352: No One Else Had Calipers
13 Nov 2019The 16-inch MacBook Pro.
Episode Description:
- ATP HOLIDAY SHIRTS available until Sunday, November 17
- Follow-up:
- Mac Pro available "December"
- iOS 13.2.2
- Casey's Catalina Catastrophe
- 16-inch MacBook Pro: Initial Impressions
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Chapters
- ATP Holiday Store
- Mac Pro: “December”
- iOS 13.2.2
- Casey’s broken computer
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- 16” MacBook Pro
- Sponsor: HelloFresh (code atp30)
- 16” MacBook Pro
- Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code ATP)
- 16” MacBook Pro
- Ending theme
- Post-show
ATP Holiday Store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s real and it’s spectacular.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should probably watch Seinfeld at some point, shouldn’t I? Now that you’ve heard all the lines. Yeah, I know. I’ve effectively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seen it from having heard all the lines. I can’t decide if I want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give Marco a chance to talk about it and then do follow-up.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, don’t give Marco a chance to talk about it. That’s the worst thing you can do. Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey worry, Marco will talk about it. Yeah, fair, fair, fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So obviously we have some important things to talk about. So let’s just start by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking about the most important thing right at the top of the show. The Holiday Store is still open,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ladies and gentlemen. We’ve got to get through the important stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Shameless plug. Of course, of course. This is how the professionals do it. So the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP Holiday Store is still open. It will be for just a few more days.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you’re one of those people who thinks, oh, I’ve still got time, I’ve still got time. You don’t still have time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As this is being released it is lucky number 13 of November you have until the 17th
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which is this upcoming Sunday to do whatever purchasing you want to do So that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can make all your friends and family happy with their sweet new ATP t-shirts and other merch So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP dot FM slash store, please if you’re interested at all, please check it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out We have some great shirts some great hoodies a great hat some great pins
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the great merch ATP dot FM http://www.nchsoftware.com. Okay.
Mac Pro: “December”
⏹️ ▶️ John Of course, you were kidding about the big announcement. Obviously, the big announcement today is the slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John more refined release date for the Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey which is now with me, everybody,
⏹️ ▶️ John with make air quotes with your fingers when you say it. Ready? Mac Pro coming December.
iOS 13.2.2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving on. iOS 13.2.2, I’m sorry, 13.2.2 is now out. Super important.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey super important. Multitasking issue solved, question mark? I did not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see the issues quite as badly as many, many, many other people did, but it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that maybe this is better now. Marco, I think you were hitting this the most, both from a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey user and a developer perspective. How is 13.2.2 been for you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually was not hitting it much as a user, but I heard from all of them because they were hitting, because like my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app is one of the apps that like, if it gets killed in the background, it has negative effects. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the main issue people were seeing was that if it got killed in the background, that it would no longer be the active
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app if you were paused and then you hit play,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would like default to the music app or whatever. So I would hear from all those people about that. But yeah, so 13.2.2 was out and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco volume of those complaints that I’ve gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has dropped substantially. So it seems, and Apple specifically said they fixed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco multitasking issues with that. So it seems like they did. So I’m really happy that they got that out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quickly because I was afraid I was gonna have to wait until 13.3 was released and they got it out in a little point
⏹️ ▶️ John Any new issues? It’s like we have to ask that with every iOS 13 release.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Anything new breaking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your out? Not that I have heard about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Knock on wood, quickly, quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh man, I got some great news. They quietly fixed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the AirPlay 2 bugs I was running into in 13.1. Well, that’s very exciting. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe I now have what I need to build an AirPlay 2 engine. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of brought back out my code that I wrote back in May that I just hit this huge roadblock with this bug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I just couldn’t proceed. It works perfectly now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, that’s excellent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m very tentatively excited to finally build out my Airplay 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Voice Boost 2 engines. I have actually some promise in Overcast development
⏹️ ▶️ Marco land for the first time in months.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s very exciting. If only you had a computer with which you could take to the beach and do it on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh my god, oh my god, oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey god, I’m so excited! Wouldn’t that be nice? I’m so excited. Before we get too excited and talk about happy things, I need to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know, I’m sorry.
Casey’s broken computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like to know, and this probably sounds sarcastic, but I really mean it. I would like to know if people,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably not you guys because I would have heard about it, but people in general have had a similar problem to me. So on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my beloved iMac, which is convincing me in ever different ways with each passing day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why I need to replace it, but be that as it may, when I upgraded to Catalina a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little over a week ago, it was after my Walt Disney World trip, I got home and I was home for a couple of days and I thought, well, Catalina
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has been pretty good on the MacBook. I haven’t heard of many issues after the first few days. So, well, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why don’t I go ahead and upgrade?” And I upgraded in place on the Mojave install I had only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done but like two or three weeks prior. And since then, intermittently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have been having the weirdest issues with my iMac. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s software for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that it happened
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after I went to Catalina, is the best I can tell. But the behavior I’m seeing, the symptom I’m seeing is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey often, but not always, I will have extreme lag
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with my mouse. Now, this is applicable with my Magic Mouse, it’s applicable with my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Magic Touchpad, or Trackpad, or whatever the heck it’s called. But what’s most interesting is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this Magic Trackpad, it does the faux clicks, you know what I mean? Like they have for the last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey few years, where the click is just something that’s firing internally. it’s like a Taptic Engine or what have you, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a physical click of the glass. Well, what I’ve had happen to me on numerous times,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is both hilarious and also depressing, is I’ll go mousing around and try to click and click
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then click and click, click, click, wondering if like anything is happening behind the scenes. And then I’ll realize what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happening, and I’ll wait for like, I don’t know, two to five seconds. And then I’ll give you one guess what this magic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trackpad finally decides to start doing. Clicking. So what I’m doing is I’m mashing on glass
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s not moving. There’s no click whatsoever. Mash, mash, mash, mash, mash, and then I wait three or four
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seconds and it’s like a frigging machine gun is attached to my desk and it goes, and fires all those clicks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that had been queuing up in the background. So I am the only person I’m aware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that has had these sorts of problems. And I was kind of hoping that a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Catalina update would come soon since all these updates seem to be happening on an hourly basis and it would magically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make my problems go away. But I’m almost wondering, especially since this build, you know, this OS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey installation is only a few weeks old now, and I’ve done so many OS re-installations over the last two months,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m getting really good at it. It’s like Windows all over again. I almost wonder if I should wipe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iMac and bring it back to Mojave for, you know, a more extended length of time and see if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that fixes the problem. But this is more for the audience than it is for the two of you guys, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since you’re here, any thoughts, advice, input, anything?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This sounds like it’s a firmware level type issue. Because the fact that the trackpad was not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco responding with the physical click sensation, I don’t even think that, that probably doesn’t even get to the OS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I’m guessing this is a lower level issue. Normally I would love to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco throw Apple’s recent software releases under the bus here, but your iMac has been weird for a while,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I think it’s probably your iMac. Yeah, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could be. John, thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ John I have not seen that one before, and I have the same question as Marco, exactly where I don’t know what the input path is.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, what thing decides to fire the little engine? Does it go all the way back to the computer? My guess would have been the opposite to Marco that it goes all the
⏹️ ▶️ John way back to the computer, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John actually know though. So I, you got me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know either, but the reason I think it goes back to the computer is because you know, when you do like a force
⏹️ ▶️ Casey click that occasionally has, it makes a difference. Occasionally it doesn’t, I believe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, first of all, you should have forced click disabled. Second of all, I don’t think it does go back to the computer because you can click
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it before it has paired via Bluetooth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Interesting. Okay, okay. I’ll allow it. That is interesting. I hadn’t considered that. Huh. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s worth keeping an eye
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, if you have had or heard about anything like this, please do tweet at me. I’d be curious to hear.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or if you happen to be like a Mac technical specialist person and you have a magical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fix, I’d love to hear it because I’m very confused and even though it’s become fairly quick for me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to reload this Neo OS from scratch, I’d rather not. So do let me know, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the good thing is, if you need to take that thing to the Apple Store, it’s way easier to carry than your iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m talking about my iMac, not my MacBook. No, the trackpad. Oh! Oh!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happening with all input, with keyboard input, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John happening with the mouse. Well, I mean, but we
⏹️ ▶️ John were just talking about the trackpad of firing off the series of clicks or whatever. I understand that the lag is happening. When do you ever
⏹️ ▶️ John get to, you’ve got those fricking things in your menu bar showing you, are the CPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey pegged? like you say, an
⏹️ ▶️ John activity monitor open of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey something. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand what you’re saying. I have not noticed anything. But I should also mention, I don’t think I stated this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey earlier, that the mouse cursor itself will also refresh it like a couple of hertz, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, as opposed to like a full 60 hertz or whatever the normal is. It’s going like, you know, it’ll start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to slow down and then it’ll jump halfway across the screen, jump back halfway across the screen. And it is clearly in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reaction to the mousing that I’m doing, but it’s doing so at such a horrendous refresh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rate and just with incredible latency. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m kind of really confused why this would be happening. And my gut tells me it’s software based on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost zero facts and in no small part because I really just don’t want to replace the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMac yet. I just want an iMac Pro refresh and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John then I’ll probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pull the trigger. Paul
⏹️ ▶️ John Matz Because it’s your iMac, I keep thinking like one of the things that can cause that historically on Macs has caused,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, things like stutter of cursors is getting swamped with IO
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey related issues or errors. Agreed. That is
⏹️ ▶️ John what it feels like. And shouldn’t really happen in normal circumstances, but if your SSD
⏹️ ▶️ John is throwing errors or something, or if there’s some process grinding away at it or something, I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey don’t know. That’s a good point. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John about my SSD, which is already…
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it is haunted. You don’t even know that meme because you don’t play Vigi games.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so I’ll keep an eye out. Maybe I’ll do some disk utility repairs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then cry when it tells me they’re all wrong. All right, so I guess we should probably move on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the main topic. And Marco had talked about how he didn’t want to talk about the Apple Card,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so should we talk about that first? Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John Mazzello We should not, God. Steven
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Connelly I’m kidding.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco Mazzello Oh my God. Steven Connelly I’m kidding. Marco Mazzello You’re killing me. Steven Connelly So Marco, I guess we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should talk about where you went and what you did and what you have in your possession.
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16” MacBook Pro
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I have finally The 16-inch MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s real. It’s so awesome. Oh, I don’t even know where to start All right. So so we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so Apple was holding briefings. I attend one of these briefings and I have a review
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unit here and it is I’ve had it for as we record this I’ve had it for about half a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day. Consider this initial impressions, first impressions after half day use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was a presentation that was fully on the record done by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Shruti Haldia who is the MacBook Pro product manager and it was kind of like a little keynote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for groups of journalists and it was, I gotta say, it was really well done. It’s almost, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of think it’s a shame that they didn’t do this publicly because if they would have done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this presentation publicly, it would have gotten such massive applause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the things that it addressed and how it addressed them. And I think this is a really big deal. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I just wanted to quickly throw out there, like, you know, Shruti Haldia did a really good job presenting it. They started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, she said that they asked, what do pro customers want? People
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who buy the 15-inch MacBook Pro, which is their most popular pro product, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not surprised to hear that, but that’s good to know. So she said people want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a larger display, fast performance, the biggest battery possible, quote, the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notebook keyboard ever, massive amounts of storage, and an awesome sound system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And of course, then went through and she went through each of those points and just how they delivered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that with the 16 inch. Almost everything I believe that was rumored about this machine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ended up being true. And that’s a very good thing. So start out obviously the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is 16 inches. Now the last one I believe was 15.4, so it’s not like a whole inch increase.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You do notice it, it seems bigger. The margins seem slimmer. The footprint of the machine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has only grown a little tiny bit, like barely grown at all. And the weight is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up from 4.0 to 4.3 pounds. It’s got like a millimeter thicker. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re looking at this thing on a table, like they had like a hands-on afterwards and they had it next to their older
⏹️ ▶️ Marco machines also, as you compare. At a glance, it just looks like a 15-inch MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you start using it and you pick it up and it just feels like a 15-inch MacBook Pro. Like this doesn’t feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bigger machine, even though it technically is a little bit bigger. But it just, it kind of looks and feels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like the size we’ve had for a while now. And in fact, there were parts where I was looking at different ones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the table, and I had to look at the inverted T arrow keys.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah! I had to look at the arrow keys to know whether it was this model or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In some cases. That’s how similar the overall package looks to what we’ve had.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did they tell you where the 0.3 pounds went? Obviously they shaved a little weight for making those
⏹️ ▶️ John arrow keys smaller. And the screen, I mean, the screen is
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit bigger, but the glass is the same size, right? So 0.3 pounds, I’m hoping it all went into battery, but did they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They did. So the 2015 generation, that one, the battery size slowly increased
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that one. The actual model year 2015, which I consider the best one ever, that had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 99.5 watt hour battery. And actually, they described
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this in the presentation that the FAA in the US limits the size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of carry-on batteries for planes to 100 watt hours. They were at 99.5. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco went almost right up to that and didn’t cross that because if you have a battery that big, you gotta check it in your bag and nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wants to check their laptop. The previous generation, the 2016, you know, the first Touch Bar generation, actually dropped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the battery capacity down to somewhere around like 80 or 76, something like that. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think they’ve tweaked it a little bit over time here, like in the revision since then. So the previous one was 84 watt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hour, the 2019 revision, 84 watt hour. They have now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brought it back up to exactly 100. So they said it’s the largest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery ever in a Mac notebook, which is true by 0.5 watt hours, but it’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I would say that seems like where most of the weight has gone, like to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco increase the battery size by whatever that is, about 20%, that’s probably where most folks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco batteries are really heavy. The quota battery life, I haven’t had time to really get an idea of how good the battery life is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The quota battery life has gone from 10 to 11 hours. It cranked it to 11. Yeah, and like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the processors are all the same that we got earlier this year. Like the Intel hasn’t released new CPUs yet. So the CPUs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are all the same ones, the six and eight core, i7 and i9s, the ninth generation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones. The GPUs are new. I don’t know anything about GPUs, so I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really tell you, but the GPUs are new. the Radeon Pro 5000M series,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seven nanometers. They have a lot of really cool sounding specs that I can’t really describe why they’re good. So they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you know if the previous GPUs were also seven nanometer or did they make a pitch for these GPUs being more power efficient?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I don’t know. I mean, it’s a new series of GPUs from ATI or AMDs rather. So I don’t really know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if like how much better, because I don’t follow GPUs. I don’t follow that world at
⏹️ ▶️ John all. I’m mostly just thinking like, how much is it gonna eat your battery? You mentioned seven nanometers. I don’t recall if
⏹️ ▶️ John the last ones were seven. So if these are seven, that bodes well for battery life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, they might have been. But like, I mean, it is pretty good. Like again, like we’ve talked before about like trying to update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco individual components rather than like waiting as things age. And they’ve done that with GPUs. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they, there was, like we forgot, like there was a 15 inch and 13 inch update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in, what was that, about May that they did the update before?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there was already an update like six months ago to these machines. So this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same CPUs, new GPUs. And again, it’s only because it’s Intel’s fault that they don’t have new CPUs as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would guess the battery life is, you know, you have the same CPU, probably a similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power envelope GPU, and a 20%-ish bigger battery. So that’s probably where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that comes from. The power adapter is up to 96 watts instead of 87 watts. Same size, though. That’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s only annoying in the most ridiculous way. When I bought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a second power adapter for my MacBook, I got the biggest USB-C power adapter I could,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the one for like the 15 inch at the time, thinking, oh, maybe one day I will have a big boy again
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t wanna have to basically throw away my existing power supply.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco You know, the little. You don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you know what I mean. That’s only for like delivering like maximum peak power, if you’re like rendering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a video, a final cut, like that’s when you need all that power. When you’re sitting around like doing, Even doing coding, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will almost always be traveling with a power brick that’s from some third party that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small and light, that is nowhere near the full, like previously, my previous laptop was 60 watts, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would travel with a 45 watt brick because it was super small and it was fine. And you hardly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever actually need that peak power. So if it’s your secondary one or your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco travel one or whatever, as long as you’re not rendering Final Cut or playing high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco games, you don’t need all that power all the time. Like, you could get away easily with one of these machines,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably with a 60-watt adapter most of the time, and you’d be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and that’s fair, but you also forget that I write exclusively in Swift, so I know all the power
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can get. Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point. No, I mean, all kidding aside, though, that it is pretty nice that they have put so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much power, like battery and electricity power. We will talk about whether or not it’s a fast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey processor and so on, but it is nice to see all that power and to see the battery life is such a big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey priority. And to the point that they’re willing to make something heavier, which as we discussed a couple of months ago, I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think around iPhone time, we had all kind of thought that things never got bigger and never got heavier. And this computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is both bigger and heavier, and I think for good reason. So that’s kind of exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like it seemed like, I think so far, I mean, again, it’s been not that much time yet, but I think they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spent that additional budget well. Like it’s always a trade-off, you know, everybody wants them to be thin and light and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone complains like crazy that their laptops are too heavy, even though they’ll put a four-pound laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into an otherwise 16-pound bag that has all sorts of crap they don’t need to carry, and they’re like, oh, this laptop’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too heavy. It’s like, no, that’s not the problem. Empty your bag. You know? But anyway, or you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an adult, who cares? These things used to be 10 pounds. It’s fine. But anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before I leave the CPU area, they’ve also changed, or they’ve improved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the thermal architecture. So they’ve made the heat sink bigger,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco redesigned the heat pipe, made the fans bigger and higher capacity and 20%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better blades and all sorts of stuff. So they said that they have raised the sustained
⏹️ ▶️ Marco workload heat output level by 12 watts of like how much the thermal system can cool. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now 12 watts higher. I asked, I wasn’t able to find out like what it was before, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would estimate that before it was probably somewhere around maybe 80, 90 watts, something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. So to be a little bit higher than that is pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Real time follow up on the GPU. As far as I can tell in 20 seconds of Googling,
⏹️ ▶️ John the previous GPUs were 14 nanometers. So these being seven bodes well for power. And I like
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that the cooling is upgraded. That’s what I was talking about a couple of shows ago, the iMac profication
⏹️ ▶️ John of this thing in one respect in terms of on the outside, it looks the same and it’s got the same CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, an updated GPU, but the experience of using it, you know, how often are the things screaming? how
⏹️ ▶️ John often are the CPUs throttling? I’m not sure if you had a chance to test that, but I’m sure people will. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is the upgraded sort of pro experience. Even if the CPU is exactly the same, if it is
⏹️ ▶️ John quieter and cooler and can run heavier loads and has a bigger battery, that is a pro experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I haven’t spent really any time with the 2019 previous 15-inch models, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ones that went six and eight core. I spent very little time with those, and so I don’t really know how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much the fans spun up on those. But so far in my testing of this so far,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which again, admittedly is not like super heavy, but I’ve heard the fans here and there as I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco push it or as Dropbox runs. It seems so far to be very similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the previous ones, maybe a little bit more tame in the fan noise department. So like I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heard the fans very loudly and I haven’t heard them for very long. And that includes doing things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my overcast build test, which is like, you know, max out the CPUs for about a minute. and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was barely registering for that. So I think anytime you heard the fans on a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recent MacBook Pro, you will probably hear them here too, but maybe a little bit quieter and for a little bit less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. Before I leave the performance area, I will say I did that test, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, these are the same CPUs you’ve had for six months, but I didn’t have one. So this was the maxed out 2.4 gigahertz i9 8-core,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it builds overcast almost exactly as fast my ten core iMac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wow, so because the CPUs are, I believe, one or two micro architecture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generations ahead of these eons in the iMac Pro currently. So you know this again this has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the case for a little while now with these laptops, but truly like this what they’ve made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here performance wise is in very many ways like a mini iMac Pro and or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a mini Mac Pro and in fact they did a lot of demos where they would do something on a new Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then do something very similar on the Macbook Pro. Can it do the same displays, like the same, like they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had a million of these Pro Display XDRs in the demo rooms and everything. And they were, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, it was very similar to that hands-on area at WBDC this year, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s just Mac Pros and Pro Display XDRs everywhere and people doing really cool stuff that I will never do on them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, not a single person had like a three-track podcast project in Logic Open.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everyone’s like, here’s like a 200-track, like orchestral composition by professionals.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m like, all right, how is this gonna run like denoising my air conditioner out of a
⏹️ ▶️ John Did any of them get that? I don’t know the exact wording. You’ll have to insert this for me. The system busy or disc
⏹️ ▶️ John too slow dialogue from Logic? That’d be great. I did not see that dialogue once.
⏹️ ▶️ John Question for, you said that they had MacBook Pros hooked up to
⏹️ ▶️ John Cinema Display XDRs. Pro Display
⏹️ ▶️ John know if they can drive that at the full native res
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full native res and they can drive two of them
⏹️ ▶️ John is that new for the is that new for like the 2019 so new for the 16-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know that offhand I don’t know but but yeah they can they can drive two of them at full res and they free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I saw many of them that did and of course in addition to their built-in display doing its own resolution so yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was it was quite impressive yeah and any and like there were there were some times when during
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of the demos where I did hear the fan spin up because they were it totally understandable. They were like running like Maya
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff. It sounded very similar to the way they’ve always sounded when they’re pushing the GPU and CPU really hard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like there’s I would say fan noise don’t expect significant differences. It’s a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better just because it has more capacity. But otherwise it’s it’s fairly similar in that area.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll get to the keyboard in a minute. I swear I want to I want to not cut the other stuff because I have a lot to say about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. surprisingly. Let’s see what else. So the SSD, I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s roughly the same performance, but there’s now an 8 terabyte option.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well if you’re gonna buy your two XDR displays, you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco have to get the 8 terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ John model. Alright. Just to match the price.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’ve raised the RAM ceiling to 64 gigs. That’s nice. So and that’s nice, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, one of the big complaints about about the 2016 Touch Bar laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generation was that that RAM ceiling, I believe it was 16 in the 2016 generation, right? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was 16 for a while. It was ridiculous. And pros were just like, I can’t fit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my stuff in 16. And so that was a big point of contention. And over the last few revisions, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have raised that to 32 at some point. But still, anytime you can raise that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you raise the limit of what people can do with these things and who needs a desktop and who needs a laptop. And so to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eight terabyte SSD and up to 64 gigs of RAM as options, I know they’re gonna cost probably a fortune.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At the time of this recording, I don’t know how much they cost. That was not disclosed yet. Yeah, it really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like a mini iMac Pro. And I’m very happy about that. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fact is we’ve had really good laptop performance for a while now. Not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only did the SSD revolution kind of usher that in, but also as Intel’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terrible at delivering their new process nodes. They’ve been upping the core counts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and really refining the micro architecture, their CPUs and everything. So like the processor performance and the disk performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and GPUs have gotten so good that if it weren’t for the stupid butterfly keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would have loved to do lots of work on laptops for all these years. But I haven’t because of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Before I get to that, the last major area that they wanted to touch on which I I think is worthy of it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the audio subsystem. So they’ve upgraded both the speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the microphones. And this is, you know, not only as an audio nerd, like this is cool, but it’s also just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool as like a Mac fan, they don’t really touch the speakers or microphones in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways that are announced very often. Like you get an upgrade like every five years maybe, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ll say, oh, we’ve also changed the microphones, now there’s two of them or whatever. Typically, microphones that are built
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into anything are terrible. And they’re not usable. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the most common tragedies in podcast recording is when somebody, like Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidentally uses their built-in mic. Maybe in Skype they had their real mic sliced,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but in the recording app they were using to record their track, maybe they accidentally had their built-in mic selected.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hypothetically. Yeah, hypothetically. It happens all the time with podcasts, especially podcasts that have guests that aren’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing this a lot. And so you’ll hear their built-in mic, and they sound like they’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the bottom of a well and you’ll hear their pets and their neighbors and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lawnmowers and you’ll hear everything and they sound distant and echoey and it’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ve actually, Apple’s actually really improved the built-in microphone, which I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that was something that was ever gonna be done. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever they touch audio, it’s kinda like when they make the screens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. No one was asking for that, but once you have it, you’re like, oh my God,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is amazing. How do we ever do without this? You know, like no one ever really asks to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these areas pushed forward. They just, you know, occasionally somebody does it, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like sets this new standard, and you’re like, oh my God. And in the realm of audio,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has really kicked butt in recent years with their audio engineering. Like the built-in speakers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I remember, I think what kicked it off for me was the first iPad Pro, where it had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the four speaker array. And the iPad Pro, at that time, not only sounded almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unbelievably good for a tablet that was sitting on a table, but it embarrassed all their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptops. And one of the ways that the Touch Bar generation kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of painfully embarrassed my beloved 2015 generation was that they made the speakers a bit better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now, in the 16 inch, the speakers are a lot better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the microphones are a lot better. In fact, so I’ll drop in here a clip of me testing the microphone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so this is, I’m sitting at the same desk using, you know, from the same position that I’m talking to you now through my like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big desktop mic. This isn’t going to replace a studio microphone, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you are somewhere where this is all you have, or if you accidentally record your built-in mic for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a podcast, it’s now way better. So here, here’s that clip. So this is me at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built-in mic. It’s just on my desk. I’m sitting in front of it, like at regular desk height. So I’m probably about, I don’t know, a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco foot and a half away from it, something like that. Yeah, I don’t know how this sounds yet. I’m gonna listen back to it, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it’s gonna probably sound pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That sounded incredible. Like it doesn’t replace your big fancy mic, just like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you said, but when somebody like me screws up and records from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the onboard mic, that would sound passable. Now, the only thing is you didn’t like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey type or click or anything as you were recording that, right? So I kind of wonder how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad that interference would be. But from the clip that you sent and played,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me try that again. From the clip that you played, it sounded good. It sounded surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like the only thing that it really doesn’t compete on is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your mouth is physically more distant from the mics. The mics are over there like by the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco escape key. The escape key, oh my God, we’ll get there. And so like, you know, normally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re, when you’re using like a studio mic for like a good podcasting, the mic is like a couple inches from your mouth. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re using something that’s built into the laptop, it’s like a foot and a half from your mouth. And no matter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve had lots of really nice high end microphones, all different price points. None of them sound good when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re far away. You have to have proximity to the, to the person to really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it sound good. And so considering how far it is from my mouth,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sounds really good. Like, I don’t think there’s any other mic I could put at that distance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have it sound that good that’s below maybe $1,000. I don’t know, man.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve spent a lot of money on this microphone and you’ll notice that as I go away from it, there’s no problems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatsoever. It sounds just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, that actually is very impressive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and then the speakers are also like really, really good. I mean, this is something you kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of have to like, you know, experience it to here. I can’t really play it for you in a useful way. But when I went to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the beach for my last work trip where I brought the iMac Pro, I didn’t bring any speakers on the trip.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just figured I’d wear headphones. So I just brought a pair of headphones and my iMac Pro. Before I plugged the headphones in, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decided, let me try the built-in speakers on the iMac Pro, which I had like never heard because I don’t use them at home. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the built-in speakers of my iMac Pro filled the room. This was like a big living room and there’s rental.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It filled the room. It was amazing. I never use the headphones the whole trip. I just listen to music from my built-in speakers of my iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro. And the new MacBook Pro is almost that good. It can’t quite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fill the room that well, because it’s a lot smaller, but it’s almost that good. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprising how good music sounds. The only weird little niggle about it is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I’m waving my hands around above the laptop as I’m using the laptop, if I hover my hand so that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it partially covers the path between one of the speakers and my ear, I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear the difference. Like the music sounds noticeably worse because my hand is blocking it from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting all the way unobstructed to my ear. Like that’s, so in a way it’s a little bit weird. I’m sure I’ll get used to that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, when you’re not waving your hand over the speaker, it really sounds very good. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it goes very loud, surprisingly loud. You know, every other laptop, you play music from the built-in speakers and it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like built-in speakers. Like it sounds terrible. And you can kind of tell like, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not a high priority for any other manufacturer because nobody cares about how good their built-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speakers are. And people don’t care, and the manufacturers don’t care. Well, you know what, Apple cares. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes, when I need it, I care. Huge upgrade in the quality of the speakers, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the 2016 generation, which itself was a huge upgrade over the 2015 generation. So I am very pleased with the speakers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the microphones, as good as a built-in mic I’ve ever heard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s still a built-in mic, but it’s surprisingly good for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it is and where it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder if any of those monster PC gaming laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey might have good speakers. Have you tried GIFs
⏹️ ▶️ John to see if they, because they’re so big and so. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re crappy. It’s simple as that. I mean, I don’t think this is like a huge downside because most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people don’t use their built-in speakers that much. But when you do use them, you want them to sound good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And until now, I just thought it was impossible. Like I just assumed like, oh, built-in speakers will always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound terrible. just like until the AirPods Pro. I thought like, well, earbuds will always sound like crap. But yeah, it turns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out you can make things sound good and that’s pretty cool. and Apple has.
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⏹️ ▶️ John Before you move on to the keyboard, one thing we skipped over is the screen. We know it’s 16-inch.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a little bit bigger than it was before, but what more can you tell me about it? Has it changed in other ways? Has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it is the same brightness, 500 nits. It’s still P3 wide color. It’s higher resolution.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a little bit higher DPI. 226, uh, PPI now. I forget what the other one was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s, it’s like a slightly more dense screen, but not to the point where like if you were using the scaling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode before or the native, like whatever, like step you had the sizing on,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re probably going to use that same step on this one. Like you’re mostly just getting the additional real estate, not getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a huge like density increase. There’s a small one, but not a big one for the most part. Like I kind of stopped noticing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the screen. It’s, it’s vast cause especially cause I’m coming most recently from a 13 inch. So it is significantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco larger than what I’m used to using. And there’s tons of space, but it is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality wise, I think it’s very similar to what we had before. And unfortunately, one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my nitpicks with the previous generation was that they use these scaling modes by default, that the native
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 2X pixels of the panel is one step down,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or I guess one step up in size from how they ship it. So like they ship it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a mode that simulates a higher resolution than the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 2X of the panel is. And you have to make everything one step larger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be the actual 2X pixels. Now, I actually usually run my Retina
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pros as the native setting, even though it makes everything a little bit bigger, I get a little bit less screen space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it. I actually prefer how it looks at that size most of the time unless I’m doing something, unless I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing like heavy coding and I’ll step it down. but usually I run it at the real native setting. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this doesn’t change what they have. It still ships by default in a scaling mode, so it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very slightly blurry at its default settings. And if you want it to be sharper, you have to lose screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real estate. And so again, that’s a trade-off I make, because I like how things look at that size, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s unchanged. This is one of those things, and I’ll get to a lot of these later, because there’s a lot about this laptop that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unchanged. It’s one of those things that it’s a trade-off. I know it’s a trade-off. I know there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, battery life costs. There’s panel actual money costs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the panels. There, you know, there’s the battery life of driving all the extra pixels that would require to have the panel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be the higher resolution to actually be true 2X if it’s default setting. So I get all that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They made the decision to leave it this way. And so I’m ambivalent towards that. Like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wish they would up that. I think it’s a waste to have such great panels in all these other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways, and then to have them scaled by default and slightly blurry on even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their highest end notebooks that have all this other work put into the displays. I think that’s a shame, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a trade-off and they’re continuing to make the same trade-off. So I’ll keep pushing for it and hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco someday they’ll change their mind on that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s incongruous with 32 gigs of RAM and an eight terabyte SSD. Like that is the most
⏹️ ▶️ John glaring thing. It’s like, obviously maybe don’t make it to the defaults. It’s expensive, it uses more battery, it costs more, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But the fact that you could spec this thing up so high and still you can’t get a
⏹️ ▶️ John higher res screen, like let people make that trade off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which they used to do, like before Retina, that was an option, it was a very inexpensive option to upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the 1440 to the 1680 screen, it was like 200 bucks, and it was great. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think, you know, I just like, you know, 64 gigs of RAM, that uses a lot of battery too. RAM uses battery.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a feel, like I wonder, would it use the same amount of battery as 64 gigs of RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know the comparison, but for those applications, as you said, that they were showing you where it’s hooked up to
⏹️ ▶️ John these two big displays and it’s doing this fancy stuff and the fans are spinning, those are plugged in anyway. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John use case. For people who need this and know they need it, make it an expensive option, just like the eight
⏹️ ▶️ John terabyte SSD, it’s not going to detract from the reputation of a laptop as having good
⏹️ ▶️ John battery life because only the people who really want that option will choose it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s hanging right there for them. Like we’ll get to more of this later and we start summing up, but
⏹️ ▶️ John this is part of the iMac Pro or Mac Pro-ification of laptop that Apple continues
⏹️ ▶️ John to choose not to pick up. They have not, like they did it in the RAM and they did it in the SSD.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not doing it in the physical attributes of the laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, and they’ve also now done a, you can now set different refresh rates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the LCD panel, the built-in one, and they now, I don’t know enough to tell you why these matter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they now have certain fractional refresh rates that are not exactly 60
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hertz, there’s like 48 or whatever for certain video production
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses. Like you want your frame rate of your monitor to be an even multiple of the frame
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rate of whatever video you’re looking at as you’re editing it, or something like that. Again, this is not an area of my expertise, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they now have different refresh rates that you can set in display settings. So that’s pretty cool for people who need it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And all these refresh rates are lower than 60. So it’s not like there’s 120 or anything like that. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all like fractions step down from 60. Now this is interesting to me because like
⏹️ ▶️ John there, Apple’s not behind, but like there’s, there are more places Apple can go with this that would actually
⏹️ ▶️ John benefit them. One of them obviously is 120 Hertz, like with the pro, what do they call it? Pro motion display on
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad pro and everything that might provide a nicer experience and
⏹️ ▶️ John give you more options on a laptop, but really what is waiting
⏹️ ▶️ John for them there is variable refresh. And that’s something that has come in with,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a bunch of gaming applications for that where the GPU is synced with the refresh rate of the monitor to exactly,
⏹️ ▶️ John to not have the monitor syncing at 60 frames per second, regardless of what
⏹️ ▶️ John the GPU is able to produce to try to get them more in sync, and in things like the watch to save power, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John very relevant to laptops. So this is like their first foray into maybe having adjustable
⏹️ ▶️ John refresh rate, like manually adjustable right for the purposes of video. But I have to think that at
⏹️ ▶️ John some point in the semi near future, say the next generation of these laptops, which could mean three years or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John variable refresh rate is right there both to save energy and for potential gaming AR
⏹️ ▶️ John applications and then also the ability to adjust to various frame rates, especially if like high
⏹️ ▶️ John frame rate video becomes a thing. Like if you’re trying to edit 120 frame per second video for some
⏹️ ▶️ John Hollywood movie on your laptop, you can’t really do that that well on a 60 frame per second display. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m looking forward to changes in that area. I didn’t expect them. I didn’t, in fact, I didn’t expect this variable refresh rate, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it is very relevant to laptops and I hope Apple jumps on board
⏹️ ▶️ Marco soon. Yeah, and to clarify, this is not variable refresh rate. It’s just different settings that you can set globally.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you manually pick it from a pop-up menu. Like you just, like it’s not, it’s not a thing that’s adjusting itself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s just like how it was in the CRT days. Like when you could pick up lots of different refresh rates from OCRT is like it’s similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to that, but way newer.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could drive your neighbor crazy by setting it to whatever the lowest refresh rate is where flicker will probably be
⏹️ ▶️ John visible. Like there’s something wrong with my display. It used to happen to people CRTs only they wouldn’t notice. I’d go over to their house and they’d
⏹️ ▶️ John be had their CRT refreshing at like 50 Hertz. They’d be like, no, this cannot stand. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco funny thing is usually that rate was 60 Hertz which is our current fastest refresh rate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s different for LCDs.
⏹️ ▶️ John 60, well, it’s a little bit different in CRTs but I feel like people who had their CUDs like below 60 or some
⏹️ ▶️ John frame rate that was incredibly blinking, it was like, you gotta get that over 100 and it was just, ah, it felt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I believe that’s it for the display. And before I move on to the keyboard, I wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk about ports. No changes. Oh, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too bad. Yeah, no SD reader, no additional or different ports.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All the ports, the ports are exactly the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we can have a positive spin on this by saying, that means they didn’t get rid of the headphone jack.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right? Yes, it’s still on the wrong side, but yeah, this headphone jack is still there, still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the wrong side. You still have four USB-C ports on the 15 inch. Again, it’s just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the display refresh. Like I get, or I mean the display density. It’s trade-offs, it’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorts of trade-offs. Like the way they’ve designed the enclosure, it’s just like before where there’s like a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco intake vent. as soon as the ports end on each side, like on the lower edge,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right after the ports end, it becomes an intake air vent on both sides. So like there is no space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there to put an SD card or more ports or anything, unless they redesigned a lot of other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. So like it’s not like a small job to do that, but again, it’s trade-offs. Like if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it were me, I would put one USB-A port, an HDMI port, and an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SD card reader, because those are the things that people need very frequently. And I still very firmly believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it is not a good customer experience to ever need a dongle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And dongles should be reserved for old, outgoing technologies that most people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t need anymore. So for instance, when the 2012 Retina
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pro, the very first Retina MacBook Pro came out, you needed a dongle to use things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ethernet or Firewire. And at that time, most people were no longer using Ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Firewire on their laptops. And so I feel like that was like an okay transition to make then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s like most people who buy these won’t need to buy an adapter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this older thing because most people aren’t using these things. Whereas on the USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generation laptops, I don’t know anybody who has any of these laptops who doesn’t need at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco least one dongle on a regular basis. Like something, either a USB-A adapter or a power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pass through for Casey’s terrible laptop or whatever. And that’s unfortunately still exactly the same.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You still need dongles. I will say like, time has slightly healed this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wound and it will continue to very slowly heal this wound.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like, I think Apple’s just kind of waiting it out at this point. Like, USB-C is becoming more common.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are seeing more and more cables and peripherals and more things are coming with USB-C cables. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, so slowly this is solving itself. Dongles are getting slowly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less terrible. people are able to find a few that seem to work okay for them. So like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time, this is slowly changing, but I think, I still think it’s a terrible customer experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have a brand new laptop and almost immediately need some kind of weird dongle for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some port it doesn’t have. Uh, but you know, they, they continue to make that trade off. Eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this will solve itself I think, but it still hasn’t after, you know, three years so far of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being all USBC on these laptops, we still need dongles. And that’s unfortunate.
⏹️ ▶️ John So are any of these ports, or all of these ports, have, I wish we knew more about the
⏹️ ▶️ John display connection, because I’m wondering if they’re the same, and they’re Thunderbolt 3, and they’re USB-C, but do
⏹️ ▶️ John they support a higher version of DisplayPort that lets them drive the big monitors? I’m not sure if there’s any difference
⏹️ ▶️ John in capability behind these strangely shaped ports. You know, my son, of all
⏹️ ▶️ John people, asked me the other day, a friend of his was asking him a question about whether we had any Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John with, I don’t know if it was like, he was asking whether we had any Macs with USB-C ports
⏹️ ▶️ John that aren’t Thunderbolt ports. So he gave me some mishmash, so I didn’t really understand. Didn’t understand what he was asking.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I was faced with having to try to explain to someone who knows absolutely nothing about this
⏹️ ▶️ John what the deal is with USB-C and Thunderbolt. It’s really hard. Like starting from first principles, because
⏹️ ▶️ John I had like, the only thing that I explained to him was the rectangular USB-A, because he’s seen those and he
⏹️ ▶️ John has them like in his room to charge his stuff, because he got USB-A to lightning ports to charge his device, he’s familiar with those wires.
⏹️ ▶️ John But everything else after that is gibberish. Like look, the hole in the side of the computer is the same shape, but by looking at the shape, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John tell what thing it does. Some of them are Thunderbolt, but some of them are not. And there’s different versions of Thunderbolt,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the earlier version had a different shape, and it’s like, oh my God, it doesn’t make any sense. So anyway, what I was asking is,
⏹️ ▶️ John are the little shaped holes that are the same in number and shape, and probably the same in capability,
⏹️ ▶️ John do they support a higher version number of DisplayPort when in the mode that they’re supporting DisplayPort?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, but I don’t think so. I haven’t followed the intricacies of DisplayPort
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versus Thunderbolt and everything. It’s still Thunderbolt 3, I know that. So I’m guessing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of that might depend on the GPU, but regardless, I think it’s the same as it was before in that area.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, it does play, because in that mode where it’s like, I am just a DisplayPort now, right? That’s like one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John modes that it can be. It can be in USB-C mode and in Thunderbolt mode and DisplayPort tunneling, I don’t know the details. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John the point is, it looks the same on the outside. It has different capabilities than
⏹️ ▶️ John the earlier ones that had the similar shaped holes in them though, because these can drive the XDR at native res earlier models could not.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Have all your keyboard prayers been answered? I think so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. So there’s one big one, and that is that the touch bar is still required
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the MacBook Pro. You know, the Touch Bar came out in 2016, I don’t like it. I know a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of people who don’t like it, who if there was an option to buy the same computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without a Touch Bar, even at the same price, I know many people who would take it. And Touch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bar is not required for Touch ID because the MacBook Air has no Touch Bar but Touch ID.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we know they can do it, you know, but this computer requires a Touch Bar. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wish it didn’t, but there are two critical changes here that I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will make it less bad of a thing for people who didn’t like it before. Number one, we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a hardware escape key again. Hooray! Thank God. Now, I should actually say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t actually use it anymore because ever since the laptops got rid of it, I converted myself to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Caps Lock for escape because Mac OS has a built-in thing in the keyboard panel to do that. If you go to modifier keys,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can set Caps Lock to be escape. And I never even need Caps Lock for anything, so I remapped that and now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just, I kind of had the muscle memory where I hit it with my little finger and that’s it. I hit escape really easily. It’s closer now, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually better. So I actually don’t need the escape key personally, but I know a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t wanna do that remapping and want that to be there. So that’s a huge improvement if you are a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco touch bar hater. And also, one of the most important changes they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could have possibly made, they made the space between the keys
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger. Thank God. So this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco along with the inverted T arrow layout, I think are actually more important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the travel distance. So the travel distance, I’ll get all this at once. Travel distance is doubled,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the butterfly is. It is one millimeter travel depth for the keys. So for comparison,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco funny, I actually went around, I think I’m gonna write a blog post and put a graph of this in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went around yesterday with my calipers, And which I actually brought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the briefing as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Of course you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did. No one else had calipers. I went around and measured a whole bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of keyboards to see like how big are the key caps universe like how much spacing is there between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the keys, how much travel do they have etc. And I found first of all I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was interesting that like the the total height of the main area of the keyboard which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I measured as like from like the top of the delete key down to to the bottom of the right arrow. So like not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco including a function row or a touch bar if it has it, like just that distance. On almost every keyboard I measured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco across a huge range, I should say I measured from a, I measured a titanium
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PowerBook G4, a white plastic MacBook, the 2015
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generation MacBook Pro, the butterfly keyboard MacBook Pro, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad Pro 11 inch smart keyboard, my Philco Mechanical 10 keyless keyboard with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big clicky key switches, and my Microsoft Sculpt ergonomic keyboard. I measured all of those,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s funny, like the height of the main key region on all of them is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right around 90 millimeters. And so what I found interesting was like how little variation there is in that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, the overall size of these keyboards was very similar, actually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess we figured out a long time ago, keyboard should be about 90 millimeters tall from the bottom of the arrow to the top of the delete key.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, cool. So what matters then of like how big the keys are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and how much they’re spaced, what shape the keycaps take, how much they travel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down and everything. And there was a huge range of these. So like my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big Philco mechanical key switch with one of the, I forget which cherry color switch it has,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it has one of those like cherry mechanical switches in it, the travel on that was 4.3 millimeters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so for reference, this laptop, the new one is one millimeter. The butterfly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was half a millimeter. So it’s twice as much travel. The Magic Keyboard was 1.2.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is very close to the Magic Keyboard, but kind of like a third of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way between the Magic Keyboard and the Butterfly in travel distance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I could actually say about the same thing for the key margins as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Magic Keyboard, 2.8 millimeters spacing between the keys.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco New MacBook Pro, 2.5. Old MacBook Pro with the crappy keyboard, 1.8. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge variation, like huge drop there. And the, you know, 2.5 millimeter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco key spacing actually compares pretty well. Like the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart keyboard, which I think has very wide key spacing is 3.1. So compared to 2.5, you know, you can see like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 2015 MacBook Pro with the key, with the other, you know, the previous generation scissor keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 3.5 millimeter spacing and about 1.5 millimeters of travel. So again, we are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re going, were hitting roughly Magic Keyboard levels,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but slightly less. So a little bit less key spacing than the Magic Keyboard, a little bit less travel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the Magic Keyboard, but way closer to that than to the Butterfly Keyboard, which sucked.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So overall, I would say that they really have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I should say too, they are calling this a Magic Keyboard. They said in the presentation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they said that the, they defended the Butterfly a little bit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t care. And I will say to be honest though like it does seem like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 2018 or the 2019 new materials revision the third gen revision they did this past
⏹️ ▶️ Marco May I haven’t heard of many problems with it so I think they actually might have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly fixed it but I don’t care it still sucks so even if they fix it I still hate it but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know good for people who have it I guess but anyway they so heavily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco focused on the keyboard during the presentation they they knew we all were too. And they said they went back,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they had people studying physiology, and they wanted to focus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on all these different areas, key shapes, the feel, acoustics, what makes people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accurate and what doesn’t. And they said something that’s funny, I actually wrote this like two years ago in a blog post. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said that they already make a fantastic keyboard that meets all those criteria. It’s the magic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard that ships with the iMac. Yes, we know, thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they really are saying that they’re bringing the Magic Keyboard to the MacBook Pro. Like that’s how they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco framing it. And based on all my measurements and based on the feel, I can say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s pretty damn accurate. Like it isn’t exactly the same, it’s actually like in some ways it’s better than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Magic Keyboard. If you were a fan of the increased key
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stability with the Butterfly Keyboard, which is one of the only advantages that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever touted for it, which was like, if you hit the edge or the corner of a key, the whole thing depresses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more evenly than on the previous types of scissor keyboards, it would kind of like slant. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s better with the 16-inch keyboard than even with the Magic Keyboard, which itself was better than previous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scissors. There’s a rubber dome that they tweaked to make a better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feedback mechanism or something. Sorry, I’m not really sure on many of the details here. And I’m sure we’ll find out a lot of this through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco teardowns down the road. but short version is they really focused
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot on these and they say, they said right in the presentation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the best typing experience ever on a Mac notebook and I might agree
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that. It’s been a while since I’ve used the old mush keyboards on like my PowerBook G4 that I loved so much,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s really good. It is not like super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high travel, but it is not so low that you really care. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and laptops have always had lower travel than desktop keyboards, but it’s been like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco close, it kind of in the ballpark that you would kind of forgive it for being a laptop. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is finally back in that area. Like when I was typing on this, even just the initial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things of just like the setup wizard, like migration assistant, typing in my wifi password, every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco key press, I was like, yes, finally, thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you, God. I don’t know, I’m an atheist, but thank you, God. Like I am, I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so happy to just type in regular things because you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what? It didn’t feel noteworthy. It felt like a keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is after three years of their laptops feeling like they hated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. Like I had to type in something on my 13 inch afterwards, like deactivating something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I just immediately wanted to throw it in the garbage. I should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco warn everybody out there, if you’ve been using a butterfly keyboard and not a fan of it like me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the second you use one of these things, your old laptop is trash. You will immediately want to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rid of it. So if you don’t want to buy a new one, don’t touch one. Just don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like don’t test drive a Tesla. Like don’t ever touch one of these keyboards. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just so nice. What’s nice about it, it dramatically changes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way the laptop feels to me because it changes from something that has literally felt hostile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco towards me for three years and frankly felt like they were never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna fix it. It felt like they thought it was fine. So for three years, it felt like this hostile thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where all of their laptops were telling me, we don’t want you using us, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hate you. We hate ourselves and we hate you. That’s how it felt to me. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so hostile. And to have this new keyboard that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only did they put a lot of effort into it, and not only did they really try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make a keyboard that people liked a lot, which I don’t think that was ever a goal of the Butterfly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they succeeded. And they made a really fricking good laptop keyboard that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still thin, still has the stability that some people like, still has like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the like the kind of snappy feedback a little bit but has significantly more travel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has easier to find keys has the inverted t arrows has a real escape key it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s it just seems like oh my god why didn’t they have this three years ago but i’m really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glad they have it now and finally i can go back to using a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not be constantly irritated by this unchangeable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fundamental quality of it. It is such a nice feeling.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like this weight has been lifted off my shoulders. Like, you know, the world made a couple of big mistakes in 2016.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of them has now been fixed. And it really, it’s like the dawning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a new day. Finally, the long night is over. Like, finally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is, I can’t describe, although I’m trying poorly, I can’t describe how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice it is to just start using this and be like, ah, okay, things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are getting right in the world again. Finally, I can use a laptop and not hate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every minute of typing on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So speaking of success and this being a successful keyboard, did they mention anything or
⏹️ ▶️ John tout anything about the reliability of this keyboard?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I honestly I’d be surprised if they, if they ever mentioned that, But it’s a scissor mechanism, which inherently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco means that it is First of all a lot less likely to break we’ve had scissor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mechanisms for a long time Like the butterfly mechanism was a whole completely new design lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like very you know Precise tiny fragile things had to go perfectly with it for it to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work scissor there’s just the design of scissor keycaps are much more resilient to problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Having increased travel means that like you can probably pop off the key cab and just like the whole way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the attach is different. So like, it’s probably gonna be way easier to service these. Time will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell, I don’t know, and they didn’t really hit it too hard, but I’m guessing these are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be way easier to service than the Butterfly’s. Probably similar to previous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptops. Like, we’ve had scissor key laptops for a long time. Many people have had keys replaced or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to get service on them. And it’s been fine. Like, occasionally it requires a huge expensive replacement,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but for minor stuff, it usually doesn’t. and most people in their lifetime with their laptops, most people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t need expensive keyboard repairs.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve repaired a scissor key switches myself on older laptops when they’d like get old or wear
⏹️ ▶️ John out or start flopping off or some kid would break one off and you’d put it back on. Like there are tiny delicate parts in there for
⏹️ ▶️ John sure, but they’re not so delicate that I destroyed my keyboard by trying to fix it, which was
⏹️ ▶️ John nice. And yeah, the scissor mechanisms are tried and true. It’s interesting though that the main, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John so you hated the keyboard even when it was working perfectly, but Apple’s big problem with the keyboards is that they weren’t working.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, some people like them, some people don’t, but not working is just a universal, right? And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of weird to pitch a new keyboard without,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I don’t know how you do it. Like, they don’t wanna say anything as ongoing lawsuits, so they can’t really say anything about, you know, they could have
⏹️ ▶️ John at least said, this is our most reliable keyboard ever, or they could have said, look, we’ll pour a bucket of sand on top of it and type,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’ll keep going, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John not true. You probably shouldn’t do that, because there are other reasons other than your keyboard working that you don’t want sand leaking into
⏹️ ▶️ John your laptop, right? But it’s kind of weird that like, I would have expected
⏹️ ▶️ John them to somehow address what is the main problem with their keyboard. The main problem
⏹️ ▶️ John with their keyboard was not that Marco didn’t like how it felt.
⏹️ ▶️ John main problem was that it would stop working sometimes like my space bar, which still doesn’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, I’ve been holding out for these laptops. I’m hoping when I bring this thing to work and say, hey, by the way, the space bar doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John work, I’m gonna do that at a time that when they order me a replacement, they could potentially get a 16-inch. Instead, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just gonna get it repaired for 900 bucks, so it’s gonna suck for me. At least I won’t have the highest chance of
⏹️ ▶️ John getting me a new one of these. But anyway, reliability is still a question. And unfortunately, although we
⏹️ ▶️ John suspect that these will be better because the travel’s bigger, because this is a mechanism, at this time, we can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Because Marco’s had this
⏹️ ▶️ John for half a day. My 2017 laptop, which admittedly, I mostly used docked at work, so I didn’t use the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot, it took pretty much two full years for the space bar
⏹️ ▶️ John to die. I still find that infuriating, but it didn’t die immediately. So, and
⏹️ ▶️ John same thing with the 2019s that you were mentioning before, they seem like the problems are okay. If the problems only come up
⏹️ ▶️ John after, you know, a year and a half, two years, we’re not gonna be able to tell that now. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, we talked about this before, like if and when they come up with a new keyboard, we just have to
⏹️ ▶️ John take their word for it. So I would have loved some reassurance to say, and we reliability tested these and we poured potato chips
⏹️ ▶️ John into them and we had our robots poking them at 20 different angles. And like whatever it is that they didn’t do with the butterflies,
⏹️ ▶️ John they should have done with this one and they could have touted that. I mean, we love seeing robot fingers poking
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboards or whatever. And speaking of the travel stuff and older keyboards,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure you have all these numbers from your Caliper travels. What was the travel on the 2015 MacBook Pro keys?
⏹️ ▶️ John You gotta consult your wall poster that shows you key travel in millimeters
⏹️ ▶️ John for all Apple laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so here, I breezed by it earlier. Let me see, the 2015, key travel was about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one and a half millimeters. So about 1.5, Magic Keyboard is 1.2, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this new laptop is 1.0. Butterfly was 0.5. So we are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the ballpark of the old one. What you get with this, like when the Butterfly came out and everyone was very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controversial, still is, there were the people like me who hated it. And there were a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people who said, We actually prefer this to the old one and a lot of people would go back to one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the old ones and say, this is too mushy. They didn’t like going back to the old ones once they were used to the more crisp
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel of the new one. I think this new one is going to really satisfy both groups
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. Again, one of the biggest problems with the butterfly was that they took this incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controversial keyboard. Again, even if it worked perfectly, even if it never had any reliability problems,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was a very controversial design. and lots of people really hated it. And it was so that therefore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was never a suitable keyboard to be the only keyboard. Like you can’t have something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that a whole bunch of your customers hate if that’s the only option you’re gonna give them for an entire category of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products. And that’s what they did with the Butterfly. I think with this, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco presumably going to trickle down to the rest of the product line. Presumably this will soon be the only keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can buy in an Apple laptop. And I think that’s fine because this new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one is, I think, gonna be a big crowd pleaser. It is not as extreme in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either direction. You know, it’s not a super high travel mechanical clicky thing, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you get from an external, you know, gamer keyboard. It’s not a super flat butterfly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing or like a virtual keyboard on a touch glass or anything like that. It’s just a regular laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard. It’s the kind of laptop keyboard that used to be the only kind of laptop keyboard. The kind that you would barely even mention because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was fine. That’s what this is. That is if you’re only gonna offer one type
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of keyboard for all your laptops. It has to be that it has to be something that everyone says that’s fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and This has a way better chance of achieving that than the butterfly ever would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So as someone who loved the magic keyboard when it first came out It was my favorite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keyboard by a mile when it first came out And then I got my MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey adorable and over time I came to really really like this keyboard. It has its faults I’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to take error to it more than zero times, which is I’ve never taken error to a magic keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before for certainly not You know, I’ve never been forced to anyway, so I do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually quite like the MacBook keyboard I do like how sturdy it feels. Is it a deal-breaker? No, but it does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. It does it does make the magic keyboard feel not mushy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but Comparatively slightly more mushy than than the MacBook keyboard and it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me like what you’re describing is basically the magic keyboard board with a little bit less travel, which I’d be fine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with, and a little bit more, if not a lot more, sturdiness or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stability, which to me sounds like you’re taking the best of both worlds and mashing them together.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I am all in on this. This sounds excellent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m telling you, I think people are going to love this thing. I don’t think there is going to be anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who is really truly upset by this move. You know, only the most diehard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco butterfly lovers are really going to care. Like, honestly, they had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their time in the sun. It’s whatever butterfly metaphor they’re going to make. It’s time for them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to fly south for the winter, whatever. Make room for us. No, I don’t know. All I want was to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to a world where we could stop talking about the freaking keyboards. And after this episode, I think we’ve achieved that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, finally, we can go back to talking about anything else because this won’t be a constant source of friction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in our computing lives anymore. Once this takes over the product line, and once the butterflies are all out of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, mainstream usage in maybe four or five years, like we’re going to look back on this time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way people look back on like that chicklet keyboard on one of the whatever computer that was John you probably know
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t I know what you’re talking about, but I don’t remember. I think it was a compact, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s like some like this some like you know terrible computer that that or maybe was it PC junior was that at the IBM PC
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’s like they’re like a membrane over yeah, although there were membrane keyboards as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if that was the check that one. I used a PC junior though. My friend had one. It was not a good computer. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably for other reasons as well. But yeah, so like I really do think we’re going to look back on the butterfly era as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this tragic mistake that was made for a few years. Like, like when back when Apple had like bad CEOs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the weird business people CEOs, like I think it’s going to, it’s going to be like that kind of era and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thank goodness it’s ending. Like I truly think this keyboard I think is so good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it will have probably a significant effect on Apple’s bottom line for saved warranty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco repairs compared to the Butterfly’s. I have a feeling this is gonna take over the product line quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would be shocked if any Butterfly keyboards were still sold one year from now. I bet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one year from now, they’re all out of the lineup.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think it’ll be good for their sales because like you said, if someone has one of these existing ones and especially if they had any
⏹️ ▶️ John problems, even if it’s just like a sticking key or they had to blow it out of there, once they try one of these, they’re going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John looking to offload these as fast as possible and replace it with basically an equivalent machine. Oh, I didn’t really need
⏹️ ▶️ John a new one, but I need my keyboard to be reliable and this one is nicer. So they’re just, you know, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John this will be good for Apple’s bottom line. Imagine making products that people like could be good for your bottom line. But
⏹️ ▶️ John surely pent up demand for the keyboard. So hopefully that will be reflected. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why they need to get it out in the rest of the line as fast as possible. Yeah, I hope they do. I hope it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John lag behind in kind of Tim Cook fashion where like the MacBook Air has the butterfly keyboard for the next three years. and we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco come on. Like I really hope it does
⏹️ ▶️ John go through all the other computers as fast as possible. We’ll see. Although I, you know, so
⏹️ ▶️ John sticking to the keyboard here, I still have my same raft of keyboard complaints that I’ve had for a while. Some
⏹️ ▶️ John of them are actually still new from the Butterfly. Obviously all we really care about is that this is a reliable keyboard and it sound, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, as far as we can tell, they’ve done everything that they could to- That isn’t all we care about. To set them, I know, but like-
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, I hated the Butterfly keyboard before it broke for everybody. I know, I know, I’m just saying like, it is
⏹️ ▶️ John in the big, big picture wise, Apple can’t have keyboards that don’t work on their laptops. Like that is the major
⏹️ ▶️ John problem that we’re addressing here. And of course we can’t tell. But there are other things about this keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John that still bother me. And this has been a problem in Apple’s line for a long time. So
⏹️ ▶️ John since the, right after the Typebook, I guess the first MacBooks, the very
⏹️ ▶️ John first aluminum MacBooks, that I believe began the era where, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John actually maybe it was before that. But anyway, whenever the era began, where Apple decided that they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to offer you multiple sizes of laptops, but every single one of them will have a keyboard that’s exactly the same size. There
⏹️ ▶️ John are advantages to that. The user experience is the same. You get used to the key layout on one. You can use all of them. Like I understand
⏹️ ▶️ John all the advantages, but like just what we were saying before about ports and eight terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ John SSDs and 64 gigs of RAM, at a certain point it becomes ridiculous. The most ridiculous it’s ever
⏹️ ▶️ John been is the 17 inch MacBook Pro, or the 17 inch PowerBook before that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was a 17 inch laptop with the same exact keyboard as their 12 inch laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John It looked dumb, it was dumb. Now they have a 16 inch with basically
⏹️ ▶️ John the same size keyboard as their 12 inch, give or take a millimeter or two according to Marcos Calipers.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t look as dumb, but it is dumb. We’re celebrating the inverted T arrow keys,
⏹️ ▶️ John which obviously is better, you can feel for them. You could have a full size inverted T, there’s plenty of room. You
⏹️ ▶️ John could have a page up, page down at home. You could have all sorts of things. You could get the stupid FN key out of the lower
⏹️ ▶️ John left corner so control could be back there if you don’t already have it remapped to caps lock. With more room,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they have more room, you can do more things and include more keys and Apple continues
⏹️ ▶️ John to resist that. Again, I understand the reasons. Everyone’s got their reasons, their excuses. Oh, we need room for the
⏹️ ▶️ John speakers. Oh, we need this. Oh, we need that. Bottom line is there’s more room there. Look at the world of laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ John When they have large laptops with 16 inch screens, there’s room for more keys and people use it
⏹️ ▶️ John and users like it. Johnny Ive doesn’t like it because it’s not symmetrical so we can’t have the inverted
⏹️ ▶️ John T poking down out of the rectangle of the keyboard but he’s gone now but his replacements apparently still like symmetry.
⏹️ ▶️ John Another symmetry thing that drives me nuts the previous generation of keyboards as
⏹️ ▶️ John we noted many many episodes ago the bottom row of keys with the spacebar and the modifiers
⏹️ ▶️ John was taller than all the other rows of keys. I thought that that was a great idea because that
⏹️ ▶️ John bottom row serves a special purpose. The spacebar, the biggest key on the keyboard, maybe doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need to be any taller, but it’s nice. The modifiers, you smush them with one of your less dexterous fingers
⏹️ ▶️ John while you hit another key because you chord with them. Having the modifiers be slightly taller than the rest of the keys
⏹️ ▶️ John was nice. More space for the half height arrows. Yeah, they did away with that in the 2016
⏹️ ▶️ John models because symmetrical, exactly symmetrical down to the millimeter keys look
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no reason to like making it slightly bigger. Someone did that intentionally and it was smart
⏹️ ▶️ John and they got rid of it because it’s not as symmetrical. Like talk about the level of symmetry. Not only can we not break the rectangle
⏹️ ▶️ John outline of the keyboard, but we also can’t have that bottom row be a little bit bigger. We have to make it small like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s ridiculous. The touch bar, which Marco mentioned, which is not optional as models, pro
⏹️ ▶️ John models. One of the problems with the touch bar is accidental input. I myself have removed
⏹️ ▶️ John the Siri button because occasionally I had the Siri thing and it would bloop, you know, like I go for the delete key and I hit where the Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John button was. Sorry, I moved it from my touch bar. Occasionally, while I’m thinking about something, my screen
⏹️ ▶️ John will go black and I realize one of my fat fingers leaned on the little brightness down button on the touch bar.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, if that happens to people who are less technically savvy, they may not realize what happened. I think their computer is broken
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s a very strange experience. You don’t notice it happening. How can you prevent accidental input on a touch bar?
⏹️ ▶️ John You can move it farther away from the keyboard. More than, you know, 0.02 millimeters
⏹️ ▶️ John farther away as they’ve done with the extra spacing or whatever. But how can we move it farther away from the keyboard? There’s no room.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s totally more room. To give an example, in the olden days the Apple Extended Keyboard 2
⏹️ ▶️ John had a huge space between the number keys and the function keys. It was great because you’d never accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ John go for a number key and hit a function key. It was a gigantic amount of space. Now there’s less room on a laptop but
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s more room than one or two millimeters. That would be less aesthetically pleasing. It is certainly nice when the
⏹️ ▶️ John space between the touch bar all the keys is exactly symmetrical but it’s not as good ergonomically.
⏹️ ▶️ John These concerns about the laptops and sort of the battle of form versus function make
⏹️ ▶️ John me think that there is still plenty of room for improvement and design innovation in especially
⏹️ ▶️ John the large pro laptop space that I really hope Apple latches onto. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want this to sound negative because I’m really excited that they’ve fixed the worst problems of their laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John and have made a keyboard that Marco likes. I mentioned the iMac profications of the laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John before. This is half of iMac profication, because if they had gone all the way, it would
⏹️ ▶️ John be more versatile and have more ports and more capabilities and would
⏹️ ▶️ John have broken out of the mold in the previous laptops. This is exactly in the mold of the previous laptops, but it’s an
⏹️ ▶️ John alternate universe one where they made them good, which is great. We want to live in that universe. We want the universe where
⏹️ ▶️ John they make the laptops good, but it’s the same design. It’s four USB-C shaped holes on the outside,
⏹️ ▶️ John headphone jack, same size keyboard as everybody else, screen, laptop, giant trackpad.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the same exact design. And I think that’s a really good design. I just continue to hope that there’s room
⏹️ ▶️ John at the top of their lineup and the largest, most powerful laptops for them to
⏹️ ▶️ John break out of that design mold and give us something more capable
⏹️ ▶️ John and frankly better in terms of like the ergonomics of the keyboard and the key layout and everything. There is room for improvement there.
⏹️ ▶️ John and I really, really hope that somehow, someway, Apple can find the courage to break out of the rectangle of
⏹️ ▶️ John the keyboard and to put a different keyboard on their largest laptop than on their smallest.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, I actually don’t know if I agree with you on that. I would love things like full height arrows,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you would need, I guess, like another row on the right probably to do that, like a home end page up kind of row at
⏹️ ▶️ John just move them down one, you know what I mean? Oh, that’s interesting. The left and right would be, it would break out of the rectangle
⏹️ ▶️ John of the keyboard. The left and right would be like lower. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boy, yeah, that’s not gonna happen. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I’m saying because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ugly, but not because it’s ergonomically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. Yeah, well, and I really do think, Johnny Ive has been gone for officially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like six months, but I think his exit was much longer than that in practice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it was a slow, gradual exit over probably a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I’m using him as the stand-in for that ethos of like, well, the bottom row of keys can’t be half a millimeter
⏹️ ▶️ John taller. They have to be exactly the same size, or I’ll notice that that ethos does not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco serve anybody. But whether it was Johnny or not, the fact is they’ve had significant change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in design leadership since the 2016s came out. And now they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have made some changes that do break symmetry, that are less attractive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like making the, first of all, giving us the inverted T arrows back. That’s a huge breaking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of symmetry on the keyboard. Giving us the escape key.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s a pre-existing one. They did that in the 2015s as well. I wouldn’t say the escape key
⏹️ ▶️ John is breaking symmetry because it’s mostly symmetrical with the Touch ID, although it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco kind of surprising that they’re not exactly the same size. I know they’re not the same size,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re still. The Escape key is wider than Touch ID. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco understand. Like it wasn’t the MacBook Escape as well. And even just even the key margins. Like I’m really convinced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the whole reason the keys were so damn close together on the Butterfly was simply that the thinner margins looked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better, even though it was awful for ergonomics and accuracy. But like, I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do think that’s why they did it. I can’t think of any other reason why they would have. And so they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have made a number of changes in this area that are aesthetically regressions,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that dramatically improve usability, accuracy, et cetera. And so that’s why I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I’m actually hopeful. You know, again, they made it thicker and heavier and a little bit bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that was required to achieve things people really wanted. Same thing on the iPhones, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The iPhones were made thicker and heavier because it achieved significant gains that people wanted.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think we actually are seeing the early days of Apple like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stepping back from the worst of form over function that I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is gonna be like the one negative asterisk on the Johnny Ive era that we’re gonna look back on is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way too much form over function. I really do think we’re seeing, the Mac Pro, the new Mac Pro is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way uglier than the trashcan Mac Pro, but it’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted. The Mac Pro is the example of going all the way. There is nothing in the Mac Pro that
⏹️ ▶️ John is functionally compromised for the sake of aesthetics, nothing. And the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro is close to that because they use the same case, but in general. They went halfway
⏹️ ▶️ John with this thing. They did the guts. They said, better cooling, bigger capabilities, everything we can
⏹️ ▶️ John possibly do on the inside other than the screen, we’re gonna do. But it’s still basically the same design as it was before.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I applaud all the things they did to the keyboard to improve on it, but they haven’t broken
⏹️ ▶️ John with their existing orthodoxy for the past decade. half-height arrow keys existed before, right? So they’re just going back
⏹️ ▶️ John to a design they had. And by the way, the spacing between the keys, my guess is that someone thought bigger keys would be better because
⏹️ ▶️ John by reducing the spacing, you do make larger keys. And you can see someone thinking that and saying, oh, larger
⏹️ ▶️ John keys would be better. They’d be easier to hit. And maybe some people even agree with that, but obviously you don’t, and I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t, don’t think I do either, but it might’ve been aesthetics, but it might’ve also just been a bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John key caps. All I’m saying is that this feels like a successful
⏹️ ▶️ John incarnation of the design of the 2015 MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John updated for modern internals and technology with a dose of the iMac Pro internals saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s just blow out the doors on the capabilities of the inside of this thing. But it’s not a fundamentally different design
⏹️ ▶️ John in the way that the Mac Pro is a fundamentally different design than the trash can is a fundamentally
⏹️ ▶️ John different design than the iMac Pro. Like that again, the different no one is looking at the Mac Pro and wondering how it
⏹️ ▶️ John is differentiated from the trash can or from the iMac Pro. Whereas if you look at this laptop, you
⏹️ ▶️ John might wonder how it’s differentiated from the 13 inch. And there are explanations for that, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John more subtle than I can just look at this and know this is a more capable thing or this is a
⏹️ ▶️ John different design. It’s not a different design. It is a better iteration of the previous design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I think ultimately, like this is hard to distinguish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from a 2015 if there isn’t a 2015 next to it, because you have the inverted T arrows and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same kind of size class and everything. It’s, at a very casual quick glance, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just looks like a MacBook Pro, simple as that. Like, it just looks like the way they’ve always looked, quote, always, right? And I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the new Mac Pro, it doesn’t look anything like the trash can, but it is very similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in lots of ways to the old towers that only, you know, ancient dinosaurs, I guess, are still using these days,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it does, like, in a way, like, they had their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco form over function, you know, peak, which was the trash can, and customers said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, and there were problems with it. And so they went back to what they had before that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco misstep. And they’ve done a lot of that same thing here. They have gone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much of the way back to before the 2016 Tuxedoir
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Generation misstep. Not as far back as they did with the Mac Pro. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to some degree, I don’t know how much further back they could have gone with some of these things. Well, they need to go
⏹️ ▶️ John forward because they’ve never made a laptop like I described. I’m obviously asking them to go
⏹️ ▶️ John way farther. I’m not saying you should go back to the Mac portable, which I mean, I guess you can go back that far, you can get some weird keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John layouts, but they’ve never made anything as ugly as what I was describing. I mean, and it makes sense because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re the nice looking computer company. I’m just saying that I think there’s room for that. Arguably,
⏹️ ▶️ John they never made a tower computer as ugly as the Mac Pro, but obviously there was room for that too. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m excited. I really am. I’m telling you, you should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The big problem I have with this announcement is, well, two problems. Number one,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not planning on spending money on a laptop soon, but it sounds like I’m going to have to. But I guess the good- Don’t touch one. Well, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here- Actually, I have a, if you love the butterfly keyboard so much, I have a 13-inch MacBook Pro that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John we go. I can give to you for a good price.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I was saying about people wanting to offload their old things. I wonder if the price on these things is
⏹️ ▶️ John really going to drop through the floor, because I think people will want to get rid of their perfectly good, completely
⏹️ ▶️ John working, very fast butterfly keyboard laptops. Get rid of it while it still
⏹️ ▶️ John works. A lot. Yeah. And then they’ll want to sell them and then there may be a glut in the market. So maybe your resale
⏹️ ▶️ John price won’t be that great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, what I was going to say is I’m really not interested in a 16 inch laptop having not seen one yet. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not arguing that it is amazing and fantastic in every possible way. But I like having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a smaller machine. And unless I go the route of replacing the iMac with this in like a 5K monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe I’ll pull a John and buy half a Civic. I mean, buy one of these Pro Display XDRs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I’d rather have this in the 13-inch form factor. So now the clock is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ticking because I agree with what you guys are saying, that this is going to trickle down to the rest of the line. It’s only a matter of time. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey man, will I be sad if it takes like two years for it to trickle down to the 13s and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Airs of the world. And I really hope that sooner rather than later, this gets put into the other size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think it probably will. I mean, I think the ideal scenario that I would like to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is for them to do the same kind of screen embiggening move onto the 13-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pro to make it like a 14-inch MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you’d have, I think the Air would stay where it is. The Air would stay at 13, and then you’d have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pros at 14 and 16. I think that would help in a lot of ways. It would help
⏹️ ▶️ Marco further distance the 13-inch Pro from the Air because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very close still. Like there are some big ways that it’s different, but like I think it needs more big ways it’s different.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that would help a little bit I think. And just, cause again, like this is so good,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also for the last couple of years I’ve been using 13 inch laptops and I’ve loved them. Like I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really enjoy the 13 inch form factor and I might go back to it in the future,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but for now this is so much better that I’m just gonna stick with it because it’s just awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you’re a person who likes the 13 inch size better and you can be patient, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never touch one of these. Never try one. But if you can be patient and wait, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it’s going to be long. I think it’s going to be less than a year, honestly, before you have a 13 inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pro with the same keyboard. But
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll find out. Yeah, it’s the air that I’m worried about. And if they ever decide to resurrect a 12 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John size, I wonder if this keyboard, first of all, would fit in there because of the travel, like, because arguably the the butterfly keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John had its, you know, its reason for existing was this very, very thin thing and they’re like, this keyboard’s so great, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John use it everywhere, which was a bad move. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m very confident that the 13-inch MacBook Pro is going to get it in short order. I just worry about the air
⏹️ ▶️ John because it deserves it. There’s room for it and an air with that keyboard would really, I know people
⏹️ ▶️ John are excited they brought back the name Air and everybody loved their Airs and it’s wedge-shaped, but I do
⏹️ ▶️ John not have good feelings about my MacBook Air. Maybe it’s the double spaces coming out of that space bar. fairly new and
⏹️ ▶️ John that one exhibited this problem very quickly and now I’m just waiting for worse problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like this computer. Yeah, just because of the double spacebar. If you’d give me that same air with this keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I would have affection for it. I think I would love it. I think it would be
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like my old 2011 air.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because everything else about the computer is great. Size and weight. It’s got Touch ID, which I love. I know we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John been in the bargaining phase of like, just please just give us a good keyboard and they have, so we’re all happy.
⏹️ ▶️ John But hanging out in there somewhere in the distance is, you know, Face ID on laptops and
⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of other potentially cool things that hopefully now that we’re sort of out of the
⏹️ ▶️ John dark days of Apple’s laptop that we can start making forward progress again. Again, I don’t expect Face ID to be
⏹️ ▶️ John on a laptop first, but I really hope that does come to the Mac and I really hope it does trickle down to laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John as much as I love Touch ID. Face ID would be even even better, and hey, why not both? I think it’s time for
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s laptops to start moving forward again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and finally, I think we can finally focus on that now. We can finally move
⏹️ ▶️ Marco past the basics being broken, which they have been for three years. And that makes me feel really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. Finally, I can stop worrying that they’re gonna make something that I totally hate as the only option.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m much more confident now that they have their heads on straight, they’re going in a better direction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, and they seem to care about the basics more than they did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few years ago, and that means a lot. And now I can start complaining about things like ports and cellular. Cellular’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big one, I really still want that very badly. It was funny, today I was kind of, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasn’t sure, like last year I had a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco briefing to which I brought my MacBook Pro to take notes on, and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next day I had an iPad briefing to which I brought my iPad Pro to take notes on, figuring that the people in the room
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might appreciate that I was using their thing. And this time to what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I suspected to be a Mac briefing, I brought only my iPad pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for two main reasons. Number one, I hated typing so much on my Mac book pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I knew I was going to do a lot of typing, taking notes. I’m like, you know what? I don’t want to type on this thing. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would rather type on my smart keyboard. So that’s what I brought. And number two,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has cellular. And so everything I’m doing is constantly synced, I’m able to quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look things up, and yeah, you know, tethering exists. Tethering is fine, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also sucks. And there’s lots of cases in technology and life where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have an option that is fine but kind of sucks, but you take it because it’s your only option.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if tethering was the only option we ever had, then fine, I guess it would be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But we have phones, they have cell phones in them, We have watches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have cell modems in them, and the iPad has had cell modems offered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since the very first iPad, which in a few months will be 10 years ago. It’s time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to bring it to the Mac. And I know it’s hard. I know there’s reasons. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No argument here. I would love it. I don’t know if I’d buy it, to be honest, because- Oh my God,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why? No, no, but here’s the thing. Here’s the thing, though. As much as I want it to exist, I don’t know if I would do it, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know? because it’s like the Mac Pro, as much as I give you guys a hard time, like I want the Mac Pro to exist, but I would never buy it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want cellular to be an option, but I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a tough call. I don’t know if I would do it because I just don’t find myself on the go to that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey degree with my MacBook that often.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it would be, especially for people who’ve been in the Apple ecosystem for such a long time, I think it would be a real
⏹️ ▶️ John game changer just because we’re not used to the idea that you can bring your laptop somewhere without Wi-Fi. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John me is such a, it’s even a bigger change than iPads, because iPads, you know, especially the mini, were kind of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, big phones or whatever. And it’s like, oh, I get the idea. But I think it would just open up new possibilities.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like so much so that you would find yourself like forgetting
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can do that on your laptop. And like, you know, it’s like, oh, I want to go there. Oh, but I can’t bring my laptop because I have no network. Wait,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would have network connection. I am all for it. And especially if it’s not too expensive, it would be great.
⏹️ ▶️ John That said, I have cellular on most of my iPads and I always loved having it except
⏹️ ▶️ John on my current iPad, I’m having, the last time I went to
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC, I’m like, oh, I better get cellular set up on my iPad. And it’s the thing that Apple can’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John control, it’s carriers. For some reason, I can’t give anyone money
⏹️ ▶️ John to give myself a cellular connection
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad. Like the thing in settings just dies with an error and never loads anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And basically I’d have to call some carrier on the phone and do something somehow. Like I’ve had cellular
⏹️ ▶️ John on this before, but whatever state it’s in now, it’s kind of borked. And so I really,
⏹️ ▶️ John that whole experience is crappy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you bring it to a carrier store, they can do a lot there. Like I did that once, it
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. Yeah, I’m sure. Like I’m sure there’s a solution. I’m not saying it’s like broken. I’m sure this can be fixed, but it can’t be fixed
⏹️ ▶️ John by me stabbing at the screen with my fingers, which is disappointing. And that is still like the truth
⏹️ ▶️ John of the terrible cellular where we live in the US is that bringing that to any of your products introduces
⏹️ ▶️ John that. But that’s not Apple’s fault and there’s nothing they can do about it. And most times it goes okay. I just
⏹️ ▶️ John want to bring that up as my sadness about the fact that my cellular capable iPad is now
⏹️ ▶️ John not cellular capable unless I’m willing to get on the phone and or go to a store. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard life. But our keyboard nightmare is over. And I’m so happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m so happy. The The death of the butterfly keyboard begins today, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I cannot wait to dance on its grave when the last one is removed from the lineup. But it doesn’t matter, because now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have an option that isn’t that. So as long as that takes, it doesn’t matter to me, because now I can buy one that isn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whatever the first laptop was that they released with a different keyboard, I would have bought, even if it was the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lowest-end one. The fact that it’s the high-end one is even nicer, because I like the high-end ones. I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so happy to have this and I can finally use a laptop again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and actually enjoy it and not be like just irritated the whole time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just so happy. It’s so good. It’s so good. Thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you, Apple. It’s so good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, missed opportunity on Apple’s part. How amazing would it have been if they reincarnated the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with this new keyboard? So Marco Arment, I’m happy to report we have a new keyboard, but it’s in a one port
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook. And that’s what you get. Enjoy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would have rather used that than my 13-inch MacBook Pro. Oh, God. That would have been amazing. Thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to our sponsors this week, Mack Weldon, Squarespace, and HelloFresh. And we will talk to
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Auntie Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, tech podcast so long
Post-show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, what’s going on? Casey lost us again. Are you back?
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope you have. You should stop your recording, Casey, and commit your files to disk and put
⏹️ ▶️ John them in Dropbox immediately. Yeah. His computer is falling
⏹️ ▶️ John apart. I think pieces of his computer are falling out the back as it goes down the road.
⏹️ ▶️ John Chips are just littered behind it. Smoke is coming out a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It looks like so based on this current error message he’s pasting us, it looks like his His microphone and speakers have now stopped
⏹️ ▶️ John When your speakers have problems? Unless the speakers are also his headphones. I don’t even know what’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on. His computer is a mess. And that’s not even like a T2 Mac. So it isn’t like the T2 freaking
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I feel like there’s some kind of haunted computer. What are you doing over
⏹️ ▶️ John there? There you go. This is for the two of you so you can get my earlier reference.
⏹️ ▶️ John Know your meme. Moon’s haunted. Beep, beep, beep.