catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

253: I Think I Ordered One

NVIDIA in Macs, fancy headphones, and a lot more about the iMac Pro.

Episode Description:

Sponsored by:

  • Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
  • Backblaze: Online backup for $5/month. Native. Unlimited. Unthrottled. Uncomplicated.
  • AfterShokz: Headphones powered by bone-conduction technology.

MP3 Header

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

Chapters

  1. Follow-up: Casey’s Wrangler
  2. Follow-up: iMac Pro RAM upgrades
  3. Follow-up: iMac Pro input devices
  4. Follow-up: Upgradeable Mac Pro
  5. Sponsor: AfterShokz
  6. iMac Pro orders
  7. #askatp: Open headphones
  8. #askatp: Car magazines for kids
  9. #askatp: ECC RAM benefits
  10. Sponsor: Backblaze
  11. NVIDIA GPUs in Macs?
  12. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
  13. More iMac Pro details
  14. Ending theme
  15. Post-show: Access and bias

Follow-up: Casey’s Wrangler

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Feel like our world is a little upside down.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you roll over in your Wrangler?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I didn’t roll over my Wrangler, but we’re gonna talk about that Since you brought it up I guess we can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just start with follow-up and coincidentally in the very first item in follow-up We have more Wrangler talk to have awesome

⏹️ ▶️ Casey first of all I wanted to publicly commend both John and Marco for for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John make giving Marco the Material with which to make a truly hilarious pre-show

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I had several people very kindly reach out to say Oh my god, John was on fire

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, oftentimes it was John was on fire beating you up. But at the very least it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Like

⏹️ ▶️ John First of all, you brought the topic of the show and said I have a problem.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m thinking about a

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Wrangler So it’s you saying

⏹️ ▶️ John convince me not to get a Wrangler. And so I was trying to do what you asked That’s not a problem.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’re saying I you know, I’m into Thinking about Jeep Wrangler, but you phrase it as like

⏹️ ▶️ John a problem situation

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if you were really enthusiastic about it, saying like, look, I’ve decided to make a life change. I have found

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who I really am now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and who I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really am is a Jeep Wrangler person like we would have been supportive of you as your friends.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can I if I get a Wrangler if I end up with a Wrangler can I have can I try to find a license plate that’s T

⏹️ ▶️ Casey O P L I S S?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey you are not allowed to do that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You are not allowed to have a giant list pun for the rest of your life.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, come

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco on. No.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, so we have some follow-up with regards to—oh, no, you distracted me. I was trying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to compliment you two and you’ve distracted me. So anyway, so yeah, Marco did a very good job editing down 30 minutes of garbage

⏹️ ▶️ Casey into eight minutes of pure comedy gold that was mostly on account of John giving Marco the raw material

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with which to carve comedy gold out of it. So thank you to the two of you. Even though I am slightly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey annoyed with you, I still find that conversation hilarious. But we have some follow-up about Wranglers

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from David Crawford, who writes in, Casey, you can tell John that this is the guy with the yellow 458 Speciale. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably, I hope I pronounced that right. I think I did. Anyway. Quite a fullio. Yeah, exactly. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can drive anything I want. But when I run out to the garage to grab a car to run around town, I jump in my Jeep Wrangler.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey My Jeep is heavily modified and was not intended as a daily driver, but I find myself driving it more than anything because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fun and nimble around town. Any thoughts, John?

⏹️ ▶️ John I buy the fun part. Nimble?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair. I think nimble in this context means it’s not a terribly long car, although

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe it was affordable.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John like, it spends a lot of time on two wheels. It’s very nimble.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, God. Here we go. Here we go.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the thing about the Jeep Wrangler, like, specifically for you. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John it strikes me, well, first of all, for this choice of cars, if you’ve got a Ferrari, a fancy Ferrari or a Jeep,

⏹️ ▶️ John neither one of those is really a great car to, you know, drive around as a regular

⏹️ ▶️ John car because you’re not going to take your Ferrari to try to like go grocery shopping and scrape the

⏹️ ▶️ John front end trying to go into a gas station or whatever. And a Jeep, like, like fun cars

⏹️ ▶️ John like that, whether they’re fun, sporty cars are fun, like off roading cars, they’re not really fun to go on like

⏹️ ▶️ John a 45 minute highway trip in a Jeep Wrangler or Ferrari, like that’s not what they’re about. So

⏹️ ▶️ John it seems to me that you’re still as far as we can tell, looking for like a, they call it daily driver, like

⏹️ ▶️ John a car that you can use every day. And yeah, you can use a Jeep every day and you could use a Ferrari every day, but

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re both, there’s a lot of big compromises with both of those things. And thus far, you’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John been looking at cars that are more like regular cars that also happen to have a fun side to them,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? So that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco why

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think either one of these cars is a good choice for you. So forget about the 458. I know that was the second

⏹️ ▶️ John one on your list, but cross

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it off. Yes, totally within my budget. I don’t know. I just I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought it was funny nevertheless that here’s someone that could really drive anything and they chose

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they choose to drive their Jeep.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why I suggested a go kart. Remember that? I even was like, I’m making a joke. I don’t know if that was cut or whatever. I suggested a go kart

⏹️ ▶️ John because like, it’s like a it’s like a fun toy to have like you can, you know, tool around on that and

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s it’s a vehicle but you’re not going to bring on roads but it’s it’s just fun, right? It’s way more fun than you would think

⏹️ ▶️ John because you’re so low to the ground and even one doesn’t go fast, it feels fast, and it corners, and you know, you’ve driven to go-karts, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re fun, and it gets that out of your system so you can just have a regular car that like works and keeps out the weather and

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t roll over and is it’s safe and all that good stuff.

Follow-up: iMac Pro RAM upgrades

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. All right, we got to get out of neutral. I’m sorry. Let’s talk about the iMac Pro since we’re not going to do any

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that today. We can dive right in and say that the iMac Pro RAM upgrades and this is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Rene Ritchie, I guess, saying you can’t upgrade the RAM yourself, but you can take it to an Apple store or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey certified service center and they can upgrade for you. What now?

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a right from Rene Ritchie. So I’m assuming it’s true means right from Apple’s mouth.

⏹️ ▶️ John we said that nothing is upgradable, meaning like if you were to open it up yourself, you’re avoiding your warranty or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah, but apparently you can bring it to Apple and they’re all great. So as far as I’m concerned, I mean, as Marco

⏹️ ▶️ John pointed out, I think, and Tweet replies to this, like then you have to pay Apple’s prices for RAM, which is ridiculous,

⏹️ ▶️ John but at the very least, it shows Apple not entirely closing the door. I wonder if that also applies to like SSDs.

⏹️ ▶️ John Could you take it to Apple and say, please take out this SSD and I will pay your crazy price

⏹️ ▶️ John to have twice as big an SSD and you’ll put it in there for me. But

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I still think the best bet is to just buy it how you want to configure it because all these upgrade options seem like

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re expensive. But you know, this is, I guess this is official from Apple. If they’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John do the upgrade, then at least that’s one option available to you if you don’t mind the cost.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and there are also third party Apple authorized service centers. So maybe you could get them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do it for you with third party RAM that would be cheaper. but that’s a big maybe,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it probably wouldn’t be that much cheaper, relatively speaking, and then if you ever had to send it back into Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know they’re gonna see that, and they’re gonna make you remove it, or have a problem with it, or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco something before they’d service the machine, or something. So it’s like having

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the downsides of having third-party RAM in your Mac that have been forever, of trouble with Apple service

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes, and everything else, everyone’s gonna blame that for any problems you have, but with the added complexity

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you really can’t get to it yourself to swap it in and out, and it probably won’t be that much cheaper.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I feel like this, there’s basically two reasons why most people want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco upgradable RAM in a Mac. Reason number one, which is probably by far the most common,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to save money from Apple’s somewhat inflated costs and get cheaper RAM

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from somebody else. Reason number two is to buy it with one amount of RAM that you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can like afford today, and then in a few years, increase the amount of RAM to extend its

⏹️ ▶️ Marco useful lifetime, and by that point you will probably have more money and also the RAM will be cheaper.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This seems to maybe solve the second one, but it almost

⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly won’t solve the first one. And I feel like the first one is probably the more common

⏹️ ▶️ Marco case among people who would be following this kind of news and making this kind of comment. So while it is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice that the RAM is upgradable by somebody, the fact that it’s not really upgradable by you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it might as well be not upgradable like I’m with John I would strongly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco suggest that you order it with the amount of RAM that you will want for long haul if at all possible.

Follow-up: iMac Pro input devices

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m a pro input devices. I thought we had talked about this on the show very briefly, but you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can get both the Blacked out magic mouse and a blacked out trackpad and something like 150

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bucks for both of their bouts I don’t think I remember exactly how

⏹️ ▶️ John much they can yeah the configurator wasn’t up when we were recording the show But we speculated like oh What do you

⏹️ ▶️ John have to buy two iMacs to get both of them because they? Apple gave the reviewers both input devices which

⏹️ ▶️ John seemed weird if that’s not a thing that you can buy but it totally is a thing you can buy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, and I I personally don’t have any particular interest in the trackpad. I know it works

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a lot of people. It’s not really my cup of tea. But if I were to order an iMac Pro, which sitting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey here now I am not currently planning on, there is zero chance that I would not get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey both devices because even if I didn’t end up using either the mouse

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or the trackpad, you know that you’ll be able to sell that thing for a billion dollars

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John online. Declan’s

⏹️ ▶️ John college fund

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey where you sell a black

⏹️ ▶️ John trackpad.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re absolutely right. Unless there’s some sort of software, like DRM for lack of a better phrase,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that prevents them from working with anything but an iMac Pro, which would be

⏹️ ▶️ John ridiculous. Yeah, the DRM is that it would clash and offend your sensibilities. Yeah, well,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fair point. I don’t know. I wonder genuinely, once these start showing up, how much the keyboard…

⏹️ ▶️ Casey How much do you think, let’s start with Marco, how much do you think a keyboard, what is it, the Magic Extended

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Keyboard, whatever it’s called, that and either Another pointy device, doesn’t matter which one, just one pointy device, how

⏹️ ▶️ Casey much do you think that combination will go for on like eBay or equivalent?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m guessing it goes for a little above what they would cost at retail. I don’t think it’s going to be a crazy amount.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey You don’t think so?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if it is a crazy amount, it’s going to be only very briefly once they are in people’s hands. I don’t think this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to be as big of a deal. Because these are already not cheap, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The trackpad’s about $160 by itself. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John going to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like that. If you buy it at retail, and the keyboards, I don’t know how much the keyboard is, and And the mouse is $100, I think, or $80.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, yeah, maybe for the $160 trackpad, you might get $200. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the first week, you might get $250. But I wouldn’t expect it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a bigger difference than that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would think it would be more.

⏹️ ▶️ John I agree. I don’t think it’s going to be a big premium. I was going to say like a $50 premium for the first week and then settling

⏹️ ▶️ John down after that, especially when people find out that the keyboard bends.

⏹️ ▶️ John We got some I didn’t put it in a fault, but we did get a bunch of feedback about that from people who

⏹️ ▶️ John had bent keyboards. And some people actually did say that as far as they’re aware, they got

⏹️ ▶️ John it and it was fine out of the box and they used it for several months and eventually the middle touches when it didn’t used to

⏹️ ▶️ John and to the point where it starts to like spin, you know, I don’t know if that’s from the force

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco of typing

⏹️ ▶️ John or from like heat or something, but you know, like when if if the contact point becomes the middle

⏹️ ▶️ John and the the sides start to lift up and it can sort of start rotating itself. That’s no good. super weird.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, if it’s happening, it’s happening, but that’s super weird.

Follow-up: Upgradeable Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, people wrote in and pointed out to us that we missed talking about something,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’m pretty sure we missed it because it didn’t happen until after we recorded. And that is that the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro, not the iMac Pro, but the Mac Pro will be quote unquote upgradeable.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so this is from an Apple press release. It reads, in addition to the new iMac Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is working on a completely redesigned next generation Mac Pro, architected for pro customers who need the highest

⏹️ ▶️ Casey performance, High-throughput system and a modular upgradeable design as well as a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey new high-end Pro display Now this isn’t really news. I don’t believe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it is Apple saying yet You know one more time no really everybody

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is a thing or well will be a thing maybe one day And it should hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ Casey solve a lot of the problems that you guys justify it well I shouldn’t say you too, but in general people were complaining about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that is upgrade ability so Marco thoughts on that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean this was pretty much my fault like we you know we recorded and I and I had said like you know be careful to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know tame your expectations and in upgradability because I thought all Apple had said before that point

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was that it would be modular not necessarily upgradable But then they released this press

⏹️ ▶️ Marco release with the iMac Pro, which I think was actually earlier that day We just didn’t see it that says literally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a modular upgradable design

⏹️ ▶️ John You can bring your pessimism back and say that just the RAM will be upgradable There’s always room for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco worry. And also, it might be a situation like what I was describing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the iMac Pro RAM, which is like, who can upgrade it? Is only Apple going to be able to upgrade

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? Also, what upgrades will work in it? Will you be able to put in any

⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPU? Probably not. Will you be able to put in any RAM? Probably not. Any disk modules?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Probably not. There’s going to be limits on what you can put in it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there always were. but the limits have increased over time with the Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco towers and everything. Also, just technology has moved on. If you’re talking about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanting, for instance, the old ones were very good about disk expansion, but that was also before

⏹️ ▶️ Marco SSDs, really. The SSD revolution started right at the end of the Mac Pro tower

⏹️ ▶️ Marco era, really. And so you could put SSDs into the Mac Pro tower, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was not designed for them up front. It was kind of a hack to get them in there if they weren’t PCI cards, even then those were kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a hack. Everything was about three and a half inch disks and optical drives. And these days if you design that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can argue like, well, it probably shouldn’t include a three and a half inch disk bay at all because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco high end customers probably are not using a lot of internal three and a half inch disks anymore. So, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, there’s a lot has changed since the era of the upgradable tower. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t, and even, and you can even argue for performance reasons. Like you wouldn’t want a whole bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, just serial ATA bays in there, because high-end SSDs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are all using direct attached methods now, like directly attached to the PCI bus and things like NVMe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff like that. So like, there’s not a lot of upgradability that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro customers who are gonna be buying the Mac Pro are actually going to want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco beyond, I think, RAM disk space, but not necessarily like a large

⏹️ ▶️ Marco number of physical disks, And probably the number one is GPU upgrades. Ding, ding,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ding. I don’t know whether they’re gonna deliver that, but I think GPU and RAM are the big ones, and disk is kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a secondary one.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think disk they can get away with, especially if they have a way for you to, you know, like they can have the super

⏹️ ▶️ John high speed storage, but then some standard for some slower bulk storage. But anyway, GPU is the big one. That’s what we were talking

⏹️ ▶️ John about last time. GPUs keep getting faster because you can make them faster by just adding more transistors. You can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John do that with CPUs. You haven’t been able to for a decade or more. And so it’s so important

⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to do that, even if Apple won’t, that you

⏹️ ▶️ John can do it. That’s why we talked about the GPUs last time, but more people have been sending more links to people showing how

⏹️ ▶️ John a cruddy old cheese grater can beat the iMac Pro and all sorts of benchmarks if you

⏹️ ▶️ John just take a faster GPU and throw it in there. And this is an ancient cheese grater. Like how do these new GPUs even work

⏹️ ▶️ John in there? Because it’s just PCI Express, right? And it’s just a standard card slot.

⏹️ ▶️ John And how does the old Mac support it? It supports it because the iMac Pro supports it and Apple just made generic

⏹️ ▶️ John drivers for it. And that Apple, that’s not an embarrassment for Apple, but it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple wants in on that action too. Hey, we’ll make a thing where you can put a new GPU in and people want that

⏹️ ▶️ John machine because like, you know, extending the life of the machine. If you buy this, the super expensive system that is upgradable,

⏹️ ▶️ John part of what you’re paying for and we build into the price in some way is that this machine can last

⏹️ ▶️ John you a long time. If you’re doing GPU intensive work after a year or two of use, you don’t need to throw the machine out. You

⏹️ ▶️ John can just take the GPU out and put in one that’s way faster for a couple hundred bucks and a new life for your

⏹️ ▶️ John machine. That’s what we all want. That’s the future liberals want.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Aftershocks bone conduction headphones. Go to ATP.Aftershocks.com

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to learn more. Aftershocks headphones work by bone conduction. This means small transducers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rest in front of your ears, not inside or around them like most headphones, and they send tiny vibrations

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can’t even feel through your cheekbones directly to your inner ear, which bypasses the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco outside of your ears completely. So unlike every other kind of headphone, bone conduction leaves your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ears completely open with nothing in them. So for example, this helps in comfort

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons. If you can’t wear earbuds or in-ear monitors without pain like I can’t,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this doesn’t have that problem because there’s nothing in your ear. They’re also really great for exercising

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and hot weather because there’s nothing covering your ear so it doesn’t get you all sweaty. And for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exercising it’s even better because, or if it starts raining, because they are IP55 certified

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for water resistance. And And the biggest thing about these headphones, the biggest thing that I think decides whether they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right for you or not, is because nothing is blocking your ears at all, you hear all the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound from the world around you, including what you’re listening to. So in loud surroundings,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this isn’t so good, but they’re awesome if you want to listen to a podcast or take a phone call while doing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like walking outside, where you really need to hear the world around you for your own safety.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re also great for practical reasons, like if you want to hear the world around you want to hear if someone knocks on the door, or if your kid

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is sleeping upstairs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they wake up. With Aftersox, you hear what’s in the world around you as well

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as what you’re listening to. Aftersox has two great models that I recommend, the Trex Titanium

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the Trex Air. They’re both fantastic. The Air is the newer of the two. I’ve spent

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a number of months with each of them and you really can’t go wrong. The battery life is fantastic on both of them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re both very comfortable, very lightweight. The Air is a little bit better for comfort and weight.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Titanium fits in a pocket better. So either way, you can’t go wrong. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco both wonderful. So check it out today. Go to ATP.Aftershocks.com

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get a good deal on a nice pair of Aftershocks TREX Titanium or Trek’s air.

iMac Pro orders

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once again, atp.aftershocks.com. Thank you so much to Aftershocks for sponsoring

⏹️ ▶️ Marco our show.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey As a final note of follow-up, did we order anything? I will start and say I have not, which I think I said a moment ago.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still don’t think I will, although if I ever see one in an Apple store, I’m going to really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have some tough thoughts because I’ve seen this thing at WWDC and it is pretty.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it’s rare that I do anything on my iMac that I have today that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like is truly and utterly constrained by something an iMac Pro would fix. John, did you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey order an iMac Pro? It’s certainly you must have since this is the thing you’ve been waiting for for years, is it not?

⏹️ ▶️ John It took a while for me to figure out what you’re even talking about. Like, what do you mean, what did we order?

⏹️ ▶️ John You were never going to order one and I was never going to order one and Marco was always going to order one. So no, I didn’t buy anything.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Marco, tell us about your configuration since we all know you did order one. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I ordered one. What? I ordered through the business

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rep, but I haven’t gotten the order confirmation email and my card has not been charged and it’s been four days.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sometimes Marco blacks out

⏹️ ▶️ John when he buys things. He just

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco wakes up and has huge boxes at

⏹️ ▶️ John his front step and it’s inexplicable.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not entirely sure whether my order has actually been placed or whether it fell on the floor because that was a very busy day

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them or something. I have to follow up.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so if you ordered one, what build, what are the highlights of what you think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco you ordered?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I did it. All right, 10-core,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to put this in context, the reason I ordered this computer is that TIFF wants it in six months. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so she wants me to buy this now so that way when the Mac Pro comes out, I upgrade to that and I give her this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I basically configured it for TIFF, which means that I got the really big SSD. That

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the big splurge. The 10-core for 64 gigs of RAM,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not 128, because I mean my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John current…

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s the really big

⏹️ ▶️ John SSD? The 4

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco gigabyte, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John What does she, for photos and stuff, what does she got mostly?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Photos and stuff mostly, and a couple of video stuff around too, because like dealing with the photos and processing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them into video sometimes.

⏹️ ▶️ John What does she have, like how much stuff does she have now? Like does she have more than 4 terabyte total storage?

⏹️ ▶️ John Like are you buying her a computer that’s like twice as big as the one she has now in terms of primary storage,

⏹️ ▶️ John or is it about the same size?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco When we bought the 2014’s that we have now, we’ve maxed it out, but at the time that was 1TB.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s 1TB internal and she’s had this 4TB external Thunderbolt

⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAID array that literally is 4 1TB SSDs in RAID 0.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t worry, it’s very much backed up to various places. But that’s now been operating

⏹️ ▶️ Marco constantly for 3 years in this little enclosure with this dumb little fan. I don’t know how long it’s going to last. I’d rather

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not depend on it for too much longer. If any of those go bad, the last thing I’m going to want to do is buy a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco new 1TB SSD in 2017. So, kind of preparing for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that to go away. Also, I just hate having another box and fan and this hot thing. All Thunderbolt

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff runs really hot. All the controller chips that are in the devices, they run red hot. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco why it needs this giant fan. It’s not for the SSDs. Yeah, basically replacing that, simplifying her setup

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and making it better. So that’s why I did that. And again, I was also kind of afraid because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, you know, I can probably never upgrade these, or at least I won’t want to upgrade them because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever will be involved and whatever it will cost will probably be crazy. So, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco four terabyte, but, and that was a lot of money. I’m not gonna try to candy coat that, that was ridiculous.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, you know, the rest, kind of a down the middle configuration, the low end GPU,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the middle RAM amount, and the middle CPU, I guess.

⏹️ ▶️ John How did TIFF approve the low-end GPU?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, interesting question.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you do the research on the 56 versus the 64, it’s not that different. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like for what we do, I don’t think anything we do,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would notice the difference at all. Because things like Photoshop and Lightroom,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do use the GPU, but not for a huge amount of stuff, and they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t use it very hard in the way that we use these apps. Additionally, you’re probably thinking what about gaming

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but even for like for a most games she plays are not on the computer be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s still gonna be a massive upgrade from what we have and see I don’t think the gaming performance

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Difference is gonna be that big between those two.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll say

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I’m surprised so Well, I’m anxious to hear about this if and when

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it comes in if and when you even ordered it it, whether or not that was a fever dream. We’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I haven’t ordered it, do you want me to make any edits when I resubmit the order?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually, I think John does. It sounds reasonable

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John to me.

⏹️ ▶️ John I would get a big GPU because it’s not that much more, right? It’s like a couple hundred bucks more. I think it’s like 600 more. 600 more?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ugh, that’s steep. I elected to spend most of the craziness on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the disk because that’s… we’ll actually use that.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s doing the thing where when you’re buying a car and it’s so expensive that $150 for format seems like nothing.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you forget that 100 that $150

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the

⏹️ ▶️ John same size, whether you compare it to 30 grand, or you compare it to 10 bucks, it’s always 150. It doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John change size, but you feel like it does. So I can use that to persuade you, given how

⏹️ ▶️ John much you paid for the SSD $600 for a bit of GPU is nothing. It’s like, like format. You’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John You’re

⏹️ ▶️ John not wrong. $600 is way too much for the for the GPU speed upgrade. But what you paid for the four terabyte is also way

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey too much. So

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I don’t know. I I don’t know where to go from here. Anyway, talk to Tiff, see what she thinks. I agree.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, shall we do some Ask ATP?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks, KTP.

#askatp: Open headphones

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Good.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, I try to discourage emailed submissions because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that encourages a lack of brevity. However, every once in a while, one sneaks through that I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really like. And you added this to the show notes only because you beat me to it. And this is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey J.D. Lewin writes, I’m looking to dip my toe into the quote-unquote high-quality

⏹️ ▶️ Casey headphone plus DAC digital analog converter market, which led me to read some of Marco’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey older blog posts. At the moment, the Beyerdynamic DT-880s, which I’m pretty sure is what I have on my head

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right now— Marc Thiessen 770s. Darn it. Can be had for under $200. And a sh**fula?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even know how to pronounce it. Marc Thiessen Fula. Thank you. Two for $90. This seems to be an affordable way

⏹️ ▶️ Casey into dangerous waters. My question is about source material. Will this setup be wasted on the AAC

⏹️ ▶️ Casey files delivered through Apple Music, Spotify, etc.? So Marco, take it away.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so to answer the actual question of whether decent headphones will be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasted on playing AAC files from Apple Music and Spotify, no, definitely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. There is a point where some people claim that they can hear differences

⏹️ ▶️ Marco between AAC slash MP3 slash other lossy compressed formats

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and lossless music. Oh, excuse me. also high sample rates

⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher than 44.1, you know, bit rates above 24 bit, etc. We talked about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this before, but you know, basically, I’m not a believer in that being noticeable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by most people. I’m not sure it’s noticeable by any people, but I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least, with a few like blind tests that have been done, seem to support that it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really is not noticeable by almost anybody. Whereas the difference

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in headphones or speakers, like the difference in the actual transducers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are producing the music for you, that can be huge differences in very noticeable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways. So when you’re looking for places to spend money if you want to get a good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco upgrade, a good bang for your buck, spend that money on the headphones or the speakers and not on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the amps and the DACs and the fancy source material and the high bitrate everything.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You will notice the headphones, you will not notice the DAC, and you will not notice

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the source material being good or bad. Because unless it’s encoded at very low bitrates

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a 128k mp3 or about the same AAC, as long as it’s higher than that basically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re probably not going to notice it. And all the services now, they all offer high quality streaming

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have enough bandwidth that is high enough that you’re not going to notice it. So don’t worry about that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco On the headphone topic itself, the Beyerdynamic DT-880 is a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very old headphone, but still a very, very good one. And if it can be had for under $200, that’s a great deal.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a huge headphone revolution happening over the last few years. Lots and lots of amazing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphones are coming out, and a lot of formerly fairly premium ones are being pushed down market.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is one of them. I highly suggest, if you are a fan of treble

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in music, like if you like the kind of like crispness that turning up the treble a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco offers you in music. If it doesn’t sound harsh to you, Bear Dynamic is a great company

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to look at. Their headphones tend to be a little treble heavy, but if you like that they are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonderful. They are also incredibly comfortable. The downside is that the 880,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like almost any good and especially good and expensive headphone, has an open back to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ear cups. So that means, if you’ve never used this before, you’re basically, the drivers are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of suspended in open air, the backs of the headphones are just like screens, they’re not solid

⏹️ ▶️ Marco material. And so, an annoying, tinny version of what you’re listening

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to plays out to the room around you, and they don’t isolate you very well

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from outside sounds. So, this is really a terrible setup,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a terrible thing to use open headphones if you are in either a loud environment, like walking around

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a city, or if you are sharing an office with anybody because your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco music will be really annoyingly tinny and weird sounding to anyone else in the office. They will hate you if you play headphones

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that way. But if you have like your own quiet space where there’s not other people around to annoy,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco open headphones are by far the best sound you can get for the money. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even close. And there’s basically three points that you need to know about in this market.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco On the very low end, you have the Grado SR60. Sounds amazing, costs like 60 or 70 bucks, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is pretty uncomfortable. Then you have the Beyerdynamic DT-880, which is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the one that JD’s asking about here. They are great. Tiff uses a pair at her desk

⏹️ ▶️ Marco still. They’re wonderful, around 200 bucks. Very, very comfortable. Everything about them is great, except

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have that open back, which is impractical in certain contexts. And then also, if you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t like very strong treble, you won’t like either of those options, if you like a more, what they call, laid back sound,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where they kind of like roll off the treble. It’s very much like, younger people tend to like this a little bit more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it kind of goes into like the soft is loud musical aesthetic that has been taken over

⏹️ ▶️ Marco recently in like emo music and stuff and whatever else that I’m probably mangling the terminology for. If you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that, if you don’t like a lot of treble and you like it to be very soft and like, you know, gentle

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your ears, the Sennheiser HD 650 used to be $600.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in recent years, they’ve done a bunch of special things where they’ve cutting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the price at that, or they’re doing special editions with mass drop, but it’s still basically the HD 650.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is an amazing headphone. It’s old and it looks kind of weird, it has speckled plastic, it’s a very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ugly thing, but it’s an amazing sounding headphone if you can get it for below 300 bucks.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you don’t like that strong treble that the Beyerdynamic will give you. So basically, those are my recommendations. Ignore

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the source material quality, just get whatever you get, don’t be upset, It’s wonderful, it’ll be good enough. And if you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanna spend 60 bucks and you like treble and you don’t like comfort, get the Grado SR60. If

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want comfort and still like treble, the DT880.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you don’t like treble and you can spend like 300 bucks-ish range, the Sennheiser HD 650.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And on the DAC side, all of those can be driven perfectly fine from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the headphone jack in any Mac desktop or laptop. The phone,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you won’t get a lot of volume out of if you try to push it too high, but you don’t need an external DAC

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for any of those headphones. You might get a little bit better performance and volume and maybe at the highest

⏹️ ▶️ Marco volume, maybe a little bit better bass, especially the HD 650 is the least efficient

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all those that I just mentioned, so that’s the one that most would need one, but you’re pretty much fine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco without that. Like if you just wanna start, just get a really nice pair of headphones that can work with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the built-in headphone jack in your Mac, which almost everything can.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I’d just like to say, I agree with pretty much everything you said. I don’t know about specific recommendations

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of headphones. I haven’t bought headphones in a long time outside of my AirPods, but I wanted

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, and I think I’ve done this every time you brought it up, I wanted to concur with you about open headphones. I have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an ancient pair of Sennheisers. I don’t even remember what model they are. They’re so damn ancient. I think they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 598 maybe? Something like that. I mean, they’re like easily 10 years old at this point. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can dig up what they are, it doesn’t really matter. But suffice to say, I have an ancient pair of Sennheiser

⏹️ ▶️ Casey open-air headphones, and they are phenomenal.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey They are truly, truly great. It is terrible to be within 30 feet of me when

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’m listening to them.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But they are really, really good. And I also wanted to agree with you about the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey quality of the source material. That, you can go flack if you want, if you wanna be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of those kind of nerds. But again, Marco was absolutely right that the best thing to do is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey change your headphones. I will however say, if you can stand in-ear

⏹️ ▶️ Casey earbuds, earphones, whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco the fancy version. In-ear

⏹️ ▶️ Casey monitors. IES. Thank you, yeah. Well, not even the custom mold ones. I’m just talking about like a really, really fancy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pair of in-ear headphones. I think they’re a lot more finicky. I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re really worth it, but I have a really fancy pair of now very discontinued

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ultimate Ears in-ear headphone things. And they are, when they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey seated properly, they’re the best headphones I have. But to be fair, to get them seated 100%

⏹️ ▶️ Casey properly is a real pain in the butt. So I still think Marco’s right that doing something,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a traditional headphone, preferably open air, is a better choice. But if you have ears

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are conducive to in-ear things or are willing to spend the money to get your ears

⏹️ ▶️ Casey poured and get custom molds made to get IEMs like Marco just brought up. That is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably the money no object, effort no object, best and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey most effective way to get good headphones in my personal opinion. But a lot of people don’t really agree with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. Hello, Marco. And other people don’t wanna spend that money and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John or don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanna be bothered. Hello, both of us. So it’s not the best answer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey unless you’re really, really going deep into this world, but it’s worth at least mentioning.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right.

#askatp: Car magazines for kids

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jeremy Nachman writes, I’ve never had much interest in cars personally, but I have a nine-year-old who seems

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have an interest. Do you have any car magazine recommendations that kids would enjoy? Doesn’t necessarily need to be one targeting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a kid’s audience. When I was growing up and I was about this age, I used to love reading Car and Driver.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t pay attention to print magazines very much anymore, and I know, John, you do, so I’m going to turn it over to you in a second.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But last I saw, Car and Driver was still pretty good. Motor Trend was okay.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can also get a lot of really good stuff on YouTube, and that’s not even like me trying to plug myself, although, hey, casing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on cars is a new series you might want to look at. So here I am plugging myself. But but no, like the Motor Trend stuff that’s on YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is actually very, very good and very digestible and not too bro. We generally

⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaking, there’s plenty of car stuff on YouTube that is very bro. And I wouldn’t necessarily recommend for a nine

⏹️ ▶️ Casey year old. But the Motor Trend stuff is good in terms of magazines, car and driver. John,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey additional thoughts.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the kid angle on this is what makes it difficult because I still I watch a lot of car stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John on YouTube and I have in the past subscribed to I think every Car

⏹️ ▶️ John every straight car magazine not like, you know truck magazines or you know, hot rod magazines or more specialty

⏹️ ▶️ John type of stuff Which which may be what you could end up getting into but for car

⏹️ ▶️ John magazines car driver is still my gold standard but the reason I have trouble

⏹️ ▶️ John recommending this for a kid is because like when you think of car magazines

⏹️ ▶️ John like Like in the worst case scenario you’re thinking of like some hot rod magazine

⏹️ ▶️ John where every single month there’s a girl in a bikini sitting on the roof of a car and you’re like, oh, I’m not going to buy those for my kids

⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s, you know, I don’t want to spread that kind of a message about how this stuff works. But here’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the problem with even car and driver, which I think has some of the best car writing and has for many

⏹️ ▶️ John years now, it is relentlessly unconsciously sexist.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like it is in every pore of that magazine and you think, well, there’s no girls in bikinis on the cover.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s fine, right? It’s not though. Like every article is written assuming that the person reading

⏹️ ▶️ John it

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is a man.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like every joke, every gag, every cover image, every like so much so that they don’t even know they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John doing it. They don’t even think that there could possibly be another joke. They don’t make any attempt like, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ John and, and then there’s some right wing politics is thrown in there, but I think that’s, that’s less harmful because it’s, it’s, you know, mixed up

⏹️ ▶️ John with everything else. I have trouble recommending that young people start their

⏹️ ▶️ John life in cars reading a magazine that assumes the only people who will ever be into cars are men

⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s not healthy for anybody involved so I would say that YouTube has a higher chance

⏹️ ▶️ John of being sort of more welcoming at least the YouTube channels I’ve seen

⏹️ ▶️ John there are many things to not recommend them and there are of course you know YouTube channels with

⏹️ ▶️ John terrible bro-y people saying terrible bro-y things what else is new it’s the internet but

⏹️ ▶️ John a I think kids are more likely to get into that than you know paper magazines which come on who reads

⏹️ ▶️ John those and be I think you might have a better chance

⏹️ ▶️ John of steering your kid towards a more inclusive

⏹️ ▶️ John YouTube channel because honestly I don’t know of any magazines that aren’t in fact the car and driver is probably the

⏹️ ▶️ John best one Automobiles is fairly good too, but just all those car magazines

⏹️ ▶️ John just assume you are a guy reading a car magazine And they half the time don’t even know they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John assuming it and it’s it’s not it’s not a good look And it’s not something that I would recommend

⏹️ ▶️ John a young person get into because why perpetuate that?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me just put out a call that if you are listening to this and you know of a YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ Casey channel hosted by a woman that’s really good that’s about cars or know an author that’s,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, either a blogger or, you know, a particular author to look at any of these car magazines that’s a woman. I would love to know

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that because I certainly only hear dudes of various bro-iness talking about cars. I’d love to hear,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, a different perspective on that. So – or maybe not even a woman, just a different perspective. I mean, define that however

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’d like. But I’d love to hear it. So feel free to tweet at me and let me know.

⏹️ ▶️ John Paul Moore And by the way, Jeremy didn’t say whether his kid was girl or boy and I don’t think it matters. you

⏹️ ▶️ John shouldn’t if your kid is like a little boy who’s super into cars he shouldn’t be reading a magazine

⏹️ ▶️ John that assumes everybody who’s reading it is a dude either like that’s it’s not it has nothing to do with the gender of the

⏹️ ▶️ John child or anything like that it’s just like what i’m getting at is print is old and it is mostly

⏹️ ▶️ John dominated by old people with old opinions and even has new writers have come in and i think i made a tweet a couple years ago

⏹️ ▶️ John to the effect that you could see the changeover in the writing staff of car and driver when they started making jokes and the captions

⏹️ ▶️ John are their images they reference things like star trek or you wouldn’t have seen that when like Brock Yates was still

⏹️ ▶️ John writing or whatever like there is a changing of the guard but it’s still it’s still the the boys club

⏹️ ▶️ John and it there’s no reason it should be there’s nothing there’s nothing gendered about cars right so that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John disappointing and YouTube I feel like is slightly better it’s also worse like you know the equivalent

⏹️ ▶️ John of the bikini girls on the hoods

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco those

⏹️ ▶️ John YouTube channels totally exist too right so you know The internet is a big place, so be

⏹️ ▶️ John careful.

#askatp: ECC RAM benefits

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and finally from Jeff Isu, ECC RAM seems

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make sense for high stakes contexts like finance, space, like space travel, et cetera.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What practical effects do you expect it to have on a Mac? Have you ever noticed a flip bit

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on your machine? Do you just find it cool as a nerd and or want it for peace of mind?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So John, can you kind of do a recap for us on what ECC RAM is, why this is relevant now,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then answer the question.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think we did that on a couple past shows. We had debates about how important this is. So ECC stands for error

⏹️ ▶️ John correcting, where if they send the information from RAM, but they also have a bit to check whether the information

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re getting is accurately represented. You think of it as like a parody bit or whatever, but I think it’s more complicated than that these days. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John usually they have the ability to recover from small errors, like a one bit error. They can correct

⏹️ ▶️ John that on the fly because they know which bit is off and what it should be instead. And so

⏹️ ▶️ John what would have been some bad data coming out of RAM gets corrected to the right data.

⏹️ ▶️ John Why would bad data come out of RAM? That’s the question about ECC RAM. What errors are you correcting? Who cares

⏹️ ▶️ John if you have error correcting ability in your RAM chips? RAM chips don’t make any errors. They’re solid state

⏹️ ▶️ John components. Everything is perfect about them, right? Unfortunately, everything in the world of digital is

⏹️ ▶️ John under the covers analog until you get down to the quantum level. But we’re not going to get into that.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So we’ve got to have

⏹️ ▶️ John limits somewhere. So the question is, how often do these errors come up? And the last time

⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about this, we cited a bunch of studies. We’ll put two links into the show notes about two

⏹️ ▶️ John semi-recent ones. One of them was a 2009 study that was supposedly saying

⏹️ ▶️ John that the error rates in RAM were much higher than had previously been measured.

⏹️ ▶️ John Something like 25,000 to 70,000 errors per billion device hours per

⏹️ ▶️ John megabit, with errors on more than 8% of DIMMs. and there’s an IBM

⏹️ ▶️ John study in the 90s looking at like the causes of this like you know radiation from space essentially

⏹️ ▶️ John flipping your bits assuming you’re not in something that is shielded from cosmic rays producing

⏹️ ▶️ John one error per 256 megabytes of RAM per month and you know you can sell

⏹️ ▶️ John it from the 90s cuz they’re talking about 200 you know so one error per 256 megabytes of RAM per month that’s not a

⏹️ ▶️ John small number if we have four gigs of RAM right or 16 gigs or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John you have errors happen now the question is all right so who cares who cares a bit is flipped

⏹️ ▶️ John what does that manifest in some way if you got unlucky you could take your whole computer down but chances

⏹️ ▶️ John are good nothing will happen because that bit didn’t matter like there are so many bits that just don’t matter

⏹️ ▶️ John not even that it gets corrupted it ends up in the file system maybe that bit just didn’t matter at all or you

⏹️ ▶️ John know it changed something, it changed the color of a pixel in a

⏹️ ▶️ John way that you couldn’t detect, or it just ended up in some garbage data at the end of,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, at the end of some buffer that never got reached. Like, maybe it just doesn’t matter. It came out of RAM and it

⏹️ ▶️ John got overwritten with something else. But every once in a while, it does matter. And the reason people use ECC is because they think, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John that for the small incremental cost of having ECC RAM, maybe it saves you

⏹️ ▶️ John from, for, you know, for computers that run a really long time and uptime is important and Correctness

⏹️ ▶️ John is important. This is the the best we have to get a little bit more safety for not that much

⏹️ ▶️ John more cost and That’s why servers use it and that’s why fancy

⏹️ ▶️ John High-end desktops with server hardware use it and I think a lot of it for nerds like us is like well

⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t cost that much more and it makes us a lot more reliable. So let’s do it

⏹️ ▶️ John But you know how it’s not like a light comes on when it tells you just saved you from something because

⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of like the big sky theory in aviation. The big ram theory is

⏹️ ▶️ John the chances of one of those bit flips actually affecting something you do in a way that you noticed is actually

⏹️ ▶️ John pretty low, but it just, you know, it does make us feel better.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the answer is no, there’s no reason, basically.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, I mean, the reason is that it does improve things and it doesn’t cost that much more. If it was seven times the cost,

⏹️ ▶️ John it would be ridiculous, but it’s just a little bit more. And so you’re like, yeah, why not? Why

⏹️ ▶️ John not do that for a little bit more?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, and this could just be terrible anecdata, but just anecdotally,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my Mac Pros have been the most stable, solid machines I’ve owned. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve used laptops full-time, I’ve used an iMac full-time, and I’ve used Mac Pros full-time. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very, very different. The Mac Pros were always the most stable machines, by far.

⏹️ ▶️ John You didn’t keep the trash cans long enough for your GPUs to overheat, so.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t use GPUs heavily enough. During the eight or nine months I had one, It was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rock solid.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Backblaze, unlimited cloud backup for Macs and PCs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for just $5 a month. Visit backblaze.com slash ATP to get a 15-day free

⏹️ ▶️ Marco trial. You need online backup because if you are only backed up to,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, a hard drive next to your computer in your office or your house, you aren’t protected from things like fire, floods,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco theft, power surges, or just human errors that could accidentally wipe the data

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that hard drive or damage that hard drive in addition to the one in your computer. With cloud backup, you have a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonderful fail-safe option that can cover all sorts of different risks that a local backup can’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You also have very convenient features. So for instance, if you have a cloud backup, you can do things like restore

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a file from your home computer onto a laptop when you’re on vacation. If you need to work on that file,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you forgot to bring it with you. You can also do the same thing from their mobile app right onto your phone. So if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your phone and need to get a file from your home computer, you can just restore it with their app for iOS and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Android right onto your phone. It’s very, very convenient. If you need to do a whole system restore, if you lose

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all your data and you need to actually restore from the cloud, you can use their website to download it immediately, or you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can have them overnight you a hard drive via FedEx. And if you return the hard drive back to them when you’re done,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get a full refund. It’s a win-win. Backblaze has restored over 20 billion files

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for their customers, and all of this is available for for just $5 a month per computer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited usage, $5 a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco month per computer. That’s it. There’s no gimmicks, there’s no add-ons, that’s all there is.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s all you need to pay. It is wonderful. I’ve used it for years now since before they were a sponsor.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I pay for it like everyone else and it is great. If you don’t have cloud backup yet, I highly,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco highly urge you, you really should have cloud backup for your own safety. And if you’re going to get cloud backup,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I recommend Backblaze. It is the best one I’ve tried, and I’ve tried them all. So check it out today. blackblaze.com

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP.

NVIDIA GPUs in Macs?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco start today. Really. Backblaze.com slash ATP for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best cloud backup service. Five bucks a month, unlimited space. Thank you so much to Backblaze for sponsoring

⏹️ ▶️ Marco our show.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have questions about the iMac Pro slash Mac Pro. As someone who used to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know the ins and outs of what the current processors were and GPUs and things of that nature like 20

⏹️ ▶️ Casey years ago when I was building my own PCs, I have not kept up in a long time.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it seems like, and I’m, and I might even get this backwards. So jump in and correct me, but it seems like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone is really perturbed that the iMac pro is only coming with an AMD graphics

⏹️ ▶️ Casey card. And apparently it’s like Nvidia or bust in the graphics card department.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can one of you guys explain to me like, Hey, do I even have that right? B Y

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and C then why isn’t Apple offering Nvidia cards and why are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they so committed to AMD or at least what’s your best guess if nothing else?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, do you want to kind of talk me through this?

⏹️ ▶️ John The Nvidia thing, we talked about this before, about who at

⏹️ ▶️ John various times in our life using computers has been the GPU performance king, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John like starting from I guess the Voodoo

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey 3D days. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John remember

⏹️ ▶️ Casey those

⏹️ ▶️ John days.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Those were

⏹️ ▶️ John good days. 3DFX and you know, anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Did

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, did the Mac, I think we’ve talked about this months and months and months ago, but did the Mac ever have the thing where

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you had a little stubby VGA cable to connect the 2D card to the 3D card? Do you know what I’m talking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John about?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was pretty sure it did not ever have anything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. No, the Mac never had gaming or VGA.

⏹️ ▶️ John It did have VGA, their Macs had VGA.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know exactly what I’m talking about though, don’t you Marco, like you had one of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these. Yeah, it would connect to your 3DFX accelerator

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey card. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. Yep. Oh, those were the days, sorry. Anyway, John, carry on please.

⏹️ ▶️ John So, you know, as the market is consolidated, it settled down in the latter

⏹️ ▶️ John years as being ATI versus NVIDIA. And occasionally they would swap places

⏹️ ▶️ John of what generation of card, you know, there’s they would revise their architectures and then they would have multiple cards

⏹️ ▶️ John and you have overclocked cards and stuff and then they revise our anyway at various points. NVIDIA

⏹️ ▶️ John had the fastest meaning like basically for games like who can run insert hot

⏹️ ▶️ John 3D game here the fastest. Sometimes it was Nvidia, sometimes it was AMD.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you looked at the swings, it seems that in the most recent years, Nvidia

⏹️ ▶️ John has been on top more, but it really depends on the specific application. But for

⏹️ ▶️ John right now, Nvidia is on top in a lot of markets. In games, I think they’re on top

⏹️ ▶️ John because they make a lot of cards that make sacrifices in precision for the purposes

⏹️ ▶️ John of performance. And very often, at I, which is now AMD, would tell you, yeah, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John fine. But if you want to do real serious work with like, a program that requires higher position that AMD

⏹️ ▶️ John is better or whatever. But also because Nvidia and AMD have chosen different

⏹️ ▶️ John platforms for compute on GPUs and Nvidia is the one that they’re what is

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a CUDA CUDA Yeah, is right now more popular. And so we had

⏹️ ▶️ John someone actually write into us about this. as Daniel who said, in addition to Nvidia being

⏹️ ▶️ John faster, there’s lots of software now that uses GPU acceleration, but only Nvidia. So

⏹️ ▶️ John their application software written, it’s accelerated for GPUs, but literally only accelerated by

⏹️ ▶️ John Nvidia GPUs. The example gives us Redshift and Maya and 3d new plugins for Nuke, like

⏹️ ▶️ John Eddie and go ghost on the 2d side. So part of it is like just market

⏹️ ▶️ John success that Nvidia was able to convince software makers of these big expensive pro applications to write

⏹️ ▶️ John their software to only be accelerated by NVIDIA cards so that forget about who’s faster for everybody who

⏹️ ▶️ John has better cards or whatever if it literally won’t work with AMD graphics cards

⏹️ ▶️ John uh that’s bad like it’ll you know but run in an accelerated mode and then secondarily if you’re into games

⏹️ ▶️ John or lots of other applications chances are that right now NVIDIA sells the absolute fastest

⏹️ ▶️ John card that will run whatever your GPU thing is the fastest that’s why we have that question while back was

⏹️ ▶️ John saying if the Mac Pro doesn’t support nvidia is it a failure or whatever I don’t think it is for the most

⏹️ ▶️ John part and you know if you have to use one of these application is only

⏹️ ▶️ John accelerated by Nvidia chances are good you haven’t had a Mac in a long time because for whatever reason

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure what the reason is but for whatever reason Macs have not shipped with Nvidia GPUs

⏹️ ▶️ John either standard or optional for a long time now so it’s not as if people are out there

⏹️ ▶️ John using Macs with Nvidia graphics card waiting to upgrade. All these people are using these programs presumably are already

⏹️ ▶️ John using PCs. But anyway, that’s why I think people are

⏹️ ▶️ John concerned about the NVIDIA situation because part of the promise of the Mac Pro is it’s a modular system and

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s upgradable, but how upgradable is it really if you can only ever put in

⏹️ ▶️ John a new AMD graphics card? I mean, that’s great, like it lets you extend life in the machine like we said before,

⏹️ ▶️ John But there was a time that met some Mac users may remember when you could buy

⏹️ ▶️ John a Mac like the one sitting next to me Right now they could run cards from both of those manufacturers

⏹️ ▶️ John and that time was good and we would like that time to return

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think I mean some other angles to consider I mean so first of all the the explanation of why we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have not seen any new Macs with Nvidia GPUs in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like three or four years is is possibly related to there was a massive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco series of Nvidia GPU failures in MacBook Pros. We heard rumblings here and there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from various uncredible sources that there might be some kind of big political rift between

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple and Nvidia from that time. But it does certainly seem

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there is definitely, it is a choice that Apple is making not to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ship Nvidia GPUs in all of their computers since a few years ago.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is not just coincidence.

⏹️ ▶️ John And on that issue, though, on it being a choice, which again, I’ve heard as well, the weird part about it

⏹️ ▶️ John is that modern Apple, especially, has always been really enthusiastic

⏹️ ▶️ John about always having two suppliers for everything that it does. Like you know, even just like,

⏹️ ▶️ John because if they get themselves into a situation where there’s one, they get into a Qualcomm situation, and they’re just like, they

⏹️ ▶️ John need someone to play off of it. the RAM, who’s manufacturing their systems on a chip,

⏹️ ▶️ John like SSDs, screens. Best case, Apple wants to have two sources,

⏹️ ▶️ John not just for redundancy, but so that you don’t become under the thumb of one, like you become under the thumb

⏹️ ▶️ John of Qualcomm. It’s like, who else are you gonna go to? No one else can make your radio chips, ha ha ha. Like, so it

⏹️ ▶️ John would behoove Apple to go to both of them and play them off each other. Who knows, maybe that’s exactly what they’re doing

⏹️ ▶️ John and Nvidia just keeps losing the contract, but from the outside it just seems like like they are now

⏹️ ▶️ John a single single vendor source for their GPUs. That can’t be healthy. I mean, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John the long term plan is Apple is going to make its own GPUs because it’s a core part of their business. And they kind of have been

⏹️ ▶️ John doing that on the, uh, you know, the, the portable side. What was it? Was this the first one that’s all their own

⏹️ ▶️ John GPU with no imagination tech? I believe so. Yeah, but they haven’t done that on the Mac and they probably won’t

⏹️ ▶️ John because for all the reasons that we’ve discussed before about investment in the Mac, but it just, it just still seems weird to me that it seems

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a much more natural fit for for Apple’s business practices to be supporting both, but they haven’t recently.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think there’s a couple angles here. I mean, number one, you might be right, like AMD just might be winning all these bids

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it certainly seems clear that Apple has a pretty good relationship with AMD.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for things like, if you look at the 2013 trashcan Mac Pro those were like total custom

⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPUs, like just for that, that AMD made at Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco order. So there’s clearly a lot of a good relationship there where AMD will probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make Apple pretty much whatever they ask for, and the pricing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they give Apple appears to be pretty good. Like if you look at the workstation GPU pricing that AMD charges,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you look at what Apple gives you in the stock configuration of the Mac Pro and the iMac Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does seem like AMD’s giving Apple a pretty good deal. So it could just be that. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re right that Apple does have two suppliers for a lot of things. one of the big ones that they don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is Intel for their CPUs. And maybe, ironically,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the winner of that bid otherwise would be AMD. But maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have a similar relationship with AMD on the GPU side

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they have with Intel on the CPU side, which is kind of this assured

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exclusivity in exchange for their good relationship with AMD.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John The

⏹️ ▶️ John difference is that Intel can give them the very best chips of that kind in the world, or AMD at various

⏹️ ▶️ John times cannot. And although this also brings in a topic that kept getting pushed down in the show notes, but the

⏹️ ▶️ John several weeks ago or months ago deal where Intel is bundling AMD GPUs and sort

⏹️ ▶️ John of like not on the same die, but like in the same package. Yeah, yeah. And so that’s an interesting synergy

⏹️ ▶️ John between Apple’s two favorite vendors. And you know, Intel, like it makes some sense to me

⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple’s going with Intel, that if am you know, there’s there’s that relationship and there’s the you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John IBM even more so than AMD has proven that they will make one off custom chips for Apple like in the MacBook air and the

⏹️ ▶️ John back in the old days and is a lot of speculation that the reason Intel put

⏹️ ▶️ John so much work into its internal GPUs with the embedded DRAM and all that stuff is because that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John what Apple wanted them to do. So I’m sure Apple likes your relationship where they they have a big say in what

⏹️ ▶️ John products get generated. And honestly, the competitors, Intel,

⏹️ ▶️ John is not particularly competitive. And we get back to, again, Apple probably wants to just make its own chips if it

⏹️ ▶️ John ever comes to that. But the difference in that scenario

⏹️ ▶️ John is there is no software that only runs accelerated on AMD

⏹️ ▶️ John CPUs, right? Like, it’s not the Nvidia situation where there’s whole classes of software that are in

⏹️ ▶️ John Dakuta and that Intel doesn’t support it or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, overall, there is a huge difference in the results here, as you briefly alluded to,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you are Intel exclusive for your PC CPUs, you’re fine, because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the vast majority of the time, Intel is the leader in that race, usually by a pretty big margin.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco AMD’s CPU business has been second run basically since the Pentium 4. It

⏹️ ▶️ Marco had a good run there for a little while where it was king, but then it wasn’t. So if it was the other way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco around, if Apple had this great relationship with AMD for the CPUs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and would never use Intel CPUs, they’d have a pretty big problem. They just wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be very competitive a lot of the time. And the problem is they now have that problem on the GPU side.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco On the GPU side, I think they do okay with power per watt, but they don’t have the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sheer performance edge that they would have if NVIDIA

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was their only supplier or if they would use both like they used to. You know, it used to be that like, you know, every

⏹️ ▶️ Marco generation of like a Mac or a MacBook Pro, like it, they would like alternate between which vendor

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were supplying, just whoever had like the most compelling one that they could get in a volume or whatever else. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but by going seemingly AMD only for GPUs for at least the last few years,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it is really starting to hurt them, especially at the high end. I’ve heard from so many people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who see the news about the iMac Pro or the Mac Pro and just write it off as,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorry, we can’t do that because it doesn’t support CUDA. And the only thing that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be an escape valve here is external GPU support.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I think with Thunderbolt 3 now supporting external GPU boxes, that might

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be their answer. Like it might be like, we’re gonna keep using AMD for our main GPUs,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if you’re a pro customer and you want a CUDA card for your work, maybe putting it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a Thunderbolt chassis is close enough.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the benchmark still, especially for these applications that need this, like that’s where the bandwidth actually

⏹️ ▶️ John does come in. Doesn’t come in in games probably. If you’re just interested in games, you can probably get away with an eGPU.

⏹️ ▶️ John But for all these fancy computational things that actually send a lot of data back and forth, Thunderbolt is,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s not even close to the bandwidth of an internal card. I think Barefeet also has done benchmarks

⏹️ ▶️ John with that too. like, you know, let’s try a MacBook Pro with an eGPU versus

⏹️ ▶️ John the iMac Pro with its internal versus a good old cheese grater with some $900 Nvidia

⏹️ ▶️ John graphic card shoved into this ancient internals from 2010 or 11. And the

⏹️ ▶️ John stupid cheese grater wins every time because it’s got an internal GPU with more bandwidth than everybody else. And

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got the fastest, the latest card from Nvidia. And so like I said, when the person originally

⏹️ ▶️ John asked the question, would the Mac Pro be a failed product? I don’t think so. I mean, it’s silly that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John won’t support it if it’s like some weird political reason or whatever, but whatever, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, if you buy a computer with the fastest available GPU, next year it’s not the fastest GPU

⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. And so if you just pretend every Mac Pro you’re buying is already a year old, as long as you can

⏹️ ▶️ John either A, upgrade it so that every single year you can buy a faster GPU, or B,

⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple revises it and so every year if you bought a new one, it has a faster GPU in it. Like the worst

⏹️ ▶️ John situation is they put it out with a competitive, pretty fast GPU that may actually by the way be faster

⏹️ ▶️ John in your particular thing. Because if you’re not running games and you’re not running a CUDA accelerator application, sometimes the AMD

⏹️ ▶️ John GPU is the fastest. Really depends on what you’re doing. But the trick is, you need some way to

⏹️ ▶️ John stay on that performance path. You can’t have the fastest one and then just never offer another GPU for three

⏹️ ▶️ John years. And not have it be upgradable. So people need some way to every year reap the benefits

⏹️ ▶️ John of the embarrassing parallelism of the graphics world. And that’s that’s what the

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro has to deliver. If it can’t deliver Nvidia, that’s a bummer for some people.

⏹️ ▶️ John But what it has to deliver is the ability to get back on the GPU train.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can put in the all aboard screen from crazy train right here, Marco. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was going to put on Back on the Train by Phish.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, I do not approve of that. Crazy train. Every podcast needs a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Viperslap.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are brought to you this week by Squarespace. Start building your website today

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at squarespace.com and enter offer code ATP at checkout to get 10% off. Make your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco next move with a beautiful website from Squarespace. Now many of our listeners, myself included,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know how to make websites ourselves without using Squarespace. We know how to like get a server

⏹️ ▶️ Marco set up and put a CMS on there or build our own CMS from scratch. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then we also, if we’re honest with ourselves, we know that that never takes as fast as we want it to and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s always additional overhead to managing it that we probably shouldn’t need to worry about things like security

⏹️ ▶️ Marco updates and patches and backups and caching and keeping it up if we get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know a prominent link from somewhere and everything else and the reality is with Squarespace

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t have to worry about any of that and that’s probably a better use of your time is to just go to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace make your website for your next podcast or your next blog or your next portfolio

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a store or just a website just for fun to show off what you like or what your business

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. Make that website with Squarespace instead of doing it yourself through any other kind of means because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much everything else honestly is not a good use of your time. You should be focused on your business

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or your project or your hobby instead of worrying about your web hosting. And Squarespace gives you that luxury.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace sites look great. No matter what your skill level is, you can create a site that looks professionally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco designed and that works on all devices of any size. They take care of patching and backups and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco security and caching and everything. You don’t have to worry about any of that. All you do is focus on your project. them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco worry about your website.

More iMac Pro details

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Start your free trial site today at Squarespace.com. When you decide to sign up, make sure to use offer code ATP

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get 10% off your first purchase. Make your next move with a beautiful website from Squarespace.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually had a call with Apple PR last week about the iMac Pro after we recorded.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What?

⏹️ ▶️ John Did you get a call, Casey? I didn’t get a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey call. I did not get a call. Well, of course I didn’t get a call. I mean, come

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John on.

⏹️ ▶️ John You sound like the biggest iMac Pro fans that figured they would call Casey, you know? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casey has a review unit. That would be the ultimate troll. Oh my god, would that be amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But no, I have received no calls of any sort. I am not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco special. Well anyway, they reached out to me and said they wanted to schedule a call. I was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very pleasantly surprised. And so I prepared some questions and I didn’t really know what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to expect but it was really nice. It was really pretty open, pretty laid

⏹️ ▶️ Marco back. I mean, you And to set the expectations a little bit,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes people will get mad at somebody, like when John Gruber has his podcast where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco he’ll occasionally have an Apple executive on, some people get mad that he doesn’t ask certain questions.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Things like, when’s the next Mac Pro coming? Because the reality is, Apple’s not gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell you about future products. It’s kind of a waste of a question. If you’re only given a limited amount of time,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a waste of time to ask them questions they are unlikely to answer. or likely to give you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the answer you want. So asking about when future products

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are coming, or really asking anything about future products, is a waste of time, so I didn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure someone’s gonna be mad and write in because of something I didn’t ask, but that was generally,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there might be things I just didn’t think about, but generally there were a lot of things that I didn’t ask because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the real question, even if it wasn’t phrased a certain way, you can tell the real question is really about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a future product. So for example, I wanted to ask about, why are there so many

⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-A ports and a card reader on the back? But I knew that’s really a question

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the MacBook Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John That was my question. So you didn’t ask that? That was probably gonna be my first thing to ask you. You didn’t ask my question?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually did kind of ask it, but I didn’t get the response that was like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco our pro customers hated the MacBook Pro. Like, no, it wasn’t like that. It was basically explaining, we offered

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ports as many as we could for our pro customers, et cetera, that kind of thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, that’s what that’s that question. Those those type of questions, because you can’t ask them about future things. You can only ask

⏹️ ▶️ John them about the product. So basically, that’s that’s the only way you ever get anything is to say, why

⏹️ ▶️ John does product that you’re at that we’re talking about right now have feature? Right. So right.

⏹️ ▶️ John Why does that you can’t even say, why does the iMac pro have USB ports

⏹️ ▶️ John and the MacBook Pro doesn’t? You have to just say, I noticed there’s a lot of USB ports in the back. Why

⏹️ ▶️ John are those there or like, why does it have them? And to give them the opportunity to give their canned PR answer. And if they

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have a canned PR answer because they thought no one would ever ask that, then they have to think on their feet and maybe you get a little

⏹️ ▶️ John bit of insight. But sometimes they’re very forthcoming about, you know, like they could say there’s some specific

⏹️ ▶️ John customers that we talked to. They have really important USB peripherals. And we thought, like, you never know what they’re going to say. And that’s the way they

⏹️ ▶️ John get legit information out of it. You just have to know how to phrase it, not as this computer doesn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ John them. Why does the iMac Pro have them? Because that’s not going to put them in the right frame of mind to give you any good info.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Exactly. Anyway, it’s very clear that they really are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very heavily focused on developers for this machine. You know, it wasn’t immediately

⏹️ ▶️ Marco obvious when the PR first came out, like on whatever day it was that all the embargoes lifted on the first week review

⏹️ ▶️ Marco units. It wasn’t incredibly obvious then because everything that came out first was all like YouTubers.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so we all thought, myself included, like, wow, they just gave it to YouTubers? That’s kind of, I guess that’s understandable.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But then as it turned out, later that day, we saw a bunch of tweets and blog posts, many

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of which were from developers. And it’s very clear that they actually were reaching out to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of developers for this, and developers just aren’t that good at being at minute one after an embargo

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff like that, because developers are not usually reviewers or journalists. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of like trying to coordinate cats to all do something. Although I still believe that cats are all a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hive mind, and they’re all the same cat, different visions of the same cat.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my goodness.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, very strong focus on developers here. They really, you could tell that they worked with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of developers in development. They talked to a lot of developers. They clearly cared a lot about developer needs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because a lot of these are gonna sell to high-end developers. They’re gonna sell to just people like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me who are willing to spend the money on a very, very fast machine for app development. They’re gonna sell

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to VR developers, hopefully, and high-end developers, content creators,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco et cetera. So like they were very concerned about making sure that this was a good machine for developers.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I really respect that. And even though, you know, it’s kind of I’m a little bit biased in that because I’m a developer and this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco worked out for me because they wanted to talk to me. So obviously I’m a little bit biased, but I thought that was a really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good angle. They seemed sincere about it. They seem like they had really done their homework, done their diligence and done their research. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for instance, like one of the things was that 10 core they find is the most ideal

⏹️ ▶️ Marco configuration for most developer workflows. And they know this because they actually did tests and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco worked with people and figured out what people do. And they were able to tell that usually after

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the 10 core mark, today’s tools tend to not use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco many of the cores after that, or you’re bottlenecked by other things like I.O. So that made total sense.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the things I asked about, because last show we had a lot of discussion about the thermal

⏹️ ▶️ Marco design of the iMac Pro, and about the idea that they were downclocking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the two base CPUs by like 10% or something at their base clocks.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we’re kind of saying, you know, John had a lot of thoughts about it and kind of saying like, you know, why drop down the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance to fit in the enclosure that nobody was asking you to fit it in. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I asked a lot about this and they were pretty unwavering about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. They didn’t like cram it in here unnecessarily.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They They tried to see if they could fit workstation components into this case

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they could. They did a lot of redesigning of the thermals. Because there is no 3.5

⏹️ ▶️ Marco inch disc offered in the iMac Pro, that frees up a pretty large

⏹️ ▶️ Marco block of pretty premium space right in the middle. 3.5 inch discs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco compared to the internals of an iMac are huge. It certainly does seem like they have filled a lot of that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco space with heat sink basically. It certainly has a massive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco heat sink apparatus back there from the pictures. So the impression I got from this question is that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they didn’t have to compromise to fit the workstation parts into this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco case. They designed it, it fit, and there seems to be headroom, which I’ll get to in a little bit.

⏹️ ▶️ John So what do they say about the downclocking? We had some feedback about that. So there’s the base CPUs

⏹️ ▶️ John that you talked about, but there’s also the GPUs, which I didn’t know whether they were downclocked and I speculated that maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John they’d be 90% downclocked, someone emailed the show to say they’re actually 83% down clock versus

⏹️ ▶️ John what they would be like if you took that same card and put it in a PC. And so, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ John and also one other bit of feedback about downclocking specifically the GPUs. Uh, again, I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ John if the providence of this information is sound or not, but someone emailed to suggest that

⏹️ ▶️ John AMD has been optimistic with the clock speeds and that really, if you run

⏹️ ▶️ John them at the quote unquote rated speed, that it shortens their life and Apple cares more about them so that they

⏹️ ▶️ John just buy you know, they just always run them slightly down clocked anyway, just because if they don’t, they’ll have reliability problems.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if that’s trash can fallout or just total BS or just speculation or whatever. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John all we know is the numbers we can look at. And apparently, if you buy this exact card

⏹️ ▶️ John from AMD and sign a regular card slot, the iMac is running them 83%

⏹️ ▶️ John slower, which is, you know, know, not not an insignificant. So when they say, Can

⏹️ ▶️ John we fit it? Yes, they could fit it. But if you can fit it by downclocking and using

⏹️ ▶️ John slower speed things, I did you really fit it? Or did you have to compromise on something

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like

⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like their answer to you is just rephrasing the question. Like, why did you fit everything inside the case? We wanted to see if we could ferry inside

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but why? Why didn’t like the real question is, why didn’t you make a new case? And that the reason there is like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John we didn’t want to spend that much money on it. It’d be a lot of design time we wouldn’t you know, like, other reasons that they’re probably not going

⏹️ ▶️ John to tell you of why they didn’t design a new case because surely it is faster to market

⏹️ ▶️ John and cost them less money and less time and less everything to use the same external design.

⏹️ ▶️ John Probably get to, well I was gonna say they get to use the same VESA mounts but they did change that part of the case so I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s still slightly mysterious to me but anyway that from as far as we can tell

⏹️ ▶️ John you take those same parts and put them in an ugly boxy PC and you can get them all

⏹️ ▶️ John to run at faster speeds or use higher-end parts?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean the GPU, I honestly, I don’t have any qualifications to talk about GPUs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I didn’t ask really anything about them because I don’t know anything about GPUs. But on the CPU

⏹️ ▶️ Marco part, as Gruber points out a lot, like Apple doesn’t usually lie.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you know, they’ll spin things a certain way if they want to, but they don’t usually outright lie. Like, usually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they tell you a straight-out answer, that is the truth. So, and in this case, like they were very clear

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like they didn’t need to change the case and and there’s some thermal stuff that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll get to in a few minutes that I think probably supports that theory if it ends up being

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know panning out that way. On the subject of the CPU downclocking so I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco did some research before the call and I discovered that it’s only the 8 and 10 core

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are downclocked from their like retail speeds from the retail parts. The 14 and 18 are identical. they are all rated at the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco same TDP, so the same heat capacity of 140 watts. They all are the same.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The 8 and 10 core chips are special chips that were made by Intel just for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s OEM use here. That’s why they even have different model numbers. They have a B on the end, and they’re like slightly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco different numbers than their counterparts. If you look, I’ll link to the Wikipedia table that lists all the Skylake

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Xeons. So you can see like these are special chips that are only used by

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple, and so far only in the iMac Pro. And their answer to that was basically like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, they are the custom part from Intel and that’s just how the clock speeds bend out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for these chips. One of the things they wanted to make sure of is that all of the processors

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are available in the iMac Pro have the same AVX512 processing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco capacity. These are the new instructions that are, I think, new to these chips, or at least new to the current generation

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Xeons. These are super high end vector instructions for certain types of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco math that can be very well optimized. Some of the Xeons that are in this family only have one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco compute unit. The high end ones have two. Apple made sure that all of theirs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have two. That being said, I looked up the specs for the corresponding parts that are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slightly higher clocked and they have two also. So I’m not entirely sure what that means right now. That

⏹️ ▶️ Marco could have been a later change in the release cycle for Intel where they decided to put two on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those or they could have been referencing different parts. They could have used but didn’t. But the important thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I got from the call is that they didn’t see this as an artificial lowering of the clock speed. This is just how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were binned out for their custom part. And they made sure their custom parts all had the same AVX-512

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dual processing units.

⏹️ ▶️ John So- What’s custom about them besides the AVX stuff? I don’t know. I can ask them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, they’re friendly. They’ll probably answer an email if I ask them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think our concerns about the thermals are probably unwarranted

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because what I heard from them, which confirms what I heard from other people who were at their demos

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or who’ve had review units so far, it sounds like there is a lot of thermal

⏹️ ▶️ Marco headroom. They had certain demos at these events that were running on loops

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all day long that were stressing all the CPU cores at like 60% or higher all the time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that you couldn’t even really hear the fan. And what I was told basically is that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way the thermals work out in this generation, that you can hammer the CPUs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty hard and you probably won’t hear the fan spin up. You will pretty much only hear it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get loud if you’re hammering the CPUs and the GPUs. And this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually is plausible to me because this is actually not that different from how the Skylake laptops work. The Skylake

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, what is it, Ivy Bridge? I already forget. So the current laptop

⏹️ ▶️ Marco generation compared to the old one that I’m still holding onto is way quieter under CPU

⏹️ ▶️ Marco load. It doesn’t spin up for nearly as long, and it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cools down much faster and everything else. So given that these are the Xeons from the Skylake family, that actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think makes sense. That’s believable to me. And it does seem like they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco designed this with a lot of thermal headroom. So for the moment, having not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco used one of these yet, having not owned one of these yet, it does sound like they are not concerned

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about thermals. And all the demo units and all the review units out there so far have shown pretty awesome

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thermal and noise performance. So, so far it seems tentatively like it might be pretty awesome on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the thermal and heat front, and therefore that also supports their position that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these aren’t really down-clocked for meaningful performance reasons.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you keep excluding the GPU because you didn’t want to talk about it, but it’s possibly more than half of the

⏹️ ▶️ John heat in here, And certainly half of the equation like if the if the if this info from this is

⏹️ ▶️ John just from a listener because I don’t know The clock speeds of this GPU and stuff but if these GPUs really are at 83% of the

⏹️ ▶️ John clock speed that if you were to buy The same card and put it in a PC and get the fastest one

⏹️ ▶️ John Like why would you choose to do that? If you’ve got the thermal headroom? It doesn’t you know, especially if it’s like literally

⏹️ ▶️ John the same part down clock to not just been differently for pricing thing Like I don’t quite understand how

⏹️ ▶️ John that math works out. So it sounds like for the CPU We have some good information on it

⏹️ ▶️ John and certainly you’ve been doing things to stress the CPU and it seems like there’s plenty of room But kind of like in the trash

⏹️ ▶️ John can if you happen to do something that uses them both at once What does that do to things like it? You know why?

⏹️ ▶️ John the explanation for why the The CPUs are down clocks like oh, that’s just how they bend out and maybe they had to be

⏹️ ▶️ John slower clocks because they’ve got the two AVX units and the normal ones of that size didn’t that kind of make some

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of sense, right? But why on the other side of the case where the other fan

⏹️ ▶️ John is blowing into you know What I like from both fans are going through the same heat sink But anyway on the other side of the case where the GPU

⏹️ ▶️ John is Why if that if that stuff actually is clocked down and by the way if you’re if you

⏹️ ▶️ John know the exact clock speeds of like The GPUs CPU and memory buses, please

⏹️ ▶️ John send it to the show Like that doesn’t match up with the idea that

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s plenty of thermal headroom because especially like on the high-end part Why wouldn’t you run those

⏹️ ▶️ John at their full speed?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and honestly, again, I just I don’t know whether they’re run at full speed or not. I will

⏹️ ▶️ Marco say that like, you know, they didn’t nothing they said indicated that it couldn’t handle stressing both the CPU and GPU

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just that you’d be more likely to hear it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t know. And I would imagine the demos that they should actually did stress both of them. But, you know, we haven’t been there for the demos but I

⏹️ ▶️ John think the demos probably did stress both the GPU and the CPU. So maybe those are a good example. And, you know, and maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John again, they traded the quiet for like, look, if we if we clock this at 83% of max speed,

⏹️ ▶️ John we can just be quiet all the time, no matter what. And isn’t that a better pro experience than allowing

⏹️ ▶️ John it to get noisy? You know, for this particular case, because maybe some people are using applications that are stressing

⏹️ ▶️ John both of them all the time. And it’s not a great experience for the pro Mac whose fans

⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t escape by putting it under the desk to be noisy. Like I can I can come up with all sorts of reasons why they can

⏹️ ▶️ John explain this. Because again, this is the compact pro machine. It’s not the Mac Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? But I don’t know which of those

⏹️ ▶️ John explanations that I could come up on my own is the right one, if any.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe I think what you just said about hitting a constant load minimum

⏹️ ▶️ Marco heat performance kind of thing, that might be related to the way the CPUs are clocked. Because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it says something that these all have the same TDP. So like when driven

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fully, like at maximum all the core stressed, they will all cap out at the same heat output,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all the core counts. However, only the bottom two chips had their base clocks

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reduced from the Intel retail parts. So maybe it really is like a heat and noise thing because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way Turbo Boost works, you know, with all the all modern Intel chips, like if it has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thermal headroom, it will increase its clock speed until it hits a certain maximum

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it won’t go past, or until it starts getting too hot, or until more cores

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get engaged and then it starts to reduce the overall ceiling on them so that it keeps below that threshold.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it doesn’t ever go below the base speed. And the turbo clock

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is reduced. On those two that they’ve modified, the 8 and 10 core, they did reduce the turbo boost

⏹️ ▶️ Marco max speed as well. So I don’t know what that means in this in this theory, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by reducing the base clock, it’s still going to turbo up a lot when it’s in use, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s going to run at the reduced base clock speed when it’s not doing heavy lifting.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so maybe that is primarily there for, you know, lower

⏹️ ▶️ Marco noise and heat when it’s most of the time doing pretty light work.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So really all of our, well maybe not all, but a lot of our qualms from last episode

⏹️ ▶️ Casey may be a little premature.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, yeah, the answer really is we don’t really know yet until we really get these machines, well, until

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I get this machine. You guys aren’t getting it. But although, well, I’ll get to that in a minute,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but until we really get these machines, we really can’t be incredibly sure about any of these things.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am hopeful now, after having this call and also having heard from the reviewers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the people who were at these events, it doesn’t sound like there’s reason to be concerned about the thermals yet.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s pretty promising. I’m very happy to hear that because that was my big concern going into

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. It seems like there’s a lot of headroom and that they didn’t need to make the case bigger

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and make it full of holes like what John wanted. Um, so we’ll see if that, if that actually pans out, but I,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, I think it’s plausible. Um, I asked a few more things, uh, kind of like side notes here

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the T2. One thing I thought was very interesting is that it is indeed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the SSD controller. Like it is the disk controller. And in all of the configurations,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not just the four terabyte one, it uses dual SSD modules and it uses them in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco parallel for performance. And so even if you get the terabyte, that’s just using two 512s.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And with the T2 controlling it, it isn’t abstracted to the OS

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as two disks, the way if you just plug in like a two disk enclosure without any kind of RAID functionality. It shows up as two disks.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It isn’t like that. It shows up as one disk. The controller shows it as one device, but behind the scenes,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is actually using two in parallel. It’s one of the reasons why they’re so freaking

⏹️ ▶️ John fast. We got anonymous feedback about that, by the way, about the dual module thing. And I think it

⏹️ ▶️ John just, what it boils down to is like, you can just do the benchmark. Look at the performance. It’s like three gigabytes per second, read and

⏹️ ▶️ John write roughly. So I think it’s a little bit less for write, right? So the debate about single versus

⏹️ ▶️ John dual, the feedback we got is that it’s not actually a dual module. It’s just one module that’s split into two bits of silicon,

⏹️ ▶️ John but the bottom line is that what is it like for PCI Express? Lanes going to this controller. Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ John like you you get the results you get and you know what whether it’s because they’re dual Or it’s just one good

⏹️ ▶️ John way They could have put it on a single chip for different packaging reasons is that they are giving you the PCI

⏹️ ▶️ John Express lanes to Get maximum performance out of the SSDs and that the performance is better better

⏹️ ▶️ John than any other Mac essentially And did you did you ask them about the encryption stuff as well

⏹️ ▶️ John a little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit? Yeah? I mean, I didn’t have a lot of questions on it because I didn’t know enough to ask really about, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, it is certainly doing all the encryption in hardware, like in the T2. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s two different types of encryption going on here. There’s the hardware encryption, kind of like what iOS devices have,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where like the actual data on the flash is encrypted, even if you’re not using file fault,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is encrypted. And if you take that SSD stick or whatever it is out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the iMac Pro and put it in some kind of enclosure or another iMac Pro to try to read it, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco won’t be able to, because the key to decrypt it is secure enclave style stored

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that T2. The reading of the flash is tied to that hardware. So the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only way to read the data on the flash is if you can get that computer to read it for you. If you do things like set

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a firmware password or something, obviously that’s going to provide pretty good security on that, so it can’t boot other things.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually, I didn’t ask too much about what’s different now with the new secure

⏹️ ▶️ Marco boot stuff with things like firmware passwords and boot options and whether it will boot external media

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff like that. I know a lot of that has changed, mostly for the better, in fact, maybe entirely for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the better. So I can’t really talk about that because I don’t know enough about it yet. So there’s that level of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco encryption. And you can also use FileVault on top of that. And if you do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use FileVault, its encryption instructions are now hardware accelerated.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s not even running on the Xeon, it’s running on the T2. It’s not taxing the Xeon at all.

⏹️ ▶️ John hardware accelerated, you got my pet peeve again. Oh, now it’s hardware accelerated. Instead of being executed

⏹️ ▶️ John on hardware, it’ll be executed on hardware. I know, but yeah, you

⏹️ ▶️ John got the important point, is that you don’t have to make, the CPU won’t be involved in this. So most people are

⏹️ ▶️ John speculating, like what performance hit do you get for using

⏹️ ▶️ John encryption with HFS Plus or APFS? And you could measure it, and Apple’s like, it’s really small or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think some testing has shown hit might actually be more with APFS than it was with a vest plus whether it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s better encryption or whatever. Theoretically,

⏹️ ▶️ John well, first of all, you know, assuredly, this will give you more CPU, because your

⏹️ ▶️ John CPU won’t be doing any encryption stuff, none zero, it’ll all be done by the T two, which is great. Like I like

⏹️ ▶️ John the idea of these little custom co processors handling this type, this very specific function, surely they have instructions just for it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John great. The second possibility that someone will have to benchmark to find out is okay, your CPU

⏹️ ▶️ John is freed up, does the T2 do that encryption job faster than the Xeon used to because,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s a dedicated type of thing? If it does, that means there will be less of a performance hit

⏹️ ▶️ John for enabling FileVault on an iMac Pro with the T2, and that’s something we’ll have to benchmark.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I’m guessing there’s probably some kind of smart implementation detail where, because like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s already in the T2’s role as the disk controller, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and doing that hardware encryption the way iOS devices do, it’s already encrypting everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in and out at full speed, even when FileVault’s not on. So I’m guessing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by using FileVault, you’re probably just having another mode of maybe that same encryption,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or having the keys combine in some way, or something like that. I don’t know the details enough to

⏹️ ▶️ John say, but. It could be, and if that’s the case, there’ll be zero speed hit, because it’s doing it whether you have FileVault on or not,

⏹️ ▶️ John and so it’s, you know, like this should be borne out by the benchmarks, But it’s an intriguing possibility. This

⏹️ ▶️ John brings me back to the good old days of Philips Tri-Media Accelerator. You guys don’t remember

⏹️ ▶️ John that, but. Nope. But there have been very, even in the early days of Mac OS X, which maybe you were around

⏹️ ▶️ John for and remember, the idea of Apple adding chips to Macs

⏹️ ▶️ John to make them faster in basically magical ways. It’s like, yeah, you can just take a CPU and

⏹️ ▶️ John some RAM and a motherboard and throw them together, but the Apple special sauce is they’ll put special magic chips on there

⏹️ ▶️ John that will make your Mac better. This is the actual reality of the T2. Apple made its own chip

⏹️ ▶️ John and threw it on there. And I mean, even on Apple’s own page, like the list of stuff this thing does in addition to what

⏹️ ▶️ John we listed is, image signal processing for the front facing camera, audio controller,

⏹️ ▶️ John of course, the secure enclave, the encryption. Oh, actually this is right from Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ John marketing page. The data in your SSD is encrypted using dedicated AES hardware with no effect on the SSD’s performance.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not clear whether they’re talking about FileVault or the other thing. Um, but yeah, they’re like,

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re actually doing something that they have very rarely done in the past, which is throw, throw in a

⏹️ ▶️ John chip, a chip that nobody else has to their computer specifically to make them perform better. And who doesn’t like

⏹️ ▶️ John that? That, that is a, that is a great pro feature. And if it lets them like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John these are things that you should be able to measure if it lets them go faster on benchmarks, because

⏹️ ▶️ John the CPU is not involved in all in any of the encryption on the disc stuff, that’s, that’s a clean win and

⏹️ ▶️ John if the t2 as is rumored is heavily based on an existing iPhone chip that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a great reuse of IP like they already did the work to design this chip for their flagship product you

⏹️ ▶️ John can repurpose this chip and throw it in with a combination of a bunch of other stuff and maybe even

⏹️ ▶️ John repurpose some software that you have to do say image processing from the iPhone or whatever you

⏹️ ▶️ John know and maybe disc controller stuff I don’t know how much of that is shared with the iOS devices that might be using

⏹️ ▶️ John a similar thing. This is a smart way to make a better, faster computer and

⏹️ ▶️ John I hope the Mac Pro has something just like this even though, you know, presumably doesn’t have a front-facing camera or

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think, you know, one of the things we said when the Touch Bar was launched was, you know, this actually does

⏹️ ▶️ Marco show like they are putting significant engineering resources into the Mac still. You know, not as much as we would like sometimes,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but clearly like it isn’t just sitting around being completely neglected. Like this wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a half-assed update. This was like a significant engineering effort and with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco significant new things being put into it, not just like a stock Intel motherboard and stock

⏹️ ▶️ Marco parts. So give them full credit where credit is due. This is major engineering work

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going into the Mac. And for a long time, it seemed like that wasn’t happening. So this is a nice

⏹️ ▶️ Marco change of the narrative and it’s good to see results.

⏹️ ▶️ John One aspect of this integration, by the way, of getting to the SSD specifically, Of like great performance

⏹️ ▶️ John the encryption addressed for free the secure enclave This is from

⏹️ ▶️ John our anonymous source again As person says they feel quite confident stating there will never

⏹️ ▶️ John be a third-party SSD upgrade for a t2 equipped to Mac because the integration is so tight

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean Maybe it’s tight down to being soldered in or maybe it’s tight just down to like This is not

⏹️ ▶️ John something you can buy off the shelf There’s tight integration between the storage and the controller and the encryption and all

⏹️ ▶️ John that other stuff going on there that it is a very custom solution.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that is very much like iOS devices, where no one considers upgrading the storage

⏹️ ▶️ John you buy a 64 gig phone, you’re like, oh, I’ll aftermarket upgrade it to 128.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, you won’t,

⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s so integrated into, like everything inside a phone has from

⏹️ ▶️ John day one been so tied up with the whole security environment of phones, and the T2

⏹️ ▶️ John brings the Mac closer to that ideal in good ways and bad. We haven’t gotten to the secure boot stuff yet,

⏹️ ▶️ John but like bringing it closer to the ideal of a phone of being more resilient

⏹️ ▶️ John to hardware attacks. Like the old adage in the world of desktop and even laptop computers is physical

⏹️ ▶️ John access trumps all security, even servers. Physical access trumps all security. If you are physically there with the hardware,

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t really matter what you’ve done security wise, because if you’re physically there, there are so many things that you can do

⏹️ ▶️ John to own that machine, right? With phones, the whole

⏹️ ▶️ John idea has been to make them Resilient to that old adage does physical access trump security here you go. Here’s my phone

⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple has done a good job It should be really hard for you to get anything out of it like anything at all

⏹️ ▶️ John Aside from you maybe like freezing the thing a liquid nitrogen and extracting the data from RAM But even then it might be

⏹️ ▶️ John encrypted like you know so anyway The t2 and the associated secure boot

⏹️ ▶️ John machinery and secure on cloud and all that stuff Are an attempt to bring the Mac more into that direction?

⏹️ ▶️ John for for good and bad Mostly good in terms of security, but bad in terms

⏹️ ▶️ John of Us as computer enthusiasts who occasionally screw up on their our

⏹️ ▶️ John computers Have gotten used to the idea that you know physical access trumps

⏹️ ▶️ John All security is good for us when we screw when we mess up our own computers say well, it’s all messed up

⏹️ ▶️ John But because I’m physically here in front of the computer I’m gonna plug in this other drive and boot from it or you know I’m gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John go and target disk mode and just pull the data off or whatever like you know even though I’ve hosted my iOS installed by

⏹️ ▶️ John messing with the bootloader or something like there’s always something we can do to save ourselves. Not so much with an iPhone.

⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe not so much with one of these iMac pros either, depending on how you have it configured.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and this is one of the reasons why like I would strongly advise similar to the RAM argument,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, don’t assume you’re going to be able to upgrade these later. You know, as you said, like, we heard from that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anonymous tip, they don’t they don’t think that it’s likely that that we’re going to have upgradeable SSDs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from third parties. I didn’t ask this during the call, so I don’t have any kind of official statement on this,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I would guess the same thing. It seems very likely that that’s going to be the case, that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think you’re going to see third-party T2 SSD modules. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we briefly discussed last week, I don’t think that’s that different from how it is now. last few

⏹️ ▶️ Marco generations of Macs that we’ve had, you haven’t had third-party SSD modules

⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually at all, or if they do come, they come like years after the machine is launched,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re usually very expensive because they’re like custom stuff from OWC or something like that. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, if you can at all order your computer with the disk space you need up front, do it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And otherwise consider external expansion because internal upgrades

⏹️ ▶️ Marco down the road just getting less and less likely to be possible or affordable.

⏹️ ▶️ John So the secure boot stuff, Cable did a bunch of tweets about it because he got one too, right? He’s another developer who

⏹️ ▶️ John got one of these.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, he

⏹️ ▶️ John got a review in it. Yeah, that’s right. He didn’t just get a call. He actually got a computer, which is cool. So he did a bunch of tweets

⏹️ ▶️ John about it. One of them was a screenshot of a new, I guess it’s an app called Startup

⏹️ ▶️ John Security Utility, and it’s where you can enable and disable the firmware password, but it also has

⏹️ ▶️ John two little sets of radio buttons. called secure boot and the options are full security

⏹️ ▶️ John which I don’t know what the defaults are but full security ensures that only the latest and most secure software can be

⏹️ ▶️ John run this mode requires a network connection at software installation time I’m a little bit confused about the details of

⏹️ ▶️ John that because ensures that only the latest and most secure software can run does that mean like if it’s not the latest software it won’t boot

⏹️ ▶️ John it but it will force you to do an update before it will even boot I don’t know anyway medium security requires

⏹️ ▶️ John verifiable software to boot but not the latest software so you you can just keep using your old OS. And

⏹️ ▶️ John no security, does not enforce any requirement. So all of our Macs now fall under the category, as

⏹️ ▶️ John far as secure boot is concerned, of no security. Like, if the,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s an interesting name for what Apple thinks of this thing. If you plug in a drive that has an OS that can boot your

⏹️ ▶️ John machine, it will boot, right? It doesn’t do any verification that that operating system is like

⏹️ ▶️ John completely valid and hasn’t been rooted, and it sure doesn’t care if it’s the latest version. You know, you can, whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John like my 2008 Mac Pro, what did it ship with? Did it ship with Snow Leopard?

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe before that. Maybe it shipped with Leopard? Yeah, I think it shipped with Leopard. It’ll boot Leopard right now. It doesn’t care

⏹️ ▶️ John that Leopard is ancient. Like, so that’s what Apple considers no security. And there’s also an option for external

⏹️ ▶️ John boot. And you can select disallow booting from external media, which is pretty straightforward.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, oh, you messed up your computer? You want to boot from another disk to try to save it? Nope, not if you have

⏹️ ▶️ John this thing set. or the option to allow booting from external media. So a lot of the TSU stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John is like, you know, you can make your iMac much more like an iPhone, or

⏹️ ▶️ John if you change these settings, it can just be like a normal Mac has always been. Now it’s clear the direction Apple wants you to go

⏹️ ▶️ John in, the top items and all these radio buttons are the most secure ones,

⏹️ ▶️ John but there’s an interesting TechNote help article that I’ll put a link to that like,

⏹️ ▶️ John what do you do if you have your iMac Pro set to the most secure settings and you screw it up.

⏹️ ▶️ John The recovery procedure, kind of like the recovery procedure when you like screw up your phone

⏹️ ▶️ John and you have to sort of go into DFU mode or whatever, the recovery procedure for your iMac Pro requires you to

⏹️ ▶️ John have another Mac and

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that you can connect to your

⏹️ ▶️ John iMac Pro. And if you think about it, it’s like, look, you always need some

⏹️ ▶️ John other thing to plug your thing into. Like when you put your phone in DFU mode, if you don’t literally have any

⏹️ ▶️ John of the hardware, it just sits there staring at you. It’s not you need some other device to connect to do

⏹️ ▶️ John in the case of the Mac Pro What you need to connect to do it would be kind of neat if you connected to an iPhone To recover it like it would

⏹️ ▶️ John download from the internet the OS update and funnel it through But anyway, this is the brave new world security

⏹️ ▶️ John the whole point of all the secure boot software is so that Your computer can verify

⏹️ ▶️ John that it is running Like you know clean software software that

⏹️ ▶️ John you know This is sort of chain of trust that each thing in the chain verifies the next thing What was it a cable had a good tweet about

⏹️ ▶️ John it? The new chip means that storage encryption keys pass from the secure enclave

⏹️ ▶️ John to the hardware encryption engine on chip. Your key never leaves the chip and allows the hardware verification of the OS, the

⏹️ ▶️ John kernel, the bootloader, the firmware, etc. And each component in turn verifies the next.

⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s a chain of trust starting with the secure enclave essentially so that each thing

⏹️ ▶️ John that runs next knows that it is being kicked off from something that is secure.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the way the phone security works and it’s the way the security works. And it’s, you know, it’s not like it’s foolproof,

⏹️ ▶️ John like any security thing. If there’s a flaw, it can be exploited to get in. That’s how jailbreaks have always worked. Right. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not, you know, it’s not impenetrable, but it is a far cry from the world of all the Macs that we’re sitting in front of now, which is

⏹️ ▶️ John like, la-dee-da, they’ll boot whatever the heck you give them. They have no idea if your operating system has been,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, rootkitted or whatever. They have no idea how new it is when they’re booting.

⏹️ ▶️ John And this iMac changes all that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder a little bit like, you know, one of the problems that I have with High Sierra is that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s pretty buggy still, but yet Apple is really pushing it heavily through like the auto update mechanism and stuff like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. The idea that like, you know, to have the best security, you should

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be running the latest OS is often true, but not always true. And sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco running the latest OS has other downsides, like certain things that are still broken or too

⏹️ ▶️ Marco different or that break your workflow, like dropping support for some old app that you use, something like that. I wonder

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how this mechanism will be useful in practice if you want to still use the old OS

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while because the new one isn’t good enough yet or doesn’t support the things you need to support yet. Is this going to force

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you to upgrade unless you turn down your security to the medium level? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John you have to change down to medium security, which, you know, they’re loaded terms, full versus

⏹️ ▶️ John medium, but for exactly the reasons you stated, it’s great that they give you these options, like that you don’t have to go to no security.

⏹️ ▶️ John Unlike, for example, what is it? What is the thing on the Mac called the

⏹️ ▶️ John thing that protects all your system files? System integrity protection, SAP? Yeah, there we go, SIP.

⏹️ ▶️ John That you can either have that on or off. And maybe there’s some developer mode that’s kind of in between

⏹️ ▶️ John you there. But very often it’s like, look, to use this fancy

⏹️ ▶️ John piece of software, you have to disable system integrity protection. And even I, who am willing to

⏹️ ▶️ John hack their Mac up a little bit, I’m also like, meh, it really makes me rethink whether I want to completely disable

⏹️ ▶️ John system integrity, because I like the protection, the additional protection and it provides,

⏹️ ▶️ John additionally, protection from myself screwing up my own computer by modifying system files, which I, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John have done in the past, right? So it makes me think twice about doing it. Having medium security where it requires

⏹️ ▶️ John verifiable software to boot, meaning that it verifies that like this is these are legit copies of everything,

⏹️ ▶️ John the bootloader, the kernel, the all, you know, everything else but does not require you to have the latest software that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the mode that I think is most appealing maybe all the time but certainly when a new release

⏹️ ▶️ John comes out because you like if the machine literally will refuse to boot until it updates itself that

⏹️ ▶️ John is a behavior that I think pro customers will not appreciate so again I have no idea what

⏹️ ▶️ John the default is but remember you know if you get one of these machines remember to use this utility

⏹️ ▶️ John and pick the option that makes the most sense for you I mean even if only like

⏹️ ▶️ John if it refused to boot until I had the latest and it literally had to run the software update to High Sierra. For all you know, that is like

⏹️ ▶️ John causing the latest version of Adobe Creative Suite not to launch, right? Like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re pro machine that you use to do work every day, you come in one morning to try to do work and it’s like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John I won’t even boot until I update myself. And then after it boots, the application

⏹️ ▶️ John that you use on this all day doesn’t launch anymore because it’s not yet compatible. That’s not a great experience. So

⏹️ ▶️ John medium security sounds like a good compromise for most people. And disallow booting

⏹️ ▶️ John from external media. Like, are you in an environment where physical security is actually that important to you?

⏹️ ▶️ John Or do you want the option of saving your own butt if you screw something up by plugging in an external drive? I feel like I would leave that

⏹️ ▶️ John on allow booting from external media. But everyone’s security exposure and environment is different.

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you’re working on the next Star Wars movie and it’s really important that

⏹️ ▶️ John if someone breaks of the office, they would have a really difficult time getting your computer

⏹️ ▶️ John to boot from their external drive in target disk mode so they can copy all your precious files off of it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alright, and then a couple other just little tidbits that I asked about or little bits of information I’ve picked up since then.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The quick thing, the PCI Express layout. I know this sounds really boring, trust me there’s a reason I’m saying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. It has the GPU running on 16 lanes, it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has two Thunderbolt controllers running on four lanes each so eight total and the 10 gig ethernet port runs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on four lanes. All those are directed to the CPU everything else including the t2 is done through the DMI

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which goes to what used to be called the South Bridge I think I don’t know if Intel still calls it the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco South Bridge anymore it’s like the controller on the chipset that controls like USB

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and all sorts of other like you know you know lower speed peripherals than like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the GPU. The t2 is the largest bandwidth consumer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco through that bus and the DMI bus seems to have approximately the same bandwidth

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as four PCI Express lanes and you can see that in the benchmarks of the SSD

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that basically the that the SSD clearly can run with the bandwidth of four PCI

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Express lanes so that that does seem to be pretty good. I didn’t ask because I got this information

⏹️ ▶️ Marco after the call so I didn’t ask why the T2 wasn’t connected to one of the CPU

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lanes directly because the The CPU has 48 lanes, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by my count, only 28 of them are being used, or at least only 28 that I can account for. But the reason I bring this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up, a lot of people look at this machine and they wonder, why do we have to pay for Xeons?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why can’t Apple just ship a cheap tower that I want that has an i7 chip in it or whatever?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is one of the reasons. I said, like, so the best i7 you can get in, say the regular

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac has 16 lanes from the CPU total.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is using 28 of them. This shows you like if you drop down

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to one of the consumer CPUs, you would be required to cut throughput

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or to cut possible bandwidth on some of these components. And maybe you won’t notice,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like some people argue, well, you can cut a GPU down to X8, down from X16 and it’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, yeah, maybe it’s fine, but is it the best it can be? like, you know, getting into getting like to John’s argument, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that the best or is it fine? So it is very clear that like, they are using

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the throughput of the Xeon here. And one of the reasons I was thinking about this was kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of trying to do some research on like, do they have enough free PCI Express lanes coming off the CPU

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a in a theoretical Mac Pro, that they could offer multiple card slots

⏹️ ▶️ Marco while also supporting more than one GPU with an X16

⏹️ ▶️ Marco connectivity lane? And the answer appears to be yes. It appears to me they can probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco offer two X16 GPUs and still have enough lanes for other

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. But I’m not like I don’t think they would also offer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco additional PCI Express slots beyond maybe just those two.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All this was theoretical, trying to educate myself to make better Mac Pro predictions. And then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally I asked if there’s still, remember when the 5K iMac first launched? At the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, Thunderbolt 2 was not powerful enough to drive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 5K display at 60 hertz. It didn’t have enough bandwidth to drive a 5K display at 60 hertz. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple made a big deal about, even during the presentation, pointing out they had developed their own timing controller

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or T-Con, and they had embedded that in the iMac to help drive the display by basically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco multi-placing two streams together. I asked if they still do that. The answer, yes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s, because I figured like, you know, that now things are faster, maybe they wouldn’t need that anymore. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nope, they still do it. So that’s useful to somebody maybe. And then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally, I asked if the AppleCare pricing is a mistake or not,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because, Wow. Because whether you, so one of the little flukes about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco AppleCare pricing is that Apple keeps flat pricing for a product family. So if you look at like a MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro, the price of AppleCare for a $2,000 configuration

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the 15-inch MacBook Pro, that’s the same price whether you get the base model or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether you spec up all the specs and it costs like $5,000. AppleCare stays the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco same price because it’s just the price of what it is for a MacBook Pro. The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac Pro is classified as an iMac for AppleCare purposes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so whether you spend literally $1,300 or $13,000,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco AppleCare is the same price of $169.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And when I ordered this, like it shows you like on the second page, it shows like the order screen of like, do you want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to add the AppleCare to your cart? I thought it was a mistake. I’m like, there’s no way that like a $10,000 configuration

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this computer that AppleCare is under $200. There’s no way. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it turns out that is not a mistake, that’s just what it costs. So this is one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those things, I say I buy AppleCare selectively based on the economics involved in each decision.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would definitely recommend buying it on an iMac Pro just because A,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these are really expensive parts if you ever need to get them serviced. I would assume that servicing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is going to cost more simply because the components are more advanced higher higher end and will cost more. And B,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is such a cheap price for AppleCare relative to the cost of the machine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it seems like an exceptionally good deal in this case.

⏹️ ▶️ John One thing about the PCI Express lanes back in the cheese grater days,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe all the cheese grater days, I think they they had like one good slot for your good card.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then one slot with like half the number of lanes. But for the purposes of

⏹️ ▶️ John in those days for the purposes of of having like a crossfire dual GPUs for games and stuff like that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Most games could get by with eight lanes instead of 16. So you’d put one card in the 16, one card in the eight, but

⏹️ ▶️ John just run them the same speed and they would, you know, work or just having two cards to have like

⏹️ ▶️ John a larger number of monitors back before you could drive 10,000 monitors off your laptops. It was a big deal to

⏹️ ▶️ John have two video cards, each of which could drive two monitors and you get a big setup like that. So

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s conceivable that a Mac Pro could have one 16x slot and then

⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of slower slots, some of which you’d still put cards in, especially if you just want to expand the number

⏹️ ▶️ John of monitors. Who knows, maybe you’re making some weird simulation thing that needs 15 monitors, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John If you have enough slots, doesn’t matter that they’re not all 16 lanes, you just need enough to drive a monitor,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? So there’s a lot of flexibility. I continue to think that card slots won’t

⏹️ ▶️ John be what the Mac Pro is about, but who knows? Like you just need a couple of slots to make it so much better than zero

⏹️ ▶️ John slots, right? And I would be perfectly happy if there was only one 16x slot

⏹️ ▶️ John in there and then just you know one or two lesser ones or even zero lesser ones because all I really care

⏹️ ▶️ John about is the ability to upgrade the GPU. But other people other people’s mileage we’re I do wonder about

⏹️ ▶️ John slots in the Mac Pro. How has Apple successfully entirely

⏹️ ▶️ John killed the market for any card you can buy to stick in a Mac? I mean, I suppose not because a lot

⏹️ ▶️ John of PC cards will still work in there or will work in there with some minor change.

⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not as if there’s tons and tons of cards being sold to Mac users, because what would they put them

⏹️ ▶️ John in? It’s been many, many years since Apple has sold a computer brand new that takes expansion

⏹️ ▶️ John cards, PCI Express cards in them. So I have to imagine if you were

⏹️ ▶️ John in the market of selling whatever, cards for whatever that go inside a Mac, that that’s been

⏹️ ▶️ John a difficult market for a while. So that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John something to watch for. It seems like there’s plenty of lanes to go around. It gives Apple lots of flexibility.

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple could certainly use them all on the Mac Pro, but I would not be absolutely shocked if it turns out that

⏹️ ▶️ John even in the biggest, beefiest configuration of Mac Pro, there was actually still a couple of lanes

⏹️ ▶️ John left over for something.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe the eGPU situation now will keep that market alive for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco compute cards and GPUs. I don’t expect that market to come back for things like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco video capture cards. That was one of the, some of the big uses of PCI cards in the past have been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco custom high-end video capture cards, certain RAID controllers and stuff like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. That’s probably not coming back.

⏹️ ▶️ John Or even putting USB 3 in a really old cheese grater, stuff like that. I mean, these tiny little cards that

⏹️ ▶️ John look like they’re embarrassingly small, like they don’t even think they should be taking up a card slot. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s lots of things that you can do, and those cards don’t have to be super Mac-specific. I think, again, it lengthened

⏹️ ▶️ John the life of your computer by giving an interface that it didn’t have before, or whatever, even like a 10

⏹️ ▶️ John gig ethernet card in a Mac Pro that didn’t come with 10 gig ethernet, or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would guess that the only likely role of card slots in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new Mac Pro is GPUs slash compute cards. If they do that, I’m guessing there’s a limit of two

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slots. If for nothing else, for bandwidth, or for just sheer size, or Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco being Apple, not wanting to offer you a ton of PCI slots, they view those as unnecessary slash the past

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash a burden and all of those I think today that would be a reasonable position to take

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as long as you can support GPUs and compute cards I think you’re okay. So Casey

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are you still with us? So now comes the final

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my final thought on this for this 10-minute period. So you know they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco call this the iMac Pro and John said he’ll never buy one.

⏹️ ▶️ John When did I say I would never buy one?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John recall

⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying that. like an hour ago. But I do, I think it’s very, very clear

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by looking, you know, look at what this machine actually is. The only reason it’s called

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac is because it has a closed back and a screen on the front. But by

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all accounts, this is a Mac Pro. Like the reason we’re talking about it so much, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason we’re so excited, the reason it’s so damn fast is because it’s a Mac Pro. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in everything but name and shape, but it isn’t Like even the shape is not that different from what we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco had from 2013 forward. One of the reasons I’m so happy about this is that we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco been crowing for years for a Mac Pro update. Well they just gave us one! This is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Mac Pro update! And it isn’t exactly what everybody wants. Like a lot of people still want the, you know, what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an expandable headless tower will offer them. And I might be one of these too. You know, I’ll decide when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it comes out. I’m just really excited about this machine because they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gave us a new Mac Pro. It’s a Mac Pro, period. No matter what they call it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a Mac Pro. And that’s really great. I’m really excited about that. I just cannot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait to be using a Mac Pro again, even if there’s an extra letter in front of

⏹️ ▶️ John it. I’ll see how excited you are when you have to bring it in for image retention. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m honestly a little worried about service issues

⏹️ ▶️ John like that. It’s like the most prosaic things like the the guts of it all were great great But

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like the the screen ends up being with you know It’s the all-in-one factor like that that if something goes wrong with

⏹️ ▶️ John it Even if everything else is working fine that all thing has to go in

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco so

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway And and it’s been brought up by a lot of the people and I’ve been thinking about it lately too as I sit here in front of my

⏹️ ▶️ John nearly 10 year old monitor That 5k screen and iMac is great Tying

⏹️ ▶️ John it to like it’s going to age much more slowly than the internals because it’s not like the 5k screen is

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be cutting edge forever say a case screens come out it’s like oh that stinky 5k screen but that 5k screen will be

⏹️ ▶️ John a great screen for years and years and years and years like you could you could keep

⏹️ ▶️ John assuming it was reliable and it kept working you’re not going to turn your nose up at that screen anytime

⏹️ ▶️ John soon like there is no second retina revolution where we have another 5x increase

⏹️ ▶️ John in resolution because there’s no benefit to that maybe HDR will start to make it crappy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if we got all that on the desktop have like those real OLED black levels. Oh man, that’d be great. But I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that doesn’t seem like it’s happening

⏹️ ▶️ John soon. I’ll let an HDR by the site because I’m sitting in front of a 10 year old monitor. This monitor

⏹️ ▶️ John is not retina. It’s not great. The black levels on it are atrocious, but it still looks nice. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John here’s what my qualifier for look nice, especially with Apple monitors color uniformity

⏹️ ▶️ John and general sharpness goes a long way. Right. The fact that this is still like if I make the screen entirely

⏹️ ▶️ John white, I can’t tell there’s like a dark splotch and a light splotch and stuff like that. No image retention

⏹️ ▶️ John as far as I’m able to tell all the pictures are still alive. Looks about as good as the day I got it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s small. But you

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know,

⏹️ ▶️ John if I wasn’t me, I could have been using this monitor with a series of Macs, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And

⏹️ ▶️ John it kind of makes me feel bad about I have a 27 inch Thunderbolt display

⏹️ ▶️ John up in the attic, which granted is an external display. But because it’s like a Thunderbolt weirdness, I don’t have stuff to plug

⏹️ ▶️ John it into without a dongle type adapter. But I you know, and If I could have plugged that into my current Mac and it wasn’t 10

⏹️ ▶️ John years old, I would have. Anyway, all this is to say that for

⏹️ ▶️ John all of the iMac Pro’s greatness, all-in-one is still an all-in-one and it’s great for what you want it

⏹️ ▶️ John to be, but the all-in-one compromises are still there and you have to be aware of them. And no matter how awesome they make the internals,

⏹️ ▶️ John nothing changes the stripes of an all-in-one being an all-in-one. And mostly I think about it because,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe I think about it because my wife’s monitor in her 5K iMac looks so much better The thing that I sit in front

⏹️ ▶️ John of every day I’m like man I would love to use that as a monitor and I know that it will never happen when

⏹️ ▶️ John the when the guts of that 5k I’m act become old and slow I can’t just

⏹️ ▶️ John use it as a monitor for another machine Which you could you could do with one of the older non retina

⏹️ ▶️ John max if I recall correctly But anyway, I’m looking what I’m saying is I’m looking forward to the pro display almost as much

⏹️ ▶️ John as the the Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I really am very excited to see what that ends up being But honestly,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if we didn’t have any hope of a Mac Pro coming,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if we didn’t have the statements from Apple saying they’re working on one, if this was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, if this was the only thing that was gonna be the new Mac Pro, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not bad. It would still be amazing. I would still be very excited.

⏹️ ▶️ John I would have ordered it. If that was the case, I would have ordered it, and I wouldn’t have been too grumpy about ordering it.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I mean, I would have gotten one of these. Hold on one second. I

⏹️ ▶️ John would have got my grump about, here’s what I would have been grumpy about. I would have been grumpy about the fact that I’m making a Mac Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I wouldn’t have been that grumpy about having to order this because it would, you know, like

⏹️ ▶️ John at various times I have to actually consider replacing my Mac Pro with a 5K when in my darkest times. And

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s clear that the 5K is not like a Mac Pro in any stretch of the imagination. It’s consumer CPUs,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, you know, like, but it would be, you know, at a certain point, it’s a big upgrade.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I would mostly be complaining about, why aren’t you gonna make a Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro? But then when it came to like, okay, fine, if you’re not gonna make a Mac Pro and you’re not gonna do that thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess I’ll settle for what you do get. And settling for the iMac Pro is a hell of a lot better

⏹️ ▶️ John than selling for a 5K iMac, so.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Come on, I mean, I admire your enthusiasm, John, I really do, but both of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you would be going bananas.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not Marco after this phone call, but up until this phone call, the two of you would be inconsolable

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about how this is BS, they’re not taking Pro seriously, I want expansion,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to be able to get inside

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John of

⏹️ ▶️ John it. That would be true, but it would be less about complaining about specifically the iMac Pro and more about complaining

⏹️ ▶️ John where is the Mac Pro and how are you, you know, all the people you’re abandoning with not making

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the whole thing, they have the April, but we don’t have to do that. Like they changed their mind. Everyone’s all happy, we’re just

⏹️ ▶️ John waiting patiently.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, also like a lot of those ships sale but the 2013 Mac Pro. A lot of that was like, oh, you can’t expand it anymore, they killed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the slots, they made it really expensive. That all happened in 2013. So we would have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco considered that already a lost cause. Yeah, and

⏹️ ▶️ John I think I was less angry about the 2013 because I think I and a lot of other people just assumed,

⏹️ ▶️ John okay, but this is the first one, this is the first trash can, give them a break. The second and third

⏹️ ▶️ John generation trash cans will surely be great, and that turned out

⏹️ ▶️ John to be a mistake. But but but that’s why we weren’t like oh, I don’t like this 2013 trash can I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John buy one I said this is not for me. I’ll wait for the second or third gen You know once you can hook a retina monitor up to it. How long did we talk

⏹️ ▶️ John about that? It just we made assumptions that were not founded that that computer would be updated

⏹️ ▶️ John I hope Marco is not correct about this Mac Pro because honestly, whatever this Mac Pro is

⏹️ ▶️ John If you didn’t do not have a 10 year old computer like me You’d be wise to wait for the second generation

⏹️ ▶️ John this one But maybe you wouldn’t be because if Marcos theory is right and there never will be a second generation this

⏹️ ▶️ John new Mac Pro It would be very unwise to wait for it and you should just get an iMac Pro now and just be happy So,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I I have no choice. I have to get the Mac Pro and it comes out It’s just it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John been too darn long But I worry about it being a one-and-done computer because that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not what I want from it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but I mean at least if it is you’ll have ten more years

⏹️ ▶️ John If it doesn’t have overheating GPUs or some other weird thing, who

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey knows?

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s going to be an octagon and it’ll spin when you use it. I don’t know. Who knows

⏹️ ▶️ John what this thing will be. Like a rotating

⏹️ ▶️ Marco restaurant. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Backblaze, and Aftershocks. We’ll see you next week!

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ John Now

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, cause it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, oh it was accidental. John

⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him,

⏹️ ▶️ John cause it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, oh it was accidental. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can find the

⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at ATP.FM And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them At

⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M The Anti-Marco

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Armen S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to.

⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, tech podcasts so long.

Post-show: Access and bias

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, how was it talking to Apple? It was pretty cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hear all the things you said. I’ve been here, I just didn’t have anything to add. But that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey got to be pretty neat.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, it was mostly just an honor that they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco decided to take their time to talk to me. I wasn’t talking to Tim, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was talking to people who matter at Apple, who have busy things that they could be doing. doing. They have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco busy schedules and in the middle of this long, they have to talk to a lot of people and they decided to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk to me for like an hour. Mad Fientist Did you ask them when your review unit would arrive? Steve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I did not presume that I’m getting a review unit. I told them right up front because they asked if I ordered

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one and I said yes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Mad Fientist Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John you should have said, no, I’m waiting for my review unit, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Steve Yeah, so it’s mostly just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an honor. And the The call also just went really well. You know, it wasn’t, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might think talking to Apple is, you know, like the way Tim Cook is in TV

⏹️ ▶️ Marco interviews, like, you know, very careful, reserved, a little bit cold maybe. But no, it isn’t like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Like, these are just humans who are, you know, on the call trying to be helpful to you, trying to be friendly.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And again, like, they’re not gonna like let slip something about the next iPhone or anything. But, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, you’re still talking to people. You’re not talking to like a robot. So it’s just a nice

⏹️ ▶️ John friendly call. Sounds to me like you got handled by Apple PR.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, we’re definitely going to have people who say that. But look, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco brought a bunch of questions to them. Some of them were a little bit challenging or difficult. And they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco took them all in stride and told me what they wanted to tell me. And I’m not going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco into this saying that because I talked to them, everything’s going to be perfect about this computer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know yet. But so far it seems pretty great and I hope that I’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fair in representing my opinion and my thoughts here.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to make it sound like now that they talk to me I’m going to say only the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good things and be brainwashed and everything else. It just sounds like this is a really good computer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think most of the early reviews bear that out. We will see what happens

⏹️ ▶️ Marco once I get one, once we get one, if John ever buys one and over Over time we will see

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like are there any long term problems that develop like reliability issues or heat or things like that but so far

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems pretty great and from what we know so far

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t see any of those problems on the horizon anymore. You know I was very concerned about thermals before.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Between what they’ve said and what other people have said who have seen or used or who have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of these computers that doesn’t seem to be a problem. So maybe that’s great.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll find out. I do hope that I’m representing these things fairly and that I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco unreasonably biased because they’re being friendly towards me, but I don’t think I am. I think I’m being reasonable here.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if I am, I know you guys will tell me. And if not, all of the listeners

⏹️ ▶️ John will. Oh, of course you are. I mean, you can’t help but be influenced by that, but as long as you

⏹️ ▶️ John call out the fact that you may be influenced by it, I feel like listeners should be able to take that into account.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, sure. The other thing is, when I talk to people at Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t pull punches, and I also, I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco super apologetic or differential or anything. I just treat them as peers.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And part of that is because I don’t have a real job, and I don’t really have a boss or anything, and so I don’t really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco treat anybody like they’re my boss. And part of that is that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I as I increasingly get into my my my mid 30s soon to be my late

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 30s I just don’t care anymore about anything

⏹️ ▶️ John so that be the title I just don’t care anymore about anything

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the follow-up to my autobiography nobody cares about me but I do care

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco second volume Mark Armand I’m not afraid if I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking to somebody apple i’m not afraid of like you know if i say the wrong thing or if i or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco afterwards if i’m on a podcast and i say the wrong thing like are they gonna cut off you know my pr

⏹️ ▶️ Marco access something because until this moment i didn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John pr

⏹️ ▶️ Marco access have any pr access to get cut off i don’t like i have nothing to lose and also everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my job everything in my career my life to this point has not needed pr access

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so like it’s one thing like if i was like the verge and i get cut off from pr that’s a much bigger problem

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me to get cut off from PR, it doesn’t really hurt me much. And so I’m not afraid

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be honest and to say when things are bad. And most good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco journalists, they try to maintain that same balance, even if their access does depend on that, because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if their access does or does not, their credibility depends on them being balanced, and being

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fair, and being willing to criticize when it’s warranted.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I’m not saying everybody with PR access is afraid to criticize, but that is definitely a trap

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I would fear falling into you know if my access increases, but I think I’m okay

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I Don’t really have anything to lose.

⏹️ ▶️ John I have to say one of the best things about Apple PR in my experience is

⏹️ ▶️ John is because they’re so selective in who they talk to, they tend to know

⏹️ ▶️ John who they’re talking to. So they will tailor not just what they say, but even

⏹️ ▶️ John who you talk to. Like at various times in my Mac OS X reviews,

⏹️ ▶️ John I had interactions with Apple PR. And in almost all those cases, I

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t have to go through like, you know, the analogy being like level one, level two, level three support. they would just

⏹️ ▶️ John hook me up directly with the engineer who works on whatever thing that

⏹️ ▶️ John I want to ask. Now partially it’s because I’m asking questions that Apple PR thinks are the most boring questions in the world. Like, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, tell me about this, the exact technical details of some subsystem that I’m going to

⏹️ ▶️ John put it in my umpteen page review that no one is going to read all of, right? So they don’t care. But the thing is,

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re efficient. They’re not going to make me ask a question of a high-level PR person who’s then

⏹️ ▶️ John going to ask someone below that who’s who’s then going to ask an engineering manager who then is going to ask

⏹️ ▶️ John an engineer through this giant game of telephone to get back to me, they just will connect me directly to the people

⏹️ ▶️ John who know, which it sounds like, well, they would never let an engineer talk directly to the press. They do. They

⏹️ ▶️ John do in if they know who they’re talking to and what they’re asking about. And the parameters are very clear that

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re just specifically asking about exactly how Facebook integration works on with contacts in some specific

⏹️ ▶️ John version of the operating system. And as we as most people know, The engineers will just tell you the

⏹️ ▶️ John truth. They wrote the thing. They designed the subsystem. It’s a boring answer to a boring question that doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John reveal anything about future anything. But very often I had those kinds of specific questions and to Apple’s credit,

⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t say, Oh, you know, we’re not talking about that now, or we’ll get back to you or

⏹️ ▶️ John give me some vague generality that’s just reading from a page, a web page, you can get, they’ll bring you right down

⏹️ ▶️ John to the, the engineer. So I would imagine when they’re talking to Marco, they’ve got people

⏹️ ▶️ John sort of appropriately scaled to the type of questions that he’s likely to ask, which would be very different than

⏹️ ▶️ John if they’re talking to, you know, Time Magazine or whatever. It’s a different set of people because they because they know who it is they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking to. Yeah, I asked, you know, very technical questions, very specific

⏹️ ▶️ Marco questions about implementation details of the iMac and things like its processors and its PCI

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lanes. And I got answers to all those questions from the people on the call, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they knew their stuff. Anyway, my attitude towards them is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very much like, I love talking to them, but I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to be talking to them. My job doesn’t depend on it. And so I hope

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will help basically keep me in check here from getting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco too biased, I guess.

⏹️ ▶️ John But we still all want review hardware, so Apple, please send

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. The funny thing is, even if I don’t get review hardware, that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John doesn’t really affect this. gonna buy it but for

⏹️ ▶️ John those of us who aren’t gonna buy every single thing review hardware and this sounds like oh you get review hardware like you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John get to keep it like you give it back to them it’s just so that you can talk in it in a more informed way

⏹️ ▶️ John on your media then you know like so you can write about it for your website or if you can talk about it on your podcast

⏹️ ▶️ John I continue to maintain that podcast is a form of media though Apple seems not yet to entirely agree when it comes to

⏹️ ▶️ John reviewing it’s been anyway it’s if Apple decides they want to get their message out

⏹️ ▶️ John through a particular person or venue or whatever However, review hardware is a great way to do that, even

⏹️ ▶️ John if they don’t get it early. Even if you just get it day of, it just lets that person know what it’s like to

⏹️ ▶️ John use that thing and then give it back after a week. And that’s part of the PR effort. So I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s out of the realm of possibility that someday that Apple could give podcast

⏹️ ▶️ John review hardware. It just doesn’t happen yet. So I’m saying we’re willing to be in that pilot program. Call us,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple. Yeah, maybe for a major desktop Mac release in 2018. Mm-hmm. Just send it right

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Casey’s house.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That would be so

⏹️ ▶️ John amazing. You can pick it up in the back of a Jeep Wrangler and just whip down the highway

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with it. Can you imagine if I got on the horn one day and was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, hey, you know that Mac Pro that’s not coming out for a week? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, the good news is I have one. The bad news is I just couldn’t be bothered by unboxing it, so I’m not going to be able

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to talk about it at all. You too would lose

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. The bad news is it fell out of my Jeep Wrangler because I didn’t have the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John doors

⏹️ ▶️ John on. Yeah, went over a big bump and it just tumbled out the back, but it seems like it’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure it’ll be okay It’s all solid state.

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no platters. It’s got a glass front and back like the new phones.