually, I don’t have too much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say if I’m really honest with you, so this is only going to take a moment. But Clips came out today. I played
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with it very, very, very briefly, and it’s pretty cool. I like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, I don’t know what the official term for it is, but the transcribe what you’re saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as you’re saying it feature. So you can turn on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a like text mode or a, it’s a little speech bubble. And as you record
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speech will, or your, your, your speech will appear on screen. So you know, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hold to record and then as you talk, you can make it show the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey words that you’re speaking. I just did that as we were recording, as I was saying those words, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it says Honda Accord instead of hold while you record. So this is already going well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Perfect. Yeah, I mean, you know, automated transcription is still a very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long way away from being good reliably. Like even, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can criticize Apple for like not being good at some of these things sometimes, but nobody can do this very well yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, even like the fancy Google algorithms that do YouTube transcription and everything like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even they are pretty bad at this. So it’s going to be a fun little thing finding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know funny mistranslations in people’s videos sometimes and uh otherwise it’s a cool idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a cool use of technology but yeah it’s going to be pretty imperfect for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly ever if not a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s going to make people enunciate is what it’s going to do. I tried that feature as well because I was excited to see if I
⏹️ ▶️ John could do the thing that I talked about when we first talked about clips, which is make the words
⏹️ ▶️ John appear over the video with a cadence, with a purpose, like say things in a certain way and
⏹️ ▶️ John emphasize certain things to have the words appear with that rhythm. And the lag seemed to be so big. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John quite sure why, whether it’s the, you know, rendering it on top of the video versus understanding the speech
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but the lag was so much worse than, for example, when you talk to one of, you know, Google
⏹️ ▶️ John Now or whatever the hell they call where it shows your words in real time or even Siri these days but Google Now was
⏹️ ▶️ John the first one I remember being startled by exactly how fast the words were appearing as I spoke them that there wasn’t a
⏹️ ▶️ John delay that it wasn’t like let me just think about what you just said and make it appear that it seemed to follow my cadence and
⏹️ ▶️ John clips clips lags I found it difficult even when trying to emphasize
⏹️ ▶️ John in a very exaggerated rhythm to get that rhythm to manifest in the video so
⏹️ ▶️ John oh well the people using real video editors can continue to dominate in the perfect timing
⏹️ ▶️ John of their word appearances and transitions. But in the meantime, yeah, it is a cool app and the effects are really
⏹️ ▶️ John neat and it makes it so easy to do something. You don’t need any expertise in any kind of video editing
⏹️ ▶️ John or production. You just need to be able to tap things on the screen and hold your finger on a giant red button
⏹️ ▶️ John and you will make cool videos.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I like I said, I only played with it briefly, but really, really impressed with what I’ve seen so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also really like, and I think this was covered on Connected recently, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forget where I heard it, but rather than Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to make their own social network or do something ridiculous like that, they’re actually just embracing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other social networks. So this is an app to pipe your video into other places, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think is really smart. Did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you just say you heard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that on Connected? Did we talk about it? It’s fine. It’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s all a mess.
⏹️ ▶️ John the show with me when I said that same thing but it’s fine you can cite connected it’s all a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey invent follow-up Casey yeah you know they did it’s it’s weird we appropriated it but it was all that
⏹️ ▶️ John I actually heard that from somebody I wasn’t connected it was what was it bonanza that did the the thing with like the echo and reverb
⏹️ ▶️ John good god no that was that was
⏹️ ▶️ John the prompt or connected all right well anyway someone wrote me to say I totally thought they invented it because
⏹️ ▶️ John they had a cool sound effect follow up. Anyway, they’ve been set. They’ve been set straight.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyhow, my very brief playing with this app. I definitely like it, although
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it confirmed to some degree that I’m an old man because I it took me a minute to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey realize how to share a video that I created because it didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it wasn’t obvious to me that in the like creation screen is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where you’re doing all your modifications and edits and whatnot. And from what I can until you have to back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out to your library screen in order to actually share something, which I thought was a little peculiar, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever. But either way, in my very brief playing with it, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really like it. And I don’t know that I’ll use it that much, but it was really cool. The only complaint
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have about it, which actually is probably for the best, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I kind of wish it wasn’t just square. As an example, I had recorded a video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of myself and Declan very quickly, and I wanted to share it as an Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ Casey story. And when I sucked it into Instagram, it looked awful. And it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like only the center of the video. And it took me a second to realize,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, it’s scaling it because the video is square, but Instagram stories, annoyingly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are portrait only. And so it’s just doing the best it can, but that ruined my video. And so that was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little frustrating, but to be honest, it’s probably for the best that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that that that it is square because it’s kind of generic. I also didn’t see a way to share to Twitter, but that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again could be user error. And I only looked for a moment. But all in all, I definitely like it. And I think it’s pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ John They got to fix that the Instagram story thing. That’s not a minor issue, because like I said, the whole point of this is to
⏹️ ▶️ John is to share another networks and Instagram stories does the particular format the app app needs
⏹️ ▶️ John to support that in some way. You can leave the defaults as whatever they are, but someone who
⏹️ ▶️ John wants to use this app primarily as a way to do Instagram stories, they’re just not gonna do it. If they, you know, it
⏹️ ▶️ John just won’t feel, it won’t feel right to not be able to shoot it in the same aspect ratio. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John get on that ClipSteam.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s see, what else has happened recently?
⏹️ ▶️ John that was your one, you get your one. That, oh, geez,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is? All right, fine. Let me go pass out. All right kids have fun. I’ll see you. I’ll see you next week
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s all the way downstairs. There’s non Mac Pro stuff We’ll clear the Mac Pro eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John and come out the other side 2019 into the sunlight where we’ll discuss
⏹️ ▶️ John patents and and NVIDIA drivers and all sorts of other things. I think we’ll make it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll see you guys next week.
More Mac Pro!
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is more Mac Pro! The show notes say. I’m pretty sure I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. You know I didn’t do it. I think I put the word more in there. The first
⏹️ ▶️ John bit is a rumor that I don’t know how much,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, worth to attach to, but it is a rumor and it has been reblogged,
⏹️ ▶️ John as we used to say, all over the place, which does not make it any more true. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, it’s from OS News, OSNews.com, and it is
⏹️ ▶️ John a rumor cited to people and sources who know their stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So there’s your source. That instills confidence.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitely means it’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the way rumors should be cited because that,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, matches the reliability. This says,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro was in limbo in size Apple. The decision to go ahead and develop a modular Mac Pro replacement
⏹️ ▶️ John seems to have been made only in recent months, with development starting only a few weeks ago.”
⏹️ ▶️ John So we were, last year we were talking about, oh this, you know, seems like it must have happened at the earliest
⏹️ ▶️ John during the last 12 months, probably during the last 6 months. This one says, in recent months the decision was made,
⏹️ ▶️ John and development started only a few weeks ago. So that is the tightest timeline I have seen even suggested.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then it goes on to say, why, why did Apple do this? Apple make a 180 on the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the reason cited is a more specific version of a thing we’ve talked about a lot that Apple was surprised
⏹️ ▶️ John by the reaction of the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, which you’ve heard from many different places in a
⏹️ ▶️ John vague sort of Apple thought that everyone was going to love their product
⏹️ ▶️ John and the negative reaction in the press, if not in the sales numbers, caught them by surprise.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so this adds some more detail to that with some more vaguely sourced rumors
⏹️ ▶️ John After it says after announcement of the new Mac Pro with the MacBook Pro with touch bar orders for Refurbished
⏹️ ▶️ John old MacBook Pro supposedly went through the roof and after the initial batch of reviews came out they shot up even higher
⏹️ ▶️ John So that would be a signal that I think Apple would pay attention to hey we’ve got the new MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro with touch bar and The refurbished version of the old one goes up really high now Now
⏹️ ▶️ John to believe this you have to a believe this is founded on anything and b you have to believe that this is not something that always
⏹️ ▶️ John happens every time a new model is introduced which I am not entirely sure because maybe every time you introduce a new model is different from the old
⏹️ ▶️ John one people buy the refurbished runs really quickly because they want to get their last chance to get the model they know and love
⏹️ ▶️ John but anyway that is a suggestion how that would reflect on the Mac Pro which it would be
⏹️ ▶️ John just basically like we thought we knew what pros wanted but we seem to be wrong and they say
⏹️ ▶️ John similar combined with the problems of the LG display and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then finally, to add more exciting unsourced rumors that will make Marco happy, if
⏹️ ▶️ John he can bring himself to believe them briefly. So far I can’t, but go ahead. Apple is said
⏹️ ▶️ John to be exploring additional Retina MacBook Pro models without the touch bar. Oh, wouldn’t you love that?
⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s something for everybody in this vaguely sourced rumor. But again,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, since people are talking about it, like I do believe
⏹️ ▶️ John that the new Mac Pro decision and project were very
⏹️ ▶️ John recent. I’m not sure if I believe a few weeks ago, but very recent. And I do believe that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John was surprised by the press reaction to the MacBook Pro with touch bars as Apple emphasizes
⏹️ ▶️ John every time you talk to them about it, including the transcript that we cited before, the new MacBook Pro with touch bar
⏹️ ▶️ John is incredibly popular and has the most orders ever of any laptop ever produced and people love it and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John awesome and all the numbers are great for it. But like so many other things Apple said in that transcript and about
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro and everything. They may be true, but if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John update a model for a really long time, some of these results fall out of
⏹️ ▶️ John it, you know, like, we’re not really selling a lot of Mac Pros, few people buy them. Well, you haven’t updated it
⏹️ ▶️ John in years. So it’s a self fulfilling prophecy as we’ve discussed before. And the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro Pro Touch Bar is the best-selling model ever. Well, again, the MacBook Pro was a little bit overdue for
⏹️ ▶️ John an update, so there’s pent-up demand for it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then you have to map into the curve of, are Mac sales increasing overall? I think the MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John is a successful product for them, but again, I do believe that Apple was surprised by the negative reaction
⏹️ ▶️ John of some of the press about it. They even emphasized in the transcript, by the way, went back to the well
⏹️ ▶️ John on the battery life of like their metrics say that the battery life for the new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar is better than
⏹️ ▶️ John the outgoing ones I believe that too you know why because the outgoing ones are old and then
⏹️ ▶️ John the new models are brand new I’m sure that I’m sure they factor that in and I’m sure they can tell the age
⏹️ ▶️ John and normalize for it or whatever but it’s difficult to to hang your hat on a lot of the stats
⏹️ ▶️ John because every stat they say I’m like I hundred percent believe that but I also don’t have enough information
⏹️ ▶️ John to to really tell whether it shows the thing you’re saying
⏹️ ▶️ John that it shows. What they’re trying to say it shows is, hey, the new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar has better battery life than our
⏹️ ▶️ John outgoing model. But you haven’t given me enough information to believe that. All you’ve said is
⏹️ ▶️ John the stats say people are getting better battery life out of it than the old one. You don’t tell me whether you’ve controlled for the age of the
⏹️ ▶️ John machines, and you know, you don’t tell me if it’s an average
⏹️ ▶️ John or a usage or what the percentiles are, what the histogram looks like, and all sorts of other stuff. As Marco’s pointed out many other times, you You can
⏹️ ▶️ John get fantastic battery life out of these new models until you do something intensive and then they tank. And I bet if more
⏹️ ▶️ John people don’t do intensive things, people aren’t playing games with their laptop unplugged because if they did,
⏹️ ▶️ John their game would be over in two and a half hours if they’re lucky. Yeah. And that would really bring the numbers down. But most people just
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t play and don’t do that. So that doesn’t show up in the stats. So anyway, I don’t want to go off on that tangent, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s that’s where my mind went when reading this weird rumor. Believe it if you want to feel good
⏹️ ▶️ John for a little while.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, this is not an incredibly reliable source. This is not like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody with a great track record. I don’t lend a lot of credibility to this, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It lines up with some of the other things that we’ve heard here and there, but not very strongly. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, for the most part, it doesn’t really matter. I think what matters is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is, at least, you know, if we believe what they said, and I don’t think we have any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason not to, they on a bad path before, they have finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recognized that. And yes, they did recognize it pretty late down that path. They did not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recognize they were on a bad path in 2013. It took a lot longer than that. I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guess they recognize it in 2016 sometime, possibly even 2017. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fact is, they are on the path to fixing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has clearly switched in Apple. Something has clearly flipped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over or changed to make them make this decision because before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this it was very clear that they were doing things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their way, what they thought was right, which involved a lot of things that did not serve pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco users. Basically, it involved saying no a lot and taking a long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time to do pretty much everything and ignoring a lot of product lines and to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some degree this is still what they’re doing. Not a lot has changed in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their actual actions here. I think it probably will over the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two years or so as some of this stuff shakes out because clearly something has changed to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make them do this 180 on the Mac Pro because again, they didn’t decide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three years ago that this design needed to be replaced and it took them three years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plus whatever it’s going to be now to do it. No, they decided three years ago to stop developing the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they have been effectively thinking for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever time span between then and within the last few months, they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought, we don’t need to develop Mac Pro anymore. This is a dead product line. It is no longer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco necessary for us to do. We won’t do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s not like they weren’t developing it, but that’s another thing that came out the transcript like that they further emphasize
⏹️ ▶️ John in the details that they did think about upgrading this component or that component. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t say that they actually tried it out. But how else would they have known that they couldn’t support like someone, one of the people
⏹️ ▶️ John present one of the press people present asked them specifically, Oh, so you I think maybe it was Panzerino saying so
⏹️ ▶️ John you were thinking like, Oh, we could increase the the GPU frequency by 300 megastars, but that doesn’t quite seem
⏹️ ▶️ John worth it. So we won’t bother updating it. And one of the Apple people said, Yeah, that’s exactly yet that
⏹️ ▶️ John what you said is what happened. Like so, they stopped developing it in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John ever releasing products, but it seemed like, at least in the beginning, they would love to have done a spec
⏹️ ▶️ John bump or component bump, but they just couldn’t do it because the design they had didn’t support it. What they
⏹️ ▶️ John had decided is basically, we’re not going to invest in entirely new models. So if you can’t update this one, and
⏹️ ▶️ John the engineers say we can’t because they either tested it or ran the numbers or whatever, we’ll look into it again when the next
⏹️ ▶️ John round of GPUs CPUs comes out. But in the meantime, no, you can’t have the budget to make a new one.
⏹️ ▶️ John So semantics say is that means stopping support or whatever. But it does mean that they they they would have liked
⏹️ ▶️ John to have been able to offer speed bumps in this one because it is embarrassing to offer the same high end computer
⏹️ ▶️ John for multiple years without without making it any faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I would nitpick a little about that. I’m not going to go too far into it now for Casey’s sake.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But thanks, buddy. But yeah, I think they could have done more in the meantime,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, they could have updated the CPU, the CPU was thermally fine. It was only the GPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thermal balance that was the issue with that design. They could have updated the CPU to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same model, like the equivalent models in the new families, and then they could have updated the GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to more mid-range, mid-temperature models over the years. Like, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to keep selling three and a half year old parts. Like, they could have Updated it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by using similar class parts there that they already used in that design. It just wouldn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been as Competitive but it is even less competitive with three-year-old parts
⏹️ ▶️ John But they were saying they didn’t think that trade-off was worth it like that Yeah We could have the parts that would fit in there weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John better enough to warrant it now arguably after three years if you had merely Done that thing that you never thought was worth it a couple
⏹️ ▶️ John of times Then you would be farther from where you were or you didn’t even he waited till the end and done it That’s definitely arguable,
⏹️ ▶️ John but You know, at some point I think it really was, you know, so far in the back burner that
⏹️ ▶️ John they weren’t even entertaining updates to it. But what they said in this thing was, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though we could have made incremental improvements, the incremental improvements didn’t seem worthwhile. I guess they couldn’t justify
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever it would take to, you know, basically the overhead of ever doing a spec bump and making new models
⏹️ ▶️ John and doing all this stuff or whatever. I think this is taking everything they said at face value. Who knows what actually, what’s actually going
⏹️ ▶️ John on and how far along they got with any kind of upgrades this thing and at what point they
⏹️ ▶️ John were nixed whether in the idea phase or after it had been almost ready for sale. You can never tell because all we see
⏹️ ▶️ John is what they actually release.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, but anyway, so the point I was trying to make is obviously something has changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Apple’s philosophy or whatever they’re using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make these decisions of whether to invest in certain product lines, whether to update them or not, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were clearly going in one direction for some time and they are still going in that direction for most of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product lines. I mean, you know, nothing has changed in the releases yet, but it’s pretty clear if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at the release schedule since about 2012, everything slowed down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it seemed like they went from releasing as much as they could in most of the product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lines to releasing as little as they could get away with. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is worrisome and that’s what we’ve been complaining about for years. And so it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like whatever was causing that to be the result,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe a change has happened there in their thinking or their decision-making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever else. Something has changed to make Apple flip around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac Pro and on displays and have this meeting and tell us what they were thinking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope that doesn’t just apply to placating the media enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the Mac Pro thing to say, okay, well now Apple cares about us again in the end. I hope that applies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to their entire thinking about all their products. I’m tired of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple seemingly thinking, you know what, if we can’t do something incredibly innovative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and awesome, we’re better off just doing nothing. You know, I think that’s the wrong approach.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they should be saying yes to things that are simple updates to their products. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s one thing to spread yourself too thin with new stuff, new initiatives,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new entire product lines, things like that, that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make an argument, and we have, that they should be really careful with that because it’s a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco risk of spreading themselves too thin. But it is not hard, it shouldn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it’s hard for them to update the Mac Mini with the same processor line but the new version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it, if that’s hard, they’ve set that up wrong. They are a huge company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with tons and tons of money and tons of engineering resources. They should be able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do what I described last week as like boring updates. Like if there’s a new processor, put it in and start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco selling it to all the products that could use it. Like there is no reason why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they need to do things like what the Mac mini is right now, right? Which is like sitting around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with ancient parts being neglected. The last update even made it worse than it was before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s nothing stopping them from doing a new Mac Mini except high up somewhere they have decided
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that is not worth investing any resources into at all. And I think that’s a mistake. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe we’ll see something of that turn around. Again, probably not, especially like the Mac Mini has always been a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco neglected product. But I don’t think that’s, that’s not a good excuse. Like if Apple really wants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like, to fulfill what they say they are, and make the best products for people that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can, and only make great stuff, like they say, that’s what they say they do. that isn’t always true, but that is what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they say they do, and I believe that’s what they want to do, and that is what they want to be,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then they have to set up their product line in a way that allows them, and their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco management structure and their priorities, they have to set this up in a way that allows them to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not leave things in complete neglect for years because they aren’t the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco profitable product lines in the world. They sell a lot of all these things, all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these products. We mentioned last week that the 1% or whatever of max sales is still $200,000
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year and it’s as many as the BMW X5.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If they’re going to have a product line at all, I think it’s worth them keeping it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minimally updated. What that means is not every four years you make it worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What that means is you keep it updated every time you can. You don’t have to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole new case design. I feel like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last week we were discussing how Apple needs the audacity and confidence to release
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boring products sometimes. It seems like they would rather do nothing and neglect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something for years than release something that isn’t that exciting. And I just think that’s the wrong decision.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that they need to start thinking the other way. That might be true for certain products, I don’t know, certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mass consumer fashion type of products. Maybe the iPhone, although that’s kind of its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own schedule anyway. you know it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not true the watch they just gave that a speed bump yeah what’s same on the outside better stuff on the inside actually thicker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but yeah like I feel like they need to bring that same philosophy to all their products are just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know what when when there’s like if the Mac mini can’t be updated at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco least every two years because like you know the stuff that goes into it updated like every year if the Mac mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t be updated at least every two years to whatever’s current for its form factor then it was badly designed and it be redesigned.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe that’s the problem with the Mac Pro too. If the Mac Pro can’t be updated easily,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then they did a horrible job designing it. And so any of their products that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can say that about, I feel like they need to… And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe this is what it took. They need to get some humility in the sense that their designs need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a little more humble, and they have to be okay releasing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a slightly more utilitarian version of some of these products. Not all of them, but some of them. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then they also then have to have the confidence, as I said last week, they have to have the confidence that, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what, it’s okay to release a boring Mac Pro update and a boring Mac Mini update.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s okay. No one’s going to say Apple can’t innovate anymore anybody’s ass because the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mini got updated again. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t think that’s true at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s totally
⏹️ ▶️ John true because the thing he’s talking about, speed bumps, we have a name for them because they were so common,
⏹️ ▶️ John so, so common for a long time, for years and years and years. This was just a thing that happened. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John like model years of cars, they would introduce a model and then there would be speed bumps
⏹️ ▶️ John and then eventually there would be a new model that’s fancier in some way. That’s how Apple products worked for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John And during that time, every time there was a speed bump, nobody says, oh no, Apple can’t innovate
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore because we understood what speed bumps were. fancy new one is in here. It’s just a speed
⏹️ ▶️ John bump to the other one and people go, oh, this is a boring announcement. It’s just a speed bump. But we had a word
⏹️ ▶️ John for it because it was a thing that happened routinely. Little did we know that you may not you may like I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want speed bumps. I want a fancy new one every time you know what’s worse than speed bumps? No speed bumps.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just nothing new at all. So I think there is no
⏹️ ▶️ John PR damage of speed bumps. It’s just that at some point, Apple decided that speed
⏹️ ▶️ John weren’t a thing they wanted to do. And I have my own completely unverified anonymous sources
⏹️ ▶️ John who are not the ATP tipster, or they could be for all we know, because it’s just email, man. I don’t know where the heck this stuff comes from.
⏹️ ▶️ John Who conveyed this again, completely unsourced information that
⏹️ ▶️ John the high end iMac was a thing that Apple’s been playing for a while. So there are hopes for that to
⏹️ ▶️ John have good internals. We’ll talk a bit more about that with more unsourced rumors later. This is the unsourced rumor show.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the decision about the new Mac Pro and display were made fairly recently. And the summary
⏹️ ▶️ John is, neither of these products, meaning the high-end iMac and the new Mac Pro, are a good financial
⏹️ ▶️ John ROI. But there is now a recognition at the senior VP and CEO level that it’s important for the company to
⏹️ ▶️ John make them. And that’s what it boils down to. I can totally imagine all these products not
⏹️ ▶️ John being a good return on investment. It doesn’t mean that they make losses, but good ROI
⏹️ ▶️ John means I put X amount in and I want to get x times some large number amount out
⏹️ ▶️ John and a bad or ROI. I mean, like, it doesn’t seem like we make enough money on speed bump Mac minis to even bother doing
⏹️ ▶️ John that at all. What if we just don’t do it? How did the sales look? It’s like, sales are flat. It’s like, great, we
⏹️ ▶️ John just saved some money. I just increased the ROI in the Mac mini by not speed bumping it and they did they did increase the ROI in
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac mini and I think they can kind of get away with that in the Mac mini with a reasonable amount but like
⏹️ ▶️ John on Mac pros, what if we just don’t ever update the Mac pro because engineering says it would cost a lot of money and require redesign.
⏹️ ▶️ John What do the sales look like? They go down a little bit, but they’re about the same. Great. We just increased the ROI on the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, the what this completely unsourced rumor now conveys is that
⏹️ ▶️ John even though it’s not a good ROI, which is the point I’ve been emphasizing since 2013, it’s important for
⏹️ ▶️ John the company to make these products anyway. And Apple is totally on that page now. And
⏹️ ▶️ John again, another thing you can pick up from the transcript is everything Marco said about frequent updates, that was in all
⏹️ ▶️ John the summary articles, like that Apple says they wanna make a new Mac Pro that can have frequent updates. It is further emphasized
⏹️ ▶️ John in the transcript, like further in detail emphasized, that like they wanna make a Mac Pro that
⏹️ ▶️ John they can make the parts inside of it better on a regular basis. They don’t commit to doing
⏹️ ▶️ John it on any particular schedule, but they emphasize, this is a thing we did wrong, and we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna fix it by doing it right. We want a machine that without redesigning the machine, we
⏹️ ▶️ John can regularly and steadily and easily and cheaply do those things that we used to think
⏹️ ▶️ John are boring, which are called speed bumps. And so you know, that’s why we’re also happy about this is because they didn’t just say we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to make a new new Mac Pro and trust us you really like it just wait. They said specific things about it and the specific
⏹️ ▶️ John things they said and emphasize are exactly what we want. So yay, Apple, let’s now fast forward
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15” MacBook Escape?
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, goodness. Do you have any other thoughts about this particular rumor?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t put too much into it. And the other part’s a bit about how Apple is said to be making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a non-touch bar 15-inch MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John option. Yeah, that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trolling, Marco. I honestly, first of all, I want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be clear, I don’t hate the touch bar that much. I would just given the choice to get it or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not get it right now I chose not get it. And as I said like that’s due to other factors also like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted something smaller and the 13-inch that comes in both touch bar and non-touch bar like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the non-touch bar gets better battery life by a lot and battery life is very important to me right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. So like you know it’s obviously like you know other factors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have go into this decision for everybody. You know, there’s cost considerations for a lot of people. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think there’s actually that much demand to make 15-inch MacBook Pros without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the touch bar. And I also would be incredibly surprised
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if Apple did that for user satisfaction reasons. Now, what they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might do, you know, there’s also a lot of complaints about the pricing of the MacBook Pros because it is higher.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I could see them maybe offering, you know, in the next update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the MacBook Pro generation, whenever that comes. I don’t know when the ships are coming out, maybe this fall or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next spring, who knows. But whenever that happens, it would not surprise me if they made an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entry-level 15-inch model that was maybe, you know, $19.99
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that one had no discrete GPU and no touch bar to hit that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price point. The 15 inch escape. Yeah, basically. You know, like, because in the past, they’ve, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve done that with the GPU selection, which I’ve talked about before, whereas like in the past, like the retina generation and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even the one right before that, they had like the base model, which was about 2000 bucks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had only the Intel integrated GPU, and you had to spend a few hundred more to get one with a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more stuff in it and the discrete GPU. And it would not surprise me at all to see them do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same thing here. So you just give it another one that is $19.99 so people will stop complaining about the price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and has a few things cut out of it and one of them would probably be the discrete GPU and one of them might be the touch bar.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that would be totally fine. But that wouldn’t be because quote everyone hates the touch bar, it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be because they want to hit a price point.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they did also mention the transcripts. People asked some questions about ports. They didn’t say they were going to even entertain
⏹️ ▶️ John this idea, but it was mentioned as an idea that exists just like the Mac Mini is a product
⏹️ ▶️ John that exists in the lineup of having a MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro with legacy ports.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that the only things on the side of it wouldn’t be the Thunderbolt 3 USB-C things. That was brought
⏹️ ▶️ John up as a question and Apple didn’t immediately shut the door and say we are never doing that. And that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, in the Apple world it’s like wow, they’re entertaining the idea of possibly having a MacBook Pro with different ports
⏹️ ▶️ John on the side of it, maybe an SD card slot, I don’t wouldn’t hold your breath for it. But, you know, that’s what Apple does. Like they said, we make
⏹️ ▶️ John a product, we do the best we can see what people think of it, what their behavior indicates. And then for the next
⏹️ ▶️ John one, you know, they said, for the next one, we’re going to do better. And we’ll take what we’ve learned. And, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ John Margo suggestion sounds totally plausible, both because it makes sense from business perspective. And also, because if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what people are telling them, based on like, you know, this rumor of buying refurbished ones, or people buying the escape
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, they’ll do that to fill a market need and the same by the same token like
⏹️ ▶️ John this is something that didn’t get too much discussion in the articles that was mentioned a few times Apple said
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’ve been hearing about for a while that they went they have been going out to pro users reaching out
⏹️ ▶️ John to just regular people like hey you use our products in a pro capacity tell us about it for a long time
⏹️ ▶️ John now leading up to this Mac Pro announcement and they do this stuff like that all the time so just just knowing that it’s like that’s they’re gonna make a new
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac they do that all the time like they say even when you just go to the Apple Store, buy a new Mac or get a new iPhone, sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John they send you a random survey about it, whatever. But they were going to people and saying, tell us how you use our pro hardware. What do
⏹️ ▶️ John you like about it? What do you not like about it? What things are important to you? What things are not important to you to try to gauge?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, whether they should make a new Mac Pro and the decision they can do is yes, they should. And probably like, what do
⏹️ ▶️ John you think about the new MacBook Pros? And what, you know, if we made a new one, what would you want to see in it and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like that? So they’re, they’re doing their job, they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing and hopefully we’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ John this feedback loop closed with the next round of MacBook Pros and I mean
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to call like if the next round of MacBook Pros has the 15-inch escape and
⏹️ ▶️ John has an SD card slot and has better batteries that they supposedly couldn’t fit in this one for
⏹️ ▶️ John some reason I forget if this is the model or it was another one that the rumor was about anyway if they come out with that
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t mean that they made a terrible mistake and have fixed it it just means they’re making their products better over time, that’s what they always do.
⏹️ ▶️ John But for the Mac Pro, I was thinking that this Mac Pro that comes out, that in theory
⏹️ ▶️ John I will buy, is elevated,
⏹️ ▶️ John is worthy of being elevated to holder of the coveted title
⏹️ ▶️ John of Apology Mac Pro, right alongside the Apology Mouse. People don’t remember the Apology
⏹️ ▶️ John Mouse is the mouse Apple released with much fanfare after subjecting the world to the completely
⏹️ ▶️ John circular puck-based mouse on the original iMac and they apologized for that by making a
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse that was not completely circular and therefore easier to align and it was under everybody’s seat
⏹️ ▶️ John at a Macworld Expo keynote and I got one because I was there and
⏹️ ▶️ John the mouse was an under your seat it was like a little card and you go to the back of the room and give someone a card and they give you an apology mouse and I still
⏹️ ▶️ John have it and it’s awesome and I would love an apology Mac Pro and it looks like I’m gonna get one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well you’re going to have one released are you going to buy one
⏹️ ▶️ John I colloquially get one. I’m not going to, it’s not going to be a card under my seat at WWDC that says I get a free
⏹️ ▶️ John But they need permission to watch it,
Touch Macs: “No.”
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, oh and I’m on the topic of by the way, I’m skipping a bunch of the Mac Pro, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John more Mac Pro topic for you, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ John one thing I want to talk about is this from we want to hit every single person who was in that meeting because there’s always like five
⏹️ ▶️ John journalists. This is from Lance Olenov at Mashable. He I quoted this because I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have the transcript at the time, but let’s give him credit. He reported and I pulled it out. When I
⏹️ ▶️ John asked if apple might consider a touchscreen mac schiller shook his head and said no he told
⏹️ ▶️ John me it’s simply not a big request from mac pro customers we’re talking to them and the things they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John most interested in this doesn’t even register he added you can see the full quotes in the transcript if you’re interested but it was basically
⏹️ ▶️ John he just like cut them off and like said no no touchscreen mac this is not something customers interested
⏹️ ▶️ John and how they know what customers are interested it’s because they’re talking to them right this is a great example
⏹️ ▶️ John of i feel like if i was in that meeting I mean I don’t know it’s hard to say what you would do when you’re in these meetings but
⏹️ ▶️ John in a relaxed environment where I didn’t feel pressure to be well-behaved I would say
⏹️ ▶️ John but come on guys you know you can’t just ask customers what they want like you yeah you have to do that but customers
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t always know what they want until you show them no one would no customer would have ever requested the iPhone but guess
⏹️ ▶️ John what when you made it they’re like yes that if you ask them what they wanted they would have been like a fancier version of whatever Nokia
⏹️ ▶️ John smartphone they had right now right I don’t I think I think Mac Pro customers
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t requesting a touchscreen Mac. But if it turns out that the Surface Studio is a good
⏹️ ▶️ John idea that has legs, by the time your customers are requesting it, it’s way too
⏹️ ▶️ John late because of the things you would have to do to your OS or to
⏹️ ▶️ John your app store economy, depending on whether you’re trying to make a Mac into that or make an iOS device into that,
⏹️ ▶️ John will take you a long time. So Apple should not be asking its customers,
⏹️ ▶️ John not be deciding just because its customers don’t want one now that it’s not a good idea. Clearly Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John thinks it’s still not a good idea and I’m sure they’ve experimented with it. I’m sure they’ve used the Surface Studio Pro. They even, they even, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John dumped on the Surface Studios like a drawing experience. Like they basically said the iPad Pro has a better drawing
⏹️ ▶️ John experience. I’m assuming they mean more responsive and less parallax because you know, this, you know, like, which is true, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John It totally true. But I, you know, they may be right that this is not,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, that the Surface Studio idea, it doesn’t have legs in the design community. But the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John I would cite for that is not that the first iteration of this has flaws versus some existing tech,
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s just like, you know, a PR, whatever, like the first version of everything is wonky, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, the first Mac was was Ramstar, the first iPhone, like didn’t even shoot video, right? You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John so you can’t cite that, right? That doesn’t mean and you also can’t cite Oh, our customers aren’t asking this, of course, they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John asking for they’re never gonna ask for the visionary next big thing, because they don’t know they want it yet. But if the server studio starts
⏹️ ▶️ John getting penetration and starts being used by more people. Eventually, they will be saying, Hey, Apple, why don’t you
⏹️ ▶️ John have something like this? And maybe Apple will say, take this humongous iPad Pro and try to find pro apps
⏹️ ▶️ John for it or something. So anyway, that bothered me a little bit because I don’t like to say
⏹️ ▶️ John no, and then you’re not thinking about it is fine. But to cite those reasons, like those are those are
⏹️ ▶️ John not, those are not reasons that should be convincing to you internally. If there are reasons you want to power back to the press
⏹️ ▶️ John to give explanations, that’s that’s fine, but I really hope internally, like, there’s that fear I get, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John when I hear people who are good at talking to the press at Apple, the fear I get that
⏹️ ▶️ John they believe their own hype, that the reasons they give externally for things are also the reasons they
⏹️ ▶️ John use internally to justify their decisions, which I sincerely hope is not the case, because so many of the reasons are
⏹️ ▶️ John bad reasons, you know, like, they’re like, they’re Apple 101 bad reasons,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, the whole history of Apple shows that this is not how you should making decisions because every success you had can, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John defied these or even just like plain old, you know, Ed Catmull, creativity and success hides problem reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Like, it’s fine to tell them to other people, but I really hope you don’t believe, like, because
⏹️ ▶️ John this first server studio has technical flaws that that’s why it’s a terrible idea. If you’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John say we’ve tried the idea internally and we found out that it’s terrible, which they have said in the past, that at least I
⏹️ ▶️ John give more credence to because it shows you are are seriously pursuing the idea but anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John that bothered me I still think the server studio is an idea that has some potential some artists also agree
⏹️ ▶️ John I just hope Apple doesn’t get caught flat-footed on this one because
⏹️ ▶️ John again it’s not like oh well so what if it comes accessible Apple can make one they have a serious software and platform thing to resolve
⏹️ ▶️ John to ever ship anything like that they have to decide whether it’s a Mac or an iPad and either decision they
⏹️ ▶️ John make there are a bunch of other software and ecosystem things they have to do to make that work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah I mean like everyone I’ve known who has bought a server studio or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used one and granted this is not a large group of people but you know it’s like people on Twitter and stuff the responses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are all are pretty consistent which is this is really cool there’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something to this but Windows sucks like we we all know that already like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is no surprise to anybody listening to this show and I like in all likelihood but you know It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clearly like, you know, there’s something here. And I think if Apple chose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do something with that, they might be able to do a really good job with it. I mean, there would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be certain limitations. There’s, you know, every computer input method
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has weird limitations to it. You know, the iPad, you know, has problems with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text entry, unless you do keyboards, but that’s a weird hack. You know, like the computers have problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with, you know, direct interaction and manipulation. Like, everything you do is gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be imperfect, but I think the kind of the model for modern computing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and devices in the last decade has really just been like, well, you know what, we’re gonna embrace that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can’t get this perfect, and we’re going to make things anyway the best we can that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take advantage of what they are and leave what they aren’t to other devices. So, like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, if you didn’t, if you weren’t willing to do things that way, tablets wouldn’t exist, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tablets are this kind of weird hybrid that is good at certain things computers are good at,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terrible at other things computers are good at, but they can do things that computers can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So when Apple says, oh, we’ve tried this and it doesn’t work, it can’t be done, there’s lots of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems or whatever, you could have said the same thing about tablets in 2009,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they made the iPad anyway. They found a slot for it to fit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the way people use things. There were things that it was really good at,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that made it worth doing, despite all the downsides of tablets. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those downsides are still there today, but it doesn’t matter, because the things that it’s good at, it’s really good at for certain people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, any kind of touch or pen Mac hybrid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be the same thing. It might be like, you know, this is kind of weird for these reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over here, but it’s really good at these things. And I think the Surface Studio’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slight success among some artists and stuff shows that to be the case. That like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, drawing on Windows is weird. You know, using a pen and touch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this giant, you know, like drafting table form factor PC, running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a PC OS is weird and does have downsides. But it also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has really cool upsides. So I think there might be something there And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be unfortunate if there was something there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Apple wasn’t able to or wasn’t willing to find it and deliver it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they either are making bad assumptions or that they aren’t willing to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tackle the software integration cost that would result in doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this kind of like Mac iOS touch kind of hybrid OS. And those aren’t small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems, those are big problems. But I do think it would be kind of a shame if there was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really a product here to be had that could be really useful to some people, and that we weren’t ever going to get it because of these other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issues. That being said…
Apple surprised by reactions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the other things I’m concerned about is it does kind of seem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like at an increasing pace Apple is being surprised
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by customer reactions to what they do and That’s a little concerning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like we keep like you know first like when you know with the the 2016 MacBook Pros those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came out and were you know? really met with a lot of ambivalence from people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a lot of criticism, and a lot of anger that they weren’t certain of the things. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple was, allegedly, they were shocked by this. They were like, we thought this was, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same thing with Touch Bar. Wow, we thought this was amazing. It seems like it’s actually not being well received.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How did this possibly happen? Why is this so different from what we expected? And similar with the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It turns out that if you kill your Pro hardware line slowly over years with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco neglect after releasing an already polarizing product, then it turns out people get mad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who like the old thing or wanted the current thing to stay current. And they seem greatly surprised
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that reminds me of something else that I forgot to address there on that exact topic of, hey, what happens if
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t update your Mac Pro for a long time? One of the things they cited in this very strange lead up that I think
⏹️ ▶️ John a few of the journalists who were there noted, this very strange lead up to this announcement at this meeting was let me tell
⏹️ ▶️ John you how few people use the Mac Pro and let me tell you how many pros use
⏹️ ▶️ John other products, how many pros use MacBook Pros. I think I
⏹️ ▶️ John flubbed that. Let me tell you how many people do not use the Mac Pro and instead use
⏹️ ▶️ John iMacs or MacBook Pros, right? That was their whole intro. If you read the transcript, it was all about that,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It’s like, and this is a thing where they’re going to announce, guess what? We’re making a new Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you had just heard the intro, it’s like this is leading up to them telling us why they don’t need to have a Mac Pro anymore, because they’re saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John look at all these pros and we’re defining pros as someone who uses a pro app at least once a week, or someone
⏹️ ▶️ John who uses it every few weeks. And they just all you know, the number one piece of hardware used by our pros
⏹️ ▶️ John is guess what the MacBook Pro the number two piece of hardware you buy our pro is guess what the iMac right and a
⏹️ ▶️ John distant third is this Mac Pro that’s such a small percentage, all that 100% believe.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you don’t update the Mac Pro for three years, of course they’re gonna flee elsewhere. Of
⏹️ ▶️ John course they’re gonna start buying iMacs and MacBooks. What choice do they have? What choice? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and again, I totally understand from a PR perspective, this is the line. This is the move.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just sincerely hope that internally that they are clearer eyed about
⏹️ ▶️ John all this. And you can’t tell. They’re not gonna tell you what they talk about in their boardrooms, what do they put up on their slides. And I really
⏹️ ▶️ John believe they are clearer eyed because remember they had like a leak of the like slideshow
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco many years ago. With the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Samsung thing about it, like we don’t have bigger phones and customers want them.
⏹️ ▶️ John right, we do not have what customers want, we need to make a bigger phone. Yeah, yeah. That’s how you
⏹️ ▶️ John talk to yourself internally in a healthy way, and I’m sure they do, but when you only get the external,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the party line of like, here’s what we have to tell you, it makes me
⏹️ ▶️ John worry sometimes, because it’s just so hard, like they’ll never tell you what they
⏹️ ▶️ John tell themselves internally, you just worry that they believe in their own hype because they are so consistent and disciplined with their message
⏹️ ▶️ John to the outside world and because they choose to offer up these things like this that are just like instantly
⏹️ ▶️ John refutable like oh people who are moving to iMacs and MacBook Pros like well
⏹️ ▶️ John duh like like why even tell us that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco aren’t we all smart here of course
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re moving like what else are they gonna do i guess they could go to windows is the other choice right which is also happening
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way and you’re not gonna tell us about that so anyway sorry to derail there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, anyway, so all that is to say that it certainly has seemed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in recent times that Apple seems to be increasingly surprised that people don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco universally love what they put out there. And that concerns me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I hope in whatever has kind of flipped around or changed that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has caused them to decide to do the Mac Pro again and to start really serving pros
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, again. Whatever has changed to cause that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope it has also fixed whatever was causing them to put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out products with a very different internal impression
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what was going to happen or how they were going to be received than what the public actually delivered. Because that is worrisome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like Apple should not be that caught off guard by the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reactions to their products. You know, Apple is really good most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time at product design. They have a huge history doing it very well. The track record is very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very good. They have incredible talent within the company. And if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re going to do something like the Apple TV remote that is incredibly bad,
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible. Good thing they update the Apple TV every year,
⏹️ ▶️ John have to deal with that bad remote for a long time, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To get something like that out into the world, there are people inside of the company who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are smart enough and clear-headed enough to look at that and say, you know what, this is kind of a bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea and here’s why. But for some reason they weren’t listened to. So I just I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something, whatever has changed that caused this Mac Pro thing, is also going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let them be a little bit more honest about their own product reactions internally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before they decide to release things or go ahead with things so that they are less surprised
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the public doesn’t love every weird, beautiful, useless thing they release.
⏹️ ▶️ John Chatroom points out, a quick real-time follow-up, that Federighi said in the thing that the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John sales didn’t fall off. That’s what I said before when I said, oh, you’re releasing Mac Pro and a trash can and the sales are kind of level.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s another one of those facts that could be 100% true, but it doesn’t tell you what the initial value was. So if the
⏹️ ▶️ John trash can Mac Pro was only appealing to a certain very small subset of people and those people were trapped into
⏹️ ▶️ John repeatedly buying it year after year, even though it didn’t get updated, that would result in flat sales. And because it’s such
⏹️ ▶️ John a small percentage, it would result in, look how many people who we classify as pros, according
⏹️ ▶️ John to this weird metric, buy our much more popular machines. Well, of course they do. Those are your most popular machines. And
⏹️ ▶️ John like, anyway, stats that are true, but do not necessarily prove the thing you’re saying that they
⏹️ ▶️ John prove. It’s a frustration. Yeah, go ahead, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s curious to try try to reason through what Apple is thinking with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regard to their products and how they’re received because, you know, anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve ever spoken to who has spent any amount of time as an Apple employee has always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vehemently said that their biggest critics are themselves. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I completely agree with you guys that from the outside, it seems clear that they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offered up this, you know, Touch Bar MacBook Pro on a platter and said, look at this magnificent piece of electronics,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you should be blessed enough to be able to give us a whole pile of money for one of these. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then it did seem from the outside, like they were surprised that people were like, yeah, we’re good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t know on the inside, it’s, it’s, it’s a bold claim for any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us to make if, if we think that on the inside, they were really taken aback by it. Because as you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, John, you know, the messaging from the out to the outside will always be, Oh no, this is exactly what we planned.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the inside, I bet that they’re being pretty darn honest with themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and maybe the expectation was different, but I don’t think it took them very long to realize that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ooh, this didn’t go the way we thought it did. And now they’re turning around. Now I will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey concede that it certainly seems like the Mac Pro something just went totally wrong there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I concede and agree that it took way too long, way, way, way too long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for them to make any statement about what’s coming and, and the consistent reports,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, be that rumors that it’s been in the last six weeks to six months that they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really gotten in on a new Mac pro like that’s kind of alarming, but at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re turning the ship around. I don’t know. It’s just, it seems weird. It seems weird to me. It’s for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us to assume that, that there aren’t some very vocal critics within
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, there’s totally. Yeah. Like even Marco was saying that they are. It’s just a question of like they don’t win they don’t win the argument because we can tell who wins
⏹️ ▶️ John by what they actually ship
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, and the and like I said, I think that the presentation about the iPhone before they had a big iPhone with
⏹️ ▶️ John it That’s slide. I was trying to quote was like, you know Customers want what we don’t have or something
⏹️ ▶️ John a similar phrasing like they were just totally brutal about we don’t have big phones customers want them
⏹️ ▶️ John We should make one and they did and guess what? It’s all really really well So like I believe internally
⏹️ ▶️ John that everything we’re saying has been said internally by multiple people and it’s just a question of Who wins the
⏹️ ▶️ John argument and my general frustration is because they have executives who are so good at talking to the public
⏹️ ▶️ John so good at talking to the public in terms of they’ll never get off message and also
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they’re willing to throw out things that don’t actually support what they’re saying But sound like they do at first
⏹️ ▶️ John at first glance and I find it frustrating to never be able to get to the no seriously just talk to me like a human being
⏹️ ▶️ John like I guess you don’t have to be off the record on the record they’re never gonna do that but because because
⏹️ ▶️ John in the end it doesn’t matter like who cares about the internal politics so the products are what they are when you ask me questions about
⏹️ ▶️ John it I’m not gonna trash my own products and I’m not gonna tell you about future ones they could be working on a surface studio style
⏹️ ▶️ John computer they could have had it in the works for three years now and they’re trying to get it right they’re never gonna tell you that
⏹️ ▶️ John there you know they’re just gonna say right up to the point when they release it Steve Jobs style that’s not a good idea we don’t think it’s a good idea
⏹️ ▶️ John until they come out and say we finally cracked it here it is and now it’s a great idea because we did it right that’s just the way they
⏹️ ▶️ John work and it can just be frustrating from the outside but uh but yeah when when the when the stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s coming out that tells you that tells you who won arguments and what decisions were made and that
⏹️ ▶️ John we can judge them based on um and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah it’s also it’s hard to like you know like if if you are like you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an engineer working on you know photos app or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are you really going to be willing to take the political hit internally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to criticize a remote that was designed by Johnny Ive or Richard Howarth?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that really going to be a wise career move? The company is set up in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way… It’s a big company. There’s rank. There’s politics internally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big company has this stuff. So like not everybody can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get their voice heard if they have a criticism about a product that is being considered for being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco designed. Like it’s up to… there have to be people who…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has to be set up in a way that like high up people can criticize and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the people who are at the high up levels need to criticize when necessary. And this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is you know like We’ve talked before about this is one of Steve Jobs’ greatest strengths, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the reasons why he had such a great relationship with Johnny Ive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and with the engineering is like there was a great balance of editing and criticism
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and honesty internally that resulted in mostly only great stuff coming out. The hit rate was pretty good there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and when things did come out, there weren’t a lot of controversial or polarizing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attributes of new products as there are now. Now it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost everything that comes out, there’s great advances in some areas, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost all those advances come at some kind of massively polarizing cost.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I feel like that’s happening more recently than it used to. And maybe that’s because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco collaboration or the editing up top is not happening with the same health
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and same balance that it used to.
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Pro users
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you to Audible for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additional 15% of all Mac users use pro apps less frequently, but at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a few times per month. That 30% of the overall Mac user base is what Apple considers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the pro market. I don’t really have a lot to extrapolate from this, but I just thought it was very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting that according to Apple, 15% of users
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uses a pro app frequently, whatever that definition is, be that daily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or multiple times a week or what have you. And then another 15 that uses them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least a few times a month. And I just thought that was a really fascinating statistic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I never expected to come out of that meeting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s a lot higher than I would have guessed for, you know, especially like the 30% total.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s kind of amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they didn’t clearly communicate that. Because if you read the transcript, and there was much debate about this,
⏹️ ▶️ John many people interpreting, but now having read the transcript, it is no more clear to me. The question is,
⏹️ ▶️ John first one is clear 15% use use what they classify as a pro app at least once a week. Totally clear.
⏹️ ▶️ John The second one is the problem because they say this group of users uses
⏹️ ▶️ John a pro app, like once every few weeks or whatever, some longer period. And the question is,
⏹️ ▶️ John does that second group of users include the first grouper clearly thinks it does, because what Apple said was 30%
⏹️ ▶️ John use it, you know, in the longer period and 15 in the shorter, but I can’t tell if the 15 is
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the 30. Like are they exclusive groups? Are they inclusive? And so you can’t tell if the total is 30% or 45.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple could have communicated that better like perhaps in text or in some other fashion or it could have been clarified. So
⏹️ ▶️ John depending on how you interpret what they said in the transcript, and I think it’s a big difference.
⏹️ ▶️ John Are 45% of Mac users classified as occasional or frequent
⏹️ ▶️ John pro users? Or is it 30% and 15 of them are once a week?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way these are very nice high numbers higher than I would have guessed.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Apple picks what it means to be a pro user. They use a pro app which they don’t tell us what it is. They just say oh you know like
⏹️ ▶️ John one of those apps you use to make things right? Well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s pretty clear that what they mean by pro app is anything Apple makes ends in pro. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Logic Pro, Final Cut Pro, also probably like I would say Adobe Creative Suite apps would make sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there and I think it was also very clear they meant Xcode and that includes a lot of people.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would agree with all of those, but there how many other things are in that category So they didn’t give us an exhaustive like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re just going by their metrics and I bet they’re picking something pretty broad For example, there could
⏹️ ▶️ John be just one application that is frequently used that they happen to classify as pro that pulls up the average Everything
⏹️ ▶️ John else these are you know, we have no visibility to these is Apple has all the information So I’m not surprised that number
⏹️ ▶️ John it sounds about what I would think they would because of their very broad definition of pro everything You defined like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think that’s broad but I’m just trying to think of like one other application that they could throw in there. There would be like, Oh, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John if you ever launched terminal, you count as a pro app. You could argue for that. But there’s millions of people who
⏹️ ▶️ John are launching terminal just so they can use their Mac to SSH into something to do something. And they’re not using their Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John in a pro capacity. It’s a it’s a, you know, it’s a glass TTY, as we used to say, back in
⏹️ ▶️ John the day. And that is not a pro use because you can do that from a MacBook adorable, and it works fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you classify terminal as a pro app, something that brings up your numbers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro is a state of mind.
More iMac Pro!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What else do we have to talk about with regard to the Mac Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we can move on to the iMac Pro because there was another completely unsourced rumor And this is the place where we’re dumping them all on this show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of them on this episode. Yep, all of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John one also got reblogged everywhere I’m surprised like people this reblogging. I thought that the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Blogosphere had gotten over that like there’ll be one completely unsourced rumor on some
⏹️ ▶️ John random thing and everybody else will grab it and you’ll see it appear in every site and And sometimes you’ll have to
⏹️ ▶️ John like pour over the site to try to figure out, are they just citing that one thing I read on that totally unsourced
⏹️ ▶️ John blog? And sometimes they don’t link to it, and sometimes they don’t source it until the very end, and you’re trying to figure it
⏹️ ▶️ John out, and you see it in so many places, like well it must be true, I’ve seen it, every Mac site I’ve seen has been telling me about the
⏹️ ▶️ John specs of this new iMac Pro. It’s like, and you trace it all back, and it’s just this one completely unsourced
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Anyway, this completely unsourced thing is giving us supposed specs for the iMac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John And this one says it will have a Intel E3-1285V6. I have no idea what the hell that is.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s nothing. Yeah. 16 gigs of RAM, upgradable
⏹️ ▶️ John or 64, ECC memory, faster SSDs, and up to two terabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John for the SSD size, and AMD graphics with support for VR and Pro apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the hell that means. Thunderbolt 3, USB-C Gen 2, with ta-da, a brand new keyboard for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey All right. Got something
⏹️ ▶️ John for everybody. Alright,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so basically, just to summarize quickly here, Xeon E3,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it might as well not be a Xeon. The Xeon E3 is only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco barely different from the consumer chips the iMac already uses. The only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing it would get you is support for ECC RAM. That’s pretty good though. That is something. And so, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel like if the iMac Pro, Which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just assume whenever we say I’m a pro. It’s in finger quotes if if the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro is something to Handle like you know heavy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco horsepower, then that’s not gonna do it You know that that’s that’s what the old iMac already has had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s something to add Checkmarks to make pro stop complaining about certain things it helps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit in that area And this is in the sense that it enables ECC RAM But that’s about it
⏹️ ▶️ John and Thunderbolt 3 and USB C like I’m assuming it has a lot of PCI Express lanes I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it has any more because you have to go to the e5 series like they There I’m pretty sure it’s the same PCI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Express configuration as the regular i7 high-end chips Because it really is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an i7 with like ECC compatibility basically there’s there’s there’s really nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else to it That’s that’s literally all it is it is a way. You know the the e3 line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line, it mostly exists to make cheap server options. Servers almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always want ECC and server needs almost always use that in data centers and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a way to basically bring the wonderful economy and power of the consumer i7 line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into cheap 1U rack mount servers. There’s not really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge benefit. That’s why, I remember about two years ago, they started selling,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not Apple, but the PC industry started selling Xeon laptops. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was the same kind of thing. It was using this E3 line where it’s like, yeah, that’s not really anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than what we had before. It’s not really anything more than the consumer line. So that’s the same thing here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would enable ECC, but that would be the only advantage that it would have over what we already have in the iMac. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being said, it would also not require any additional thermal headroom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it isn’t a bigger chip, it doesn’t have more cores, it doesn’t have a higher TDP. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be very easy for Apple to configure an iMac with an E3. So if the idea of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac Pro is to do as little work as possible and check off a few more boxes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Pros while changing almost nothing about the iMac, then okay, maybe. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably not, like, that wouldn’t be a very compelling product for almost anybody. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope that isn’t what they’re doing. I hope they’re doing more than that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, if it’s the only one that comes with Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C, then suddenly that becomes a lot more attractive because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not just people who are looking for pro who are buying it. It’s like anybody who wants basically a modern, modern 5K
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac would buy it. It’s like, well, if that’s the only one that has all the new ports on it, I’ll get it. And if they want that fancy new
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard, right? Other other ancillary rumors attached to this, and I keep seeing this, and I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John traced this back to the origin to the fantastical origin but the 8k display
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s working on an 8k display for the next generation of Mac pros 8k display has
⏹️ ▶️ John been floating around for a long time is that a thing that anyone is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well tell just shipped one you see like Dell just shipped one for five grand
⏹️ ▶️ John I know I know all right so yeah right
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco but my question is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah like it does the size math work out to be something reasonable like
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah like how How big would it have to be to keep the current DPI?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think it would have to be like 40 inches. It would have to be pretty big. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we learned from past monitor things and some current day ones where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have that one LG super wide 35 inch or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is, right? So we’ve seen a rough idea of what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitor sizes are and what works and what doesn’t. We can probably agree,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually I’m curious John because you’re probably the contrarian here, what do you think is the largest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inch diagonal measurement that a single monitor could reasonably be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for practical desktop computer use where you wouldn’t have to sit so far back from it that the resolution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be wasted? So my answer to that question would probably be maybe like 32
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inches, maybe at most 35. What do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ John I would go up to 42 because I know people who use televisions as their monitors. Obviously the resolution
⏹️ ▶️ John is horrendous, right? But they’re using like actual televisions as their monitors because they can get them in really big sizes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And why? Because if you have any kind of vision impairment, you can’t buy a computer monitor that
⏹️ ▶️ John makes things as big as you want that doesn’t make it look like you’re looking through a tiny little portal. will get a 42
⏹️ ▶️ John inch television and put it at like a resolution that we would run a 23 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John display at and keep it like normal computer distance from them and just let them see things better. So I think it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ John surprising, surprisingly big.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that wouldn’t be a use case for 8K though. 8K is talking about like… Right, no, no. But you just
⏹️ ▶️ John asked about the inch sizes, right? Now
⏹️ ▶️ John specifically, the reason I’m skeptical of the 8K thing is not because I think 8K is not a thing, right? But just
⏹️ ▶️ John when I envision Apple making a monitor for its Mac Pro, I envisioned 8k as a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that only people who are working like an ILM get so they can look at their 8k video, you know, composites
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, like that, you know, people who are working with source material shot in 8k. But traditionally, Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John left that market to like, the super duper high end color calibrated
⏹️ ▶️ John weird monitors with hoods over them. And like, that type of thing. Apple has never sold one of those. They’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John always sold a really good monitor for regular people that has great color calibration, but always during the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John history of Apple, if you go into a very fancy place that even just does stuff with Photoshop
⏹️ ▶️ John or with special effects or whatever, you will see one of those really weird, I don’t think any scene makes a bunch of them, or
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, one of those really weird monitors just for this specific industry. And
⏹️ ▶️ John right now, I feel like 8K is in that category. The only people who need 8K are people who are shooting
⏹️ ▶️ John 8K footage who wanna see it displayed in 8K. So you want 8K monitor. But
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I’m not gonna be sad if Apple makes one. I think it’ll be awesome. But that seems such like such
⏹️ ▶️ John a narrow thing that Apple’s gonna go from, we’re not making a monitor at all to guess what, we’re making an 8K one.
⏹️ ▶️ John And to get back to what you were saying, Marco, if they do make an 8K one, I hope it’s not the only one because
⏹️ ▶️ John I really don’t, I personally don’t actually want a 40 inch monitor. And I think 8K at 27
⏹️ ▶️ John or 30 inches is overkill for my needs. So if they only make an 8K monitor, A, it’s going to be super expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John and B, oh god, I’d probably actually buy it too, wouldn’t I?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Like, oh yeah. Oh, you would. Oh, you would.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not what I want out of a monitor, and I’m thinking they’re going to make a 5K display, because I think 5K is in the spot
⏹️ ▶️ John where Apple usually makes monitors, and leave 8K to Dell and NEC and ViewSonic
⏹️ ▶️ John and whoever else is making these monitors for professional things that you can already buy today.
⏹️ ▶️ John But we’ll see. 8K rumor won’t die.
NVIDIA Mac support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anything else on the Mac Pro kids?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s always you why do you even keep asking that you know if you just stopped asking that And just moved on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would like catch us off guard
⏹️ ▶️ John No, because there’s more unfortunately Two related
⏹️ ▶️ John stories that were in the notes last week or what least one of them was and we didn’t get to it that May or
⏹️ ▶️ John may not be related the more recent one is Nvidia’s announcement that their
⏹️ ▶️ John new graphics cards have Mac support and you’re like what what do you mean by
⏹️ ▶️ John that there are no Macs with card slots what are you talking about how can you have Mac support
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s like oh yeah all those cheese graters yeah you can put these things in there so Nvidia
⏹️ ▶️ John is offering drivers for its Pascal based GPUs that’s their latest architecture of GPUs and this is
⏹️ ▶️ John the the Titan Nvidia Titan XP is their product they’re launching but the drivers they’re making
⏹️ ▶️ John will work with any Pascal-based GPU apparently on the Mac. And why would they
⏹️ ▶️ John do that? I mean, people with cheese graters can buy them, or people with Hackintoshes
⏹️ ▶️ John who want to run Mac OS and do all this stuff. And Apple doesn’t ship drivers
⏹️ ▶️ John for this because they don’t ship any machines with Pascal GPUs in them, as far as I’m aware. Do they have a Pascal-based
⏹️ ▶️ John one in one of the portables? I forget. Maybe the chat room will tell me. But anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think Apple ships Nvidia anything right now. Apple and Nvidia had seemed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have some kind of major fallout And they I think they ship ATI stuff or AMD stuff now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everywhere Which is kind of a problem like you know we we keep hearing I don’t want to steal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you’re gonna say if you’re gonna say this But we keep hearing from people who know this stuff that like Really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nvidia has has kicked AMD’s butt so hard and GPUs and and things like GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like those like parallel computing cards recently that Apple really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really apparently if they want to be competitive in in these high-end GPU areas They should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really consider going back to Nvidia And it seems like for for whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason possibly some kind of weird like business disagreement or history They have been unwilling to do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far But maybe they should reconsider now that they’re trying to address pros better
⏹️ ▶️ John So that balance of power between AMD and Nv it has swung around It’s not like Intel and AMD
⏹️ ▶️ John where Intel just dominated has come back from the the the bruising of the
⏹️ ▶️ John Athlon age as we discussed in a past show and it’s just dominated for a long time and like Ryzen is just like
⏹️ ▶️ John the turnaround possibly now but AMD Nvidia have traded the lead many
⏹️ ▶️ John times and Specifically for Apple’s purposes not talking about the highest
⏹️ ▶️ John at the high end which Apple’s been ignoring Anyway, very often the ATI or AMD part actually
⏹️ ▶️ John is the right choice for specific things But if your concern is I want
⏹️ ▶️ John the best performance in a given Thermal envelope or whatever and that thermal envelope isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John really really low and video is currently the leader That could change with
⏹️ ▶️ John the next generation of GPUs But either way Apple has nothing and any
⏹️ ▶️ John of its product hasn’t for many many years that could be considered a high-end GPU none Just
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t they don’t sell them. They didn’t even when the 2013 trashcan Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John was brand new. The day it was released, the day it was announced for that matter,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could buy faster cards and put them in PCs. Single cards, double cards, everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty sure, like the last time they had competitive GPUs was when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and at the time I bought the 2008 Mac Pro and you could for $200 get an NVIDIA 8800
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GT and at the time that was like an upper mid-range card and we were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, oh that’s That’s a nice option, thanks. Yeah, it was. It was a
⏹️ ▶️ John a long time ago. And always, there have been third party people like buying PC cards
⏹️ ▶️ John and flashing the firmware and stuff. And it was just a matter of like, does Apple support this GPU architecture? Because if they supported
⏹️ ▶️ John it, sometimes the drivers would work with the higher end cards that were just overclocked or just had more VRAM and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. And so this announcement by NVIDIA has a lot of people thinking, oh, maybe the new Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro that Apple just admitted they were creating like three days ago, maybe it’s going to use Pascal-based
⏹️ ▶️ John GPUs. And you know what? That would be awesome. And I hope it does because they’re really good, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But I can’t draw any kind of sane connecting line between Nvidia
⏹️ ▶️ John supporting Macs with its current crop of lines and anything that Apple’s gonna do by its as
⏹️ ▶️ John yet unknown to anybody outside Apple Mac Pro project. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t connect those lines, but I really sincerely do hope that an option on the
⏹️ ▶️ John new Mac Pro is the highest of high-end video cards from NVIDIA, because
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be awesome. And they kept talking about how people want a single really fast GPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John and this is a single really fast GPU. For all we know, Apple could have made a deal with NVIDIA for them to develop these drivers,
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s the only line I could draw. It’s like, why the heck is NVIDIA doing this? Are they so desperate for money that they want the seven people
⏹️ ▶️ John who have Hackintoshes to buy this card and put it in? Like, why? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John making drivers for, making Mac drivers for a video card is non-trivial.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a difficult thing to do working with Apple’s, you know, driver stack so different from Windows,
⏹️ ▶️ John and for what benefit. So maybe there was some kind of agreement or money changing hands
⏹️ ▶️ John to have Nvidia do this sometime in the past, and they’re just like, well, while we wait to
⏹️ ▶️ John be in the new Mac Pro, we’ll sell this to people or whatever. I don’t know. But anyway, I’m excited about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John People who have cheese graters that are more modern than mine that it can actually run this. I believe I can’t run this in mine because
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it requires more
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco PC. Yeah, I can’t even.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Anyway, this seems like an exciting announcement for a very small group of
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac nerds. I’m excited by the prospect of a very super high end GPU and a future
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro. But for now, I can’t I can’t connect the dots on this to
⏹️ ▶️ John say that this means anything about what GPU the next Mac Pro is going to have.
Imagination GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John And related to this is the older story, which is about Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John moving away from imagination The power be our power VR GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John that it uses in all of its iOS products for many many years speaking of of GPUs Apple’s GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John and its iOS devices have been awesome They have been Amazingly good. They always show
⏹️ ▶️ John that graph that shows look how crappy our GPUs were in the beginning of the of the iOS devices
⏹️ ▶️ John before we even called it iOS. And look at this curve! Every time we come out with a new product the GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John is like super duper faster. It’s like it’s not linear. It’s like going up like a hockey stick. We are kicking
⏹️ ▶️ John butt on GPUs and look what we can do with these games and all you know. And it’s true. They’ve been doing a
⏹️ ▶️ John really good job with the GPUs. And for I think for the entire life of iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John devices they have been using PowerVR based GPUs with intellectual
⏹️ ▶️ John property licensed from Imagination Technology. And Imagination Technology
⏹️ ▶️ John put out this press release, this very sad, angry press release that’s like, Apple tells
⏹️ ▶️ John us they’re not going to be using our intellectual property anymore. And Apple, by the way, is like
⏹️ ▶️ John more than 50% of our revenue. But we think basically it’s impossible
⏹️ ▶️ John to make a modern GPU without infringing our intellectual property, which by the way, is another reason the patent system is ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, little does Apple know, it is literally impossible to make a modern GPU without our intellectual property,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So we own these ideas forevermore, or like, whatever the ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ John term limit is on patents.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco patents are to foster innovation. Without patents, nobody would innovate.
⏹️ ▶️ John No one would ever be able to make a GPU without these ideas that are now obvious to everybody who is, what is it,
⏹️ ▶️ John obvious to people well-versed in the art, anyway, I hate patents. But, you
⏹️ ▶️ John But but Apple says they’re they’re not licensing this technology, which means that Apple is going
⏹️ ▶️ John to make GPUs for its iOS devices, presumably, or you know, whatever they’re going to do, they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John going to make GPUs or they’re going to make GPUs licensed from somebody else, or they’re going to make their own. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has as Phil Schiller points out, or one of the people points out, one of the best chip design groups
⏹️ ▶️ John in the world, arguably the best going based on how good their system on chips are for their devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like, Have you seen the benchmarks of the new Samsung S8 or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It matches the performance of the iPhone 6S.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re like two generations behind. Apple is doing amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re making these chips themselves. Yes, it’s ARM-based technology and they have that license from ARM to use the instruction set
⏹️ ▶️ John and all that other stuff or whatever. And yes, they’re licensing GPU stuff from Power BI or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John make no mistake, Apple is designing these things. since the confusingly named Swift CPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I think was the first one that they really did themselves from scratch. Yeah, it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco was the iPhone 5, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they’re doing amazing. So I have zero doubt that if Apple wanted to,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have the in-house expertise to make an amazing GPU for the next iPhone. Whether or not it infringes
⏹️ ▶️ John on patents, who the hell knows, let the lawyers fight it out. I think Apple’s gonna win that one because they have more money and that’s how our legal
⏹️ ▶️ John system works. They’re like, you know what? F you, imagination, we’re gonna buy your company.
⏹️ ▶️ John done and done we win and that’s and that’s their worst case scenario so apple will
⏹️ ▶️ John not lose this or they could be licensing
⏹️ ▶️ John someone else’s thing but combining the new mac pro rumor which now affects everything
⏹️ ▶️ John that that is discussed surrounding the mac it’s like does this mean apple is going to make their
⏹️ ▶️ John own gpus for the new mac pro and while i think that would be amazing and fantastical
⏹️ ▶️ John i’m gonna say no yeah that makes no sense because because Apple already
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t like the ROI on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John reportedly and in fact, they seem to not like it so much that they didn’t even make one. They just barely
⏹️ ▶️ John decided to make one. If Apple’s making a GPU architecture, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John making it for iOS devices. And I have a hard time believing that a GPU design
⏹️ ▶️ John could even be adapted from iOS devices to something like the
⏹️ ▶️ John new Mac Pro. So I’m thinking the new Mac Pro will not have a GPU Apple’s own design
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m hoping it will have a super high-end and video GPU or at least the the best whatever the best
⏹️ ▶️ John architecture is that AMD has I forget what this is called is it Maxwell and I remember
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s another Nvidia one um and I don’t think the
⏹️ ▶️ John the imagination rumor is connected to the Mac Pro either it does make me kind of excited about what the next
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone you know and the GPUs are gonna look like there because like presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is ditching imagination for some benefit. And I don’t think the benefit
⏹️ ▶️ John is the relatively piddling amount of money they pay. It’s like only only $75 million a
⏹️ ▶️ John year, which is a lot of money to imagination technologies. Apparently, it’s like, you know, Apple is their biggest customer.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like more than half of their revenue. But Apple sneezes and $75 million comes out and falls on the carpet like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John how much that’s how much they spend for snacks at the defunct Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John car project, right? Yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they want to do it for the same reason they do everything they want to own and control the blah, blah, blah, technology, blah, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I bet they have some good ideas about, you know, that chip team is like, we have some
⏹️ ▶️ John good ideas about how to do a GPU. In ways that are
⏹️ ▶️ John there our own our own ideas. Why don’t we do it? Why do we need this imagination technology stuff anymore? We have all
⏹️ ▶️ John the expertise in house to make an amazing GPU ourselves. We don’t need them anymore. It will free us up
⏹️ ▶️ John to do what we want. Now, there’s a couple of good articles about this is saying, all right, so Apple could do this, but
⏹️ ▶️ John there is an entire software ecosystem built up around the power of your architecture
⏹️ ▶️ John that take advantage of features of the power of your architecture that are tuned
⏹️ ▶️ John to work well on on that architecture in terms of, you know, for games, you can get really low level type
⏹️ ▶️ John of stuff like things that perform particularly well on a Particular chip with a particular set of execution units in a particular
⏹️ ▶️ John arrangement with particular latencies That’s how game development works a lot of the time especially as you get up towards the high end
⏹️ ▶️ John If Apple makes a new GPU that has very different characteristics or that doesn’t support
⏹️ ▶️ John any of these weird power VR specific extensions that are there are things that
⏹️ ▶️ John game developers can use or Could have used in the past that may be a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John for iOS game compatibility stuff like metal Metal may help with this because
⏹️ ▶️ John presumably Metal provides, I mean it’s less of an abstraction layer
⏹️ ▶️ John than OpenGL but it’s more than like writing against the bare metal of the GPU.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there could be trouble waters ahead for iOS game performance but I have faith that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John knows about all these issues and will have software based solutions and because their new GPU will be so much
⏹️ ▶️ John faster than the old ones, games tuned for PowerVR performance specifics they’ll get by the new one just because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so much faster so this this development this sort of corporate divorce
⏹️ ▶️ John divorce makes me excited to see what what the next GPU will be
⏹️ ▶️ John like and I assume it’s like that not this year’s one but next year’s like we’ll find out as soon as the iPhone 8
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever they’re gonna call it comes out and someone checks it out and see sees if it has a power VR based
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU in there but I’m kind of excited about that but I don’t think it’s related to the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I agree completely. There’s no way that is connected to the Mac Pro. The timing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a coincidence. Yeah, there’s no way. I also think, you know, with the idea of like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changing it and being a problem for games, I don’t think it’s that big of a deal because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there aren’t that many people writing high-performance, low-level game engines
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at that, you know, at that level for iOS or for anything really. There’s not a lot of original
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low-level game engines being written at any given time. Most games that come out are using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco someone else’s engine. So it’s a relatively small number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of engine providers and authors that will need to adapt to any changes like this anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the fact is, enough iPhones are sold that if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new iPhones from this point forward have this architecture, every mobile game developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to demand support for that. And so the engine makers are going to do it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s really not an issue. Like that’s that’s not going to be a problem at
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s still it’s still better. It’s same thing on game consoles, consoles these days where like game consoles will
⏹️ ▶️ John feel free to rev their hardware and then console game developers just deal with it like
⏹️ ▶️ John when the PS, PS4 Pro comes out or the Scorpio like this like, well, the hardware changed in a way
⏹️ ▶️ John that we have never optimized for it. But then again, also the hardware is faster as this new GPU will faster
⏹️ ▶️ John as well. And they figure it out because that’s how you make that’s how you make the money. So you sell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks for our three sponsors this week, Squarespace, audible and fracture. We will see you
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T.
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, accidental, tech podcasts so
Post-show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So once I went back and listened to the tape last time it certainly does appear that I’m going to win the bet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in all likelihood because I never I never bet on it being unmodified. I just said if the 2013
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Pro is still for sale on January 1st.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone did provide a link that I actually removed from follow-up that was like see look they didn’t change the name of it and they
⏹️ ▶️ John gave me a link to the page that talks about the 2013 but I couldn’t find anything on the page that said
⏹️ ▶️ John that it wasn’t just like a page that hadn’t yet been updated like nothing about it indicated that that page was aware that
⏹️ ▶️ John they did the reconfiguration thing but anyway I everything that I’ve seen indicates
⏹️ ▶️ John to me that this is just a price drop and a model elimination and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John about them will be exactly the same including the name and the model number and
⏹️ ▶️ John so even on the strictest possible definition they could still be for sale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah so I won’t declare victory until January 1st I am confident that I’m most likely to
⏹️ ▶️ John You should just start scrounging for money in your couch, Casey, each day, if you find any change there. Put it in a little
⏹️ ▶️ John jar, and by the end of the year, you’ll have $5.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, remember I found $5 at the end of last week’s story, so we’re good. Mm-hmm. Uh-huh.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey At some point,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t worry, at some point we’re gonna talk about something else. Just that time is not today. I’m skeptical.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s probably not until 2018.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Actually, no, and then in 2018, it’ll be,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, where’s the Mac Pro? Where’s the Mac Pro? Where’s the Mac Pro? It’s not here. Where’s the Mac Pro? It’s not here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why isn’t it here? Apple is doomed. Where’s the Mac Pro? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John not here. They already said,
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t even say it was gonna come in 2018. So we’re already saying it might not be here until 2019.
⏹️ ▶️ John So our expectations are appropriately set.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey We will be hopeful. Oh, like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gonna stop YouTube.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah, it’ll be totally, like this, seriously though, this announcement that they’re doing this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John gets rid of a lot of anxiety. It’s like, it’s just a matter of, we used to before say it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a matter of when, but we didn’t know. Now we know, they put a stake in the ground. They said words, they made promises,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re gonna keep them, like it’s gonna happen. It’s gonna happen for us, I know it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then we can complain about what they release, that’s where the good stuff is. After they release something or announce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Everything in between too, like if they preview it at a fall event or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WBDC or whatever else, then we can nitpick the preview to death. That’s at least two episodes.
⏹️ ▶️ John say like, they said they were gonna make the parts upgradable, but everything is soldered to this motherboard. What were they thinking? Did they
⏹️ ▶️ John just mean that they’re gonna upgrade it? Maybe they won’t even upgrade it if everything is soldered on. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll have fun with air. But they said so many of the right things. This is gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John a long honeymoon period for me to just imagine how awesome this thing’s gonna be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then a three year long just tirade about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how it doesn’t meet your every expectation.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still even considering buying the iMac Pro. Like, in addition to
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac, it’s been so long since I bought a Mac, I should do a Marco thing where I’m gonna buy the iMac Pro, keep
⏹️ ▶️ John it for a little while, sell it, buy the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro. Yeah, because I had the Mac Pro for only about nine or 10 months before the 5K came out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I didn’t lose that much money on it. Like, I lost, I think, like 15% or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over, like, you know, almost a year. I consider that pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you think a MacBook Adorable update is imminent? Because I’m really itching to buy one.
⏹️ ▶️ John You mean a speed bump? Sorry, Apple doesn’t do those anymore. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my God. It honestly is a very good question, like where the heck that is. Because it sure seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, that probably should have come out this spring. Pretty sure the chip was available, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know. See, now we don’t know. Before we could just say, ah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just Tim Cook being, you know, Tim Cook. Now we can say maybe they’re rethinking things. Maybe like now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can be a little more optimistic and be like, well, maybe they’re doing something else.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, like I said, when you talked about the Mac mini, just because they’ve realized that if you want a
⏹️ ▶️ John high-end computer, you have to update it. Like they’ve clearly made that realization that A, they do want to have a high-end computer and
⏹️ ▶️ John B, you can’t have a high-end computer that you don’t update it, right? That doesn’t mean they made that same realization about anything
⏹️ ▶️ John else in the product line because they could be saying, as you go down the line, it’s like, you can have a MacBook Adorable that we
⏹️ ▶️ John never update. It’s not a high-end product. Nobody cares about performance. It’s fine. Why waste time updating
⏹️ ▶️ John it every year with speed bumps? You know, and like that’s one of those things, like so many things that Apple reconsiders,
⏹️ ▶️ John like why does the computer have to have an optical drive? Why do batteries have to be removable on laptops, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John All these things that other companies won’t consider. One of the recent ones that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has adopted is, do you have to speed bump computers every year just because new components
⏹️ ▶️ John are available? And Apple’s answer was, no, no you don’t. Like our sales don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John seem to suffer from it. In fact, maybe they do better because we built up all this demand among the people who know that our computers are old
⏹️ ▶️ John and crappy, that we have these big spikes when we release new things. So maybe you don’t have to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, on the high end, they’ve changed their mind. But the whole rest of the line, I will need to
⏹️ ▶️ John be convinced that they’ve realized that speed bumps are a thing that they should go back to doing. And honestly, I don’t know if they
⏹️ ▶️ John should, quote unquote, should for the business. We all want them. Tech nerds get upset that
⏹️ ▶️ John like speed bumps don’t happen. But maybe they’re right for non-high-end products that the customers
⏹️ ▶️ John for those products don’t care and we’ll just keep buying the MacBook Adorable and update it every two years or
⏹️ ▶️ John every three years or whatever and it will be fine. And honestly, I can kind of get on the same page with them
⏹️ ▶️ John if they have the numbers to back that up because the role of those products is not to be the very fastest thing you can get.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when you do comparisons against competitive products, it’s like, well, but we got macOS. You can’t, it’s not an Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John to Apple’s comparison, haha. Because who cares if you can buy a Dell laptop for way cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ John that has updated components? No Mac OS. So that could be
⏹️ ▶️ John what they’re saying. Now, I hope they go back to speed bumps because I think it’s just a healthier thing to do overall
⏹️ ▶️ John and the lack of speed bumps makes technical people angry at Apple, which spills over into our attitudes about everything else
⏹️ ▶️ John that they do. But who knows? But anyway, they made the right decision on the Mac Pro. Again, I’m still basking in that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John You know, if you look at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, if you look at the Mac rumors, buyers guide, MacBook, don’t buy MacBook Air, don’t buy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Pro. I Mac don’t buy Mac Mini don’t buy Mac Pro by
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I can’t I can’t believe they did that. Like it’s like a bug in their systems. Like, yeah, I know they
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote updated it by changing prices. But like, you got to turn that back
⏹️ ▶️ John to don’t buy. Like don’t don’t buy that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, there’s no way that is earned. There’s no way that’s a bug. That has earned even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less than the new badge was when we started this show for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the 2012 Mac Pro. Is
⏹️ ▶️ John that still that way? Because I saw those same screenshots when people screen shot, look at this, isn’t this funny? Their buggy software
⏹️ ▶️ John put it as a buy. But if it’s still there, maybe it means someone at MacRumors actually thinks… I looked a minute ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco They need to change that. It’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. It’s right there, right on top. Buy now, it says buy now, price drop. So it at least clarifies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s not an update. But don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John buy now. No one should buy those unless you have to, unless you know you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to because like whatever reason that Casey’s coworker needs to buy them. But regular people
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t buy those. It did not improve. No. And if the price dropped, if they had dropped
⏹️ ▶️ John the price to 50 bucks, yeah, definitely buy, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But they didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s still pretty darn expensive. You should not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy it. Yeah. Now to get a good configuration, instead of spending $7,000, you’ll spend $5,000.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably not worth spending for an almost four-year-old
⏹️ ▶️ John for a computer that your phone beats in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco certain benchmarks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well it’s not that bad but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not great. There’s a refurb MacBook Adorables.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know my brain is telling me no but my heart is saying yes. Don’t just don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want one though I’m sick of having an iPad that doesn’t let me get anything done on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Imagine if iPads actually worked for getting things done that’d be amazing. Oh Oh my god.