404: With Four Hands Tied Behind Its Back
12 Nov 2020Apple’s M1 chip, the first Macs equipped with it, and Casey’s latest “oops”.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- iPhone 12 Mini, Max press reviews are out
- Casey had an oops
- Apple Event
- M1 Name
- System on a Chip [Soc]
- Unified Memory Architecture
- RAM on-package
- Anandtech die shot article
- Sky Shadow
- “Buzz Off”
- Custom Technologies
- M1 performance
- MacBook Air
- Mac Mini
- MacBook Pro
- The future of the Mac
- Post-show: What did we order?
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Chapters
- ATP Store 🖼️
- iPhone 12 Mini, Max
- Sponsor: Bombas
- Casey had an oops
- M1 🖼️
- Sponsor: Flatfile
- Performance
- MacBook Air
- Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code atppodcast)
- Mac Mini
- 13” MacBook Pro
- Future M chips
- Ending theme
- Post-show
ATP Store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d like to give a update on my situation because inquiring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minds have not only wanted to know but have asked. I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here with the lights on and I am not in my sleepy shirt. I’m actually in the very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old throwback ATP watch sport edition.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Which you cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get anymore but it’s my favorite workout shirt because it’s like kind of sort of under armor sort of material.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so it’s like a little stretchy and plasticky, which is good for a workout shirt. And so anyway, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am wearing that with the lights on. And if you wanted to get some sort of sweet ATP merchandise,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can tell you that now is the time to do it. Like literally right now, because as we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey record, there’s a little over a week left, or no, I’m sorry, less than that, less than a week, less than a week, just a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco couple of days left. Like four
⏹️ ▶️ Casey days, right? Yeah. Yes, I almost got my wires crossed there. There’s just a couple of days left for you to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go to atp.fm slash store and get yourself some sweet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sweet ATP merch. We’ve got a new Mac Pro outline shirts with or without wheels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and all sorts of other stuff. We do not have mugs. A lot of people have asked about mugs. We don’t have those at the moment. We’ll probably do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those again, maybe next year or something, but we have a lot of great shirts. We’ve got the hoodie, which is extremely comfortable. We’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got the classic six colors ATP shirt, all sorts of good merchandise at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash store. Now, here’s where I do the hard sell. Every single
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time, somebody, not in a funny way, a lot of people do it in a funny way, oh, is it too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey late to order? Which is fine, whatever, I’ve made this bed, now I get to sleep in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But- That’s the laugh for a truly funny joke when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey get that laugh.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly, exactly. So, every time somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey non-ironically, non-sarcastically tweets at us,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at me, at somebody, and says, Oh, is it too late? Yes, there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are no exceptions. It will be too late if you do not go now to atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash store. Now is the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you listeners, you might think that Casey’s making this up or that 100% of the people who say that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are being sarcastic. I guarantee you, every time there is like one or two people at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who honestly, like totally not sarcastically say, Oh my God, please, I missed it. Like, can you are you able to send
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me one more shirt or or something like that. Like it always happens every time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, every single time. So you might be thinking to yourself, I have a great memory. I know I can’t do it right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. Maybe I’m driving, maybe I’m walking, maybe I’m just not at my computer and I’d rather do it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a full-size computer. And you may think you have a good memory. Every time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somebody says, Oh, no, I forgot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey single time. Don’t be that person. Don’t be that person. If you’re driving, pull over. If you’re walking, especially in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Manhattan or something, get to the side. Don’t just stop dead. That’s not cool. Get to the side, do what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you got to do. Use your phone, use your iPad, use your, your computer, do whatever you got to do to go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to atp.fm slash store, because as we record this, which is on the 11th,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the afternoon of the 11th, you have three more days. So please
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone, atp.fm slash store. Now’s the time. And Marco, would you mind reminding me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what the situation is? if you happen to be an ATP member?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yes. If you happen to be an ATP member, you can go to your member panel on ATP.fm, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get a coupon code that will give you 15% off our merchandise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s yet another reason to become a member. If you want to become a member, just use this code once,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then cancel your membership. You totally can. That’s totally a thing. We hope you don’t, but you can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And hey, no judgment. And
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s still time to do that, by the way. I wanted to put in my warning
⏹️ ▶️ John for the second order effect of missing the sale. Very often what happens
⏹️ ▶️ John is somebody who listens to the show has someone in their life who would like to get them
⏹️ ▶️ John some ATV merch for say the holidays or whatever, but they don’t listen to the show, so
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t know when the sale happens. So if you’re listening to the show and you think there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John someone in your life who wants to get you a gift and you would like to get one of these gifts, you have to basically
⏹️ ▶️ John go and tell them, uh, hey, if you’re thinking of gift ideas for me, you should get something from this
⏹️ ▶️ John store that’s closing on the 14th. So hurry up. You should have actually honestly done this a long time ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’ve been leaving hints, if you’ve been trying to be subtle or whatever, it’s time to cut that out. No more subtlety is allowed.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to say, look, if you can’t, if you haven’t already bought me something and you’re going to get me something
⏹️ ▶️ John I would like, and then just point to the shirt that you want or the pin that you want or the hoodie that you want or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, and by the way, this sale ends on the 14th. So order now
⏹️ ▶️ John because we get email from those people to this. Say, oh, is the store open? I don’t listen to the show, but, uh, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John my husband or wife listens to the show and I know they would love this, but, uh, it seems like your store is closed. Can I get
⏹️ ▶️ John this stuff for the holidays? Once the store is closed? No, you can’t. So do it now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. We’re not sure if it’ll make it in time for the holidays. I don’t wanna make any guarantees in that regard, but it certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey won’t make it in time for the holidays if you don’t order. So, atp.fm. slash store. Thank you.
iPhone 12 Mini, Max
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am holding in my hand right now, my product red
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone 12 mini. Wait, what? How? Leather case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I was gonna say, I walked right into that. You walked right, I should, you would think I’m a professional
⏹️ ▶️ John it red? It’s black, I thought.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh no, but I have the Apple case too. You’re talking about the one that you got. I also got the Apple one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s right. Okay, nevermind. Yeah. Confusion over. We don’t have time to do case reviews in this episode. This is an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John event episode, but rest assured next episode in the notes, I’ll certainly be reviewing the cases
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’ve got. By then, Marco, will you have your phone by then? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. Maybe. So the way things work here, my phone is going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be delivered on Friday to a ferry terminal. And if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it gets delivered past about 9 30 in the morning, which it almost certainly will, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I won’t get it till the next day. They’re closed on the weekends. So- Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m probably not going to get it until Monday.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Man, can you like loiter at the ferry terminal all day, just to intercept the package when it arrives?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They would probably let me do that, but I’d rather not. That seems a little bit excessive. And? So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, I will get my phone a few days later than everybody else. Granted, I have done weirder things to get my phone on launch day,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but this year I’m a little bit more chill about it, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you got a Mini for yourself. Remind me what model you were planning to and now have bought.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did everything John said I would do. So I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone 12 mini in red slash orange slash salmon slash coral whatever the whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really is in that color. I got the 256 instead of the 128 because John was telling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me in my head just get the 256 you know there’s no way you’re gonna get the 128 and I thought he’s probably right so yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t try to blame me for doing what you were gonna do yes I predicted it correctly but I didn’t make you do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mm-hmm and and easily enough like it was is the store opened up a couple minutes later than it should have, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got mine for day one delivery. Tiff at the same time was ordering her Pro Max Blue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for day one delivery, and there were no problems getting either one of them on time. And I think even a few hours after sale,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they were still available for day one delivery. So it seems like this was actually very well stocked compared to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco previous iPhone launches. And especially I’m surprised that the Max stayed in stock that well, but here we are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s excellent.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, these are the two lower demand models, right? It’s the most expensive model, which has
⏹️ ▶️ John historically lower demand than the less expensive models. And then the small one, which as much as the people who want
⏹️ ▶️ John it really want it, is not the way the industry is trending. So it doesn’t surprise me that they were able to
⏹️ ▶️ John keep things in stock.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and it’s interesting, like, you know, looking at the iPhone 12 mini as quote, the small one, you know, typically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the smallest Apple product in a lineup is the most successful sales wise, but that’s almost always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s the cheapest. And it turns out the cheapest thing of any Apple product lineup is the most successful sales-wise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in this case, the iPhone SE is the cheapest. The iPhone 12 mini is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the smallest. And it seems like whatever big demand there is for the small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone is mostly about the cheap phone. And that seems to get most of it. And so it’ll be interesting to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see if the mini actually succeeds as a major product, that they will continue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I sure hope it does, because I’m telling you what, seeing this case, I mean, yeah, there’s no phone in it yet, But like seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this case next to my 11 Pro, I’m really excited about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think we did reach a gentleman’s agreement that you will not discuss that phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this program at all or with me in any capacity. I don’t wanna get an iMessage, I don’t wanna get a Slack DM,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want nothing because I do really love my 12 Pro, I really honestly do. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was using the telephoto lens just yesterday, but-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As was I. But- Every time I think, oh crap, I’m using this thing more than I thought.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I am having some serious FOMO about the Mini and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even know but a couple of people that have gotten press, or not press copies,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you see the pre-release phones. And I’m already getting jealous and getting scared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’m going to kind of wish I got that one. So we agreed that you’re never gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about it. Great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, right, because I forgot also between our last show and now, the press reviews all dropped for the Mini and the Max.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve only read Gruber’s so far, but it sounds very, very good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the gist of all the reviews has been pretty consistent with one exception. The gist is basically that the Mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is awesome, except that it gets a little bit less battery life than the medium-sized ones, which is to be expected,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think. And that the Max is really big and really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heavy. And the camera is either awesome, which is what most people are saying, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only a little bit better, which is what a few people like NPBHD said. So it’s kind of, it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the gain that you get from that bigger sensor in the Max
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is there, but it’s only noticeable in certain challenging circumstances like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low light and stuff, where the daylight pictures and well-lit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pictures, you pretty much can’t tell the difference. But that is, certainly if I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a person who was at all interested in a big phone, I would get it because there is a difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and when you need it, it is great. But I, like a few times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during this ordering period, I’ve picked up TIFF’s Max, and I just, every time I’m like, no, I can’t do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I haven’t held a Max in my hand in a long time, but certainly anytime I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have, I’ve been like, oh, this is not for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it’s for you, that’s fine. I’m not saying it’s bad. It’s just, it is not for me, not at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what it mostly comes down to is like, do you keep it in a pants pocket? and do you need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it one-handed very often? And if the answer to both of those is no, it’s a pretty good sell to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Max because it is the best in most ways. But if you do keep it in the pants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pocket and or use it one-handed frequently, it’s challenging.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you know, interestingly, I haven’t read really any of the reviews other than Gruber so far
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or watched any of the videos, but I saw a fly by, maybe one of you guys retweeted it, I don’t recall, but I saw a fly by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a tweet from Neelay Patel who said, Here’s why I think MKBHD and I had different reactions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the 12 Pro Max camera. I take a lot of photos of a toddler. For any given light, the Pro Max will generally pick a higher ISO
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and faster shutter speed, which makes a big difference when your subject never sits still. Which, not having any experience with this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey myself, that does make sense. And it certainly is another notch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the belt of why one would want a Pro Max. But again, every time I picked it up, I would just get nauseous and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wouldn’t wanna do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, there was an Apple event, and you two, even though there’s no follow-up, are just talking about the iPhone Pro Max. If you notice below
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple vendor notes, there’s a whole section on the Max and the Mini where there are things about the Max and then Marco’s gonna talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John if you wanna do it now, that’s fine because I have some tweets about the Pro Max as well. Notes? Matt Panzarino said
⏹️ ▶️ John that the telephoto lens actually gets the 5,000 adjustments per second image
⏹️ ▶️ John stabilization. That’s something that Apple didn’t mention, but it’s the lens stabilization, not the
⏹️ ▶️ John sensor shift stabilization. So it’s an increase in number of moves per second,
⏹️ ▶️ John not the sensor shift that’s in the main lens. And the other thing he said is that the ISO range
⏹️ ▶️ John of the wide lens, the 1X lens, is larger, which allows for
⏹️ ▶️ John faster shutter speeds with wide apertures. And he mentions the same thing as Daniel Apetalde, that moving
⏹️ ▶️ John subjects in iffy light, it’s a big jump in quality. But if you don’t have something that’s moving, you won’t notice that there was
⏹️ ▶️ John a faster shutter, and then you won’t notice that you get less blur.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it also seems like one of the major improvements of the Maxis camera system is in night mode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and any kind of long exposure situation because the sensor is pulling in a lot more light, you have to have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can have shorter exposures. So night mode, what this results in is you can have like less time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to hold still while taking the picture, which will almost always result in a better and sharper picture. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s pretty nice. If you do a lot of night mode, it’s kind of a no-brainer.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. And I feel like a lot of these reviewers who didn’t notice anything about the camera, if you put the camera
⏹️ ▶️ John on a tripod and take a picture in good light, I mean, you’re not gonna notice much of a difference. And even in bad light, if
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a very stable shot or you don’t have moving subjects, if you look at the pictures people tend to test with, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, here is my parking lot at night outside of my YouTube studio.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a very popular one. Here is a beautiful person smiling and staying very still, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But no one’s trying to catch a toddler. In studio lighting.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or even if it’s in low light, here’s someone outside under a tree at night in the dark, but they’re not a little kid running
⏹️ ▶️ John around. And so that’s where I feel like you have to, like pulling up stats like Panzer did to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is the ISO range? I’m assuming he pulled that out of like Halliday or some other app that gives that information.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, and seeing like looking at the picture after it was taken and say, how long was the shutter open for this shot versus how long
⏹️ ▶️ John was the shutter open for this similar looking shot on another iPhone, right? So obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a night and day difference that people can’t tell immediately, but the difference does exist and
⏹️ ▶️ John it manifests itself in the way that you would think it would manifest itself given the actual physical changes
⏹️ ▶️ John where, you know, larger sensor, larger pixels, you know, all that stuff. It’s not going to, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not going to suddenly make it look like a, you know, quote unquote, real camera, because it’s still a tiny little camera in the back
⏹️ ▶️ John of the phone, but the sensor’s a little bigger and you can hold the shutter open a little bit less time to get adequate light.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s only gonna manifest in situations where that difference makes a difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, two things. Number one, if there’s no question, this camera is a big difference in certain circumstances.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if they somehow sold this camera in the mini, I would pay any price they wanted for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much bigger camera system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And it would
⏹️ ▶️ John make the mini much bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, but well, it would make the bump much bigger. Maybe not the body of the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John make the battery even smaller because you’d be squeezing. You gotta.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I might take that. But yeah, so that’s part one. And if they put that same camera system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the medium sized pro, I would probably have stuck with the pro line. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number two, Is it really pronounced Halliday or is this a Bazelle situation?
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Casey had an oops
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we have just a spot of follow up. Jeff Nadeau. No, no, we’re not.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s an Apple event episode. Oh my God, people.
⏹️ ▶️ John we need to have pre-show? This is what we need to do. People don’t know this, but before we put on the live stream, we often
⏹️ ▶️ John talk to each other. Oh, do we have anything we need to discuss? No. Apparently, new rule. We always have something
⏹️ ▶️ John to discuss, which is John is going to tell you how the show goes. Today is an Apple event show. There is
⏹️ ▶️ John no follow up. I allowed Casey to have one pre-Apple event item just because I didn’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ John it was and it looked like it might be funny. So Casey, if you would scroll down to topics,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you will see Casey had an oops.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hopefully your oops does not take 45 minutes. If it does not take 45 minutes, you may now describe your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Have we met John? This will absolutely take 45 minutes. So Aaron’s car has murdered another Apple device
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of mine. I was washing her car the other day and I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a ladder this time. If you recall, my 11 Pro, which coincidentally, I just got repaired
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to put in cold storage because I had AppleCare on it, so why wouldn’t I repair it? But anyways, because it was scratched
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to smithereens, that is. Anyways, so the 11 Pro, when I first got it, literally the day I got it, I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey washing Aaron’s car for reasons that are uninteresting. And I was in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a rush because the daylight was fading. I was trying to get into the kids and into Aaron, and her car’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an SUV. And so I jumped up to just quickly take a swipe at the roof, I don’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I was washing or drying at this point, but I had the phone in my back pocket, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never, ever do. This again was a year ago. And it, all of a sudden, as I landed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I heard something hit the concrete of my driveway and thought, oh no. And so literally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey within 12 hours of receiving my 11 Pro, it was, it had a shattered back glass, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is even with AppleCare, considerably more expensive than repairing the front glass. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just the other day, I was washing Aaron’s car And I was on a ladder this time. I was doing, you know, taking my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. I was in no rush. Everything was going well. And I was, I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was washing at this point. I was not drying yet. And I was swiping across the roof. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by some miracle in a way that has never happened to me in the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey however many years I’ve owned Apple watches, I swiped at the, like the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my wrist clipped the roof rack. And I watched the Apple watch. This is a series five,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mind you. I still haven’t bought a Series 6 yet. I watched it roll down her windshield
⏹️ ▶️ Casey across the top of the fender and hit the cement. And sure enough, I picked it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up and it now has a little shatter in the upper left-hand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John corner. Wait,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Mm-hmm. So it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unsnatched, what kind of band was it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Solo Loop. No, no, no, it was Series 5. I
⏹️ ▶️ John but Solo Loop would have saved you, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s a good point. I see your, I did not get your point at first. Yeah, you’re right, it would have saved me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Your call is like Apollo Robbins. that remove the watch from your wrist. What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the hell? Well done. Yeah, so I honest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to God have no idea how this happened. I’ve never in my, you know, what five, six years, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s been of owning Apple watches and wearing them literally every day, basically all day long,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have never done something where the watch just catapulted right off my wrist. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I swiped the bottom of my wrist against the roof rack in some particularly perfect way that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it just went catapulting right off my wrist. So it is not unusable, but every time I look at it, I die a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inside. And this is not news to basically anyone except me. Do you gentlemen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know how much it costs to repair the Series 5 watch just to get the display fixed? The thing that’s $30
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you have AppleCare on an iPhone, and I think it’s like a hundred bucks if you don’t. Do you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any idea how much it is on an Apple Watch?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m surprised they repair those things at all because I’ve seen the process of repairing them. Well, just
⏹️ ▶️ John wait. Yeah, it’s like, what can, you know, We make this joke about laptops, like when you open
⏹️ ▶️ John them up, like once you’ve opened them up once, it’s hard to really get them back together quite the same way. But with the watch, when you see what’s in there,
⏹️ ▶️ John can you imagine opening that up? And there’s so many things that are glued that you have to heat up and then re-glue.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, why are they even bothering? They should just use the broken one for parts or like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John just disassemble it or I don’t know what they could do with it, but like actually taking it apart to repair some
⏹️ ▶️ John part and then putting it back together so that it stays together. seems to me that it’s perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ John a money-losing proposition. But go ahead, how much was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Geez, John, this was supposed to be a fast intro. It’s an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John event show. I know.
⏹️ ▶️ John What are you doing? Well, I let him have the oops. I let him have one oops because it’s fun
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to hear about him breaking things. Oh, thanks. And it’s less exciting next week. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is $350 to repair this watch. Oh, that’s not bad. Yeah, that makes sense. Because it’s basically full
⏹️ ▶️ Marco replacement to do any kind of repair for an Apple Watch. Because the parts and stuff inside,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think maybe you might be able to inexpensively and easily replace the battery, but that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be about it at most because most repair at this scale is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effectively, you replace it and you send the old one to refurbishing because it’s just so hard to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco discussed in previous episodes, what you can refurbish out of an Apple Watch is not much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because typically, especially first-party manufacturer refurbishing, you typically don’t refurbish the case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or anything that people can touch for various sanitary and aesthetic reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, think about, and usually you don’t refurbish batteries either, because you just replace them and recycle the old one. And so you figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, how much of the Apple Watch is the exterior and the battery? And then how much is the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco refurbishable part on the inside? It’s very little.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, yeah. I mean, it’s fine. I was planning on getting a new one anyway. I would rather not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have murdered this one, but you know, it’s frustrating, but it’s not the end of the earth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But golly, $350 to replace the screen on this thing. And for all the reasons that both of you said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, I’m not saying that’s wrong or it’s not reasonable, but holy smokes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is a lot of money to replace this thing. And as it turns out, a new one, a new Series 6, I think starts at $400
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you get the small one like I do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. Yeah. But I mean, look at it this way. This is an excuse to get the new watch, which you always want every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year. You always want an excuse. And here, you just popped off an excuse. So here we go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s the thing. And I wish I could tell you this was all some master plan to just back my way into getting a new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one. But I actually had planned on already having a new one on my wrist at this point. And it’s funny you say that about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Solo Loop, John, because I guess that would have saved me. But no, I just hadn’t gotten around to it because I’m so frustrated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by the order process because I’m a petulant whiner. And so anyways, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to order one sometime in the next day or two. But I couldn’t help but realize that Aaron’s car has now murdered both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a phone and a watch. And lesson learned, never wash your car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it the car’s fault when it causes problems to happen when it is not being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco operated or moving? I don’t know. It’s like if you ride your bike into a parked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car, then you get hurt. Is that the car’s fault? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re going to go with yes, because otherwise I have to feel even more responsible than I already do. Yeah.
M1
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so I guess we have to talk about some stuff that happened yesterday or else John is going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to explode Is that how this works?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you may I think you’ve cut into your time to talk about the glorification of Apple Park I think you’ve lost the ability
⏹️ ▶️ John to talk about this the celebrities that were shown. I think you’ve lost the ability to
⏹️ ▶️ John Talk about John Ternus’s big pitch about Apple Silicon and how great they are And I think we actually have to dive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Well, let’s do it. Tell me about the M1 John
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s start with a sidetrack from the M1, because we have time for that. Yay!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Man, it’s good to be the king, isn’t it, John? My word. Yeah, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I sacrifice. I sacrifice pre-show. I take things and I cut them out of folk. I move them down. I compress.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, now my sacrifices pay off.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And I didn’t break any of
⏹️ ▶️ John my hardware, so I didn’t have any loops. So this is a call for listeners, because
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re bad and we should really have full-text search of our episodes, but we don’t. And I have a terrible memory.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can never remember when we talked about something. On some past episode of ATP, it could have been literally years in the past,
⏹️ ▶️ John someone, probably Casey, said, hey, what do we all think? Place your bets. What do you think the name of
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s, you know, ARM chips for the Mac will be? Will it just be the A-series? Will it be X something? Will it be
⏹️ ▶️ John M something? Everybody place your bets. And all of us chimed in and said, I think it’ll be this, I think it’ll be that. I would love
⏹️ ▶️ John to know what we all said and which one of us was right, but I have no idea when we talked about that. So if you know, please write
⏹️ ▶️ John in and tell us. Don’t guess. Send us a timestamp link and overcast. So you can be super cool. If nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John knows, then it’ll remain a mystery. It’s not a big deal. I was just wondering. Anyway, the reason that comes up is because when
⏹️ ▶️ John we were discussing what they’re going to call the new series of chips in
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s ARM-based Macs, when we talked about them being called M, we said, oh, but also,
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t Apple has already kind of used M with the M7 Apple Motion coprocessor that they
⏹️ ▶️ John included in the something or other? I got to look it up. 5S, I believe? Yeah, anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’ve incremented that number, apparently, like the M8 was in the phone after, then the M now, and they’re up to M14 now, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s like, well, they already used M something, but,
⏹️ ▶️ John they can reuse names. They’ve reused iBook for a piece of hardware in a store where you buy eBooks, and nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John knows the name of the motion core processor anymore anyway, and it’s all folded into the system on a chip these days, I think, anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Or maybe not, because it’s got this little,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I think that’s kind of why they stopped talking about it because it used to be a separate chip, and then at some point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just became part of the, A, whatever, series system on a chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, so anyway, we know that Apple decided to call it the M1, which made me think of the BMW
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey M1, which was
⏹️ ▶️ John a late 70s, early 80s, mid-engine supercar from BMW.
⏹️ ▶️ John And BMW has a line of cars that we talk about, the M series. They have a 3 Series, 5 Series, 7 Series, 8 Series,
⏹️ ▶️ John so on. And they make an M3 and M5. I think they make an M8 now. It’s M3, M4, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because it’s the four-door and two-door. Anyway, BMW made a 1 Series.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if they’re gonna make an M version of the 1 series, it would have to be the M1 to go along with the M3 And
⏹️ ▶️ John the M5 and so on and so forth. Aha, but BMW said we can’t use the name M1 We already used that for our supercar
⏹️ ▶️ John in the late 70s early 80s, so they called it Frustratingly non-uniformly
⏹️ ▶️ John the 1M, a car that Marco owned for a while Apple again
⏹️ ▶️ John has no such problem They’re calling this thing the M1 despite the fact that six years from now They’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John put a chip in some Mac called the M7 which will be the exact same name as the motion go processor but no one will
⏹️ ▶️ John care. I just thought this was funny. And the M series of chips, that I think
⏹️ ▶️ John regardless of who thought that was going to be the chip, is like the obvious
⏹️ ▶️ John choice. We always talked about it as like the boring choice. Eh, M for Mac, right? Heard
⏹️ ▶️ John someone say it might be M for mobile. No, I think it’s M for Mac. So this is the first chip
⏹️ ▶️ John in a Mac and it’s called the M1. Now, as for the actual chip, we talked at the very
⏹️ ▶️ John end of last week’s episode, What is Apple gonna do? This is the first time they’re doing an ARM
⏹️ ▶️ John chip for a Mac. They could do all sorts of stuff. They could do three entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John different chips for three totally different, uh, Macs, because the rumors were there was going to be a 16-inch, which turned out
⏹️ ▶️ John not to be, um, and the 13-inch in the air or whatever. So in the 16-inch, they could have this huge monstrous
⏹️ ▶️ John chip with tons of cores and a giant GPU that just is a massive performance beast that fits within the
⏹️ ▶️ John power envelope allowable in there, all the way down to a very tiny wimpy little chip that they would put in their small
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop that didn’t even require a fan. And the other side of the spectrum was, maybe they just
⏹️ ▶️ John use the same A14 everywhere, like it’s not by name, but like literally, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John same little wimpy chip that you see in phones, just use that chip everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s what they have on hand and they don’t wanna make custom expensive weird variants for every single
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac. If those are the two ends of the spectrum, what Apple ended up doing
⏹️ ▶️ John is a lot closer to the just use the same chip everywhere, But that same chip is not
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly an A14. In fact, what it looks like, it looks a lot like if you can imagine what an A14X
⏹️ ▶️ John would look like, that’s what the M1 looks a lot like. Maybe a little bit beefier than an A14X, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I just read a tweet today that if you look at the part numbers, if you had to guess based on the part
⏹️ ▶️ John numbers and the code names and stuff, you would think the M1 is the A14X because, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John they stick a G at the end of the regular part name and that’s the X version or whatever. But they
⏹️ ▶️ John use this M1 chip. They use the same N1 chip across all of the Macs they introduced today.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’ll get to them in a little bit as the Air, the Mini and the 13-inch MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro. And so, you know, the idea that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John would invest a huge amount of money in giant, scary chips
⏹️ ▶️ John right out of the gate for the Mac seems not to have happened, but it’s not particularly surprising, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John given the Macs that they actually introduced. but I’m not gonna say I’m disappointed.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m surprised, put it this way. I’m surprised that, you know, it seems almost like they said, what kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of chip can we make and what Macs will be best suited to use that chip?
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s what they introduced.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s the first system on a chip on a Mac though. That’s exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that was their big pitch where people don’t know what a system on a chip is. Like they showed all the different
⏹️ ▶️ John chips in a motherboard and without any labels on them. Take all these chips and shove them into one
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and it’s like a system but on a chip. It’s like yeah, I know We’ve seen it in phones
⏹️ ▶️ John and iPads. It’s it’s cool and everything but uh in terms of size It’s 16 billion transistors, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is 35% more than the a14 Again, kind of like, you know, the X
⏹️ ▶️ John things a13 or sorry a12 a12 X a12 Z
⏹️ ▶️ John You can add more GPU cores you can add more CPU cores a little bit more memory a little bit more transistors,
⏹️ ▶️ John right So if you’re wondering how much bigger is this chip than the chip in my phone in terms of transistor
⏹️ ▶️ John size 35% So it’s not that much bigger There’s no t2 in these Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John because you don’t need it because the M1 has all that stuff inside it, right? So this in case you’re wondering
⏹️ ▶️ John is the 13-inch MacBook Pro has a touch bar. Does that touch bar run off a t2? No, doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean they could have and maybe it would have been more like the old way it ran But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not how it works Apparently it works like this as far as the computer is concerned the touch bar is just another just another
⏹️ ▶️ John little miniature screen and just Another little input device like the trackpad or whatever Right all running
⏹️ ▶️ John off the same, you know system on chip Unified memory architecture, which is just
⏹️ ▶️ John their way of saying that we don’t have dedicated VRAM There’s just one set of RAM for the GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John and the CPU again like every iPad and phone that’s been out there, right? Not surprising
⏹️ ▶️ John what they showed in the keynote and what I think a lot of people weren’t aware of before and continue
⏹️ ▶️ John not to be aware of based on the questions I see on Twitter, is that on Apple system-on-chips, the
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM is in the same package as the system-on-chip. Right, so, or at least in the
⏹️ ▶️ John M1, anyway, I don’t know about those on the phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and do we have confirmation that it’s not on die, right, but it’s in the same package?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah, I put a picture in the show notes. You can see, this is a picture that Apple put up, and unlike their other
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures that are just like, sort of, logical diagrams of the bits and pieces, this appears
⏹️ ▶️ John to be an actual photo of a physical part. So you can see the
⏹️ ▶️ John shot of the M1 die, and then in the same package, meaning in the same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that we’re gonna cover with a piece of plastic that says M1 on it, over to the side are two
⏹️ ▶️ John chips that represent the RAM. So it’s mere millimeters from the thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the same package, connected by little interconnects, not wires or anything, right? And then that thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is slathered over with a piece of plastic that says M1 on it, right? And so people
⏹️ ▶️ John were wondering, like, why, you know, we’ll get to the RAM specs in a second, but
⏹️ ▶️ John why are the RAM limits the way they are? Well, the amount of RAM you can put in an M1 Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John is the amount of RAM you can fit in the package in those two little spots. Now, there’s no reason an ARM-based Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t have RAM external to the system on a chip, but this one doesn’t. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John so there, right? I believe this is the first die shot that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has given at least in recent memory Meaning a photo of
⏹️ ▶️ John what the actual M1 silicon chip looks like presumably under some kind of microscope
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’ve ever seen one of these photos they always kind of like shimmery and multicolored because of the the way the tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John features, you know bend the light and reflect off of it and you can look at them and it looks kind of like a city viewed
⏹️ ▶️ John a a multicolored city viewed from very high above and a satellite or something and you can identify
⏹️ ▶️ John different regions based on the sort of patterns of regularity right.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you compare to Apple’s logical diagram you can kind of see oh I see how they when they draw like the GPU and they draw
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of rectangles I kind of see what they’re drawing because here and that’s looks kind of like that but as you can see in the real die
⏹️ ▶️ John shot diagram um Anatec has a good article where they put outlines around the parts and they try to label them
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not as as neatly as arranged as their diagrams are it is it’s more like a city that has evolved
⏹️ ▶️ John over time and by the way i did when uh when i wrote die shot into the notes
⏹️ ▶️ John this reminded me of a game from a classic mac game
⏹️ ▶️ John called sky shadow by cassidy and green and it had a sound effect it must have been like a you know 22 kilohertz
⏹️ ▶️ John sound effect of some british person saying nice one when you went over a power up
⏹️ ▶️ John right but with the british accent and the sort of garbled nature of the recording
⏹️ ▶️ John when I was a kid, me and my brother would debate, is he saying, is he saying
⏹️ ▶️ John die schwaat or is he saying nice one? Die schwaat. Nice one.
⏹️ ▶️ John So every time I hear die shot, I think die schwaat, which is not a real thing. If you would like to hear that sound effect,
⏹️ ▶️ John we will put a link to it in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. Die schwaat. It’s funny what sticks in your head after all this time and not just you, John, like the royal you. It’s funny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what will stick in your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John head. Someone
⏹️ ▶️ John just did, someone just did. But speaking of that, I don’t know what the word for this is. Someone will tell us, that
⏹️ ▶️ John there was some video of a news reporter being heckled and he turns around to the person behind him.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it was a meme video on YouTube and it’s captioned, so you can watch it with the sound off on
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone. And so the heckler’s behind the reporter. The reporter turns around to the heckler and the caption says,
⏹️ ▶️ John just so Marco doesn’t have to believe it. But if you close your eyes and don’t read the captions
⏹️ ▶️ John and listen, the reporter says, buzz off. But because the captions say F
⏹️ ▶️ John off, you hear F off in your head, even though he says buzz off. I think we’ve done that with the- Really?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Cause I’ve seen that video and I could swear that I heard the- I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John know. Four letter
⏹️ ▶️ John Watch it again with your eyes closed and you’ll hear him say buzz off. It’s like the, what was it? The green needle and the
⏹️ ▶️ John brainstorming green needle one. That’s another one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yeah. And the purple, well that was visual, but the purple green dress or whatever it was. I forget exactly what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was. Purple gold, something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. I still can’t see that dress as gold. It’s always blue to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, die, Schwoz. Um, let’s talk about this. Uh, CPU eight cores.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, I can’t remember. What does the eight 12 Z have? I should have put this in the notes. We were doing a little bit of a scramble to get the
⏹️ ▶️ John notes. But anyway, I mean this, this is sort of in keeping with what I said before, like bottom line, 16 billion transistors, 35%
⏹️ ▶️ John more, where are those 35% of transistors being spent? They mostly got spent in
⏹️ ▶️ John having more of a certain thing. You’re the more, you know, more execution units, more CPU cores, more GPU cores,
⏹️ ▶️ John or more Ram, right? Um, the cores. It’s got four high performance cores and four
⏹️ ▶️ John high efficiency cores. The Anandtech article labels these as Firestorm and Icestorm, which presumably are the real
⏹️ ▶️ John code names that they extracted from some technical doc somewhere. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John did give us the instruction cache and data cache sizes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, that was really wild. I rewatched the video this morning to enter way too much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey information in the show notes so we would have it handy. And I realized, Whoa, they actually put cache sizes on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. That’s very un-Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like of all the things to give us, especially since they don’t give us things like the clock
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’d be more higher level than, anyway, so they give the cache sizes and it’s only interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John to say like, for example, the shared 12 megabyte L2 cache.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is an L2 cache that’s shared just among the high performance cores, as far as I can tell.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It has 12 megabytes. The A14
⏹️ ▶️ John has eight megabytes. So again, this is, M1 is like a slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John scaled up A14. It has more cores, it has more cache to feed those cores.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got the high for, four high efficiency cores, similar, you know, I’m assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John these are the same cores in the A14 that are high efficiency, similar, slightly larger cache sizes, so on and so forth. And Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John bragging that this is the best CPU performance per watt, the fastest CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John in the world. Casey was upset about the charts they provided
⏹️ ▶️ John to demonstrate this? I’m assuming that’s you put this in here and said, called it a Bezos chart.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John charts. They are, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fair. There’s no units, it’s performance. Higher is better. Power consumption, lower is better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would generally have a problem with the use of Bezos charts, but when you’re trying to communicate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a PR commercial, performance. That’s a really hard thing to generalize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into one graph because performance has so many different aspects. So like, there is no way to create a precise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco graph of quote performance as a whole. So the fact that they’re using hand wavy things here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t really offend me that much.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought these charts were good in that what they were trying to show, like they eventually did label
⏹️ ▶️ John and put numbers on what they were trying to show which is relative performance. Now, if you just look at the chart with
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing labeled, you’re like, well, that can’t be relative performance because I have no idea where zero is. So these two lines could be 0.00001,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever units from each other. And they’re just showing me a real zoomed in portions
⏹️ ▶️ John that look like they’re far apart, right? But when they labeled them, they said, look, we are
⏹️ ▶️ John twice the speed at half the wattage. And they put like a 10-watt line down the vertical line down the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they did show, oh, we’re not fooling you by zooming way in on what is actually a small difference.
⏹️ ▶️ John They came out and said, we are this much faster, this much less power, so on and so forth. So they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John really just showing the relative curves of things. And this is their version instead of showing
⏹️ ▶️ John benchmarks. They used to say, here’s a common task, and here’s how long that common test takes.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re going with more synthetic benchmarks here. Like we’re this much faster per watt on whatever it is that we’re deciding
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re measuring. Same thing with the GPU. They didn’t even label, this is another theme, they didn’t say Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John anywhere. They just kept saying PC, laptop PC chip, our latest
⏹️ ▶️ John PC laptop GPU. We know what they mean. We all know they’re talking about Intel.
⏹️ ▶️ John They are in fact also talking about all of their own products, although not every one of Apple’s products has the latest
⏹️ ▶️ John and greatest of everything. But what they’re saying is M1 performance really good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which is not shocking considering how much faster the A14 is than every Mac that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple sells. And now this is like an A14 with more cores in the CPU.
⏹️ ▶️ John More cores in the GPU as well. It’s got an eight core GPU. Cores and GPU parlance is weird because
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how Apple counts cores. Every company that makes GPUs decides what number they’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John throw at you. you know, how many, like, you can break it down into much smaller and smaller pieces
⏹️ ▶️ John and say we have, you know, 5,000 of these little execution things, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple tends to go in bigger chunks. So these core things for the GPU, they’re only comparable
⏹️ ▶️ John between Apple’s own chips because GPU cores don’t have a sort of agreed upon meaning
⏹️ ▶️ John and it really depends on how big a block of your GPU you decide to look at. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s eight GPU cores, which is the same as the A12Z terms of number of cores, whatever that
⏹️ ▶️ John means, seven GPU cores on some of the models, which we assume is exactly the
⏹️ ▶️ John same situation as the A12X and the A12Z, where they make a chip with eight GPU cores, and for some
⏹️ ▶️ John of those chips one of the GPU cores doesn’t work, and they just disable that core and say, no, it’s a seven-core
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU, because GPU cores in general is just, you know, not infinitely, but very easily
⏹️ ▶️ John horizontally expandable. You can just keep adding more cores depending on on what your budget is for transistor space and
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s plenty of pixels to pump through them. Yeah, they do give
⏹️ ▶️ John 8 GB of cores, 128 execution units, 24,000 concurrent threads.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would love to know a breakdown of what they consider a core. If you look on the chip, you can see kind of a shape that’s repeated 8 times.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m like, well, I guess that’s the core because you can look at it and it looks like the same shape a couple
⏹️ ▶️ John times. And the boast Apple makes is the, when
⏹️ ▶️ John it comes to personal computers, the M1 has the the world’s fastest integrated graphics. Probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does. I mean, that wouldn’t be hard. Like Intel’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John integrated graphics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attempts are not great historically.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, what they’re, well, see, here’s the other modifier you’re missing here is when it
⏹️ ▶️ John comes to personal computers. Did you put this quote in here, Casey? Is this actually a quote?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, sorry, I didn’t put the literal quotation marks around it, but yes, that was a verbatim quote, if I recall correctly. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have to put personal computers because the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X exist,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey which also have
⏹️ ▶️ John integrated GPUs, technically speaking. Casey put the big technology slide in here, where they have the big
⏹️ ▶️ John slide with a bunch of little boxes all around the M1 saying all the stuff that it has. Is there anything in
⏹️ ▶️ John that slide in particular that jumped out to anybody? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think so. They do, I know it was a different slide actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they were talking about like video encoding and decoding, but no, I thought that this was relatively straightforward. HDR
⏹️ ▶️ Casey imaging is on there. Oh, there it is, I’m sorry. High performance video editing. Oh no, editing, not encoding, decoding.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, there was nothing that remarkable now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s one little bit here that was interesting. Always on processor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I didn’t even notice that. I guess that has to do with the bow-chicka-bow-wow that Craig was talking about later
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. That’s a great
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Which by the way was easily my favorite moment of that entire presentation by a mile.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Craig has a sexual harassment case against Apple. Don’t always sexualize Craig.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s a technologist first and a heartthrob second. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, the always on processor, I think, you know, I’m glad that, you know, even though it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of cringy, I’m glad that they called out the instant wake because that’s something that just the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco architecture and the realities of Intel-based PCs makes that really hard to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And when Apple can control so much more of everything with using their own, you know, everything, basically, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are here, they can make stuff like that better. And that’s one of the, one of the ways that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am so happy that they attacked that as a, as a thing that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Silicon, I’m so glad we can stop saying that, the M-based Macs can actually improve on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a meaningful day-to-day way. Because a lot of this stuff, a lot of people don’t push their computers very hard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people don’t use their batteries that heavily, and so a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aren’t gonna see incredibly noticeable differences in day-to-day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use, but something like that, like instant wake and having it wake up reliably every single time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s something that we can see. And something like an always-on processor probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe enables things like background push notifications to background update apps, you know, things like that. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see how that works out, but that could be a really meaningful thing in just day-to-day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco niceties that we couldn’t have before.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this goes all the way back to the old Steve Jobs thing where he added a MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air, so the story goes, and talked to the Mac team and said, when I wake up my iPad, it’s ready to go instantly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why isn’t the MacBook Air like that? So it took a while, but it seems like we finally got there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And imagine if you started your MacBook Air or what have you and you didn’t wait five minutes for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the last 24 hours of iMessages to come in. Like that would be a neat change.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the thing. Like, you know, I mean, we’re lucky that we have like computers that we don’t use very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often that we occasionally wake up after, after like, you know, a week of sleep. And yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sucks having to wait for everything to roll in. And iOS devices don’t work that way. iOS devices are always on until you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco manually power them off. But if it’s just in sleep mode, then it will keep receiving background updates and keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco updating the apps periodically. And so it’s never that out of date when you turn it on. Whereas Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t work that way so far. And so to have this, have an always on processor and instant wake and everything, that’s probably gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a really nice improvement. And we’ll see how much the software supports that. It might take a few years of software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco evolution to be able to get things like background updates reliably working on the Mac. But it’s really nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the iOS world. And I think this brings us closer to that reality on Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John One tweet somebody had about, one funny tweet someone had about this diagram is off to the side, there is one of the squares
⏹️ ▶️ John says cryptography acceleration. And they joked, hey, will this make expanding an
⏹️ ▶️ John Xcode zip any faster?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ John I doubt it because that task is almost certainly I-O bound. But I’ll be happy to be proven,
⏹️ ▶️ John I-O bound and I think non-multithreaded. So if they just multithreaded it, it would really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco help. Well, and also, cryptography acceleration is nothing new in modern CPUs. What they probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are getting this from, partly, is bringing the T2 in chip, because the T2 had acceleration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for disk encryption. Even the previous Intel chips and all the previous A-series chips have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had hardware-accelerated cryptography instructions at the chip level. So that itself is nothing particularly new.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s nice, but it’s not new.
⏹️ ▶️ John The way to think about the T2 is they took stuff out of their iPad and iPhone chips and put
⏹️ ▶️ John it into a little chip that they called the T2. So anything the T2 is able to do, that’s stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ John their iPad and iPhone chips have already been able to do. The H.264 or H.265 decoding
⏹️ ▶️ John and encoding hardware, the I.O. processing, that’s all. System on chips had to do
⏹️ ▶️ John that themselves because they dealt with their own flash storage on the phones and everything like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. So pretty sure the T2 was just sort of like the opposite of that diagram we saw at the beginning where a bunch of chips
⏹️ ▶️ John merged together into one. The T2 was like a tiny chip ejected from Apple’s phone chips and it landed on our Macs. Now
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t need it anymore because all that crap is in the M1. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonder what the high-efficiency audio processor is.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s probably something that already exists in phone and iPad chips. It’s some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John audio… you know, it’s like the image signal processing thing they have for the camera, right? But for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco audio. It could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like hardware-accelerated DSP, but they already had that in the CPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, here’s the thing about Apple not really telling us all the details of their system on the chips. Even if you look at
⏹️ ▶️ John the Zenn and Tucker article, they’re trying to guess what’s inside the CPU, how many execution units, how deep are the pipelines,
⏹️ ▶️ John how many reorder buffers, what is the dispatch width? But they have to guess, because Apple doesn’t tell you, so they have
⏹️ ▶️ John to run these tests that try to experimentally determine these answers. If you look in the system on a chip, with
⏹️ ▶️ John the die shot that we had earlier, they have labeled regions. There’s also a lot of regions that are not labeled,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that stuff does something. What is it? And so you’re like, oh, well, there are instructions in
⏹️ ▶️ John the CPU for doing this type of stuff. The NEON instruction set, the SIMD instruction set that ARM supports,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s in there too. But for any given task, and this is part of Apple system on a chip
⏹️ ▶️ John design, if there’s a thing that you need to do, you have a lot of choices. You could do it on the
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU. Like think of just audio processing. You just do it on the CPU. You could do it on the CPU with SIMD instructions.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you have some kind, on the GPU, sometimes you use GPU to do general purpose compute stuff. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John you get into these other things that this chip may or may not have. What if I’m encoding or decoding video? I could do that in 10 different
⏹️ ▶️ John places. But if this chip has dedicated hardware for this codec, I could also use that. Image
⏹️ ▶️ John single processing, audio processing. If there’s some region on the chip that has a separate little
⏹️ ▶️ John either miniature CPU or miniature set of execution units just for a specific task,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has a lot of flexibility to dole out the workloads to just the part of the chip that will
⏹️ ▶️ John do that job in the most power efficient manner and also the fastest, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why the M1 is so much more than a CPU and a GPU. That’s why all these other
⏹️ ▶️ John little label blocks are in there. And that’s what makes their ability to tie these things together so
⏹️ ▶️ John important because Apple does tons of work to figure out what is it that our devices and apps are
⏹️ ▶️ John actually doing when somebody uses them? Someone uses an iPad over the course of the day.
⏹️ ▶️ John How much are, is this corner of the chip used? How much do we use the integer units? How much do we use
⏹️ ▶️ John the floating point units? The United Tech article has an interesting thing about the fact that the M1
⏹️ ▶️ John can apparently do like, What is it dispatch do for floating-point
⏹️ ▶️ John operations per cycle or something like that? Which is wider than even like the biggest Intel chips and like why would Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John care so much about being able to? Crank through floating-point instructions and they speculate
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s because in JavaScript every number is a floating-point Number and that’s why Apple’s things
⏹️ ▶️ John could do so well in JavaScript benchmarks, right? Who knows like they’re just speculating but the whole idea is that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John figures out what their devices actually do and then they say look We’re spending
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of time, for example, doing audio processing on the CPU, and the CPU is a relatively large thing to keep powered
⏹️ ▶️ John up and cranking. So maybe if we fed whatever that audio API is
⏹️ ▶️ John to a dedicated tiny unit that just does that one function, we could keep the larger CPU asleep. Even the
⏹️ ▶️ John high efficiency cores can be less efficient because you’ve got to turn all the machinery of instruction
⏹️ ▶️ John decoding and everything instead of have those things go to this dedicated unit. I have no idea how much
⏹️ ▶️ John of that is happening in the M1, But if you look at the results in terms of, we’ll get those in a little bit,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is the performance? What is the supposed battery life? Or just look at the results on iPads and our current
⏹️ ▶️ John phones, right? Clearly they’re doing a really good job of not
⏹️ ▶️ John burning electricity, doing everything, you know, with the CPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So every one of these little blocks in this diagram is not an execution unit, it’s just a bunch of words on a slide.
⏹️ ▶️ John But some of them might be. Some of them might be in that sort of unlabeled region of the chip, we just don’t know.
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Performance
⏹️ ▶️ John right, so what else we got?
⏹️ ▶️ John Performance little just we don’t have any benchmarks yet because nobody has these things and we just have those Bezos charts, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But everyone wants to know what is this thing going to be like? And it’s X again, keep referencing this article. They
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have one either. But they’re saying, look, we do have an A14. And we do know how the A14 runs.
⏹️ ▶️ John And let’s compare the A14 to a bunch of other chips. It’s already like the fastest
⏹️ ▶️ John chip out there. This is going to be better because it has more execution units and a bigger GPU and so on and so forth,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So I’m a concrete m1 performance numbers is from David Smith not underscore
⏹️ ▶️ John on Twitter who is an Apple employee He says fun fact
⏹️ ▶️ John retaining and releasing an NS object takes 30 nanoseconds on Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John 6.5 nanoseconds on an m1 and 14 nanoseconds on an m1 emulating Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John So an Intel app running an emulation
⏹️ ▶️ John for this one tiny little operation, which is retaining and releasing an NSObject, was just incrementing and decrementing a number.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which is a very common operation in Mac code.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think we need to take just a quick pause here. So when you’re doing stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in code, you need to keep things in memory and then eventually let them go and give that memory back to the operating system.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there’s a million different ways to handle this problem. the way that Apple technologies handle it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by saying, how many people care about this memory? And then when, and just keep a count, keep a number.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And when that number falls down to zero, which means nobody cares about it, then that memory can be given back to the operating system. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as the guys were saying, you know, this happens just constantly. It’s nonstop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you’re saying, ooh, I care about that. Ooh, don’t care about that. Ooh, I care about this. Nope, don’t care about that anymore. And it’s just nonstop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so for this to be considerably faster can make a tangible difference in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speed of your of your computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s you know, and again, it’s not. This is what getting back to what I was saying before. It is not shocking that this operation is very fast
⏹️ ▶️ John on Apple’s hardware because Apple has a platform that does reference counting
⏹️ ▶️ John on all of its memory and all of its programs and has for years and years. So all of the iPhone chips and
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad chips, like when they were, you know, saying, what is what does the CPU spend most of its time doing? A huge
⏹️ ▶️ John chunk of his time, surely, is spent retaining and releasing things and sending messages. That’s why they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John always optimizing objectivity, messaging, and stuff like that. So this is not like just the M1
⏹️ ▶️ John is doing this. M1 is standing on the shoulders of every chip that came before it, including, of course, the A14.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s just saying, just FYI, this is probably true of the A14 as well. The M1
⏹️ ▶️ John is almost five times faster at doing this common operation than Intel. And an M1
⏹️ ▶️ John running Intel code in emulation is twice as fast as an Intel, in this one particular
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny operation as an Intel chip doing this specific thing. Because no one at Intel is
⏹️ ▶️ John optimizing their chip architecture around Apple’s need to call retain and release
⏹️ ▶️ John in their Objective-C and Swift code. But Apple sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. I mean, this is one of the benefits Apple gets of having, like on the App Store, they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all code that runs on the platform passing through their hands. On the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you now have notarization. So they’re getting the same benefit now on the Mac. And when you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the third-party code out there passing through your hands, or at least most of it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the Mac doesn’t have necessarily all of it because you have things like, you know, things that aren’t notarized going through open source stuff or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but for the most part, you have almost all the code that is being run out there on your platform passing through your hands.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can save a copy of it if you want, and you can analyze it if you want, and you can really have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good idea of what kind of instructions are being used most often, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how can we design our silicon to optimize for the entire world of third-party
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software out there. And you can have even more advancements when you consider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like bitcode, where with bitcode, code that was originally not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco written to take advantage of certain instructions, maybe, that you’d later add to your instruction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set, can be automatically recompiled to take advantage of those instructions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you can retroactively improve performance of apps as you improve your silicon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through your own distribution channels. Like that’s a pretty powerful thing. That’s something no one else in the industry has.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as much as a pain in the butt as it is for us developers, it gives Apple a huge advantage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in performance design.
⏹️ ▶️ John David Smith warns that this boost in speed comes at the cost of potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John exposing certain multi-threading bugs. So he suggests using thread sanitizer in your apps to make sure you’re not making
⏹️ ▶️ John a threading mistake.
⏹️ ▶️ John gets to one of the things in the Anitech article. There is speculation about the size of the instruction reorder
⏹️ ▶️ John buffers. They’re huge. The reorder buffer is like, these CPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t execute instructions in the order that they are in the program. They’re out of order execution. And they do
⏹️ ▶️ John parallel dispatch. They’re executing multiple instructions at once. And so they have this buffer where they keep
⏹️ ▶️ John some window of instruction, some big bag of instructions. And they pull from that bag and say, OK, well, these four instructions
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to go together. And these three instructions can go over here together in the floating point unit. And these instructions, you know, and that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John the CPU is doing, right? But it needs that bucket because if you were just given four instructions,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe you can only execute like one of those and the other three have to wait. And so the bigger the bucket is, the more
⏹️ ▶️ John you can sort of pick and choose out. Now we’ve built up enough instructions that I can say, okay, this set can go together and this set can
⏹️ ▶️ John go together and that set can go together. CPUs are very complicated. Anyway, the reorder buckets
⏹️ ▶️ John on these CPUs, according to Antec’s analysis, are hundreds of instructions.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re bigger than even they are, again, they are on the biggest Intel CPUs, right? And that
⏹️ ▶️ John lends itself to the idea that Apple has determined in its own real programs, it is advantageous to have
⏹️ ▶️ John big caches, big reorder buffers, and wide execution,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they can actually extract that level of parallelism and use it to good effect.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is frustrating how much of this is speculation, because Apple doesn’t want to talk about it, about these things. Intel had like
⏹️ ▶️ John data sheets down to you know the practically the gate level, not really, but they would tell you
⏹️ ▶️ John for each instruction what the latency is and you know what instructions can be dispatched with other instructions and they would have
⏹️ ▶️ John conferences where they would tell you about their you know instruction decoder and how it works and Apple is much more
⏹️ ▶️ John tight-lipped which which is fine. Anyway so that’s the M1. This this chip that I
⏹️ ▶️ John described, eight cores and you know the eight core GPU we know less about but it’s very similar to the GPU that’s in the A14, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got eight eight cores, the birth of it. Four big, four little cores, eight core GPU, all
⏹️ ▶️ John the rest of the stuff you’d expect it to have, you know, from the phone and
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad chips, Skier Enclave, all the stuff the T2 did, image signal processing, yada,
⏹️ ▶️ John yada, yada. It’s all in there. This one chip powers all the Macs they introduced. The only difference
⏹️ ▶️ John is maybe clock speed, but they won’t tell us, and we’ll find out as soon as we get the hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that one GPU core that may or may not be working. If
⏹️ ▶️ John not working, you pay less money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you want to explain that a little bit more?
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve talked about it on the last show. Like, I’m talking about it earlier today. I think people know about binning, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Same deal as A12X versus A12Z. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ John We have a big section on Big Sur here, but I think we can skip right to the Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, fair enough.
MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, we started with MacBook Air, and it is now without a fan. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, in many ways, this seems like the love child of the Adorable and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey existing MacBook Air to me, because it doesn’t have a fan, which is good, I think. It has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more than one port, which is excellent. And so you’ve got the no fan from the Adorable and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the more than one port from the Air. They claim that it is faster than 98% of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey PC laptops sold in the last year. My word.
⏹️ ▶️ John They love bragging about that, but it’s like, who cares?
⏹️ ▶️ John Most laptops sold are not fast, because by definition, the fast ones are at the edge of the
⏹️ ▶️ John bell curve, right? I don’t, the thing that I’m bragging about how this
⏹️ ▶️ John is faster than X percentage of PCs that are sold, I don’t know why they do that. They should just say
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s like really, really fast and compare it to like a fast laptop, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or I don’t know if they don’t wanna compare it on price because they’ll fall down or anyway, I don’t think that this
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Air has anything to be ashamed of speed wise. Again, we’ll find out from benchmarking, but I just described the chip that’s in it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The only way you can make that chip not insanely fast is to just clock
⏹️ ▶️ John it really, really low. But we already know in a fanless iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ John a lesser version of this same chip,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you know, much lesser,
⏹️ ▶️ John the A12Z, two generations old thing with, you know, fewer CPU cores
⏹️ ▶️ John and similar GPU cores, is insanely fast. This MacBook Air,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, unless it’s a clock lower than the iPad, which I can’t possibly imagine, is going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be very, very fast. I don’t think it’s a love child of anything. I think it is just,
⏹️ ▶️ John take the existing MacBook Air, remove the fans, because you don’t need them anymore, and
⏹️ ▶️ John put a way, way faster and more power efficient CPU in there, and
⏹️ ▶️ John a faster and more power efficient GPU. This computer
⏹️ ▶️ John is, with the exception of the complete lack of touch and face ID, but again,
⏹️ ▶️ John set that aside. We’ll get there. I think it’s great. I think if you have an old MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air, you should throw it into the sea right now. No, not really, because you might need to run Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff or whatever, but can you imagine, like just set aside the Apple Silicon stuff. Pretend this was still
⏹️ ▶️ John an Intel Mac. If this was the new MacBook Air, and we weren’t talking about our Macs, This is just the new
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel MacBook Air. And I mean, I know we don’t have benchmarks yet, but I’m saying right
⏹️ ▶️ John now, when people start benchmarking this thing against the previous MacBook Air, it’s going to embarrass
⏹️ ▶️ John the previous MacBook Air big time in both performance and
⏹️ ▶️ John battery life. And the battery life isn’t 5% better, right? It’s not like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John hugely better. And everything else about it is the same. Still a scissor keyboard, still the same,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, function keys on top of it. The display is the same resolution, although now
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a P3 thing. This computer is fairly amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, and by the way, it’s got USB 4 slash Thunderbolt 3 ports instead of the older
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. I know that whole spec thing is confusing, but just trust us when we tell you it’s at least as good,
⏹️ ▶️ John if not better than the ports on the previous MacBook Air, as far as we know. Same crappy 720p
⏹️ ▶️ John FaceTime camera. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was hilarious. I love how much time they spent talking about how much better their image
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processing was. So you’ll be able to get better video out of the stupid FaceTime camera because of their wonderful image
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processing. So in other words, the hardware’s the same, which is still embarrassingly bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I mean, I don’t know how long their timeline is for developing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such things, but if they aren’t really working hard on improving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the webcams in their laptops and desktops, they really should be. because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the world really demands that right now. And their webcams are so, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before this past year, their webcams were kind of comically out of date and crappy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like, yeah, people say, oh, well, it would make the lid thicker. Well, you know, figure something out, figure out some kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of compromise. Camera bump. Yeah, maybe, that’s fine. That would be fine because people actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need that. Like, I personally wouldn’t use it a ton, but I use it some and it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, people use that. It matters. It matters now more than ever, but it has always mattered.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, so I did find that kind of hilarious how much time they gave to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their lack of hardware upgrade to the camera, but somehow we’re gonna fudge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the image a bit to make it better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, see the thing about fudging the image, like yes, they should upgrade the hardware. They absolutely should, they
⏹️ ▶️ John need to or whatever. That said, our experience with Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John phones has shown that a lot of progress can be made with quote unquote crappy
⏹️ ▶️ John sensors just by improving the image processing. Now I don’t know how much this particular
⏹️ ▶️ John image processing improvement makes a difference on this terrible 720p FaceTime camera, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John can hurt, right? And if it wasn’t being done before, like the fact that they can sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of piggyback on all of the work done for the front face, or for all the cameras, but you know, for the
⏹️ ▶️ John traditionally lesser front facing camera on phones, That’s one of the benefits of going to
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM. It’s like, oh, why don’t we just do the same thing we do when people look into their front-facing camera on phones? It’s the same
⏹️ ▶️ John architecture, we’ve got the same libraries, the same weird execution units, whatever, same image processor, whatever we’re doing on the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John do that here. And they do it, and they say, hey, this makes the camera look a little better. Does it make the camera
⏹️ ▶️ John that much better? No, we still need better hardware. But this is like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not free really, because it’s a different operating system, but like, this is what I expect to get from moving to ARM
⏹️ ▶️ John is things that the phone was previously better at, now the Mac should be
⏹️ ▶️ John better at them as well. And in terms of the hardware, I was, I said camera bump.
⏹️ ▶️ John I said the same thing during the keynote and tweet, I think. If you start thinking about a camera bump
⏹️ ▶️ John on a Mac, you start to wonder how that would manifest, right? You could bump it out
⏹️ ▶️ John the back, which would, you know, make Johnny Ive cry, but hey, it’s bumped
⏹️ ▶️ John out of the back on phones. Like, you know what I’m saying? The camera faces front, but the bulk of the camera bumps
⏹️ ▶️ John out the back for like a little bump or a notch or something, I would pay that price in a heartbeat for Face
⏹️ ▶️ John ID. But I can see them not wanting that. You could bump it out the front,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then you need like some kind of dent or ditch for it to go into when you go into clamshell mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, which is right where your thumb lifts the lid up though. So they already have the cutout there, so you kind of can’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you could do a-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You can make it go
⏹️ ▶️ John think of it as like a tab going into a cutout. So now when you lift, you’re actually lifting the little tab out of the slot instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of just having a slot with nothing in it. You know what I mean? I don’t know. I leave it, I would even accept, just
⏹️ ▶️ John make the lid a little bit thicker. It’s not like someone’s crying that the MacBook Air is super thick and they can’t handle it
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. Right? Especially on the front edge, right? Just make the lid thicker. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s future facing. This hasn’t been discussed, but as far as I’m aware, this
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Air is exactly the same. Like it’s the same case, other than potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John different venting holes and obviously different sort of internal structure, but dimension-wise, I don’t think this
⏹️ ▶️ John is any bigger or smaller than the current MacBook Air. In fact, it weighs the same as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I think, and that’s been a point of a lot of criticism of this event so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far, that basically what they released, it did do, you know, kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what we were saying last time, like it did change out the guts, and now they’re faster and better in a few little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways and a few big ones, and they are, you know, better battery life, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco otherwise they look pretty much the same. They didn’t really shuffle up the lineup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very much and they don’t really look any different and they don’t really have massive hardware differences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are visible from the outside. And so they do look kind of dated in a way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When you look at what PC laptops are doing and have been doing for some time, Apple’s laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look like they were designed in 2015 still. And we still have these big, thick screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bezels. We still have relatively small screens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the body size, for the 13-inch class. Because when you make the bezels thinner, you can fit a bigger screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the same laptop size that the PC world has been doing forever or for years. We still don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have things like cellular that we were hoping to get with this transition. We still have the same situation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with touch, which is we have no touch screens. And on the same models as before, we have forced touch bars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And on the ones that don’t, we still don’t. That’s nice. And so, a lot of that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hasn’t changed at all. Now, it remains to be seen whether that will change. In previous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco architecture transitions, the first models of the new generation kind of looked the same as the previous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones. And then, they, over the following years, used their gains in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco efficiency and everything else to make better things that they wouldn’t have been able to make with the old architecture. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a feeling a lot of that stuff is yet to come, but a lot of people are understandably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of disappointed that all the things that didn’t change, you know, we didn’t see big price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cuts. We didn’t see, you know, as a result of not being able to not having to use Intel chips anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, we saw small price cuts here and there, but mostly, mostly similar. We you know, we still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the exact same dimensions, size, weight, like all that stuff. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope and I suspect that more differentiation in the hardware is coming,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but here on day one, it’s not here yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that was another sort of spectrum that we talked about the previous show. The spectrum of the CPU was, are you gonna make a radically
⏹️ ▶️ John different CPU and three different radically different CPUs for three different Macs? Or are you basically just gonna take an A14,
⏹️ ▶️ John puff it up a little bit and use that across the whole line? And similarly, the range of, do what you did in the Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John transition, which is take your current line of computers and put different chips inside them, Something radical where these computers
⏹️ ▶️ John look nothing like the previous ones and they have touchscreens and face ID and they’re just you know Totally new they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do that this they went in this case They went hard on the other edge Which is like there if you looked at these
⏹️ ▶️ John you cannot visually tell the difference without squinting at most of them So I mean for
⏹️ ▶️ John the first generation product, it’s not unexpected again That’s what they did with Intel people who are disappointed
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope that they channel that disappointment into more fervor in in the second and third gen,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I think it is very excusable for the first gen. It’s not like Apple doesn’t have a lot to do. They have a lot to do just to make these things
⏹️ ▶️ John work at all with all the software stuff and to get it all, you know, to work in this package. And, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John thankfully they sorted out the keyboard situation before this came, right? So I give them a lot of leeway
⏹️ ▶️ John to have these computers be boring. And there is, this was talked about in the Intel thing. I don’t know if Apple talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about this, but obviously all of the, you know, the customers talked about this, of like, that it is comforting
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, I heard the Macs have this new thing and now I’m scared and Apple’s here to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the same computer you know and love. Look, it looks identical. Like, oh, I feel better now. Whether that
⏹️ ▶️ John was ever an actual strategy or whether it’s just the reality of you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do everything all at once, it is a real thing in the market that having
⏹️ ▶️ John a computer that looks the same as your previous MacBook Air, but it’s just better in all measurable performance ways,
⏹️ ▶️ John makes people happy without scaring them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, and to reinforce that point, doing that is a ton of work. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the other things that had to happen for an architectural transition to be pulled off smoothly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make the new things that are completely different internally and technically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look and work just like the old things, but better. That’s a ton of work and that’s a ton
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of engineering. And so it is reasonable to expect that we didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive other changes because even making this happen was a massive undertaking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I have faith, you know, Apple is pretty good on the whole, there have been some dark periods,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they are pretty good on the whole at moving Mac hardware forward
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time and making exciting things happen in their hardware lineup. And, you know, it doesn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it usually doesn’t happen as quickly as we want and sometimes we take a step back before we take a step forward, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does happen on an infinite timescale. And so I do think we will get there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even though I was hoping for more excitement in the hardware, it is totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco understandable why they aren’t there yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have hoped for it like you just said, but I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s unreasonable at all that they’re wading into the pool rather than jumping in the deep end. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, in some ways this is kind of jumping in the deep end, right? Because the M1 sounds, if you believe the Apple hype machine to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be like a phenomenal, phenomenal processor. And if the M1 is basically just the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A14 cranked up a bit, like we’ve been saying, imagine what an M2 or an M1Z or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I know we’ve covered this earlier, but it, I’m really, it seems so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obvious to me in retrospect that you would want to, if your Apple wade into the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey water very slowly, use these chips that are almost exactly like what you’ve already been shipping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a while and use them in the basic laptops and smaller computers that a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of people rely on. And then it seems to me like if there was going to be a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hardware refresh, I would think, and you can remind me of this in a few months whenever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the hardware refresh happens, but I would think that they would wait and do something bigger with like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 16-inch MacBook Pro or something like that, or even the 16 and 13 in concert. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would imagine that they would do something where the processor is bigger,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better, and different-er than the M1 is to the A14. I don’t know what that looks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, but maybe it has features that have never existed on a Mac before. Hell,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it could have a cellular modem in it, which has never been in a Mac. I don’t know, something like that. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like today, or yesterday, strictly speaking, was the, all right, let’s get our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feet under us and let’s walk before we run. And I would be very surprised
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if we don’t see stuff in the next six months that’s really gonna knock our socks off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe even not six months, but I think a year or two, then we will look back on this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time and be like, oh, those were so quaint. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John whatever we have in like a year or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two, and especially once they complete the transition across the whole lineup, we’re gonna look back on this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like those first Core Duo’s and the Core Solo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the Mac Mini of the first Intel transition of just like, wow, those chips were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so important at the time, but so primitive in retrospect.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m glad to see that all of the specs of the M1 in terms of the supported
⏹️ ▶️ John protocols and ports and everything, that they didn’t skimp, right? I mean, most of it, they’re just piggybacking on stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’ve done in the iPads and phones already, but not all of it. So this has Bluetooth 5 and Wi-Fi 6,
⏹️ ▶️ John so the latest versions of that stuff. Two Thunderbolt slash USB 4
⏹️ ▶️ John ports, right? As that’s new to Mac, like as far as I’m aware, the iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t support Thunderbolt in any way, shape or form, and none of them support USB 4, which is a confusing spec that we
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about in the past in the show, but it supports DisplayPort, Thunderbolt 3, USB 3.1 Gen 2, like it has ports
⏹️ ▶️ John that you would expect a Mac to have. Like when I saw the MacBook Air, when they said it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fanless, I immediately had dread on my heart. So, oh no, are
⏹️ ▶️ John those just plain USB-C ports on the side?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Like are those basically two,
⏹️ ▶️ John are those two ports, are those just like two iPad ports? No, no, they’re full-fledged
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac ports. There’s only two of them, which isn’t great, right? And they’re more limited, right? But hey, it’s the MacBook Air, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m glad these specs are, you know, it’s a forward-looking architecture. Like they, you know, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John wondering how are they ever gonna figure out how to do Thunderbolt with an ARM Mac, done, don’t worry about it. They’ve got it under control.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously more work to do for the bigger Macs, and we’ll talk about that later. But for the Air, this makes sense. The
⏹️ ▶️ John one hardware change that, in the case, again, other than the sort of venting situation,
⏹️ ▶️ John which we can’t really assess from the photos, is that the hardware function keys, the F4,
⏹️ ▶️ John F5, and F6 keys have different little pictures on them, and presumably they’re mapped differently in the software.
⏹️ ▶️ John The F4 key has a little magnifying glass. The F5 has a little microphone, and
⏹️ ▶️ John the F6 has a little crescent moon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Spotlight, Siri, and sleep? Maybe dark mode?
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe do not disturb mode? I don’t know. Maybe, yeah. You can bind these keys to anything, so this is mostly,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, we’ll see when we get them what they have them bound by default, and over the years, it’s been kind of weird that
⏹️ ▶️ John they ship, I mean, I’m using a keyboard like this too, as hardware quote-unquote function keys. They
⏹️ ▶️ John do say F1, F2, so on and so forth underneath them, but they always have these little pictures on them. But if you rebind
⏹️ ▶️ John them, the pictures become
⏹️ ▶️ John Like if you bind F4 to something that’s not search, that magnifying glass doesn’t mean search anymore. So it’s, I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, this is obviously the way they made the touch bar. Hey, look, it’s not a, it’s just like a, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna say, why don’t we just make it a whole big screen, and then we can update the keys
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John to look like whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John they want. It’s why they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware keyboard on the iPhone, because you have a screen and it’s infinitely changeable, but buttons are cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway. Yeah, please don’t encourage them, John. Please don’t encourage them to use more touch bars.
⏹️ ▶️ John Please. I don’t know, like the idea of changing the symbols
⏹️ ▶️ John every couple of years on the function keys and the physical function keys, like I don’t, all right, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s fine. All I’m saying is that those pictures just remind me of
⏹️ ▶️ John how limited it is to have to paint little pictures on actual keys. But I do love the keys,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t like the touch bar, so I prefer to have this model. The pricing is the same. Still starts
⏹️ ▶️ John at $999, and that’s for the, quote unquote, seven-core GPU, which has
⏹️ ▶️ John an eighth core that doesn’t work. And then the eight-core one starts at $1249.
⏹️ ▶️ John Ah, there’s a storage difference between them. That’s a seven-core. See, this is so weird. They have to
⏹️ ▶️ John find some way to make an expensive one and a cheap one. This is true of all these models, right? They wanna have a range of prices.
⏹️ ▶️ John But given that it’s a system on a chip, and given that the RAM is on the package with the thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not easy to decide how you’re going to price tier them. The only things you can
⏹️ ▶️ John adjust is RAM, which I guess we’ll talk about now. You can get two amounts of RAM, eight and 16 gigs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Done, that’s it. There are no other options because it’s on the same package as a system on
⏹️ ▶️ John a chip, and I guess they couldn’t fit more than 16 given current
⏹️ ▶️ John memory sizes and the size they wanted to make the thing. So that’s a difference in price.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s seven versus eight core GPU, which is a binning thing of like, well, sometimes they come out with seven working, sometimes they come out with eight
⏹️ ▶️ John working, but it’s more rare, so those won’t cost more. And then there’s SSD space, right? How big do
⏹️ ▶️ John you want the drive? And depending on which one of those things you care
⏹️ ▶️ John about, you might say, oh, that’s where all the cost is. Or you might get super angry and say, how much is it an increase
⏹️ ▶️ John in cost to get, you know, if go to eight, 16 gigs of RAM, at eight gigs of RAM for 20 bucks. How is it a $200 price difference to get another eight?
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t matter where you think the money is. Apple just says, look, we’re going to charge you more
⏹️ ▶️ John for the better model. And you can decide to distribute that money wherever you think it goes, but there’s not much that varies
⏹️ ▶️ John between these things. And no, you’re not going to be able to say, subtract the prices from each other,
⏹️ ▶️ John take that bucket of money, and then lay bills down on the parts that are different. Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do that exercise, it won’t add up. The margins are better on the more expensive products.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why Apple makes a billion dollars. But as they use system on a chips like
⏹️ ▶️ John and get sort of more regular, for example, there’s no clock speed difference that you can pick. You can’t get a faster CPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t get an i7, i8, you know, sorry, I’m thinking of BMW again. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get an i5, an i7, an i9 CPU. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John the M1. And whatever speed it’s clocked at or whatever clock, it’s the same
⏹️ ▶️ John for all of them. So they can only differentiate on, the thing that blows my mind is they’re differentiating on
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU cores. When has Apple ever tried to differentiate their pricing models
⏹️ ▶️ John on GPU? Never, like they give you a better GPU with the big one maybe, especially if it’s a discrete GPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John but boy, so weird. So like they won’t tell us the clock speed, but they want us to know how many cores are
⏹️ ▶️ John working in the GPU and they tell us the instruction caches. Anyway, the price range, all this is saying is the
⏹️ ▶️ John price range is the same. The memory range of eight to 16, eight as a default is terrible. I wish they had all been 16,
⏹️ ▶️ John but so what? As long as they offer 16, that’s fine. Overall, the assessment of the machine is like I said
⏹️ ▶️ John before. It’s like the previous MacBook Air, but better in every way that
⏹️ ▶️ John you care about. Like, you know, do you want the battery to last longer? Do you want it to be faster? Do you want it to be quieter?
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you want it to be cooler? And probably, do you want the SSD to even be faster?
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t have this in hand, we can’t benchmark it, but I will confidently say that this thing is going to have amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John performance in battery life compared to the previous MacBook Air. If you’re disappointed
⏹️ ▶️ John that the MacBook Air can’t support 32 gigs of memory, you’re not a MacBook Air customer. I think it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Using it with eight, I think, is not fine. So if someone in your life wants to buy this computer and they
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna get the super cheap one with eight gigs, I don’t remember what the default was for the Intel one, but just in general. I think it was the
⏹️ ▶️ John same. Eight gigs, hmm. I know it’s their cheapest computer, I understand
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but 8 gigs is not great 16 gigs. I think it’s fine
⏹️ ▶️ John for a MacBook Air. I said earlier that they had this chip the m1 They’re gonna use it across
⏹️ ▶️ John all their computers and they’re gonna use all the computers that were introduced at the event We’re just three computers
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re going to use it in computers where it makes sense This chip makes total sense
⏹️ ▶️ John in this computer I said in the last show What if they make the air fanless and they did
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t have to they could have put a fan in there and then Presumably clocked it higher
⏹️ ▶️ John like they do in another one on the other models that we’re going to talk about But they didn’t because being fanless
⏹️ ▶️ John is a benefit and it’s cool and on the MacBook Air model They’re not dying to do,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know Tons of high-performance work because it’s the MacBook Air. It’s the casual
⏹️ ▶️ John mainline computer Uh, this, Marko said the computer is dated,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it is. It looks like a computer that was designed in 2015 because it more or less was, or 2018 or wherever this design
⏹️ ▶️ John came from. But on the inside, I think it’s pretty amazing. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John this could, especially if they redesign the MacBook Air sometime soon, this could go down in history as like
⏹️ ▶️ John the new modern equivalent of the 2011 MacBook Air. Given that the shape and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John is very similar, because this is probably the biggest bump in
⏹️ ▶️ John performance, and I mean that like in terms of how the product performs, not necessarily like CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John benchmarks, like performance as far as the customer is concerned, from one year to the next. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you got an Intel MacBook Air, and then your friend got this one,
⏹️ ▶️ John your friend got the better computer
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You would be so jealous.
⏹️ ▶️ John Your battery is dead in half the time, your thing is so slow, the fans are spinning up, and their thing is sitting there quiet,
⏹️ ▶️ John Cool as a cucumber, like an iPad with a hinge, they would call it, but faster.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is a phenomenal computer. Maybe you think it’s boring because it doesn’t have a touchscreen and
⏹️ ▶️ John face ID and I want all those things, and cellular and I want all those things too. But boy, I
⏹️ ▶️ John was blown away by this. As far as I’m concerned, this is like the
⏹️ ▶️ John no compromises Intel MacBook Air. It’s a compromise ARM MacBook Air for all the reasons that we
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about, the things they could have done and they could have had a fan but if this was an Intel computer, we would be bowing down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and my only reservations on the MacBook Air, that we will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only be able to tell by, like in people getting them and using them and everything, is they made it fanless,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the other two computers they launched with the exact same CPU have fans.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So clearly this is a chip that benefits from active cooling.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by the way, real time follow up in case anybody hasn’t emailed us yet, The A12X is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four core high performance and four core low performance chip. So it actually is the same core count as what is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as what’s in the M1. Um, so that’s just for reference anyway, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John we have three cores,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, different cores, the A12 cores versus the A14 cores and yeah, probably a clock difference and everything too. And anyway, so that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we were, we were assuming earlier that the A12X was fewer cores, but it actually wasn’t. Um, anyway, so back to this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my main reservation with the MacBook Air is in order to make it fanless,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How much did they have to either clock it down, or how much does it have to throttle its performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down under heavy load? Because obviously, they said twice that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the other Macs, they mentioned their active cooling, their fans, and they mentioned that it would allow them to quote, sustain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their performance. So what it sounds like based on that is the MacBook Air probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco peaks at the same performance as the other ones, but I bet it has to throttle down after a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seconds maybe of high load to some kind of lower clock speed just for thermal reasons. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is probably going to be kind of peaky and limited in that way. How much that matters to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you is a different story and certainly to most MacBook Air buyers it probably doesn’t matter at all. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still probably, even in its throttled state, it’s still probably going to be way faster the old one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that is something to be aware of here that the 13 inch Pro and the Mac Mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are able to quote sustain their performance by using fans. So that means this can’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. And then secondly, we don’t know how warm it’s going to get.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like for me, I cannot stand a hot laptop like it makes my hands all sweaty. It makes it really hard to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it like I don’t I hate heat radiating out of my out of my laptop as I’m using it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that you know you can make something fanless by just having it spread the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heat around a lot and tolerating a high temperature as okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope that’s not what they’ve done here like I hope that it’s fanless because it just runs so cool in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco configuration that it can be pleasantly cool and and still perform well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but one way they could have also done it is it just radiates a lot of heat constantly and it’s really warm in use and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I hope That’s not the reality of using this computer. So we’ll find out. But those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are two things to watch out for in the early reviews, for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m very confident in the heat, and I’ll tell you why, especially given your your real time follow up that the
⏹️ ▶️ John A12Z has four high performance and four high efficiency cores and an eight core GPU. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John built on five nanometer process, and the A12Z is what? Ten nanometer?
⏹️ ▶️ John Seven. Unless this thing is clocked massively higher than than the A12Z, We
⏹️ ▶️ John have a direct comparison. How hot does it does the a12z you get? I bet an a12z iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John can get a little toasty playing a game for a long time But in general people don’t complain about the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro getting super hot I think this laptop will be exactly the same that most
⏹️ ▶️ John people for most people This will be the coolest as in temperature laptop. They’ve ever used Until
⏹️ ▶️ John they play a game like oh I can finally hear feel some warmth, right? Because it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a situation where Apple was forced to make this fanless. If there was any doubt, they could have put a fan in there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Fanless iPads have existed for a really long time and I have confidence that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John will make the right sort of trade-off. Most of the laptops that get hot have been
⏹️ ▶️ John the ones that have fans that are screaming all the time. So in terms of throttling,
⏹️ ▶️ John this will almost certainly throttle. If it doesn’t throttle, they didn’t clock it high enough. This is the type of laptop you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to throttle because you want it to be able to peak high, but then most of the time you want it to be going
⏹️ ▶️ John low. Like this is not the computer for doing your pro video editing, although I’m sure it’ll work fine for that and be better
⏹️ ▶️ John than most of the Mac laptops ever made. But if you care about that quote unquote sustained workload,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, get one of the other models with a fan in it because that’ll help it. But like this is the exact, like I personally think this is
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly the right trade-off to make. Give me less consistent performance in exchange
⏹️ ▶️ John for having no fan and having it be super cool all the time. And everything is relative. So you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, it’s a little bit slower than it could be. If this little bit slower than it could be is like 80%
⏹️ ▶️ John faster than the previous MacBook Air that quote unquote didn’t throttle because it had a fan, who cares that it’s throttling?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like one of the things they said in the presentation was that when they were talking about the M1,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they said that the low performance cores, the efficiency cores
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on their own have similar performance as the dual core MacBook Air outgoing from Intel.
⏹️ ▶️ John So like it’s like with four hands tied behind its back.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Right? Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So this is this is pretty it’s pretty likely that it I mean, I think they effectively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outright told us that it will throttle like that. I’m I’m accepting throttling as a given because I think they literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said that, but you know, in their way in the in the most PR way possible,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they told us it will throttle. So that’s, yeah, that’s gonna happen, I think. But how much it matters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remains to be seen. And how much it matters for this product, I think the answer, I think, John, you’re right, that this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the right move for this product.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you know, I was impressed by the presentation and I enjoyed the presentation, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t come away from it thinking, oh my God, my 13-inch MacBook Pro, my Intel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 13-inch MacBook Pro is a piece of garbage that needs to be thrown into the sea. Now, part of that is surely because there wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a direct, there wasn’t a direct comparison, right? There is a, there is a- And Apple is still
⏹️ ▶️ John selling them too, so they might not want to tell you that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, so fair point. But, you know, listening to you, John, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the same place in my computing life that I was when I bought my adorable, my one port
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook, which I bought in like 2017 or thereabouts. But the more I think about it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the more I think that the things I loved about the Adorable were that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was incredibly small and incredibly light, a little smaller than the MacBook Air. I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it’s lighter off top of my head. But it was incredibly small and it was incredibly light. And even though
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am nowhere near as offended as the two of you are by fan noise, I don’t like fan noise. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would rather not have fan noise if I have the choice. And that also did not have a fan.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I loved that computer so much, even despite all its flaws. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there were two major, major, major flaws to that computer. The first one was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it only had one port. You know, it only had one USB-C port and it was only USB-C,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it wasn’t Thunderbolt. So that severely limited what you could connect in terms
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the quality of thing you could connect because you could only get USB-C things. You couldn’t get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thunderbolt things, but it obviously limited the quantity of what you can connect. So if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were to record a podcast for the sake of discussion, I need a dongle that will give me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like traditional USB out and USB-C in for power. I would need a dongle just to plug in power
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a microphone, which is kind of ridiculous if you think about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Yeah, and one thing you don’t want is for your live audio gear to be plugged in through a dongle because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey they are never 100%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliable. Ever, ever, ever. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so that was a huge flaw. And you know what? Check, it’s been fixed. There’s two ports. I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prefer four for sure, but I mean, two is better than one. And the other thing that really stank
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the Adorable, in a way that was arguably much worse than the one port
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because the one port bothered me frequently, but it’s incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slow performance bothered me always.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from any measure, this forthcoming MacBook Air, it’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way faster than the adorable was. And potentially, like we’ve been saying way faster than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the existing MacBook Air that it’s replacing in most cases anyway. So potentially 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John When they said this, when I got done with this part of the presentation, I said, is there anything that the fastest MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro you can buy today will actually do faster than this fanless MacBook Air? That’s the thing to watch for
⏹️ ▶️ John in the specs. Don’t watch for how much faster is it than your stupid adorable, how much faster is it? When they show the specs and when
⏹️ ▶️ John they put it on the big chart, try to find something that the top end, most expensive 16 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John i9 MacBook Pro does faster than this fanless Air in terms of CPU and GPU speed.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I’m looking for. I’m not even comparing it to, forget about the period, It’s gonna blow all those things away. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, but does it embarrass Apple’s most expensive laptop, this fanless thing? I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that- Single-threaded, yes. Single-threaded, we know it does. The A14 already does, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But multi-threaded GPU, well, discrete GPU, it’s gonna lose out on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, we can tell that. Like, if you look at any benchmark that benchmarks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the A14, and you compare that to Macs. I always like Geekbench. You may have your benchmark of choice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you look at that and it basically, we’re still looking at multi-threaded,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco multi-core performance that scales up with core count. And the four high-performance cores
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the latest iPads, or in the old iPads now, and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two high-performance cores in the A14, we can kind of extrapolate, and we’re not gonna beat the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eight-core MacBook Pro, or the 10-core iMac Pro, or the God knows how many cores Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until Apple delivers an M chip with more cores. Simple as that. They just need more of them. And I don’t see any reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why they can’t release that, you know, sometime in the next year.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if that’s necessarily the case though, and Apple make the same point. When I say compare it, you know, doing
⏹️ ▶️ John something, I’m saying like a real world task. And that’s, they leaned on this as well. They said like, let’s do a thing with an app.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s encode a bunch of video. Let’s, you know, I don’t know, I forget what their examples were. Let’s play, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John 4K, multiple 4K video streams, whatever, you know, let’s process raw images in Lightroom, or whatever it
⏹️ ▶️ John is that they were trying to show. Because, especially in the case of Apple apps, when Apple is able
⏹️ ▶️ John to tune its software to its specific hardware, they can get ridiculous numbers that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not possible for apps that are just Intel apps that are just made for generic Intel CPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Eventually, the apps will catch up with that on Apple’s platform, or so Apple hopes. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that even cases where it is under-specced, like, oh, well, the eight-core
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pro has eight full-power cores, I’ve just got four good cores and four wimpy ones, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it gets outclassed there, but maybe it still completes the task faster in one of
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s apps because Apple has, you know, custom tailored and optimized it for its specific hardware. And in the
⏹️ ▶️ John end, that’s what people care about, right? I’m basically saying like, synthetic benchmarks versus application performance.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still not entirely counting it out against an eight core against obviously a 12 core or whatever, as the core counts go up, you know, it
⏹️ ▶️ John loses, right? But, and in GPU, I think it’s gonna lose too to the biggest discrete GPUs that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John ships. And certainly it won’t be as fast as like a gaming PC or whatever. But I am
⏹️ ▶️ John very optimistic about direct performance comparisons to pretty much any
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel Mac laptop, except for in the extreme cases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, my best guess is, you know, performance-wise, again, having known nothing about this, except seeing the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A14 in iPads and phones so far. My best guess is, you know, right now the A14
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Geekbench single core is in the 1500 range. I’m guessing we’re somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco near that, maybe a little bit higher from clock differences. Maybe we’re at like 1700 or at most 2000.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like, you know, the best Macs are like 1200. So we’re already single core gonna be,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, significantly higher, possibly like 50% higher, possibly more. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s, we’re looking at significant gain, single threaded. Multi-threaded, this is where it gets interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new iPad Air, which is the fastest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A14, but only has two high-performance cores, has a multi-core score of about 4200.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you imagine that can be doubled with having four cores instead of two on the high-performance end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to roughly 8,000, including, and you know it doesn’t scale exactly linearly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you know we do also have a higher thermal envelope here, probably a higher base clock.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if we get roughly 8,000 multi-core on Geekbench, whatever this is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five, I think, then that puts it in the performance category of an eight core iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that puts it ahead of every MacBook Pro. So it might, it might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually be faster than the MacBook Pro in CPU bound things. Where it won’t probably be able to compete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is with discrete GPUs for GPU bound stuff. So So like, I’m not expecting it to crush
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other laptops or desktops in things like video editing that heavily rely on the GPU.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And probably, you know, gaming is not gonna be like a massive thing for lots of reasons, but you know, that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything that’s heavily GPU bound, I expect these to still not do very well. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Apple will get there. Like this is step one. I think they’ll get there for the rest. But for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CPU bound tasks, I am optimistic. I think these things are gonna be quite something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think once they eventually do an update to the 16-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and possibly a 14-inch or whatever, that I think is where things are gonna get really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hot. And it’s not in a bad way, the good version of mine. So I’m very much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking forward to that.
⏹️ ▶️ John We already move on to the main-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey haven’t even finished my thesis here, hold on. We’re on our 17th sidetrack. So I’ll try to, yeah, I know. I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey try to make it brief, but I went on this meandering point that I’ll try to close now, which is, If you look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at why I bought the Adorable in 2017 or thereabouts, I wanted something that was basically like an iPad, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wasn’t constrained. Please email somebody else. I wanted it to run macOS, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted it to be light and portable. And I had to trade off having more than one port.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had to trade, and I mean, heck, even my iPad Pro from what, two years ago now, now it has two ports, thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the keyboard. But I had to make the trade off of only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one port, and that bothered me frequently. But I also had to make the trade off of just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dog slow performance. Like even when the thing was brand new, it was not a particularly fast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer. And I knew that going into it, but it got real bad after a year,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really bad after a couple of years. And so that was something that bothered me every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time I used the computer. And now you’re telling me for a thousand bucks, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I paid like $2,500 for that computer or something like that for a thousand bucks, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get a MacBook Air that has two ports and will absolutely smoke that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey adorable. Like, how do you say no to that? I mean, you, you can’t, it’s, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s phenomenal. And, and to extrapolate what the gains could be on a proper 13 inch MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro, and we’ll talk a little bit more about that in a minute, or even a 16 inch MacBook Pro, which is not really the computer for me anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I can understand those who like it. Like this is, this is going to be something, and this, this is going to be an interesting and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exciting ride over the next six to 12 months.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, some limitations, and these limitations are, some of them are across the whole line,
⏹️ ▶️ John some of them might just be this one computer. Only 2 terabytes for the max SSD size.
⏹️ ▶️ John The fact that all the other machines have the same limitation makes me wonder if it is a product choice
⏹️ ▶️ John or some kind of inherent limitation. I bet it’s probably just a product choice, especially on the Air,
⏹️ ▶️ John although it would have been nice to offer a 4 terabyte model because as Apple itself has pointed out several
⏹️ ▶️ John times, Sometimes the computer you want is weirdly balanced. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, I don’t care about CPU or GPU performance, but I store a lot of stuff. Like, so please,
⏹️ ▶️ John storage is important to me. So I would love an Air that has four terabytes of storage, right? Or vice versa.
⏹️ ▶️ John I need very little storage of a really fast CPU. They don’t give you that flexibility. So kind of like the RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ John only eight and 16, you know, the SSD only goes up two terabytes, kind of disappointing.
⏹️ ▶️ John No eGPU support, despite the fact that it has Thunderbolt. Apple says no, no
⏹️ ▶️ John external GPUs for you. So if you’re not happy with the GPU that’s in there, you cannot use an external GPU. It only supports
⏹️ ▶️ John one external display. Starting to smell a little bit like an iPad now, isn’t it? Only supports one external display.
⏹️ ▶️ John The external display it supports, it can support the 6K display at 60 hertz, right? So it can support Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John big display, which is great, but I think a lot of, nobody has Apple’s big display and a lot of people have two
⏹️ ▶️ John small displays. And if you’re thinking of using those two ports to connect the two displays, not gonna happen, which is kind of disappointing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they did find the one guy in the world who has a Mac mini connected to their $6,000 display though for the video. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they want it, like, I think this is good. If Apple’s gonna sell a big, giant, expensive monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John with tons of pixels, all of their Macs sold in the years after should support it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even the wimpy ones. And I think that’s great. I think it’s not saying, oh, you need a pro computer to connect that display. Nope, the mini will do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. The Air will do it. The limitation of one display though is kind of disappointing. And I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John that is a hangover from the iPad architecture, from which this is derived slash shared
⏹️ ▶️ John with or whatever, we’ll find out in the coming years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is all, these are all just like signs that what they have updated is still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only their low-end products. You know, like people are complaining, and we’ll get to this later, people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are complaining like there’s no four port update to the 13 inch, for instance. And the mini lost a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few IO ports, which we’ll get to in a second. But like overall, what they updated is only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their low-end stuff. And we’ll see what comes once they get around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the high end, which I’m guessing, you know, probably next year, maybe next summer, you know, something like that. We’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what changes, which of these limitations get lifted and which ones don’t. I would expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher RAM ceilings, although how they do that is up for debate, you know, whether it’s, whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the RAM goes off package and they have like, you know, soldered or socketed in various models.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a big question mark because they’re, Right now, their high-end products support very large
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amounts of RAM that would be impractical to keep in package in the SoC. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m assuming that their high-end models will have off-package RAM and maybe use the additional space in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the package for more CPU cores. GPU support is still very much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a question mark. They took out eGPU support so far. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know if it’ll ever come back. I’m guessing probably not. I’m guessing every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPU that ever runs on Apple Silicon is an Apple GPU. But then that raises a huge question of what the heck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do with the Mac Pro. Do they have Apple GPUs on something like MPX modules
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can buy like three or four of them and swap them in later? Maybe, that’s one possibility.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Will they support other GPUs from other manufacturers? I don’t know, probably not if I had to guess now, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. These are all questions that will be answered as they release higher end products.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we’re just not there yet. And so I wouldn’t necessarily assume anything about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their high-end limitations from what we have so far. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can certainly take educated guesses. And I do think that the likelihood of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco external GPUs from other manufacturers being supported is low. But that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean that Apple can’t take their own GPUs and make them external to the package for their higher-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products and kind of still have like discrete GPUs just for like chip size and heat reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is still on the table, I think, but I wouldn’t assume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we’re gonna get like AMD or Nvidia support, certainly Nvidia, probably not any support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either. But I also wouldn’t assume that that would preclude the existence of high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expandability and options. Honestly, I think having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mark Gurman’s theoretical smaller Mac Pro that has slots for the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple G3, G5, and G7 GPUs they can slot in there and different configurations.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, that’s a possibility. I wouldn’t rule it out. And I think that that’s actually probably a more likely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibility than what they have now, which is like, we’ll take parts from other people and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put them in. Nope, don’t see that happening. But I also don’t see them taking a Mac Pro and making it not expandable again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we’ll see what happens in the high end. Anyway, this is all… we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Right now we’re looking at the low end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and while a lot of people are really upset that it’s capped at 16 gigs of RAM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and two Thunderbolt ports, that is in line with their previous low-end products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that this is replacing. And the high-end stuff that has more than that, they just haven’t replaced yet so we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really don’t know.
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Mac Mini
⏹️ ▶️ John So speaking of low-end, the Mac Mini was the next computer, and if you look at the specs
⏹️ ▶️ John and limitations, it looks very familiar. It’s an M1, it goes from 5 gig SSD to 2 terabytes,
⏹️ ▶️ John it can have 8 or 16 gigs of RAM, it has no external GPU support, it has Thunderbolt slash USB 4
⏹️ ▶️ John ports on it. It’s a little bit Mac Mini-ish, it’s got an HDMI port on the back, it’s got USB-A ports,
⏹️ ▶️ John it supports two external displays, but I think only because it’s got the HDMI port, so we The
⏹️ ▶️ John Thunderbolt port supports up to the 6K display at 60 Hertz, and then the HDMI port supports up
⏹️ ▶️ John to 4K resolution at 60 Hertz, right? It, you know, it has, we didn’t mention this
⏹️ ▶️ John about the other one either, but both this and the Air have a headphone jack. We didn’t mention it, which means just assume that it’s still a guest. Headphone
⏹️ ▶️ John jack still exists on these computers. The thing that surprised me the most about the Mac mini,
⏹️ ▶️ John other than it only coming in silver and not coming in space gray, which is a little baffling, is that it has a
⏹️ ▶️ John fan. Because when they introduced the fanless MacBook Air, I’m like, well, the Mac mini is a similar kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John low-end computer, right? Like if you can make the MacBook Air fanless, you can make the mini fanless, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t, which makes me think, again, we have no idea because they won’t tell us. They like literally won’t tell us. People asked them and they said,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, you know, whatever they say, we’re not talking about this today. Is the Mac mini clocked higher than the MacBook Air?
⏹️ ▶️ John Seems like it’s gotta be, right? Because why would you need a fan in the Mac mini, which
⏹️ ▶️ John has way more room for airflow and cooling and everything compared to a MacBook Air and not need
⏹️ ▶️ John it in the air? So the Mac mini could end up being a little speed demon because it’s got a fan, probably
⏹️ ▶️ John a very quiet fan, running on that same M1 system on the chip. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know if I think I put this in the notes. Do they even offer a seven GPU core version
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Mac mini or are
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they all like- No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s only for the Air. All
⏹️ ▶️ John right, so it’s all the top bin parts. It’s the same M1, presumably clocked tire, but everything else
⏹️ ▶️ John about it is the same. They dropped the price $100, the entry level price. It used to be 799, now the entry level is 699.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re differentiating the only, so given all the specs are just set, the only thing they have to differentiate
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac mini, how can you charge more for it, is storage. Because nothing else about it changes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like RAM, I guess, but like RAM and storage, like they’re really getting, and like how
⏹️ ▶️ John long will the RAM last? Like we talked about this before the RMX came out, you differentiate iOS devices just by storage.
⏹️ ▶️ John What size phone is Marco getting? 128, 256? We never ask him how much RAM he’s getting, because you’re getting what you’re getting, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s nice that they gave two choices for RAM. I dread the day they give one choice and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like eight gigabytes or something. But yeah, this one doesn’t even differ in the GPU cores.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you are interested in a Mac mini to be a tiny little Intel server, this is not your computer because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not Intel. What ports did it lose versus the Intel ones? I forget, I think it lost some USBs. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John just two USB-C ports. Yeah, oh, and a gigabit ethernet instead of 10 gig. The Intel Mac mini has 10
⏹️ ▶️ John gig ethernet. Why does it have Gigabit Ethernet? Well, you might not know this, but Ethernet has not been a
⏹️ ▶️ John big feature on the iPads and iPhones,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thus far in history.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it’s supported, it’s supported certainly on the iPad and possibly on iPhones, I don’t remember, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John know it’s supported on iPad. Yeah, but not 10 gig Ethernet. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that could be a PCIe lane thing. More likely, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably just a high-end versus low-end thing. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do later, once there is a higher-end M chip for their higher-end products,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they might offer a higher-end configuration of the Mac Mini with that chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like once they integrate that, because they’ve had no reason thus far to make 10 gig ethernet support
⏹️ ▶️ John in any of their ARM-based products. And arguably, with this line of
⏹️ ▶️ John things that they’ve released, they still kind of don’t. I know the old Intel Mac Mini had it, just because it’s probably cheap and easy to make
⏹️ ▶️ John with given the chipsets that work with the Intel things, but they don’t quite have it yet. So there are some regressions, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John entry level price being lower is great. I think this is, and the performance, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John the performance compared to the past Mac mini, this should have phenomenal performance, especially since you don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John care about the GPU probably in a Mac mini if you’re just using it as a little server or something. But even if you’re not, like so
⏹️ ▶️ John the picture that everyone’s making fun of, that the Mac mini sitting there, connected
⏹️ ▶️ John to an Apple 6K display, where the computer costs less money than the stand that is holding
⏹️ ▶️ John the monitor. Right? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s sitting on, I think they had it sitting on top of the stand.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a little bit absurd in some respects, but in other respects, what I thought about was, here’s what I immediately
⏹️ ▶️ John thought about. I like, with the Intel transition kits, the developer transition kits,
⏹️ ▶️ John they like, what do they do? They give you like, you send back the developer transition kit and they give you a good deal on like an Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac or something. I would love to send back my developer transition kit. By the way, I just
⏹️ ▶️ John uploaded my ARM versions of all my apps to the store. they’re available now if you want to go get them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would love to send that back and have them give me a good deal on an ARM-based Mac mini.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know what I’d do with that ARM-based Mac mini? I would sit it on the stand that costs more money than it does, and I would
⏹️ ▶️ John connect it to my 6K display. Because, you know, you could have a whole second computer
⏹️ ▶️ John with the same peripherals and the same desk setup, and it would be a fast computer. It would be faster in single-core
⏹️ ▶️ John performance than the gigantic Mac Pro that’s over there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Just take your display, keyboard, and mouse and disconnect them from your old computer that you’re switching away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from and plug them into the Mac mini.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just Bluetooth, right? I mean, I do this with my laptop. Like, you know, the magic of Bluetooth accessories. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, all I’m saying is that a Mac mini connected to an absurdly large display only sounds
⏹️ ▶️ John ridiculous because you think of a Mac mini as a wimpy computer. It’s not wimpy. It’s got the same
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 chip as the other three computers. And this one has a fan on it, which probably means it’s clocked higher
⏹️ ▶️ John and can sustain higher speeds. This Mac mini, again, like what
⏹️ ▶️ John are we gonna be comparing to, are we gonna be benchmarking against the Mac mini? Or as Marco mentioned before, are we gonna be benchmarking
⏹️ ▶️ John against the eight core iMac? It is not a, it’s an
⏹️ ▶️ John inexpensive computer and it’s silly to connect it to a $7,000 monitor setup, but if you’ve already got a $7,000 monitor setup,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s suddenly faster than your Mac Pro. All three of you. Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying like. Hell of a flex there, Joe.
⏹️ ▶️ John mini is going to be faster than my Mac Pro in almost everything not related to gaming,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It’s terrifying. And obviously it’s, you know, 16 gigs of RAM, so it’s a limited computer, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I think this Mac mini is perfectly fine. And I think like
⏹️ ▶️ John the Intel Mac mini, it’s a bit of a sleeper in terms of performance. Like if you don’t care about the places where it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John weak, like if you’re not like gonna play games on it, for instance, doing day-to-day stuff and you have an external
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor that you like, because a lot of people have external monitors that they like, it’s not bad. Now the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can only do a 6K and a 4K monitor or one has to be HDMI and one Thunderbolt, that’s a little bit limiting
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want like a three monitor setup or whatever, but I think this is a perfectly fine computer. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John excited to see a price drop. Again, don’t try to allocate the money. You’ll just get sad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t try to think about how much less the M1 costs Apple to put in these machines than the Intel chips,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s a lot less, and they do not pass that savings on to you for the most part.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I know it’s $100
⏹️ ▶️ John less, but in general, Apple is benefiting more from this savings
⏹️ ▶️ John than you are, which is fine. Like for prices to be stable or to go down $100 on the low end,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s all fine. I give Apple a pass on that. I think the Mac mini is fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can you imagine how many more of these Mac minis they would sell if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they sold a 5k external display for like a thousand or 1500 bucks?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s crazy talk. They would never make a 5k display. I don’t even know how to make a 5K display. Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John never shipped a 5K display, except inside other computers. Don’t look at those.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I couldn’t agree with you more, Marco. I’m not in the market for a new computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in any capacity really, but particularly to replace my iMac Pro, which we should talk about eventually one day at some point. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I were to replace the iMac Pro tomorrow, and if there was a 5K
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like first-party display, I would really think hard about getting exactly that. I love this iMac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really do. But the Mac mini should be a screamer for all the sorts of things I would wanna do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and made it with a decent 5K display. I mean, why wouldn’t you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s why like more than ever, the giant hole in Apple’s lineup for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco displays is not only apparent, but I think holding them back at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, agreed. Yeah, and this is another instance again, the two terabyte SSD Max.
⏹️ ▶️ John On a Mac mini, you feel like, can’t you give me the four options? Plenty of room, thermals
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t a concern, you’ve got a fan, this is where you start to think, is it actually a limitation of, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John understand how it could be though, but maybe it feels like, well, it was the storage management
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff was tailored to the iPad and the biggest iPad is one terabyte, but it just seems a missed opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ John not to give higher ceilings than SSD size. Because just to be clear, the SSDs are not on the package with
⏹️ ▶️ John the system on a chip, those are elsewhere on the board. So there’s no sort of packaging constraints saying you can’t fit more
⏹️ ▶️ John than, you know, they could, and they would price it ridiculously and we know how it goes with Apple and storage. I’m just saying like
⏹️ ▶️ John capacity wise, it hurts a little bit more for the Mac mini to not
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to scale up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, and it could be as simple as these are their low-end products. I mean, they historically have not offered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their highest SSD sizes in their lowest end products. Like you couldn’t get a four terabyte MacBook Air before.
⏹️ ▶️ John But isn’t their highest size eight now, not four?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On the high-end products, yes, but again, you couldn’t get those in the Airs.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like now that you can get eight on the big ones, you should be able to get four on the lesser products.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe, but I think the more likely explanation besides, I think it’s both. I think it’s both the product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco segmentation of wanting to push people with higher end needs to the higher end products. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s possibly just the reality of how many chips does that take on the board
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to offer those larger capacities and how much room do you want to devote to those on these products?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the problem with the Mac mini though is that the higher end version of that is $6,000. Yes. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John there is no other headless desktop computer that they sell. You go from mini to something that’s like 17
⏹️ ▶️ John times the volume of the mini. 20, 30, how many Mac minis could I fit inside my computer? A lot. A lot.
13” MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my word. All right. So we should talk about the MacBook Pro. Now it was so obvious when I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heard them say this, but it didn’t occur to me until I was listening to dithering, I think this morning.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I forget if it was John or Ben, but one of them said, you know, you could think of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Pro that was released yesterday as the spiritual successor to what Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dubbed the MacBook escape. And so this was the MacBook Pro that, you know, the escape was the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro, you know, Intel, of course, that did not have a touch bar. and it only had two ports,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that correct, Marco? Yep. Okay, so this new MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro running on the M1 also has two ports and in many,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many ways, with the exception of having a touch bar now, seems like it’s kind of the spiritual successor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the MacBook Escape in that it is a MacBook Pro in name, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe not in other ways, question mark. But nevertheless, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s nice. and if you don’t mind giving up a couple of ports, I don’t know why you wouldn’t be interested
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this. The reason I’m not interested in it is because I really don’t wanna replace a six month old laptop because my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name is not Marco. But beyond that, I do use all the ports in this laptop. Perhaps I’m just port crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now that I’ve spent three years without them. But there are occasions when I’ll have like Ethernet plugged in and a phone plugged in,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe even a phone and an iPad plugged in, and of course power. So I don’t wanna go back down to two, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I didn’t mind, this would be a very interesting and compelling machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, and to be clear, like there have been, as you mentioned, like the 13-inch MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has actually been two very different products since 2016. You know, since they went to this generation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with like touch bar and crappy keyboards at first and everything, like the 13-inch MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has always had like the low-end model, which is basically a souped up Air in many ways. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the higher-end model, which usually had, it always had four ports on the higher-end model and it usually had,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it always had the touch bar, But it’s always been these two very different products. One of them was basically a souped up Air,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other one was like really what you would expect from a quote MacBook Pro. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve only replaced the lower end one here. Again, it’s only the low end products. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many people are especially upset at them calling this quote Pro while not offering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher RAM than 16 gigs and everything like that. And again, I think that’s reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you look at what they replaced so far and what they haven’t gotten to yet. the higher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end 13-inch Pro has always been a higher end product. It’s always used higher grade CPUs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher thermal envelopes, higher performance, higher core counts for most of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, I think it’s reasonable what they’ve done here. It’s just that the computer that a lot of people want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the quote 13-inch MacBook Pro, they haven’t replaced that one yet because that’s the higher end one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That said, I do take issue with when they have only two ports,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why don’t they put one on each side?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, a lot of people are very upset about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco this. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the most wonderful luxuries, ever since they went to all USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the laptops in 2016, one of the wonderful luxuries of having a four port model is that you can plug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the charging cable on either side, depending on whatever was convenient for you. Now, there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been a few asterisks on this arrangement so far. In
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many of these computers, one side had more Thunderbolt bandwidth than the other. There’s a common problem with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger ones that like if you plug it into the left side or something, it makes the whole thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run hotter. And if you plug it into the right side, it doesn’t for some reason. Like there’s a few weirdnesses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have cropped up. But for the most part, as somebody who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the most of this time has owned four port models, having the ability to plug the charging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cable in on either side is a wonderful little nicety. wish that for the two port models,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would put one port on the right.
⏹️ ▶️ John So now that we’ve seen all three of these computers here, it is like the
⏹️ ▶️ John two port 13 inch MacBook Pro, like you said, the MacBook Escape, you could squint and see that as just like an
⏹️ ▶️ John air in a different case, but with these three new arm computers that they’ve rolled out, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s basically the same computer in three different sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John contexts. One of them is a fanless thin laptop, but
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of like what’s in there, it’s the same stuff that’s in the mini, but now it’s got a fan and a couple of different ports.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s the same stuff that’s in the MacBook Pro, but now it’s a laptop with fans and a bigger battery and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And a touch bar.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, right. We know the M1 is in all of them, but also
⏹️ ▶️ John most of the limitations are the same across all of them. Eight or 16 gigs of RAM across the board,
⏹️ ▶️ John only up to two terabyte SSD, only two ports, two Thunderbolt slash USB four ports,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I wouldn’t be surprised if they crack these things open, like I fix it and it looks at
⏹️ ▶️ John the motherboards of all of them and that the motherboards actually look kind of similar in terms of what’s on them, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you looked at the motherboard when they showed it like floating into the, I think it was the MacBook Air when they showed it floating
⏹️ ▶️ John in, it looked for all the world like an iPad, logic board, quote unquote logic board or whatever. Cause it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, that’s the skinny thing off to the side and it makes room for the big battery in the iPad, right? Or like if you’ve seen what the logic board
⏹️ ▶️ John and the phone looks like it’s just like, oh, it’s basically a giant battery. And then along the edge, there’s this little tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that’s the actual phone. That’s what these things are like too. So the limitations of this sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of system, this M1 based system, and Margot mentioned PCI
⏹️ ▶️ John Express lanes, right? How much bandwidth is there? How much connectivity can you even have?
⏹️ ▶️ John How much RAM can we even fit in the system on a chip? It’s basically the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John And these three computers they introduce are the three computers where this sort of system, this set
⏹️ ▶️ John of constraints is reasonable. There are places where it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a little bit unreasonable, like again, the storage thing or whatever, and it would be better if they supported more monitors
⏹️ ▶️ John and so on and so forth. But if you looked at Apple’s existing line and said, we, here, here is the
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 based system and here are its possible capabilities. What computers will this fit into?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the three you would pick. Because these are the three where this type of thing makes sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John None of the other models does it really make sense to have these limitations. You can’t do the quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John good 13-inch MacBook Pro and just have two ports. You can’t do the 16-inch. You can’t do an iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t do a Mac Pro, right? This set of constraints only works in these computers. And
⏹️ ▶️ John this computer is the one where it is probably pressed the most. Even though, as Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John said, it’s like, people don’t understand, it’s replacing the lesser 13, which has always been
⏹️ ▶️ John a weirdo computer. And by the way, it’s replacing the lesser 13 with CPU and battery performance
⏹️ ▶️ John that blows away any 13 ever made, right? People apparently don’t care about
⏹️ ▶️ John that. All of a sudden, people don’t care about performance and battery life. Anyone complaining about these computers, I give it to them for one
⏹️ ▶️ John day and have them look at that battery meter and not go down. And they’ll, you know, again, assuming Apple’s claims are correct, nobody has
⏹️ ▶️ John these computers, I don’t know. I’m just, I have faith that it will perform as behaved.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of fascinating. And it’s fascinating for both of the reason of like
⏹️ ▶️ John how they’re rolling this out and also about the future, which I guess, we’ll get through this computer first and I’ll talk more about the future,
⏹️ ▶️ John but what else? Is there anything else to say about this computer? Battery life is even bigger than the
⏹️ ▶️ John Air, as you can imagine, because it’s not wedge-shaped, right? Up to 17 hours of wireless web, but
⏹️ ▶️ John your brain may be breaking on these numbers. You’d be like, I get like five hours out of my MacBook. What are they talking about, 17 hours? That
⏹️ ▶️ John must be a typo. We’ll find out, but like, you know how long your iPad lasts, and this has bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John batteries than your iPad, right? 61 watt power adapter, whereas the
⏹️ ▶️ John Air has a 30 watt, right? Again, this has a fan, presumably it’s clocked higher,
⏹️ ▶️ John but Apple won’t tell us. And the pricing is the same, more or less, and
⏹️ ▶️ John differentiated only based on SSD size and I suppose RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m very interested to see how much faster it is than the Air
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in real world use and in benchmarks, because the cooling system has to mean something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. And again, they said as much with the whole thing about sustaining its performance. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know it’s gonna be faster than the Air, I don’t know how much faster and how much that matters. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will a fan be noticeably loud during high performance or can they only give it a little bit of active cooling and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that might be enough? Who knows, time will tell, but I’m very interested to find out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can I ask a dumb question? Why is the power adapter on the MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey double the wattage? Like obvious, some of this I think I could explain away by perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe a difference in the screen or I don’t actually know, but they should be the same screens, I mean, presumably.
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s the battery size? Is it a 58 watt hour battery?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like the MacBook Air is something like 50 and this is something like 60 or it’s something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah, it’s 50 and, well, 50 and 58 is not that much bigger. Yeah. I don’t know, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John I just put the bigger one in it because if it’s gonna have that sustained performance, you need a power adapter
⏹️ ▶️ John that can keep up with maximum power draw from everything, and maybe all they had on hand is 30 and 60 watts.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if 30 watt won’t do it, which might be borderline, give them a 60.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, and that’s, to be clear, that’s also what the previous ones used. Like the previous Air
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was 30, and the previous 13-inch Pro was 60. I’m guessing this is partly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like keep everything external the same, and also, you know, the power adapter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is sometimes the limiting factor with high-end workloads, like video encoding. sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the laptop can’t actually be fully powered by the power adapter, and that’s when you see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some models that actually will slowly discharge themselves, even when plugged in, when doing something like a heavy video encode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s more tolerable on something like an Air than it is on something called MacBook Pro that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be used by video people. So that could be a situation as well. I’m guessing that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably not gonna be a major factor, but it could just be like, pros want the battery to charge faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It could be as simple as that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And to be clear, this only supports one external monitor as well. That’s another thing that can draw power. This
⏹️ ▶️ John one probably hurts the most because it is MacBook Pro. It does have two ports. The ports do look the same as
⏹️ ▶️ John each other, but you cannot connect two monitors to them. Why? Because like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the system they give you. It makes me wonder how they managed to give HDMI output on the Mac mini and not,
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe like, maybe, you know, the HDMI output can be limited to 4K because of limitations of the
⏹️ ▶️ John HDMI spec that they’re using or whatever. But once you have these Thunderbolt ports, It would be weird
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you know, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you plug in a 6K monitor into one Thunderbolt port, now all you can plug into the other Thunderbolt port is like a 720p
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor or something, I don’t know. But that’s a pretty disappointing limitation.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like it is just, that is one of the more painful inherited traits of this overall
⏹️ ▶️ John system that the MacBook Pro gets.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One more power adapter theory also is that they will presumably at some point in the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year launch a higher end 13 inch MacBook Pro. or maybe 14 inch, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe they want to use the same adapter for both because it’s very confusing if you have a 13 inch MacBook Pro and you need a power adapter and they have to say which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. Because people won’t even know which one they have. You
⏹️ ▶️ John gotta feel along the sides to see, are there ports on
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the right side? Or just
⏹️ ▶️ John headphone port? This is the smaller adapter.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right, so it could be also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just planning for the future where they just want to have one power adapter for each size class and that could be it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What I was hoping to back one of the three of us into is, is it feasible or possible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they would crank up the clock speed or something on the M1 specifically in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the MacBook Pro, or I suppose the Mini for that matter, and make it considerably quicker than the one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the Air? I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I think your theories are better, but is it possible?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s limited by cooling, not by power draw, I imagine. Like that’s, it’s always, you know, it’s not as if you can
⏹️ ▶️ John go faster. It’s kind of like the, what’s like the switch is like that. The switch actually goes faster when it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John in its dock. Yeah. Because it’s powered, that’s a battery life savings. But I think in this case,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the dissipation of heat that’s limiting the speed these things can go. So I don’t think you can clock it any faster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and also think about battery math here. Like if you’re running a 30
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watt adapter and maxing out how much power it can draw on a 60 watt hour battery,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not going to last a lot of hours. Right? So these are like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco peak charge level, or peak power draws, not meant to be anything sustained.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That actually reminds me that a common thread I heard throughout the entirety of yesterday’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey presentation, but particularly when it came to the discussion of the M1, was that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything was couched and hedged to some degree as low power. Like this is the fastest low
⏹️ ▶️ Casey power processor ever put into a computer. This is the best. Oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the one for the 13 inch, there were like five words in that qualification. It was like the fastest of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any like, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Fastest 13 inch silver computer with an Apple logo on it. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there were so that was so many qualifications on that one. It was kind of ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s absolutely true.
Future M chips
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t know, it occurred to me like the non-tinfoil
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hat justification for that was that, hey, you know, there are other computers that exist today
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are not low power, that are quite a bit quicker, simple as that. But I couldn’t help but wonder,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it that there’s going to be, which presumably there will be one day, but is it that there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a, you know, an M1Z, an M1 Plus, an M1 Plus Plus, or what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have that is a high power version of this chip that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to be in an entirely different class, and they’re just setting up for, you know, in the future in the next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey presentation saying, well, you know how we kept talking about how low power it was? Well, here in the Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where we don’t care about low power, look at how she screams, you know, or something like that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the simple answer is probably the right answer, but I couldn’t help but wonder if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of this hedging was a very quiet nod to the future.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that brings me to my next point about the future, right? So obviously, Apple can do whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John it wants with the Macs. That’s why we talked about the various, the spectrums, the possibilities of what they could do with the hardware, what
⏹️ ▶️ John they could do with the CPUs. But we did have the history of all the iOS devices before
⏹️ ▶️ John it, right? And it turns out what they did was with the hardware, similar to what they did with the Intel, and with
⏹️ ▶️ John the system on a chip, they reused the stuff they already had for the the iPad and the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John in not radically different configurations, right? Now on the iOS side, the cadence
⏹️ ▶️ John has been more or less, you know, you get the A13 and the next year you get the A14, right? They’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John just gone, the number has gone up once each year, A7, A8, A9, like it’s fairly like clockwork. And there are variants
⏹️ ▶️ John during the year and trailing where you get the Z and the X variants, which have been for the bigger versions
⏹️ ▶️ John of them. But for the most part, you know, we got the A14 in our phones this year. nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John is looking forward to an A15 based phone this year. Well, obviously it’s the end of the year, it doesn’t make
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey but you know
⏹️ ▶️ John what I mean? Like there’s the idea that you’re going to increment that number after the letter
⏹️ ▶️ John more than once in a year, that hasn’t happened on the iOS side. And because we assume
⏹️ ▶️ John and thus far, and Apple has done nothing to dissuade us from this, that the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John gets basically, not the leftovers from the iPad and the phone, but basically Apple does the work for
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone. and to a lesser extent for the iPad, and now the Mac gets the benefit of that, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But so far, Apple has yet to show that they are doing some work that is clearly
⏹️ ▶️ John only for the Mac. If you look at the M1, it looks a lot like an A14 with more
⏹️ ▶️ John cores and stuff in it, right? So we’re like, okay, we’ve got these new Macs, these low-end
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs, they get the M1, right? And now we’re like, yeah, maybe in January, February,
⏹️ ▶️ John or March, or maybe in the spring, we’ll see the M2. It’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa. The M2,
⏹️ ▶️ John we just gave you the M1. If you follow the same cadence as the iOS things, you shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John be expecting an M2 until next November because we just gave you
⏹️ ▶️ John the M1. Now, M1X, M1Z, something like that, maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ John but don’t go looking for an M2 because you’re not gonna see an M2 until next fall
⏹️ ▶️ John at the earliest. We don’t know that that’s what the cadence is going to be, but if the M2
⏹️ ▶️ John is based on the A15, That’s not an unreasonable assumption.
⏹️ ▶️ John All this is to say that the future of this line of computers like, oh, and I bet they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna do the 16-inch MacBook Pro in the spring. If they do the 16-inch MacBook Pro in the spring,
⏹️ ▶️ John expect its CPU and GPU to look an awful lot like the current one, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John with more cores. Don’t expect the 16-inch MacBook Pro to come out in the spring
⏹️ ▶️ John with an M2 with entirely different CPU and GPU cores. That would be awesome if
⏹️ ▶️ John that happened. We would all love it, but it seems to me that everything Apple has actually done so far
⏹️ ▶️ John makes me think that they really, really want to share sort of a foundational technology
⏹️ ▶️ John stack with their other products, which makes perfect sense. It’s the whole reason, you know, that Macs are
⏹️ ▶️ John getting these to begin with is that Apple didn’t have to go to the drawing board and start a whole new CPU and GPU architecture.
⏹️ ▶️ John They had the work they had already done. Now, that raises the question,
⏹️ ▶️ John what the hell is an M1X or an M1Z? because the M1 is already basically an A14X.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess you just put on a different letter at the end and give it more cores, because
⏹️ ▶️ John you can give it more cores. You can give it more high-performance cores, more high-efficiency cores. You can scale up
⏹️ ▶️ John the GPU. Presumably they can give it more PCI Express lanes for more Thunderbolt ports
⏹️ ▶️ John and higher storage limitations. You can give it more RAM. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe put more RAM on the package, but you can take the RAM off the package for the high-end machines. These are all things that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John can do with the basic underpinnings of the M1 architecture,
⏹️ ▶️ John the M1 suffix architecture. All those things are possible. But it seems
⏹️ ▶️ John to me right now that for, obviously the rest of this year, but for all of 2021, I do not expect,
⏹️ ▶️ John except for maybe the tail end, I do not expect to see any Macs that come with anything other than
⏹️ ▶️ John A14 cores and those same GPU cores in different arrangements with different IO and
⏹️ ▶️ John different RAM sizes, which to be clear is fine. Those will all be faster. They’ll be the fastest
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs Apple has ever made and they’ll be awesome. And you can scale them up to everything except the Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is a real problem that probably not gonna happen until 2022. But that’s my current
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking on this. As I said before this presentation, feel free to surprise me Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Feel free to roll out the M2, M3, M4 all next year. It’ll be awesome. I’ll be cheering you on. Totally new core
⏹️ ▶️ John architectures, everything, just amazing stuff that I’ve never seen before. but I’m not getting my hopes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I think you’re exactly right. I think it’s most sensible. Like we were gonna see exactly what they’ve done with the iPad, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are doing here, which is this is the M1 and the other products that are gonna be released,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, maybe next spring or summer or whatever it is, are gonna be the M1X or something similarly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco named or similarly functioning where it is the exact same cores as the M1, just more of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we’ll see how they scale RAM and GPU performance. You know, as I said earlier, and as you said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I don’t think it’s out of the question that they would have like, you know, maybe in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco models that currently have discrete GPUs. So iMacs, the 16-inch MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac Pro, maybe they have an architecture where the higher end chips have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more cores on the chip and they move some of the stuff that’s in the chip now out of package. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, so the RAM is one of the biggest things to move out. Then you can make a bigger die to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more CPU cores And to solve some of your higher end performance needs, you probably move the GPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out as well into its own chip. And then you have higher end CPU, you have more CPU cores
⏹️ ▶️ Marco available for a reasonable die size in the chip. And then you have a whole separate chip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make an even higher end GPU to be able to compete for high end workloads there in that way. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s your answer. Then, and the RAM is also off package. Then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can basically make things like the 16 inch the way they’ve been made. You know, the 16-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has had a separate GPU and off-package RAM, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 15-inch before that always had the same thing with the exception of the handful of models that had integrated graphics as an option,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but for the most part, like that’s how these models have always been made and it’s been fine. And you can take that exact same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco architecture and scale it up to basically whatever level you need for that product. You can, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can fit probably easily eight of the high-performance cores into an M1
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that didn’t need to have a GPU in it. And so, the more you can separate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out from the main package and into separate chips on the board, whether they’re slotted or socketed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or not, the higher end performance you can achieve. And so I think that’s most likely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where this goes next, that at some point next year, we have an M1X
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has pushed some of the stuff that’s in the package now out of the package in order to offer more of everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think anything is getting pushed out except for RAM next year. I think the entire 16 inch line next year
⏹️ ▶️ John will have the GPU will be on die. Like I know what you’re saying and it’s totally possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think they have to do it for the Mac Pro but for the 16 inch into quote unquote integrated GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John only is my guess. The other possibility with the naming is interesting that we
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about BMW before. BMW has, you know, the M3, the three series,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Very recently, BMW decided, you know what? When we take the M3 and give it two
⏹️ ▶️ John doors, that’s not the M3 Coupe anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Now it’s the M4.
⏹️ ▶️ John wait, what? Why is that the M4?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Makes total sense. You subtract
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, it has fewer doors, but the number is higher. Like normally, like the five series is bigger than the three
⏹️ ▶️ John series is bigger than the two series is bigger than the one series. It all makes sense. But the quote unquote four series
⏹️ ▶️ John is not bigger than the three series. In fact, it’s smaller in some ways because it’s got the two doors. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make any sense. Anyway, Apple could, because it’s just the marketing name, come out with essentially the M1X
⏹️ ▶️ John and just call it the M2. There’s no rules about this stuff, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey They can do it. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John under the covers, it would just be, you know, the A14 core, like it would do, you know, we can look at it,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll figure out what it actually is. They can call it the M2 if they want. We don’t have precedent, right? All we’ve got is this one point
⏹️ ▶️ John so far. We don’t have a line yet, right? So it’s possible that Apple could do that. It seems
⏹️ ▶️ John less likely than sticking letters on the end of it. But who knows, if you want to make a big splash with the 16-inch
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pro with its huge number of cores and amazing integrated GPU, the fastest integrated
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU ever made, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you wanna call it the M2, but it’s really just an M1 with
⏹️ ▶️ John more stuff inside it. Sure, go ahead.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so what’d you order, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John I actually wanna give one quick technical note here. This is a tweet from Longhorn. I think his thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John never underscore released on Twitter. You should follow him. Whoever this person is, they seem to know a lot about this stuff. But
⏹️ ▶️ John one check-in on the security stuff. They talked about this in the keynote. Oh, we made our iOS devices so secure
⏹️ ▶️ John and now Macs will be secure too and blah, blah, blah. And there’s Big Sur with its secure boot image and
⏹️ ▶️ John all that other stuff. People were still worried about, okay, but if I
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna just do development work myself and not be in super security
⏹️ ▶️ John mode, can I write my own kernel extensions? Can I recompile the kernel?
⏹️ ▶️ John Can I boot basically a quote, unquote, untrusted operating system? And according to Longhorn,
⏹️ ▶️ John on all these ARM Macs, there is no, all the security checks are turned off mode. What you can
⏹️ ▶️ John do, however, is take your unsigned operating system kernel and bless
⏹️ ▶️ John it yourself so that the secure boot policy allows you to boot. It’s kind of like a self-signed certificate in SSL
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re a web developer and understand what I’m talking about, right? These RMACs will not boot
⏹️ ▶️ John a non-secured operating system image, but you can make
⏹️ ▶️ John your own secured operating system image with your own changes in it if you’re that type of hacker.
⏹️ ▶️ John And one final note, the A14 has four kilobyte page support. So I know we were talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John how we couldn’t boot Windows on the DDK because the page support wasn’t right. You still can’t boot Windows as far as
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but that particular limitation, as we suspected, does not exist in the shipping on our Macs. It was just
⏹️ ▶️ John a DDK thing. That’s interesting. All right. Your move, Microsoft.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Bombas, Mac Weldon, and Flatfile. And thank you to our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco members who support us directly. You can become one if you’d like to at atp.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to begin Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, Auntie
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental, check podcast so long
Post-show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, we have a post show. That’s right, I put it in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I suppose we should talk about what we ordered.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s what we should talk about.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey show. That’s what everyone’s demanding. But this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a timely thing. It’s a timely thing. We can do both.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John We’ll get the
⏹️ ▶️ John ordering done quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Screw it, we’ll do it. Oh, okay, okay, you heard it here first.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll get the ordering done quickly. John, what’d you order? I ordered a MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ John because it is basically perfect for what I wanted. I wanted a computer for the kids to use
⏹️ ▶️ John And I just wanted it to be an ARM-based MacBook Air that’s good and bonus, it has way better battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life and has no fan in it. So I got the 16 gig, obviously, 16
⏹️ ▶️ John gigs of RAM, one terabyte SSD, Space Gray. And it’s coming
⏹️ ▶️ John on the 18th, and I am looking forward to my children accidentally destroying it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John ordered it like within moments of the end of the keynote, I just fired up the
⏹️ ▶️ John store, and as soon as the store came up, I ordered it, I ordered it in such a hurry that A, I ordered it on the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID, I ordered it on my developer Apple ID and I hope I can transfer, you know when you go to your Apple ID
⏹️ ▶️ John and it shows you all your computers?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I hope I can
⏹️ ▶️ John make it go on the list with my other Apple ID, my non-developer one. And B, I forgot to buy AppleCare, so as
⏹️ ▶️ John soon as the computer comes I have to buy the AppleCare retroactively, which apparently you can do
⏹️ ▶️ John up to 60 days after you get the Mac, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you can’t do it. I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John true with most devices. You can’t do it until you get the Mac because they ask you for the serial number. So anyway, that’s what I got.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also worth pointing out, any orders placed now are under the extended return policy for the holidays
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the US at least. So anything you buy now, you can return until early January.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s true, I forgot about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Remember that saved my butt last year with my defective 16 inch? Oh yeah. I had gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like the day it started.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So John, we knew that you were looking for a computer for your children, although from the sounds of it, you might be stealing it from them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, Marco, I honestly don’t recall what your laptop scenario was. So can you, before you tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me if and when, or well, knowing you, what you bought, can you recap for me what the laptop scenario
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was in the Armut household?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use a 16-inch, Tiff uses a previous year 15-inch, and with the exception
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Tiff’s laptop having to be serviced recently for a defective logic board,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco otherwise they have been fine, and we are both fairly stable in that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Our plan was whenever they update the 16-inch, least she would get one and I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably end up getting one as well and then we’d sell it to Intel ones but that didn’t happen yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so when I look at what my needs are I don’t want to go smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my laptop. I’m very happy with the big one. I’ve lived a lot of years in the 13-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size class and it’s nice for a lot of reasons but my current needs and priorities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just happier with the bigger one. As for development needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though, you know I’m a software developer and I have a couple of little Mac utility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps and I have a big iOS app that I need to care about and so I need some kind of hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use as a development platform for my apps and to test
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things and everything and ideally I would love for that to just be my computer I would love to upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my main desktop or my main laptop to be that but they didn’t release anything that I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consider suitable for that purpose yet so although we’ll see what you know once these things actually get here we’ll see but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the main problem with the desktop is the damn display. I hate the LG 5k I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to haul it out to the beach I don’t want to use on a day-to-day basis I have done that before I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it for lots of reasons not least of which that it’s a buggy piece of crap but anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so they didn’t release anything that can replace my iMac Pro they didn’t release
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a desktop that has a good monitor story that I could replace the whole setup with,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they didn’t release a laptop that’s a direct replacement for what I want. Instead of getting the Mac Mini,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I have the DTK, which is a Mac Mini, and I’ve kind of shamefully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not used it very much because using it through like screen sharing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my computer is terrible. I don’t have enough space here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the office to have a second monitor, you know, just for that. I don’t want a whole second setup like keyboard, mouse,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitor. I don’t want to hold them like that. And so I passed on the Mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I would use it as much as I use this DTK, which is unfortunately not enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I didn’t want to buy a $7000 screen to use with it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or use the LG one, which I don’t like. So I was considering the two laptops,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I thought, okay, well, for performance reasons, the 13 inch Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably the one to get. I do use it, I’m planning on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually doing software development on it. Presumably Apple’s gonna want the DDK back pretty soon, so I’m about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to lose my ARM development platform, we assume. We haven’t heard anything yet, but we assume that’s probably what’s gonna happen. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna want some kind of ARM Mac to compile my software on, to test it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, and to ship it to the App Store with, until I can get my replacement desktop whenever that happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so obviously, so I’m gonna go for a laptop, and I’m gonna do my development on that. So clearly the right answer is the 13 inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro. But the 13 inch pro is not very exciting to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The air is exciting. The air is fanless and it, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though it’s, it’s not a big difference, it also feels better. Like it feels thinner and lighter, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, at least assuming they feel the same because given that they’re the exact same dimensions and weight, they probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do feel the same. Um, so, you know, assuming it’s probably still gonna feel a lot better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even though the Air is a lower end machine and will perform worse,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’ll make me just happier as like a novel new thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it is not only this whole new architecture, but it’s fanless. And I also thought the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air might be more likely to have a longer lifespan in my household,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because what I’m really doing by picking one of these laptops is getting something temporary.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to be using an Air full-time for myself for the entire next two years or three years or whatever it would be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once there’s a 16-inch replacement, I’m going to get that in all likelihood, unless major things change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in what they do with it, but they probably won’t. So what I’m looking for now is really a temporary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop to be an ARM development machine for a little while until they release higher-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. And even though for development the Pro is almost certainly better for performance and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for fan reasons, the Air is the cooler one, I think. Not temperature-wise, it almost certainly won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be, but it is the cooler one in terms of awesomeness and novelty and advancement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in how these things work and feel. So I went for the Air. I figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after I’m done with it, either I’ll sell it or I’ll trade it into Apple or whatever, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe that might become Adam’s first laptop, depending on what his needs are and when I’m done
⏹️ ▶️ John you got a homework laptop too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, possibly. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’ll see what happens. The difference is that yours is maxed out in every spec.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I only got the one terabyte disk, not the
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh my goodness. You’re really skimping on Adam’s laptop here. It’s like $400.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John tell him about this. Your dad decided because you might use his laptop. You don’t deserve two terabytes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figured I didn’t deserve two terabytes. I always get one on all my laptops so far. I’ve gotten either 512 or one terabyte.
⏹️ ▶️ John figured you would max it out because it’s the cheaper one. You did get the eight core
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPU though, right? Oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and the 16 gigs of RAM. Me too, by the way. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, yeah. I don’t want a seven core.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I don’t want a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco broken GPU core in my computer. No, it was more because, I couldn’t tell you about the GPU honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it was more for the 512, or for the higher storage and the higher RAM. It basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made the price, I think it’s the same price once you spec it up. So anyway, it was, that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I ordered the MacBook Air and I took a bit of a risk. I ordered it in gold.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey never had a gold laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I can’t get behind that at all. You do you, but I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I didn’t like the shade of gold they used on the 12 inch MacBook. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they switched over to 13 inch, they tweaked the color of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And every time I’ve seen it in person, I’m like, ooh, that’s kind of nice. And it looks different in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different lighting. Sometimes it looks a little bit rosy, sometimes it doesn’t. but it’s a cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking color. I’m doing everything differently here. I’m getting the lowest end product. I’m getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an air. It’s gonna be like a probably temporary thing. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting a different outfit for like one night out. You know, like this is my like weird, you know, winter 2020 temporary laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I’m gonna develop arm stuff on. And then I’m probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only gonna have it for nine months or something like that. So, you know, we’ll see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I kind of figured it would be a fun little diversion. And it helps it look more different, because it’s more different than anything else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve ever had. So it kind of helps the novelty factor as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. So a couple of weeks ago, MyNameIsTee in the chat made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a request for this episode, which I thought we could at least try to honor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They said, After show requests for the week after next, two Wednesdays from now is the 10th anniversary of the first Build & Analyze
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode. So happy quasi-anniversary.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey questions on 10 years of podcasting, how it’s changed, what surprised you, etc.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I’m the least well-equipped as the newest of the three of us to podcasting to answer this. And obviously, since
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is kind of centered around build and analyze, it makes more sense for you to start, Marco. So, any thoughts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on 10 years of podcasting?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marc Thiessen Ha, I didn’t prepare for this at all, because I didn’t think we would get to it. As we are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over two and a half hours into the show, it might be worth having a quick little celebration now and actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking about this next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. Well, congratulations and happy anniversary. John, do you want a chance to get in on this or no?
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess, is this your way of saying you didn’t order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything? No, I didn’t order anything. Are you nuts? Of course not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John how could you not get this MacBook Air? It is basically your adorable, but good. Yeah. But I want
⏹️ ▶️ John you got more, you got two instead of one. That’s more. It’s a hundred percent more. I mean, I guess it’s heavier. I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not as sleek as the adorable was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, it’s a lot heavier. Casey, you said earlier that you thought it was a little bit heavier. it’s 2.0 versus 2.8 pounds. It’s a lot heavier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, but I’m used to this 13-inch MacBook Pro now for all its benefits and drawbacks. And I just bought it six
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I don’t know, like, I could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey read, I could go the mark away and like resell it or whatever, but I don’t know, man. I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do like this MacBook Pro that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John have. What does your
⏹️ ▶️ John 13-inch have? What are the specs?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s, oh God, I don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John remember. It was a good one. It was a high-end one,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? It was a pretty good one. So let me look here. So it’s a two gigahertz
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quad core Intel Core i5, 32 gigs of video memory. How
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much actual memory? I’m sorry, 32 gigs regular memory. Apparently I’m getting tired at the end
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this episode, even though we’re recording four hours earlier than normal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, so it’s a 32 gigs RAM and a one terabyte SSD.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, the RAM is the real thing is gonna kill you and that’s why I’m not recommending you upgrade,
⏹️ ▶️ John but honestly this air is gonna stomp all over that computer in every area except for
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM, where if you’re using 32 gigs of RAM and doing lots of stuff, which is not that hard to do if you’re doing a bunch of development, have a thousand
⏹️ ▶️ John Chrome tabs open and whatever else and have 20 copies of your app running in simulators.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can see that, but yeah. When Marco gets his, you two should, before
⏹️ ▶️ John the show, come up with some sort of representative tasks, like, I don’t know, build some publicly accessible app and
⏹️ ▶️ John index code or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and compare.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re quote unquote high end 13 inch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I’ll build overcast on my 16 inch, because I have a command line build script that can do it for benchmarking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I build overcast on the 16 inch, and I’ll build it on that. And I’ll let you know what it does.
⏹️ ▶️ John But he’s got a 13 inch, not the 16 inch. I know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why it’ll be even better when the error embarrasses it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It’s not going to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like compiling is highly multi-threaded with parallel processes being forked
⏹️ ▶️ John off and everything. We’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But only in short bursts, though. Like a lot of it is just like shuffling data around. So it’s, you need like SSD performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and memory throughput and stuff like that. You need a whole bunch of, it’s kind of like whole system performance gets stressed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. You know, there are big chunks of it that are, that you know, you see all the cores max out for like 15 seconds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here in the middle, and then it goes back to other stuff. But you know, it is certainly more than just that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would not surprise me if, I’m not sure if the Air is going to beat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my eight core MacBook Pro or my 10 core iMac Pro, But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet it’s going to actually put up a pretty good showing if it doesn’t beat it. So that’s what I want to see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you know, it’s funny you say that because as you’re talking, I’m thinking to myself about you writing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SwiftUI and Swift in general. And I don’t think it’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey faster than your iMac Pro and certainly the screen real estate will be night and day different. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a universe that we could splinter into in just a few weeks where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suddenly you come sheepishly to this very program and say, I’ve stopped using my iMac Pro because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the darn MacBook Air is so much faster
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John and so much better. The
⏹️ ▶️ John screen space is going to keep them out. I know. I know. I know. You can go back to looking through that tiny, tiny little porthole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Like the true, the true like, you know, reason, resignment and giving up and defeat for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me will be when I get my LG 5K here for one of the new Mac minis.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s true. That’s true. That’s when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know I’ve, I’ve just given up like, oh man, I just couldn’t do it anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really do kind of mean it though. I see a future wherein you could decide,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I agree from what I know of you, and I like to think I know you pretty well, that real estate is a big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deal for you, but with all respect, you are not the most patient human I’ve ever met. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I think that if somehow builds of overcast are considerably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quicker on this MacBook Air, which is not entirely implausible, I could see you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, actually, I think you’re right, that the more likely thing you would do is just get a new Mac mini and take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 5K from home or whatever and bring it to where you are. But nevertheless, I could see a reality wherein you decide
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to just go all in on developing on this Mac mini, real estate be damned.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That would only be if it’s a lot faster though. And honestly, I don’t think it’s gonna be a lot faster because there is a parallelism
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advantage that I have significantly in the iMac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and a lot of compiling is I O bound because you’ve got all these files and you got, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, this, there’s lots of, you’re reading files in and writing files out and as multi-threaded as you want, like how much
⏹️ ▶️ John faster, you know, compiling is not going to probably play to these machines’ strength, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’ll be competitive. But for you, Casey, all I’m doing is endorsing the idea that even though you just got
⏹️ ▶️ John this computer, I think you should be open to the idea of selling the 13-inch in a couple
⏹️ ▶️ John months and buying whatever the equivalent, less expensive computer that is better in all possible
⏹️ ▶️ John ways. Again, the RAM is hampering you, but you know, you can, you know, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John feel tied to this 13 inches is what I’m saying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I didn’t, mentally I don’t, but I don’t know. I’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey held onto a computer for only a handful of months. I mean, it’s something that people can do. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco should try it, it’s fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like it’s been done before, but yeah, see that’s the other thing. I don’t wanna rip that bandaid off cause it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John slippery slope. He can’t even hold
⏹️ ▶️ John onto his phone or his watch apparently.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, that’s true, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John but- Don’t wash any cars with your new laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, just take the laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, wash your car, put it in your pocket and- and then I’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John fine. Aaron’s car is
⏹️ ▶️ John at it again, it destroyed my laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It might run it over, you never know. It’s actually funny though, because sitting here today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I consider 32 gigs RAM table stakes for a computer that I would want to use. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that really the case? Like, is that just some sort of vestigial, like old-
⏹️ ▶️ John on your computer now or are you on your iMac?
⏹️ ▶️ John If you open up your laptop and go to activity monitor and see what your situation is. Now, here’s the thing with RAM measurement.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unused RAM is wasted RAM. So in all conditions, no matter how much RAM your computer has, it should
⏹️ ▶️ John be using all of it. The question is, how much of it is used for like file caches and stuff like that
⏹️ ▶️ John versus how much of it is used for actual applications that you’re using. So it’s not always easy to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I opened up my computer and I’m using all the RAM, therefore I must always need a computer, like we do with the storage on our phones,
⏹️ ▶️ John like how much storage you’re using. RAM is different. The operating system’s goal is to use all the RAM at all the
⏹️ ▶️ John times, because there’s always something you can be caching, right? The real question is, are you pushing into
⏹️ ▶️ John swap? You know, are you paging anything out? You know, like it’s harder to make that assessment,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the easy way to do it is to just launch all the apps that you expect to launch. And before you even start using them,
⏹️ ▶️ John before you start warming up the file caches, then look after like a fresh reboot, how much RAM that takes and how much
⏹️ ▶️ John you expect them to expand. I get what you’re saying though. Like I said, when I
⏹️ ▶️ John bought my Mac Pro, that I no longer have to think about RAM because I got enough that my workload fits in it
⏹️ ▶️ John and not having to think about RAM is great. And so I fully endorse
⏹️ ▶️ John at least 32 for the stuff that you’re doing, just because why even have to worry about it? But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s possible you could live in 16 and not notice too much of a difference, but you’d be thinking about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, I’ve had 16 on my laptops forever, and it’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine in a secondary role. But on my iMac Pro, I have 64 because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I thought I’m gonna need more, And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I might as well, like the price difference wasn’t huge. I knew I would have it for a long time, so it’s fine. And actually, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco currently according to Activity Monitor, I’m using 37 of that. But you know, again, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Where in Activity Monitor are you looking to get that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m looking under the memory tab down at the bottom. You have physical memory and then you have memory used. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if that includes the cached files that’s below that. I don’t think it does.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, what does it say for swap used? 149 megs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see, on my laptop, I see swap used of a gigabyte. I don’t have Xcode up. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laptop is currently in second computer social networking web browsing mode. And right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am memory used 18 and 1 1 gig, swap used 1 gig. Whereas on the iMac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is recording two different ways, it’s got two different browsers open. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually have Xcode up right now. It has Skype. It has Visual Studio Code. I am at 21
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigs, oh actually almost 27 gigs used and swap used zero. Yeah, I’m at swap zero
⏹️ ▶️ John as well on my 96 gig Mac Pro. I
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, when I look at the memory view, I, you know, I could just send you a screenshot of
⏹️ ▶️ John the Chrome section, you know, it’s in the hierarchical by process name and the Chrome section doesn’t fit
⏹️ ▶️ John in the window. Yeah. But it’s more than one process per tab. It’s like VT decode
⏹️ ▶️ John XPC service for some video thing. MTL compiler service, like who knows what these are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of tabs. Yeah, so what I was gonna say earlier, just to put a period on the end of the sentence is, you know, I tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you that I need 32 gigs of RAM, but I don’t really have any empirical evidence to back that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. And if the CPU screen in the SSDs scream as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much as we’re being told they do, maybe I don’t, maybe I’d be fine with 16. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t wanna roll the dice by paying between one and $2,000 and going on a wing and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a prayer, especially since I have something that really does work quite well. I really, really do like this laptop quite a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you make a good point that I might not need 32 gigs RAM. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think if they released an equivalent of this computer today, and for all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the reasons we already discussed, I understand why they didn’t. But if they had a four-port MacBook Pro, 13-inch MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey preferably that I could put 32 gigs RAM into, I might’ve already bought it. If they had the four
⏹️ ▶️ Casey port with only 16 gigs RAM, I would’ve thought about it real hard, but I don’t think I would’ve pulled the trigger.
⏹️ ▶️ John This brings up a point you mentioned how much RAM these new Macs might be using. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John seen a lot of people tweeting about this, and I think people are somewhat confused. They’re like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, iOS devices don’t have a lot of RAM. So if these new ARM Macs, quote unquote, use
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM like an iOS device, maybe a 16 gig Mac will be the same as a 32 Intel Mac. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John here to tell you, don’t get your hopes up. Because the thing, the things
⏹️ ▶️ John like the way iOS devices use RAM has to do with the operating system and the app runtime environment,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s less to do with the architecture of the CPU. These Macs still run Mac OS. Mac OS manages
⏹️ ▶️ John memory the same way it always has. Mac OS has made tons of advancements to try to be more like iOS with
⏹️ ▶️ John sudden termination Automatic termination and all sorts of other things that try to make it more iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John like but it’s not I was like and being 64 bit only helps to because you don’t have to have copies
⏹️ ▶️ John of the 32-bit libraries But you get that same benefit on Intel Macs now with the operating systems that don’t support
⏹️ ▶️ John 32-bit So do not expect these are Macs to be Massively
⏹️ ▶️ John different in terms of memory usage if you’re running the same apps and doing the same stuff the memory usage is going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be Similar to what it was on on Intel Macs running the same operating system.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you know, 64-bit compared to 64-bit, like if you cut up 32-bit libraries. That said,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is a possibility that, you know, we mentioned like, what if I go into swap? Are these SSDs
⏹️ ▶️ John faster than the SSDs in the Intel Macs?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, these are newer Macs. The SSDs could be faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They said during the MacBook Air segment, up to twice as fast SSDs, but that’s because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the previous MacBook Air had actually very slow SSDs. Like, they actually updated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it at one point and made them slower. So, and they didn’t say anything about the SSDs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac Mini or the 13 inch Pro. So I’m guessing we’re looking at roughly the same SSDs.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you have one of those MacBook Airs with the slower SSD, this new MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ John may swap faster. but honestly you really just want to stay at a swap period.